The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (39 page)

Macaulay’s account of this interview is indignant and scornful: ‘The King cannot be blamed for determining that Monmouth should suffer death…But to see him and not spare him was an outrage on humanity and decency.’ Yet Monmouth himself had begged for the meeting and, as Macaulay recorded, had claimed to be in possession of ‘a secret which he could not entrust to paper, a secret which lay in a single word, and which, if he spoke that word, would secure the throne against all danger’.
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There was in truth no such secret, but it is unreasonable to blame James for granting an interview in which it was, apparently, to be divulged. As for the poor Duke, the historian condemns his ‘pusillanimous fear’ and writes contemptuously of his abject behaviour. No doubt Monmouth behaved badly, worse than many of his wretched followers. But historians have rarely had their own courage and resolution put to such a test, or found themselves in danger of having their head struck off by an axe.

Punishment for the rebels was harsh, rendered obnoxious by the savage relish with which they were pursued and condemned by the Lord Chief Justice, Jeffreys. Given the feebleness of the enterprise, leniency might have been a wiser, as well as more generous, policy than the use of the law as an instrument of revenge. But James could not forget the innocent Catholic victims of the Popish Plot, the attempt to deprive him of his rightful throne, the Whig conspiracy to murder him and his brother. The so-called ‘Bloody Assizes’ held by Jeffreys were cruel and horrible, as cruel and horrible as Cromwell’s massacres in Ireland.

The lack of support Monmouth had attracted and the ease with which the rebellion had been suppressed encouraged James to try to repeal the Test Act, which excluded his Catholic co-religionists from holding public office or commissions in the army or navy. Debate in Parliament was fierce. Burnet, a Scots Episcopalian and by no means an unprejudiced witness, summed it up as follows.

The truth is, all who argued for the repeal had no more to say than this – that it was against the rights of the Crown to deny the King the service of all his subjects, and an insufferable affront done him to oblige all those whom he should employ to swear his religion was idolatrous; whereas those on the other side declared that the Test was the best fence they had for their religion, which, if once given up, all the rest should follow; and that if the King might by his authority supersede such a law…it was in vain to think of law any more; the Government would then become absolute and arbitrary.
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Both arguments had some validity, but from James’s point of view the Test Act was an abomination. When passed, a dozen years previously, it had compelled him to resign the post of Lord High Admiral in which he delighted; now it deprived him of the service of his fellow Catholics, who were his most loyal subjects. He set out to circumvent the act by use of the royal prerogative, claiming the right to dispense with the law in individual cases and, more generally, to suspend any law. This was alarming, especially to those who believed that the stability of the state depended on the ability of the Anglican ascendancy to exclude Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters from public life. To their mind, defence of the liberty of England required that freedom be denied to all whose view of true religion differed from theirs.

James now tried to construct an alliance between all those excluded, and to cultivate the Protestant dissenters. Given that it is improbable that he should have supposed there was any chance of making England Catholic again, he may well have been sincere in proposing the suspension of discriminatory laws and advocating toleration. He was a devoted Catholic, but not a bigoted one. Among his friends was the leading Quaker William Penn; he supported Penn’s establishment of a colony (later named Pennsylvania) in America.

Yet his policy was unrealistic, for in general the Protestant dissenters were even more fiercely anti-Catholic, and disposed to believe in popish plots, than the dominant Anglicans. They were the heirs of the opposition to Charles I, and they had supported Shaftesbury’s attempt to exclude James from the throne. They eyed the approaches the King made to them with suspicion. Moreover, like the Anglicans, they were alarmed by the army James was creating, stationed at Hounslow Heath on the outskirts of London, and staffed by an ever-increasing number of Catholic officers. What was its purpose if not to advance the Catholic interest and suppress opposition to the King’s lack of respect for Parliament and the law?

Events in France now further inflamed Protestant opinion. The French religious wars of the sixteenth century had ended with a compromise, which, while maintaining Catholicism as the official state religion, had granted liberty of worship to Protestants. But Louis XIV had been persecuting Protestants for years, provoking a rebellion in the Cevennes, suppressed with a deal of brutality. Now, urged on by his bishops and his second wife (the devout Madame de Maintenon), he was on the point of revoking the Edict of Nantes, which had secured the French Protestants their rights. Many chose to emigrate rather than submit. They flocked to the Netherlands, to Prussia and to England. Their arrival inevitably intensified suspicion of the policies being pursued by a Catholic king, for if Louis so viciously persecuted Protestants, whose liberty of worship had previously been guaranteed by law, might not James follow suit?

In the years since the Restoration, Church of England divines had proclaimed a doctrine of ‘non-resistance’. Inspired by their memories of the civil war, they held that it was sinful to offer opposition (resistance) to an anointed king. James now put their sincerity to the test. First he challenged them in the citadel of High Anglicanism, the ostentatiously royalist University of Oxford. He appointed a Catholic as master of Magdalen College, and when the college fellows objected, expelled them and replaced them with Catholics. This was stupid and provocative, though no doubt to his mind it was only just that Catholics should no longer be excluded from the university, or at least from one of its colleges. Foolishly self-confident, he pressed on, disregarding the hostility with which his measure was greeted.

Next, in 1687, he issued a Declaration of Indulgence, suspending the Penal Laws against Catholics and the acts known as the Clarendon Code, which had imposed restrictions on the Protestant dissenters’ freedom of worship. The failure of Charles II’s similar 1672 declaration should have been a warning, but James was now deaf to reason. He ordered that the declaration be read from every pulpit on two successive Sundays, and when seven bishops, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, refused to do so, he had them arrested and charged with seditious libel. Their counsel argued that the King could legislate only through Parliament, and that his attempt to bypass Parliament was illegal. There was general rejoicing in London when they were acquitted.

In July 1688, while that trial was still undecided, the Queen gave birth to a son. James had married Mary of Modena in 1673, three years after the death of his first wife. She was then only fourteen, and had not welcomed the prospect of a husband twenty years her senior. Indeed, she was in tears when she arrived in England and found she much preferred her brother-in-law to her husband. Charles, she said, ‘was always kind to me, and so truly amiable and good-natured that I loved him very much’.
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As an Italian and a Catholic she was never popular in England, but at least till 1688 she had not threatened the liberty of Protestant England by producing an heir, her happy failure to do so making it likely that on James’s death the throne would pass to his Protestant daughter Mary. Now, to general dismay, there was a male heir who would undoubtedly be reared as a Catholic.

A rumour quickly spread: the child was not the Queen’s at all. Her own had been born dead, and a substitute brought into the palace in – it was asserted – a warming-pan. The story was widely believed. Burnet, who was in the Netherlands at the time, and whose information was therefore derived at second or third hand, declared in his
History
that ‘if a child was born, there are further presumptions that it soon died, and another was put in his room. The Queen’s children were all naturally very weak, and died young.’ It was further insisted that the only people allowed into the Queen’s bedroom were Catholics, and that the Protestant Princess Anne had been ordered to Bath by her father to take the waters. The story took some time to die, though no one encountering the new Prince of Wales, James Edward, in adult life could have doubted for one moment that he was a Stuart.

Rebellion was simmering even before the child was born, though the men who plotted treason did not dare to make a move themselves. Instead they sent the Whig Admiral Russell to the Netherlands (where he had the excuse of visiting a sister) to sound out the Prince of Orange. William made it clear that he would require something in the nature of a formal invitation if he was to venture on an invasion of England; meanwhile he sent an envoy to London to congratulate the King, who was both his uncle and his father-in-law, on the birth of the little Prince of Wales. Throughout the summer, rumour and counter-rumour flew, and more English grandees, some of them Tories, committed themselves, if cautiously, to William. Meanwhile Louis XIV, learning of the Dutch military movements from spies, sent a warning to James and with it an offer of French troops. This was rejected. James declared his confidence in his loyal army.

Eventually William sailed with an army of some 24,000 men – the largest force ever to invade England. He had issued a declaration recounting James’s breaches of the law and proclaiming his own intention to restore the liberties of England – though he also stated that he had no intention of deposing his father-in-law. A wind that held the Royal Navy – itself less than wholly loyal – by the Essex coast blew the Dutch through the Channel and William landed safely at Torbay. His admirers called it ‘a Protestant wind’.

If James had moved swiftly and decisively, he might well have checked the invasion, for the grandees who had issued the invitation to William had not yet dared to join him, and it is probable that they were unwilling to act till all risk had been removed, for they were comfortable men with great possessions and much to lose. But James was now himself moving from the ridiculous overconfidence of the previous year by way of self-doubt and distrust towards despair. He remained in London while his army advanced slowly to the west. Soon there came word of the first defection: the young Lord Cornbury. He was of no great significance himself (and failed to persuade his men to cross over to the enemy with him), but as a son of the second Earl of Clarendon, he was James’s nephew by marriage. His desertion dealt a notable blow to the King’s crumbling morale.

James was in a state of high nervous tension. When he joined his army, he suffered a succession of nosebleeds. It was not surprising, for he no longer knew whom he might trust, and the same uncertainty disturbed even those who remained loyal to him. Nevertheless, at this critical moment the King behaved like a man of honour. He told Clarendon that he would not hold either him or any other members of his family accountable for Cornbury’s treasonable desertion. Then he called his generals and senior officers together, among them Churchill, the Duke of Grafton (one of Charles II’s bastards), and generals Kirke and Trelawney. Macaulay, so hostile to James, wrote that:

he addressed the assembly in language worthy of a better man and a better cause. It might be, he said, that some of the officers had conscientious scruples about fighting for him. If so, he was willing to receive back their commissions. But he adjured them as gentlemen and soldiers not to imitate the shameful example of Cornbury. All seemed moved; and none more than Churchill. He was the first to vow with well feigned enthusiasm that he would shed the last drop of his blood in the service of his gracious master: Grafton was loud and forward in similar protestations; and the example was followed by Kirke and Trelawney.
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Macaulay’s account of this meeting was derived from a biography of James, compiled during his exile, which is based, if only in part, on memoirs written by him in his own hand. Given Macaulay’s antipathy to James, anything he recounts favourable to the King may deserve to be trusted. However, his dislike of Churchill and contempt for him were also intense. Churchill’s partisans may therefore choose to reject this story. His descendant, Sir Winston, in his five-volume
Life of Marlborough
, does so. Others, including A. L. Rowse and Marlborough’s most recent biographer, Richard Holmes, make no mention of it at all.

Be that as it may, it is clear that Churchill was already planning to abandon the King who had been his patron and to whom he owed so much. All that was necessary was to choose the right moment, and to co-ordinate his desertion with that of the Princess Anne, his wife Sarah’s closest friend. Any immediate intention was however put on hold when the King joined his army. Churchill then suggested that James should inspect the outposts of the army at Warminster. He was about to do so when he was overcome by another violent nosebleed, and it was three days before he fully recovered. Subsequently the King was to ascribe this to Providence, having become convinced that there had been a plot to seize him at Warminster and carry him over to the Prince’s camp.

While James was incapacitated, Churchill and the Duke of Grafton rode off to join William. Churchill left behind a letter in which, while admitting that he owed everything to James, he asserted that his devotion to the Church of England made it impossible to remain in his service. ‘Churchill’s conduct at this crisis for the nation needs no defending,’ wrote Rowse, ‘and we need waste no time upon it. He was bound to suffer the charge of ingratitude, then and for ever afterwards; but the responsibility was James’s. In leaving him Churchill was doing what was best for the nation.’
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Or, of course, for John Churchill. The ship was sinking, and he ratted. ‘Est-il possible?’ said Princess Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark, on hearing of Churchill’s desertion. ‘Est-il possible?’ he asked again, in perhaps simulated surprise, before he and Princess Anne followed Churchill’s example.