Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (72 page)

That relief would have to come by sea from England, for James II now controlled the whole of southern and western Ireland. By the time a Williamite relief force arrived on July 30, thousands of Protestant Ulstermen and women had died from starvation and disease. Moreover, the situation of the rest of Protestant Ireland remained desperate, despite the arrival in August of an Anglo-Dutch army under the veteran Protestant commander Frederick Herman, duke of Schomberg (1615–90). Schomberg’s army wasted away from disease born of inadequate provisions, heavy rains, and typhus emanating from the bogs of Ireland. Worse, on June 30, 1690, the French defeated a combined British and Dutch fleet under Arthur Herbert, earl of Torrington (1648–1716) at the battle of Beachy Head, off the southern English coast. With the French in control of the sea and the main army away in Ireland, England itself seemed ripe for invasion.

The day after the Beachy Head disaster, however, William’s adherents had reason to cheer again. William III had been forced to spend 1689 establishing his new regime, and so it was not until the summer of 1690 that he could take personal command of his forces in Ireland. He landed with 35,000 troops, mostly untried Englishmen but also some battle-hardened and loyal Dutch regulars. Given the far inferior quality of James’s troops, William had little trouble relieving Ulster and pushing the Catholic forces back to the River Boyne, north of Dublin (see
map 7
). There, on July 1, 1690, 60,000 troops clashed, the largest number ever to meet in a single battle in the British Isles. William and his Dutch Blue Guards performed bravely and resolutely; James and his French generals did not. Although the Jacobite army retreated intact, King James, his nose bleeding again from the stress of yet another disaster, fled Ireland for France. He would never again set foot within his former kingdoms. Amazingly, James’s Irish army regrouped and fought on for another year until it was smashed at Aughrim, Galway, on July 12, 1691.

William’s victory in Ireland confirmed the Protestant ascendancy and spelled disaster for the Catholic population. The king himself wanted no reprisals and the Treaty of Limerick of 1691 promised religious toleration. It also allowed some 11,000 Irish Jacobite soldiers (and their families) free passage to the continent, where many of these “Wild Geese” later fought for France. But William needed the Protestant aristocracy to fight his war, and they wanted revenge. Between 1695 and 1727, he and his successors allowed the Protestant landowners to pass legislation in both the Irish and English Parliaments, known collectively as the Penal Code, which had the effect of reducing the native Catholic population to a state of utter misery. Catholics were barred from voting, officeholding, practicing law, teaching, attending a university, wearing swords (a mark of gentility), and purchasing either land or any horse worth more than £5. They were, moreover, forbidden from inheriting land from Protestants and from bequeathing it to an eldest son. Rather, they were forced to divide their holdings among
all
their sons, which ensured that no Catholic family could preserve large holdings. During the same period, nonresident English landowners and local Protestant landlords consolidated their positions. As a result, Catholics, amounting to four-fifths of the population of Ireland, were reduced by 1727 to ownership of but one-seventh of its land.

None of this is to say that their English cousins considered Irish Protestant landowners and merchants their equals. The English Parliament tightened its hold on its Irish counterpart by the Declaratory Act (1720). Throughout the period, it sought to restrict Irish trade so as to favor England. For example, an act of 1699 forbade the Irish from exporting woolens except through English ports, where they were loaded with exorbitant tariffs. It is no exaggeration to say that, as the period of this book closed, Ireland was ruled from London with every regard to the interests of the English ruling class, some regard to those of the Protestant Irish ruling class, and no regard at all to those of the majority native Irish population. As a result, the eighteenth century was to prove, in many ways, the most miserable in Irish history. In 1729 Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) offered a startling comment on that misery by making the satirical suggestion, in A
Modest Proposal,
that since the English had apparently sought to liquidate the Irish in any case, they might as well eat their children. Even today, long after the establishment of an independent Republic of Ireland in the south, the memory of William’s relief of Ulster, victory at the Boyne, and their aftermath continues to rankle with Irish Catholics, while it is celebrated, tauntingly, by Ulster Protestants.

The War and the Parties, 1688–97

For England, William’s Irish victory provided a moment of relief. The danger of immediate invasion passed and the king returned to his capital in triumph. Still, the domestic political situation looked grim. Remember that after Beachy Head the French navy controlled the Channel and Louis threatened invasion. Worse, William remained unsure about his subjects’ loyalty to the new regime, especially his Tory subjects. After all, the very act which had led to the establishment of that regime – the Glorious Revolution – went against everything that Toryism stood for on the relationship between sovereigns and subjects. In fact, the Tories in William’s government found themselves living a number of contradictions. They were the party of Divine Right monarchy, yet they served a usurper. They were the party of high Anglicanism, yet the new king was a Calvinist who had brought with him a toleration for Dissenters. They were the party of peaceful isolation and friendship with France, yet they were forced to fight a European war against Louis XIV. They were the party of much of the landed gentry, yet the war forced them into a heavy tax on land.

Is it any wonder that the Tories seemed to be half-hearted about the war and the king for whom it was being fought? Tories in the administration seemed to be uncooperative, corrupt, or suspiciously incompetent when it came to the war. Tories in Parliament tended to favor a “blue-water” strategy in which Britain would use its navy to harass the French empire overseas and protect mercantile investment in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean while remaining aloof from the land war in Europe. Tory landowners saw this as a cheap alternative to William’s advocacy of expensive armies and continental entanglements; William saw it as cowardly, defeatist, and of little help to his Dutch countrymen or European allies. Worse, by 1692 it became clear that a number of prominent Tory peers, including William’s ablest military commander, John Churchill, now earl of Marlborough, had been writing to King James, apologizing for their part in the Revolution of 1688 and, in some cases, offering assistance for a restoration. Most of these letters were probably just insurance policies against the possibility that James might return. Their authors may not have been committed Jacobites willing to risk outright rebellion so much as realists, careful to ensure the favor of whichever side won. Still, William cannot be blamed for assuming the worst. The most prominent letter writers, including Marlborough, were sent to the Tower and Tories began to be purged from the central government.

In their place, William III began to name Whigs. If the Revolution of 1688–9 and the Nine Years’ War tore the Tory party apart with contradiction, they solved many such contradictions for the Whigs. After all, the Whigs had always supported the ideas of parliamentary sovereignty and revolution against a bad king. Whigs, many of whom were Dissenters, embraced the toleration. Whigs had no love for Catholic France and genuinely feared Louis’s ambitions; they therefore embraced Britain’s role in the Grand Alliance and Nine Years’ War. Since the Whig party included large numbers of merchants and financiers as well as landowners, they had less cause to grumble over high taxes on land. Indeed, many Whig landowners began to move over to the Tories.

In short, the 1690s and the war which dominated them saw a seismic shift in the roles and composition of the two political parties in England. The Tories’ ideological problems with King William, his war, and co-religionists gradually turned them from being a court or government party into an opposition or “country” party of political outsiders. The same factors turned the Whigs, heretofore the radical opposition party, made up of political and religious outcasts, into the party of government – but with one crucial difference. The Tories (and before them their Cavalier and “court” ancestors) had been the party of the Crown because they had believed passionately, even irrationally, in the Great Chain of Being generally, and in the Stuarts as God’s lieutenants in particular. During the Civil Wars, many Tory families had suffered, losing loved ones and lands, for those beliefs. They had revered Charles II and even James II, in spite of their faults, not only because those kings rewarded them with positions at court, but because they were the rightful heirs, the ceremonial fathers of the country. For Tories, there was something magical and heart-stirring in the name of “king,” a name which only God, not Parliament, could bestow.

The Whigs, on the other hand, felt no such affection for William III because they had never attached any magic to the title which Parliament had, in fact, bestowed upon him. If Whigs believed passionately in anything, it was in the rights of Parliament and the need to defend Protestantism. Many Whig families had made comparable sacrifices for their beliefs during the Civil Wars and, more recently, during the Tory revenge of 1681–5, but those beliefs were not necessarily Royalist. Their support for the new king was practical, a sort of business proposition. He was a chairman of the board or chief executive officer, not a god or a father. Though the Whigs would work hard on behalf of William’s regime, though many would develop some affection for him, they were not above threatening to quit or oppose his government in order to gain political advantage. In particular, Whig majorities, seeking to bolster Parliament’s power, sometimes threatened to withhold funds unless the king made concessions, such as a new Triennial Act in 1694 to force him to call Parliament at least once every three years. Since William III was far more interested in defeating Louis XIV and saving the United Provinces than he was in defending the prerogatives of the Crown, he usually gave in. These concessions did more to reduce royal power than had the Revolution itself. Thus, the political revolution of 1688–9 and the war that followed recast the two parties and, in the long run, further subordinated the British Crown to Parliament.

The Rise of the Whig Junto, 1693–97

In the short run, however, William III’s turn toward the Whigs gave him exactly what he wanted: a government and a parliament which would support the war. The Whig leaders proved to be exceedingly competent as war ministers. Those leaders comprised five men who, because they formed an effective and cohesive political and administrative team, came to be known as “the
Junto
.” The most flamboyant member of the Junto was Thomas Wharton (1648–1715), from 1696 Lord Wharton. He held a lucrative position at court as comptroller of the Household, and he was a brilliant orator, capable of swaying parliamentary opinion. He was also a great landowner. Given the realities of English electoral politics, this meant that he could dictate the representatives of a number of parliamentary constituencies and control their votes in the House of Commons. (He was also a notorious libertine and one of the great swordsmen-duelists of his age.) The Junto’s constitutional and legal expert was Sir John Somers (1651–1716), from 1693 lord keeper of the Great Seal, from 1697 Lord Somers and lord chancellor of England. Somers was an attorney who proved to be an excellent draftsman of legislation, including the Bill of Rights of 1689. (He, too, was a bit of a rake and also a great literary patron.) The youngest member of the Junto, Charles Spencer (1675–1722), later to succeed his father as earl of Sunderland, proved to be an important leader in the House of Commons after Wharton and Somers were elevated to the Lords. Spencer also had useful connections to the Churchills (he married Anne Churchill [1683–1716], one of Marlborough’s daughters) and he would, in the next reign, develop foreign policy expertise. Naval affairs were handled by Admiral Edward Russell, from 1694 first lord of the Admiralty and from 1697 earl of Orford. In 1692, Russell won a decisive victory against the French navy at La Hogue, thus restoring Britain’s command of the sea and ending the invasion threat. Subsequently, he established a British naval presence in the Mediterranean and launched a reform of the Royal Navy, building new ships and updating dockyards. The former disrupted French trade and led to British dominance in the region for 250 years; the latter provided the infrastructure for overall British naval supremacy for decades.

Russell’s victory at La Hogue enabled William to take the war to the French on the continent. This required large armies supported by an extensive logistical network to train, pay, feed, clothe, equip, and transport them. To this must be added the charge of the expanding Royal Navy. The result was the most expensive war in English history to date. The Nine Years’ War drove total government expenditure to about £5.5 million a year, three times its average annual peacetime revenue. Failure to raise this sum would doom the British war effort and, perhaps, the Revolution Settlement. In order to pay for each summer’s campaign, William had to turn to Parliament. In 1693 that body voted a Land Tax of four shillings in the pound; that is, for every pound’s worth of land an owner possessed, he had to pay the government four shillings (or one-fifth of a pound). Theoretically, this meant that all landowners owed one-fifth of their annual income from land to the Crown. But William’s government never received that level of funding because taxes were assessed and collected by local JPs and other landowners, who were reluctant to assess their neighbors up to the real value of their estates or to collect rigorously the taxes so assessed (which came on top of the poor rate, tithes for the Church, etc.). In any case, this tax was never expected to yield more than £2 million a year. As a result, the new regime was falling behind in the arms and money race with Louis – who, remember, did not have to call a parliament to tax his people.