A History of Britain, Volume 2 (46 page)

For a moment, all these calculations were thrown into disarray by the improbable return of James to London. When he was almost on board ship, he had been recognized (though as a fleeing priest, not as a king), searched and physically harassed. In fact, such was his pathetic condition that it actually inspired sympathy from the London populace for the first time in years. Fortunately for William and the Whigs, James was not listening to the cheers. His only thought was to get out of the country again as quickly as possible, and in this, of course, his captors were only too delighted to assist. This time he did not come back.

With the throne now well and truly vacant, the second Convention Parliament in thirty years debated the future of the realm. Despite the fact that both Whigs and Tories (the latter returned as a minority but a substantial one) and the country thought of the assembly as a free parliament, it actually met under the conditions of a foreign occupation, with Dutch troops patrolling Westminster, Whitehall and most of the City of London. And, needless to say, William's ambitions had grown and hardened as his military position in England had become unchallengeable. James's presence in France had altered the dynamic of their conflict in ways that no longer allowed for sentimental niceties. For James was there, not just as a guest, but as an ally in an international war that had already ignited across Europe. So some sort of half-baked provisional arrangement – of the kind that parliament presented to him – might not be enough security for the kind of test he would imminently face. In fact, the Convention had divided. The Whig majority in the Commons was all for William and Mary becoming monarchs right away, and doing so on the grounds that James had demonstrably violated his coronation oath and had dethroned himself by breaking his contract with the people. The Tory majority in the House of Lords, however, refused to acknowledge any such contract and instead took refuge in the ‘vacancy' argument, by which the throne must needs be filled without altering its divine-right sovereignty. The compromise was that William and Mary would be made regents until the death of James, at which point they could ascend the throne as his already designated lawful heirs. No mention was made by either side, of course, of the inconvenient existence of the Prince of Wales.

But it was precisely the fact of the Prince of Wales – and the possibility that as time went on his legitimacy would seem more, not less, credible – that made William realize, with his peerless sense of timing, that if he failed to seize the moment, he would squander an advantage that might never return. So, with the Dutch Blues on the streets, he simply
rejected every overture short of the crown itself. He knew, of course, that in the last resort the Tories had no alternative. Veiled threats that if the matter were not settled he would depart forthwith sent them into a tizzy of anxiety. On 6 February, the House of Lords capitulated.

A week later, on 13 February 1689, William and Mary were declared king and queen. At their coronation on 11 April, before the crowns were set on their heads a reading took place of the Declaration of Rights, passed by the Convention. The moment was not just ceremonial, but profoundly significant for the future of the monarchy in Britain. For it solemnized the Crown's commitment to the reforms of the Long Parliament and the Protectorate as a condition of its authority. No more standing armies; no dispensing power; no resort to extra-parliamentary taxation; no resurrection of special courts and tribunals, ecclesiastical or civil; freedom to petition guaranteed; free elections; annual parliaments. Later in the spring an Act ofToleration was passed. It fell a long way short of the promise of its billing, not extending to all Christian sects (those, for example, who denied the Trinity). But, as John Locke wrote to a friend in the Dutch Republic, ‘Toleration has now at last been established by law in our country. Not perhaps so wide in scope as might be wished for by you and those like you who are true Christians and free from ambition or envy. Still, it is something to have progressed so far. I hope that, with these beginnings, the foundations have been laid of that liberty and peace, in which the Church of Christ is one day to be established.'

Whatever else it was, the English state of 1700 was unquestionably not the Stuart monarchy of 1603 or 1660. But William's government did have a true predecessor – and that was the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. For the regime that had been all too briefly established in 1657 – of a ‘single person and [a bicameral] parliament' guaranteeing regular elections and limited toleration – looks like the authentic blueprint of what actually came to pass after 1688. In this sense, at least, the real ‘Interregnum' might be seen as 1659–87! Just as the government sketched out in the Humble Petition and Advice had corresponded to what a majority of the country's ruling landed elites wanted then, so the Williamite government corresponded to it a generation later.

This was not what old Edmund Ludlow, the last of the regicide republicans, had foreseen when, at the age of seventy-one, he left his Swiss exile on Lac Leman for England to see first-hand if William was indeed, as he hoped, the new ‘Gideon'. Ludlow took with him bitter memories of comrades assassinated in Lausanne, or dying sad and poor in exile, or of soldiers of the ‘Good Old Cause', such as Algernon Sidney in England, betrayed and hanged. But Ludlow fondly imagined that the issue in 1689
was the same as it had been forty years before, namely ‘whether the king should govern as a god by his will and the nation be governed by beasts, or whether the people should be governed by themselves, by their own consent'. Once in London, though, aside from congenial evenings spent with the survivors of countless republican débâcles, such as John Wildman, Ludlow was doomed to disenchantment. William had no interest whatsoever in encouraging a government based on popular consent. He was neither a crowned republican nor Gideon. He was, for Ludlow, the worst of all reincarnations: a second Cromwell. It was not long before indignant noises were made in the Commons about the presence of so notorious a regicide as Edmund Ludlow – indignation endorsed by the new king. Before worse could happen, Ludlow returned his old bones to the limbo from whence they came.

Future Ludlows would have to travel a little further in search of their elusive Promised Land: across the Atlantic, in fact, where many of those seeking a truly new world, such as William Penn the younger, could find space to make it. The ‘Revolutionary Settlement' turned out to be neither. But that, paradoxically, was its greatest strength and accomplishment. The unsettlement of 1689 – and with it the creation of a polity within which mutually conflicting views on what had happened and why could be sustained – was a measure not of failure but success. For a kingdom of debate had been created, in which it was possible for fierce arguments about the constitution and government of the state to be conducted without necessitating outright civil war.

Thomas Hobbes – who had survived to see the Popish Plot – had insisted that the containment of argument was impossible short of the surrender of liberties to an omnipotent adjudicator, the Leviathan. But if William were indeed powerful, he was certainly not omnipotent. It was a back-handed compliment to the rough-house ebullience of party politics that the king was so shocked and vexed by it. He had imagined he would lead a grateful and united nation into the European war, which he assumed to be as much in English as Dutch interests. Instead, he discovered that what he had effected had developed a political momentum that refused to march in lock-step with military obedience. The more he pressured, the more trouble he got. In the 1690s, with the country at war, the first parliamentary Committee of Account, to which government officials were obliged to report, was established. And the Triennial Act (another revival of 1657) ensured that parliamentary oversight would be a permanent, not an intermittent, feature of the English political system. However irksome for the king, William would learn to live with these inconveniences. For it turned out that what the country
needed was not, after all, a Leviathan, but a Chairman of the Board.

Nothing like this peculiar regime, in which viable government coexisted with party polemics, existed anywhere else in Europe. However puffed up with self-congratulation, Macaulay was justified at the end of volume III of his great
History of England
in seeing the implanting of a genuine parliamentary system as the precondition for avoiding the later fates of absolute monarchies, destroyed by much fiercer revolutions: ‘For the authority of law, for the security of property, for the peace of our streets, for the happiness of our homes, our gratitude is due, under him who pulls down nations at his pleasure, to the Long Parliament, to the Convention and to William of Orange.'

But who, exactly, were laying flowers on the bier of William of Orange? The English, naturally. For Macaulay neglected to add in this anthem that English liberty was won over Irish and Highland-Scottish corpses. That if 1689 were a triumph for England, it was a tragedy for Britain. And that outside England, lawlessness, insecurity of property, war in the streets and bitter domestic sorrow were as much the enduring legacy of what Cromwell and his reincarnation, William, wrought as any of the glories of the Glorious Revolution.

For although Ireland may be at the western edge of Europe geographically, it can never escape the inexorable effects of the Continent's wars. Not for the first or last time, it found itself fighting a European war by proxy and paying, as a result, a terrible price. When William set out on the enterprise of England he knew very well that his campaigns were unlikely to stop at the Tweed or the Irish Sea. His pessimism served him well. In March 1689, a month before William and Mary were crowned, James arrived in Ireland, supported by 20,000 French troops under the command of the Duc de Lauzun. Tens of thousands of Irish Catholics streamed to volunteer for his army. In May in Dublin, James and the ‘Patriot Parliament' rescinded Cromwell's Land Settlement (perpetuated by his brother Charles), restored confiscated lands to their original owners and brought Catholics back into every branch of government. For the first time since the wars against Elizabeth, Ireland was in the hands of native Irish (Macaulay's ‘aboriginals'). Unfortunately it was also in the hands of James II and the French, neither of whom were especially interested in what the Irish wanted except as a stepping stone to the reconquest of England and the re-establishment of an authoritarian Stuart monarchy there. James formally anathematized the constitutional settlement in England as ‘contrary to the law of God, nature and the nation'. In return, the Irish parliament produced a reassertion of divine-right kingship categorical enough even for James, who in 1692 would candidly instruct
his son that his only proper recourse was to a Catholic court, guarded by a Catholic army. ‘Your Majesty's right to your Imperial Crown is, originally, by nature and descent of blood, from God alone by whom kings reign and not from your people, not by virtue of any contract made with them or any act of your estates on their behalf . . . neither the peers nor the people, collective or representatively have or ought to have any coercive power over the persons of the kings of this realm.'

The armies that faced each other twenty miles north of Dublin on the last day of June 1690 were divided, then, by more than the river Boyne. They also stood for utterly different historical destinies for Britain. Neither offered a particularly happy outcome. But perhaps the measurement of felicity is beside the point. The point is that they represented contrasting visions of power. In James's tents between the walls of Dublin and the river were encamped the servants of a cult: the mystery of the godlike king, the obedience of the Christian flock, the unquestioning service of the faithful. William, on the other hand, was the chief engineer of a war machine. His grandfather Maurice had led the first armies to use printed drill manuals. When William looked out across the river at the French–Irish lines he did so through the most accurately lensed telescope that Dutch instrument-makers could devise (though he was looking the wrong way when an opportunistically fired cannonball nearly took his head off on the eve of battle). His army was truly international, containing Danes and Germans as well as Dutch, Huguenots and English, as befitted the king of a multinational corporate state. And it was funded, of course, by international finance – Portuguese Jews and Huguenots, precisely the kind of people for whom the absolutist monarchies found no place.

In the end, it's true, machinery was not what decided the battle but, rather, intelligent and daring strategy, accomplished by horses, riders and shooters. William sent a division of his army down river to ford it and outflank the defenders while his own troops rode straight across in a headlong attack. Surrounded as the French and Irish were on three sides, panic inevitably ensued, with James himself not especially keen to fight to the bitter end. After a night spent in Dublin, he made one of the hasty departures, at which by now he was well practised, and settled down to end his political career, as he had begun it, as a guest of the king of France.

To many, then and since, it looked like the end of a chapter. And so it was, if the book is a history of England. But if the book is a history of Britain, the Boyne was just the turning of another bloody page.

IN WILLIAMITE BRITAIN,
showing up late could get you killed. William III came from a culture that set great store by good timing. In 1688, his own carefully maintained and calibrated political clock (as well as the luck of the Protestant winds) had made the difference between a throne and a débâcle. The Dutch king expected men, money, armies to move like clockwork, with reassuring predictability. Although the kingdom he now governed fell far short of those ideals of regular movement, the winding of a spring, the greasing of a wheel might yet make the machine keep proper time and motion.