Happy 330th birthday to the Glorious Revolution
On this day, Guy Fawkes’ Day, November 5th, exactly three hundred and thirty years ago, the Protestant Dutch ruler William of Orange landed his invading army at Brixham, near Torquay in Devon. His fleet of 250 carrier ships and 60 fishing boats was bigger than the Spanish Armada, which menaced the country a hundred years earlier, and he had with him 15,000 crack troops with which to seize the throne of England. This was the beginning of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which is the subject of my new novel Blood’s Revolution . . .
James II and VII, king of England, Scotland and Ireland was a Roman Catholic – a publicly professed member of the Old Faith. And this was a major problem for the people of the Three Kingdoms over whom he ruled. Ever since Henry VIII broke with Rome, monarchs of England, Scotland and Ireland had been wrangling over the souls of their subjects. Bloody Mary burnt hundreds of Protestants at the stake; James I and VI had Guy Fawkes, Robert Catesby and the other plotters trying to blow him up.
Triumph of the Protestants
In England and Scotland, Protestantism was triumphant in the third quarter of the 17th century. Charles II may secretly have been Catholic – he certainly made a deathbed conversion – but he couldn’t afford to admit his beliefs. His brother, who became James II, was more forthright. He made no secret of his faith and made great efforts during his brief reign trying to change the laws concerning his co-religionists.
At that time the Roman Catholic worship was proscribed. Ninety percent of the population of England was Protestant and Catholics were seen as odd, sinister, in fact, downright dangerous. It was the faith of their foreign enemies, of Louis XIV, the Sun King, the Catholic tyrant who took all political power in France into his own hands.
Catholics excluded from public office
A series of anti-Catholic laws had been passed by Parliament that banned Catholic forms of worship and prevented Catholics from holding any offices of state. They could not be MPs, or Justices of the Peace, or officers in the Army, or hold any positions in government, except by special dispensation from the King. Since James was himself a Catholic, these dispensations, called indulgences, were readily granted, although Protestant civil servants would often do their best to obstruct the process.
Nevertheless, James was determined that Roman Catholics – and non-Anglican dissenters such as Quakers and Baptists – should be shown more tolerance in his realm. He surrounded himself with Catholics at court and approached hundreds of men who might stand in future as MPs – justices, wealthy merchants, minor landowners – and subjected them to a process called “closeting”. This meant summoning them to his presence for a private meeting in which he tried to persuade them to support his legal reforms in a future Parliament. Most refused him, even under threat of loss of their existing positions and privileges. James was furious.
No return to bad old bishop-burning days
Despite these manoeuvrings, the majority of the population were content to let James rule. He might have strange beliefs and behave in an autocratic manner – but he had one saving grace: he had no son and heir. Whenever he was called unto God, the next monarch of England, Scotland and Ireland would be his eldest daughter Mary, a staunch Protestant who was married to the Dutch ruler William of Orange. There was no danger of a Catholic dynasty ruling after James and a return to the bad old bishop-burning days of Bloody Mary. Whatever antics James got up to while on the throne, the next ruler would be a good Protestant woman.
Then, in June 1688, James II’s Catholic wife the Italian princess Mary of Modena gave birth to a son: James Francis Edward Stuart. The baby boy, the new heir to the thrones of the Three Kingdoms would certainly be raised to manhood in the Old Faith. A long-running Catholic dynasty was now definitely on the cards.
The warming-pan plot
The citizens of London rioted. Rumours abounded that the child was, in the parlance of the day, “supposititious”, ie, substituted with the intent to deceive. The child had been brought into the birthing chamber in a bed-warming pan. James Junior was no true heir, they said, he was a pawn in a wicked Catholic plot. Officers of the Army and Navy began to scheme in their drinking clubs and taverns. They were furious with James for introducing more papist officers into the armed services. In the Irish Army, almost all the Protestant officers were being summarily dismissed and replaced by Catholics, men often with little of no military experience. The noblemen of England decided they must act. Seven influential men wrote to William of Orange, husband of the former heir Mary, and invited him to come to England and seize the throne. They would support him, they said, and the rest of the country would too.
Five months later, on 5th November 1688, Guy Fawkes’ Day, William landed on the south coast of Devon with a large army of 15,000 Dutchmen and other Protestant Europeans. He quickly seized Exeter and began to march east towards London.
The officer corps defects to the enemy
James, in a panic, called out his own troops and marched west to confront the invader. But all over the country local magnates were declaring for William. Even James’s younger daughter Anne left Whitehall and went to join rebels in Yorkshire. The Royal Army reached Salisbury and formed up to block the approach to London. However, over several days and nights in mid-November, a large part of James’s officer corps slipped away from the camp and defected to the enemy. Some took their troops with them. James’s army completely disintegrated. Many of his soldiers, bereft of their officers, simply abandoned their arms and trudged off home. There were a few minor skirmishes but the war was lost in a matter of days. James was forced to flee into exile in France. Early in 1690, William and Mary were proclaimed joint monarchs of the Three Kingdoms – and the “Glorious Revolution” was over.
I would argue, however, that this was a coup, pure and simple, arranged by the British ruling class. It was said to be “Glorious” because there was so little bloodshed – and yet in the next two years in Ireland there were a series of bloody battles (as told in my next novel Blood’s Campaign), and Scotland, too, saw its far share of violence. I would also say that the coup was won by treachery. Without the defection of the Army officers – who had all sworn a personal oath of loyalty to James – there might have been resistance to William’s invasion. It is possible (though unlikely) that the Prince of Orange might have been defeated. Either way, treachery is never glorious.
Not glorious and not really a revolution
Was it then a revolution? I think not. That implies an uprising by the common people to rid themselves of a tyrant. It implies a radical change in the way a state is governed. This coup was arranged in secret by the nobility and gentry, who deftly replaced one ruler with others more to their religious taste. And James was no tyrant. The irony is that he was not trying to become another Sun King, he did not seek absolute power like his cousin Louis, he was merely trying to introduce more fairness and tolerance – by legal means – for Roman Catholics and other dissenting groups.
Today we prize tolerance. Yet it was an attempt to foster tolerance in the Three Kingdoms that brought about James’s downfall in the so-called Glorious Revolution.
Blood’s Revolution by Angus Donald is available from Amazon. Click here
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