The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (43 page)

William had found great difficulty in governing two countries with separate parliaments, and advised his successor that the only way to remove the antagonism between them was to effect a union of the parliaments of England and Scotland. The idea was not new. James VI and I had pressed for such a complete union; more tentatively Charles II had appointed commissioners to investigate the possibility of effecting one. Both attempts had come to nothing, principally because the English saw no advantage in the proposal. Anne was of William’s mind in this matter. Whether she had come to that conclusion herself or was following his advice is immaterial. In her first speech to her English parliament, made within three days of her accession, she spoke of her desire for a closer union. The English were now ready to consider this proposition. In the past the Scots had been more eager, the English uninterested. Now the positions were reversed.

It was the question of the succession to the throne that brought about the English volte-face. It was now clear that Anne would have no child to succeed her. The English parliament had passed an Act of Settlement in 1701, which declared that the Crown should pass to the nearest Protestant heir of James VI and I – the Electress Sophia and then her son, George. The Scottish parliament had passed its own measure – the Act of Security. This too had stipulated that the monarch must be a Protestant, but had not identified an heir. More alarmingly for the English, it declared that Scotland might choose a king of its own – not necessarily the same person as the King of England – unless particular Scottish grievances were settled and certain assurances given. Since the failure of the Darien Scheme, hostility to England, amounting to Anglophobia, was running high in Scotland. Moreover, there were acknowledged Jacobites in the Scottish parliament. The Scots, from ancestral loyalty to the Stuarts, might even offer the Crown to the ‘Pretender’ James Edward, whom the Jacobites called James VIII and III, especially if he could be persuaded to turn Protestant. Since he was a pensioner of the French king, this raised the horrid possibility, in the middle of a war with France, of the renewal of the old Franco-Scottish alliance. It was not to be thought of. So English politicians came round to the idea of parliamentary union, because the alternative was the breaking of the regnal union.

The Scots were more divided. The Jacobites opposed union. So did many who feared that the loss of independence – even of the qualified independence Scotland had enjoyed since 1603 – would see Scotland swallowed up by England. The burghs were suspicious; the city mob in Edinburgh and Glasgow fiercely opposed. Yet for many, the prospect of rejecting the proposed union was disturbing. It might even result in an English invasion. Others saw the political and economic advantages of union – security and trade with the English colonies from which Scotland was currently debarred.

Anne appointed commissioners from each kingdom, and the terms of a treaty of union were agreed in 1707. Approval was easily got in the English parliament, achieved with greater difficulty, and after bitter argument, in the Scottish one. Though she saw some of the commissioners privately, Anne achieved her aim without playing any public part in the debates. In effect she had made a treaty with herself, as Queen of England and Scotland. These titles were now extinguished. She was legally Queen of Great Britain and Ireland.

One of the Scots commissioners, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, had several audiences with the Queen at Kensington Palace, the first in the company of the Duke of Queensberry, who represented her views to the Scottish parliament. ‘I twice saw her in her Closet,’ Clerk remembered.

One day I had occasion to observe the Calamities which attend humane nature even in the greatest dignities of Life. Her majesty was labouring under a fit of the Gout, and in extream pain and agony, and on this occasion everything about her was much in the same disorder as about the meanest of her subjects. Her face, which was red and spotted, was rendered something frightful by her negligent dress, and the foot affected was tied up with a pultis and some nasty bandages. I was much affected at this sight, and the more when she had occasion to mention her people of Scotland, which she did frequently to the Duke. What are you, poor mean like Mortal, thought I, who talks in the style of a Sovereign?
⁵

On another occasion his reflections were equally sympathetic, even pitiful:

The poor Lady was again under a severe fit of the Gout, ill-dressed, bloated in her countenance, and surrounded with plasters, cataplasims and dirty-like rags. The extremity of her pain was not then upon her, and it diverted her a little to see company with whom she was not to use ceremonies, otherways I had not been allowed access to her. However, I believe she was not displeased to see any body, for no Court Attenders ever came near her. All the Incence and Adoration offered at Courts were to her Ministers, particularly the Earl of Godolphin, her chief minister, and the two Secretaries of State; her palace at Kensington, where she commonly resided, was a perfect solitude, as I had occasion to observe several times. I never saw anybody attending there but some of her guards in the outer room, with one at most of the Gentlemen of her Bedchamber. Her frequent fits of sickness and the distance of the place from London, did not admit of what are commonly called Drawing-Room nights, so that I had many occasions to think that few Houses in England belonging to persons of Quality were keept in a more privat way than the Queen’s Royal Palace of Kensington.

Despite her wretched health, Anne had her amusements. Chief among them was horse-racing. In the early summer of 1711, while out for a carriage drive, she halted on the common at Ascot, and seeing that it appeared to have been designed by nature for her favourite sport, ordered that a racecourse be laid out, and declared that she would present a challenge plate for the inaugural meeting. The work was done quickly – more quickly than subsequent improvements to the course – and the first meeting was held that August, the Queen driving from Windsor Castle and presenting ‘Her Majesty’s Plate of 100 guineas’ to the winning owner. If little about the poor Queen is memorable, her invention of Royal Ascot at least should not be forgotten.

The war dragged on with no great victories after Malplaquet (1709), a fierce encounter where the allied losses were greater than those of the French. It became more and more unpopular and a Tory ministry came in determined to make peace. Marlborough was dismissed and sent into exile; there was much talk of corruption. Meanwhile the Whigs spoke angrily of peace negotiations being a betrayal of their allies, the Dutch and the Habsburg emperor. But it had proved impossible to dislodge the French prince from Spain, and all the other aims of the war had been achieved. In particular France’s power had been given a stiff blow. There would be no French aggression for decades, so badly had this war gone. Jonathan Swift wrote a pamphlet,
The Conduct of the Allies
, which demolished the Whig case for continuing the war – at least in the opinion of the Tories. Swift thought his services to his party deserved a bishopric, but he had to be content with the deanery of St Patrick’s in Dublin. He told his favourite correspondent, ‘Stella’ (Hester Johnson), that he thought it would be a good peace for England, and he was right.
⁶

Poor Anne’s health continued to deteriorate. Swift went to court and reported to Stella that he had seen the Queen carried in a chair into the garden or to chapel; she had almost lost the use of her legs. Yet she continued to do her duty as she understood it. Though she was queen by the will of Parliament and the old Stuart claim to divine right was dead, she still ‘touched’ for the king’s evil (scrofula), the last monarch to do so. One of those she ministered to in this way was the infant Samuel Johnson.

In 1714 she was failing fast. With the Tories in office the great question was whether they had the will, or the courage, to change the succession and bring back Anne’s half-brother, James Edward. Certainly one of the two leading ministers, Henry St John, Lord Bolingbroke, was in communication with the Jacobite court at St-Germains; but he was scarcely on speaking terms with his chief colleague, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, the Lord Treasurer. Anne was known to dislike her distant Hanoverian cousins – the Elector, though heir to the throne, had been forbidden to come to England. Many thought she had a tenderness to her half-brother, even if it was provoked by feelings of guilt for her conduct in 1688. Perhaps if he had been prepared to become a Protestant, she might have favoured his succession. But he refused, and Anne’s loyalty to the Church of England was stronger than any family feeling. In any case, to change the succession would have required Parliament to amend or repeal the Act of Settlement, and there was no majority for that. Even if Bolingbroke was planning a
coup d’état
, he was prevented by the rapidity of the Queen’s decline. Antipathy between him and Oxford was now open. Almost Anne’s last act was to dismiss Oxford, who had turned up completely drunk at a Council meeting, and then deny Bolingbroke the treasurer’s White Staff, which she offered instead to a moderate Whig, the Duke of Shrewsbury.

Anne died on 1 August 1714. The Protestant succession was assured. The new German king came in, the Whigs were rewarded, Marlborough recalled, the Tories dished, and the Stuart monarchy was at an end – except in the eyes of the exiles and the Jacobite sympathisers at home.

Chapter 17

James VIII and III: Jacobites

James Edward Stuart was born in the Palace of Whitehall and reared in the gloom of St-Germains. Thirteen years old when his father died and Louis XIV with rash chivalry hailed him as King of England, Scotland and Ireland, he would pass all his life in exile, a king who never ruled. He would be known as the Chevalier de St-George, as the Pretender (or Claimant) and then as the Old Pretender; for many in England as well as Scotland he was ‘the King over the water’, and in company that was not all of their opinion, they would pass their glass over the water jug when invited to drink the King’s health. The longer he lived, the more the hope of a restoration faded, and well before his death in 1766 he was resigned to failure, piously accepting it as the unfathomable will of God.

But it was different in his youth. James was a soldier then and served in the French army, displaying a courage and disregard of danger that won him the respect not only of his own commanding officers but of those whom he considered his rightful subjects now arrayed against him. Some cheered him when they saw him riding along the French lines; others were happy to drink his health, if only in admiration of a brave young man.

Hopes of a restoration were still high, and would remain so as long as France and Britain were at war. The 1707 Treaty of Union was known to be unpopular in Scotland, and the Jacobites there were fierce against union. Their leader, George Lockhart of Carnwath, whose father, the Lord President of the Court of Session, had been murdered in the high street of Edinburgh by a disappointed litigant, had been the only out-and-out opponent of union among the commissioners appointed by Queen Anne to consider it. Without union, there was a chance of a Jacobite restoration; this would be much diminished if union was achieved – which was after all the prime purpose of any union in the eyes of the English government.

The treaty was made, but its immediate unpopularity raised Jacobite hopes. Louis was persuaded to sanction an invasion. Six thousand French infantry were put aboard a fleet of more than twenty ships commanded by the Comte de Forbin, a famous privateer. He himself was sceptical, consenting to take the command only when the troops were transferred from slow transports to fast-sailing privateers. He had reason to be doubtful, for British spies were active, and ships of the Royal Navy appeared off Dunkirk, where, by mischance, the young King was confined to bed with measles. But then the wind changed, James recovered, and Forbin consented to sail. He was contemptuous of the quality of the Jacobites on board and declared that the young king – James was not yet twenty – was the only one who showed any courage. Forbin displayed no great spirit himself. His little fleet entered the Firth of Forth, but was shadowed by vessels of the Royal Navy. James begged to be put ashore, alone if necessary, but Forbin would have none of it, and aborted the enterprise.

James had prepared a proclamation to be issued on landing. It would appeal ‘to his good people of his ancestral Kingdom of Scotland’ to break the parliamentary union. He would leave everything, he promised, to a newly elected Scottish parliament. Such an appeal would have won him support, for implicit in it was an undertaking not to disrupt the Church settlement of 1688–9 that had re-established the Presbyterian Kirk at the expense of the Episcopalians – unless Parliament chose to amend it. But there was no landing.

The danger of invasion and a Jacobite rising alarmed the government. Any noble or laird suspected of Jacobite sympathies who could be apprehended was put under arrest. But most remained at liberty and Edinburgh was almost undefended. The castle garrison was tiny and short of ammunition. Its commander, the Earl of Leven, was ready to withdraw. An English agent reported that the little Scottish home army – most of the regiments were serving under Marlborough in the Netherlands – was ‘debauched’ and would join the Pretender.

This might have been the best chance the Jacobites ever had. It was the only time when France supplied a sizeable force that came within sight of Scotland. Union then had few supporters in Scotland. If Forbin had landed his troops, James might have been master of his ‘ancestral kingdom’. But unnerved by the presence of the English ships that chivvied him up the North Sea, Forbin did not dare to follow his orders. James wept in anger and shame.

Nevertheless, Jacobite hopes rose again as the war became unpopular in England and the Tories – the High Church party – returned to power determined to make peace. Their leaders were even ready to contemplate changing the succession. They were in contact with the exiled court. If James was to change his religion and abjure Catholicism, might he not be more acceptable than his distant German cousin, the Elector of Hanover? But James, though of an amiable temper, had all the characteristic obstinacy of the Stuarts.