The Glorious Revolution, Part 1
The Glorious Revolution, Part 1
Nineteen out of twenty Englishmen agree: "We need a revolution!"
June 1688 was the month when seven English noblemen sent a written invitation to William III, Stadtholder of the Netherlands, inviting him to invade and conquer England.
"The people are so generally dissatisfied with the present conduct of the government" under King James II, they explained, that "nineteen parts of twenty... would willingly contribute" to a conquest.
William took up their invitation later that year, landing on 5 November1. King James's army melted away (as the invitation had predicted), King James himself fled, and William took the throne bloodlessly in what was called the Glorious Revolution.
Why were things in such a state that, not only did English noblemen invite an overseas invasion, but almost all England actually did welcome it? And how did England define the meaning of it afterwards? That's a fascinating story that underlies much of the modern world.
In 1688, England was still recovering from the Civil War and Cromwell's dictatorship. In the 1640's, Parliament had gone to war against King Charles I, won, and cut off his head, before themselves being overthrown by their own General Oliver Cromwell2. Cromwell tried to establish a new stable government, but he ended up ruling as a military dictator until his death in 1658. After his death, a faction of the army recalled Parliament and coerced them to hold new elections, and the newly-elected Parliament brought back King Charles's son as King Charles II.
It was clear that Parliament now held much more power than before. Charles II would quip accurately, "My words are my own, and my actions are my ministers'." He was fine with this - but his brother, who succeeded him as James II, wasn't.
The related problem was that James was Roman Catholic. He'd become interested in Catholicism while in exile in (Catholic) France during the Commonwealth, and officially converted in 1668 several years after returning to England. However, England was very staunchly Protestant, and had been since Queen Elizabeth's reign. Roman Catholic priests were banned, people were fined for not attending Church of England services, and "Test Acts" banned Roman Catholics from public office. All of this was extremely popular among the majority of English people.
(Among other reasons, Cromwell's regime had encouraged Protestant "Dissenters," so named because they "dissented" from the Anglican state church. They ranged from Presbyterians (like Cromwell himself) to Baptists and Quakers. All of these Dissenters had fallen out of favor along with his regime.)
For all his folly and shortsightedness - which would shortly become apparent - James was honest, and sincerely committed to Roman Catholicism. While still a Prince and his brother's heir, he resigned all his official offices rather than comply with the Test Acts or ignore them.
It's possible that King Charles took another route. While alive, he seemed happy to be an Anglican. He did take it lightly enough to have numerous mistresses and acknowledged bastards, but that was very common in his day. However, on his deathbed, James arranged for a Roman Catholic priest to officially receive him into the church. And, Charles went along with it and died Catholic. We don't know whether he was insincerely doing it to please his brother, or whether he'd been wanting this but waited rather than anger his subjects. (The English people, of course, blamed it all on James coercing a dying man.) But, whatever Charles had been thinking, it was clear James would take a different course.
Parliament had tried to keep James away from the throne. During Charles's reign (in May 1679), the House of Commons had overwhelmingly passed an Exclusion Bill which would've prevented any Roman Catholic from becoming king. The previous Test Acts had been for offices under the Crown; this would've extended them to the Crown itself. (So, the crown would've skipped James and gone to his daughter Mary, who had been raised Protestant.)
However, King Charles blocked the bill by dissolving Parliament. (That is, he adjourned them until he decided to call new elections.) He was fine with a more-powerful Parliament, but he didn't want to deny his brother his inheritance.
So, when Charles did die several years later, on 6 February 1685, James succeeded him as rightful King of England. There was one armed revolt (led by an illegitimate son of Charles3), but it was unpopular and quickly suppressed by James and all the influential men of England. Even though the people hated James's Catholicism, they willingly let him ascend to the throne.
After the Civil War, England didn't want any more turmoil and another uncertain government. They were willing to let a Catholic king reign, confident that - with Parliament - they could hold fast and wait him out till his Protestant daughters Mary and Anne succeeded.
Indeed, it seemed for a bit at first, Parliament did check him. King James immediately tried to repeal the Test Acts and penal laws; Parliament refused both. James responded (on 20 November 1685) by dissolving Parliament, leaving the laws in force.
Still, King James tried to work around the laws. The King of England had always held a power to dispense from legal requirements in occasional specific cases. For the first time, James started using that systematically. He handed out public offices, both in the civil government and the army, to numerous Roman Catholics. He started pressuring existing officeholders to convert to Catholicism. (Some did; many others refused and were sometimes dismissed.) The people were horrified.
What's more, he didn't give up on trying to get the laws repealed: he decided to structure elections so the next Parliament would be more pliable! His strategy was to appoint new, more congenial (and often Catholic) officers to supervise elections. He dismissed and replaced many county sheriffs, and coerced towns and cities into giving up their charters to be replaced by new charters letting him appoint officials.
We don't know how well this scheme would've worked. Some people clearly approved: at least, Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters. Many others (clearly more than approved) were horrified. But we don't know exactly how many, or whether they would've been enough to stop the planned election rigging. King James summoned a new Parliament in 1688 - but the elections were never actually held, thanks to being overtaken by events.
William III, Prince of Orange and Stadtholder of Holland4, was the husband of King James's elder daughter Mary. They were both staunch Protestants (Mary having grown up in her uncle's court), and William had consciously positioned himself as a Protestant champion for all Englishmen who might be wanting one.
It was an easy positioning. He was staunchly Protestant; he was busily fighting the Catholic monarchy of France; he was married to the heir presumptive to the English crown should anything happen to James. And besides, England could significantly help with his French wars. Mary herself, being madly in love with William5 and committedly Protestant herself, went along with all of this.
It seemed for a bit that things could pass peacefully: King James would be checked by Parliament, and then Mary would inherit as a Protestant successor. But then, James's wife became pregnant.
On 10 June 1688, the child was born: a son, named James after his father.
The incentives were obvious: King James would obviously raise his son Catholic, he would inherit the throne ahead of his older sisters6, and England would have a Catholic monarchy for the foreseeable future. The Catholics rejoiced; the Protestants despaired.
Unless... maybe he wasn't King James's son after all? Maybe he'd been smuggled into the birthing room in a warming-pan?
Today, this sounds like a silly story. It's clearly made up; as soon as the baby grew up, he looked exactly like his father. But at the time, the incentives were so clear that most every prominent Protestant in England and the Netherlands believed it. And, as every witness to the birth was Roman Catholic, no Protestant believed their testimony.
Right after the baby James was born, and while James's election rigging was in full swing, the Earl of Oxford - who'd been consulting with William of Orange - returned to England to gather support for an invasion. Later that month, in June 1688, "the Immortal Seven" wrote a letter inviting William of Orange to invade:
The people are so generally dissatisfied with the present conduct of the government, in relation to their religion, liberties and properties (all which have been greatly invaded), and they are in such expectation of their prospects being daily worse, that your Highness may be assured, there are nineteen parts of twenty of the people throughout the kingdom, who are desirous of a change; and who, we believe, would willingly contribute to it, if they had such a protection to countenance their rising, as would secure them from being destroyed.
In September, James summoned a new Parliament. Elections - under the new rigged system - were to be held in November.
Also in September, France attacked Austria. The Netherlands could safely send its army to England.
On 28 September, William was ready to sail, declaring he had come solely to ensure a free Parliament and protect the rights of Englishmen. This was obviously propaganda; it was clear to everyone paying attention that he was actually after the crown - or, at least, after getting England on his side in the coming war on France.
James gathered his army, and hastily reversed some of his unpopular changes to town charters, but his real hope was in the weather. However, on 14 October, the wind finally turned, and William set sail.
William, not counting on the promised English support, had brought a large army with him - at least 21,000 strong, roughly equal to James's field army. He landed in Devon (in the southwest of England) on November 5, without resistance.
Over the next two weeks, as James marched out to meet him, a constant stream of influential people deserted to William: noblemen, recent Members of Parliament, local officials, and military officers. A Lord Delamere led an uprising in Cheshire in support of William - the first of many local uprisings.
When King James finally reached Salisbury with his army to face William, the desertions only continued - within the next week, three to five thousand men left for William, including half of James's officers and most of his general staff. As one of William's generals said to General John Churchill7 when he arrived, "You're the first deserter of the rank of Lieutenant-General I've ever met."
Unsurprisingly, James pulled back toward London and tried to negotiate. William, with more supporters pouring in by the day - including James's younger (also Protestant) daughter Princess Anne - upped his demands: dismissing all Catholics from office, James's army to stay away from London when the new Parliament met, and garrisons to be put in hands friendly to William.
In panic, James fled. He sent his wife and son away to France, burned the Great Seal and writs for the upcoming Parliament, and then left himself. William would have let him get away - he didn't want to have to kill his brother-in-law, and he thought it would be awkward to kill a king. Some English seamen loyal to William caught him on the coast and brought him back, but William quickly left a door unguarded. That gave him an opportunity to escape again - which he took.
James would remain in exile in France for the rest of his life, with the King of France still recognizing him as King of England.
This was called the Glorious Revolution, both because England hailed its result as glorious, and because it was almost entirely bloodless.
There's more that happened - I'll be continuing this post next week with how Parliament legally recognized William and Mary as joint King and Queen, the significance of how they did it, and why the Glorious Revolution is so glorious. The most significant part is still to come.
But even before that, James's near-bloodless overthrow displayed the power of the people and of their representatives in Parliament. The reason it was all but bloodless - the reason King James fled without fighting a single battle - was that the people of England themselves cast him out.
I sometimes see people musing wistfully over what would happen if the police or army all resigned rather than keep serving some odious government. Or, on a broader scale, John Lennon's utopian song "Imagine" asks us to "Imagine there's no countries... I hope someday you'll join us and the world will be as one." Yes, if everyone "will be as one" in deciding not to keep following a government, it would vanish. But, for some good reasons and some bad, it doesn't happen.
The one time it almost did happen was in 1688. Almost exactly that happened: the army and local officials of England decided they didn't want to serve King James anymore, and they didn't. In the last resort, with his people against him, King James had to flee. The people had decided not to have that king, and they didn't.
Continued in The Glorious Revolution, Part Two
In 1688, England hadn't yet adopted the modern Gregorian Calendar. Being staunchly Protestant, they refused to comply with any Papal action, even Pope Gregory's proclamation of a new modern calendar. So, I'm using "old style" dates in this article: each date is ten days behind where it'd be in the modern calendar.
This’s another fascinating story, which I hope to tell sometime later.
Being illegitimate, this son - James Fitzroy, Duke of Monmouth - had no legal place in the royal succession. Even today, illegitimate children remain ineligible to inherit the British crown.
"Prince of Orange" was a hereditary title, technically linked to a town in southern France. Since William the Silent (ancestor of this William III) led the Dutch Revolt, the Princes of Orange had lived in the Netherlands. The title of "Stadtholder", literally "Steward", was chosen by the legislature of each province of the Netherlands. Traditionally, they'd awarded it to the Princes of Orange - and so, William III was Stadtholder of the Netherlands.
Sadly, while William appeared a dutiful husband, he apparently didn't return her love. There were contemporary rumors that he was homosexual; there's no clear evidence, but some modern historians credit those rumors.
England, and then Great Britain, had male-preference primogeniture until 2015.
An appreciative King William made him Earl (later Duke) of Marlborough. He was an ancestor of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who greatly respected him and wrote a multi-volume biography of him.
Out of interest, are you familiar with The Vicar of Bray: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vicar_of_Bray_(song) ?