The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (40 page)

James’s nerve now cracked completely. He had already sent his wife and baby son to France, and was anxious to follow them. His first attempt failed. He was recognised by some fishermen, endured their insults, and was brought back to London. In fact he was in a stronger position than he realised. William was determined to be king, despite his protestations to the contrary, as the only sure way of bringing England into his Grand Alliance against France; and the last thing he wanted was to have his father-in-law in his hands. If James had held his ground, there might have been a compromise, with James retained as king but deprived of control of the government, and with a council of regency established. That would have been an unstable situation, capable of being reversed in the future. The possibility was not to William’s taste. Moreover, James and William, uncle and nephew as well as father-in-law and son-in-law, had previously been on good, even friendly terms. It would have been embarrassing for William to have had the King as his prisoner. So he ordered that James should be given the chance to flee again. This time he succeeded in getting to France.

Louis XIV received him with kindness and courtesy. The Palace of St-Germains was put at his disposal. The Queen made a good impression. ‘She is judicious and sensible in all she says,’ Madame de Sevigné wrote. However, ‘her husband is quite different; he is courageous but his intelligence is only mediocre. He recounts all that has happened in England with such indifference that that is all one can feel for him.’
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Nevertheless, she thought him ‘a decent sort of man’. Other judgements were more severe. The Archbishop of Rheims, brother of Louis’s war minister, Louvois, remarked: ‘There goes a simpleton, who has lost three kingdoms for a Mass.’ Whatever might be the fear of Catholicism in England, European politics were no longer determined by religious divisions. William’s Grand Alliance against France had the Catholic Habsburg emperor and Catholic Spain among its members. Indeed, when William sailed for England, the Spanish ambassador at the Hague had caused Masses to be said for a successful voyage.

The revolution in England would be called ‘Glorious’ and ‘Bloodless’; there had been almost no fighting. It wasn’t bloodless in Scotland or Ireland, where the King retained support.

Despite criticism of his enthusiasm for watching the torture of Covenanting prisoners, James had been quite popular when dispatched to Scotland by his brother during the Exclusion crisis. Fifty years later, Robert Chambers remembered that ‘old people used to talk with delight of the magnificence and brilliancy of the Court which James assembled [at Holyrood] and of the general tone of happiness and satisfaction which pervaded the town’.
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He had revived the old royal bodyguard, the Company of Archers, created the Order of the Knights of the Thistle, become patron of the Royal College of Physicians and extended his support to the Physic Garden in the grounds of Trinity Hospital. But however welcome his sojourn had been to the nobility, gentry and intelligentsia, the old spirit of the Covenant and suspicion of Catholicism were still alive. When the revolution broke out and the chancellor, the Catholic Earl of Perth, prudently fled from Edinburgh, a mob attacked and destroyed the abbey chapel at Holyrood, which James had converted to Catholic use.

However, the King had supporters in Scotland who, unlike those in England, were prepared to fight for him. Their leader was John Graham of Claverhouse, whom James had made Viscount Dundee. He was a professional soldier who had served in the Dutch army, once indeed saving William’s life when he was unhorsed in battle. He had later commanded the royal army in Scotland against the Covenanting rebels, and now resolved, as Sir Walter Scott’s ballad has it, that ‘Ere the King’s crown shall fall, there are crowns to be broke; / So let each Cavalier who loves honour and me, Come follow the bonnet of Bonnie Dundee.’ As a Graham and a cousin of the great Marquis of Montrose, Dundee had influence with the Highland clans, especially those hostile to the Whig Clan Campbell. He raised an army that met the professional Anglo-Scottish-Dutch troops commanded by General Mackay in the Pass of Killiecrankie on the border between Highland and Lowland Scotland. The Highland charge swept all before them, but a bullet hit Dundee and he died in the hour of victory. No one could take his place. King James’s cause was lost in Scotland, but the exiled Stuarts would find support there for more than fifty years to come.

Ireland was even more promising territory for James. The native Irish were Catholic, and James’s deputy in Ireland, Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell (and Churchill’s brother-in-law) commanded a large predominantly Catholic army. He marched against the Protestant stronghold of Londonderry. It was almost taken straight away, saved only by the prompt action of thirteen young apprentice boys, whose names suggest a Scottish origin, who closed the Ferry Gate against the attackers. The siege lasted 105 days – days of hardship and near starvation – before the city was relieved and a tradition of Protestant defiance was established that has coloured and, some would say, prejudiced the subsequent history of Ulster.

James himself now arrived in Ireland with French troops provided by his cousin Louis, but William defeated him at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. James, blaming the indiscipline of the Irish for his defeat, left them to their fate, which was miserable, and retired in depression to France. He would live another ten years there at St-Germains, in frequent correspondence with English and Scots politicians anxious to maintain some relations with the exiled King, in case a turn of Fortune’s wheel should see him back in Whitehall. Churchill, rewarded for his treason with the earldom of Marlborough, was only one of many, both Whigs and Tories, to keep a line to St-Germains open. No wonder William looked on his leading subjects in England with suspicion and contempt.

As for James, he devoted himself to the practice of the religion that had cost him his throne, and to the recital of complaints about the treachery of his subjects. His mood was morose, his life gloomy. He wrote memoirs full of self-justification and self-pity, and enjoyed only the occasional lighter moment provided by a bottle of his favourite champagne. Some thought the court of St-Germains the most miserable place in France with the exception of the Bastille. He died in 1701, and a few Irish Jesuits maintained that miracles had been performed at his tomb. They might think him a martyr to his faith, but the Pope, more anxious to check the ambitions of France than to restore a Catholic king to the thrones of England and Scotland as a pensioner and ally of Louis XIV, had ordered the bells to be rung in Rome to celebrate James’s defeat at the Boyne, and was indifferent to requests that he be considered as a candidate for canonisation.

Chapter 15

William III (1689–1702) and Mary II (1689–94): Revolution Settlement and Dutch Rule

Despite the disclaimer in the declaration he published before invading England, William was determined to be king. He would not act as regent, either for his exiled father-in-law, as some High Church Tories wished, or for his wife, the legitimate heir if the fiction about the warming-pan baby was accepted. So he held out for sovereignty, and the Convention Parliament,
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having conveniently decided that James’s desertion had left the throne vacant, named William and Mary as joint king and queen. William’s determination was reasonable. Only as king could he achieve his aim of bringing England – and Scotland – into his Grand Alliance against Louis. He was content to share the throne with his wife, because they were now on reasonably good terms; he could be sure she wouldn’t interfere, would do as she was told, and might usefully smooth his relations with the English politicians whom, with good reason, he distrusted and despised. He cared not a jot for the so-called liberties of England he had been invited to preserve. He wanted the English army and navy, and money to finance his wars against Louis, and he made sure he got all of these.

His father had died just before he was born in 1650, and he had been brought up by his mother, Mary Stuart. He had been a sweet-tempered small boy, a favourite of his uncle, Charles, whose pro-French policies he would come to deplore. But the charming affectionate child was soon soured by experience. Mary died when he was only ten, and, with the government of the United Provinces of the Netherlands in the hands of severe republicans who detested the House of Orange, he learned self-sufficiency in his youth. He grew up chilly and reserved in manner, distrustful of all but a handful of intimate friends, chief among them a Dutch nobleman of his own age, William Bentinck, whom he regarded as a brother. The French invasion of 1672 and the revolution in the Netherlands that followed it determined the course of his life. Though only twenty-two he was appointed Stadtholder of the United Provinces and commander of the armed forces, a position less than royal, more than presidential, held by members of the House of Orange since William’s great-grandfather had inspired and led the revolt of the Dutch against Philip II of Spain. Henceforth he devoted his life to the struggle against Louis XIV. He was not a great general, though conspicuously brave in battle, but he was a great leader.

He hoped that the marriage to his cousin Mary would lead to a reorientation of English foreign policy. When his uncle Charles showed no inclination for this, but preferred friendship with France, and the pension Louis paid him, William soon lost whatever interest he had had in his wife. He can scarcely be blamed for this. Mary was doubtless a good woman – Bishop Burnet certainly thought so – but she seems to have been a singularly dull one, with less character than any of the rest of the Stuart family. She talked a great deal, but not to any point, and practised her religion faithfully. William was soon bored and took mistresses, chief among them Elizabeth Villiers, whom he would make Countess of Orkney. She was a distant cousin of the Duke of Buckingham, a lively conversationalist but no beauty, disfigured by a hideous squint. Their affair may have been more companionable than sexual. Unlike his uncles, Charles and James, William fathered no children, legitimate or illegitimate. Some thought him homosexually inclined, and he did indeed prefer the company of young officers to ladies. But his friendship with Bentinck was no more than friendship, and only late in life, when he made a favourite of Arnold Joost van Keppel, a pretty young man with, as Macaulay says, a sweet and obliging temper, was there any relationship that might give substance to this rumour; and this principally because Bentinck, now Earl of Portland, was so manifestly jealous of the young man, who had been one of William’s pages and was now made Earl of Albemarle and a Knight of the Garter. The favour shown Keppel ‘furnished the Jacobites with a fresh topic for calumny and ribaldry’,
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but Macaulay could not bring himself to suppose that the calumny was other than baseless. He was probably right, though even Burnet found the young man’s progress unaccountably quick. Yet it is not difficult to explain. Keppel was unfailingly cheerful and lighthearted, eager to please, whereas Portland had become stiff and peevish. Keppel was indeed generally popular; even the English nobility, jealous of foreign favourites, liked him. If William had regarded Bentinck as the brother he never had, then his little Joost took the place of a son. Moreover, he was one of the few people who could make William laugh.

William never achieved popularity; the English regarded him as a necessary expedient. The Tory squires resented his determination to involve the country in expensive wars, from which they derived no benefit. Nor, outside Protestant Ulster, where, as King Billy, he enjoys the status of a hero, has posterity remembered him with much pleasure. But for Macaulay he was the greatest of kings, and the Whig historian’s verdict is worth quoting:

His name at once calls up before us a slender and feeble frame, a lofty and ample forehead, a nose curved like the beak of an eagle, an eye rivalling that of an eagle in brightness and keenness, a thoughtful and somewhat sullen brow, a firm and somewhat peevish mouth, a cheek pale, thin, and deeply furrowed by sickness and by care. That pensive, severe, and solemn aspect could scarcely have belonged to a happy or a good-humoured man. But it indicates in a manner not to be mistaken capacity equal to the most arduous enterprises, and fortitude not to be shaken by reverses or dangers. Nature had largely endowed William with the qualities of a great ruler; and education had developed these qualities in no common degree…

The audacity of his spirit was the more remarkable because his physical organization was unusually delicate. From a child he had been weak and sickly. In the prime of manhood his complaints had been aggravated by a severe attack of smallpox. He was asthmatic and consumptive. His slender frame was shaken by a constant hoarse cough. He could not sleep unless his head was propped by several pillows, and could scarcely draw his breath in any but the purest air. [For this reason, he found it intolerable to take up residence at Whitehall or St James’s Palace, preferring Kensington or Hampton Court, distant from the oppressive and foetid air of London.]

Cruel headaches frequently tormented him. Exertion soon fatigued him. The physicians constantly kept up the hopes of his enemies by fixing some date beyond which, if there were anything certain in medical science, it was impossible that his broken constitution could hold out. Yet, through a life which was one long disease, the force of his mind never failed, on any occasion, to bear up his suffering and languid body.
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Macaulay admits that William ‘passed for the most cold-blooded of mankind’; nevertheless he asserts that ‘to a very small circle of friends, on whose fidelity and secrecy he could absolutely depend, he was a different man from the reserved and stoical William whom the multitude supposed to be destitute of human feelings. He was kind, cordial, open, even convivial and jocose, would sit at table many hours, and would bear his full share in festive conversation.’