Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory Read online

  The Blue Coats continued to guard Whitehall, St James’s Palace and Somerset House for many months, ‘to the general disgust of the whole English army’. The entire London area remained under Dutch military occupation until the spring of 1690. No English regiments were allowed within twenty miles of the city. The English and Scots regiments of the States General’s forces, which had led the triumphal entry (in order not to alarm the citizens of London too much) were stationed at the Tower and Lambeth. Dutch and German regiments encamped at Woolwich, Kensington, Chelsea and Paddington, while another crack regiment was positioned at Richmond, and the Huguenots put up in various parts of London. As far as possible, the Prince avoided billeting his troops on private households, and insisted that they behave courteously, and pay for any goods acquired. Nevertheless, in spite of his efforts to avoid the appearance of foreign occupation, the continuing presence of large numbers of heavily armed troops in the city caused growing consternation and unrest.38

  The Dutch invasion of 1688 was a brilliantly stage-managed sequence of events, forever vivid in the memory of those who witnessed them. A number of contemporary diarists record the intensity of their feelings as events unfolded – whether they were for the overthrow of the Catholic James or against. John Evelyn (one of those apparently unsure of his own response to the imminent regime change) had recorded in his diary the sense of dread with which the news was received in late October that William’s immense fleet was poised ready to sail. There were ‘tumults’ in London as ‘the rabble’ attacked and demolished Catholic places of worship. Evelyn reported a ‘universal discontent’, which had ‘brought people to so desperate a passe as with uttmost expressions even passionately seeme to long for & desire the landing of that Prince, whom they looked on as their deliverer from popish Tyrannie’. For those like Evelyn who had lived through the turmoil of the Civil War years, the upheaval caused by William’s intervention in England’s national affairs seemed all too likely to herald another period of instability. Figuratively wringing his hands, he recalled in his diary his fearful state of mind as he witnessed the arrival of William’s invading army, when ‘To such a strange temper & unheard of in any former age, was this poore nation reduc’d, & of which I was an Eye witnesse.’39

  The complexity of the political response to James’s ‘abdication’ and William’s ‘peaceful’ arrival has been much discussed by historians, particularly since the three hundredth anniversary of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ was celebrated in 1988. In the end, the decision of the English people to accept William and Mary as joint monarchs had a good deal to do with a general reluctance to return to the bad old days of public disorder and civil unrest. Regime change was preferable to another civil war.

  * Since the key individuals in three generations of this extraordinary family are all named either Constantijn or Christiaan, the reader is advised to turn to the family tree on page 359 in cases of uncertainty. I shall do my best to use the qualifiers ‘junior’ and ‘senior’ for clarification. ‘Sir Constantijn’ always means Constantijn senior, knighted by King James I of England.

  2

  From Invasion to Glorious Revolution: Editing Out the Dutch

  So why is there almost no trace of this vast, hostile armada, with its dramatic progress along the English Channel, its fanfares and gun-salutes and parading battalions, in conventional historical accounts of the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’? Why are many of us unaware of the fact that at the time of the English Parliament’s ‘welcoming’ William and his wife Mary Stuart, and subsequently, in early 1689, inviting them jointly to ascend the English throne, the country was in the grip of full-scale military occupation, with Dutch troops posted in front of key buildings throughout London, and growing unrest and resentment throughout the land? Since contemporary accounts clearly report outbreaks of violence up and down the country in support of James II, and Dutch troops being summarily dispatched to restore order, how have we come to believe that William of Orange ascended the English throne in an entirely peaceful, not to say ‘glorious’, revolution?

  Some of the colourful local stories we have heard so far – the providential wind aiding William, James’s dropping of the Great Seal in the Thames as he fled – have a familiar ring. But as historian Jonathan Israel has observed: ‘Since the early eighteenth century, a thick wall of silence has descended over the Dutch occupation of London 1688–90. The whole business came to seem so improbable to later generations that by common consent, scholarly and popular, it was simply erased from the record.’1

  One obvious reason for this historical amnesia is the enduring impact and lasting success of the propaganda offensive launched by William of Orange even before he left Dutch shores. Surviving documents tend to exert a strong influence over retrospective historical interpretation – they are the stuff of which narrative history and interpretation are made. It is all too easy for the reader to be drawn into agendas and interpretations intentionally made part of the original telling. In the case of the so-called Glorious Revolution that shaping influence is especially misleading. For the story of William’s Protestant invasion had been honed and edited with enormous care, fashioned in the telling with great pains, and conscientiously committed to print, before ever the fleet left its Dutch harbour.

  While the invasion was still in the early planning stages, English aristocrats sympathetic to William’s cause, and corresponding regularly with his closest Dutch advisers, Willem Bentinck, Everard Weede, Heer van Dijkvelt and Frederick van Nassau, Count Zuylestein, argued that a widely distributed manifesto was vital for the success of any bid for the English throne: if he wanted to keep England ‘in humour’, William must ‘entertain it by papers’. They also provided advice and information on the content and distribution of pamphlets, and established connections with local printers and publishers. Jacobite pamphleteers attributed the ready acceptance of regime change to the Prince of Orange’s ‘debauching’ of the English people with his well-judged propaganda publications. The carefully reasoned case made in the Prince of Orange’s Declaration ‘of the reasons inducing him to appear in armes in the Kingdome of England’ – composed in the greatest secrecy, and then blanket-distributed to all those likely to be affected by the invasion – has shaped the telling of the story of the Glorious Revolution ever since.

  As a piece of writing, William of Orange’s Declaration was a masterly effort in collaborative drafting on the part of the Prince, his English and Dutch advisers at The Hague, and selected members of the English expatriate community there. It originated in a series of discussions discreetly held in England in 1687, between Dijkvelt, who had been sent by William to sound out opinion concerning James II’s policies for the English succession, and a group of English aristocrats.2 The final text was produced months ahead of the campaign, during the early autumn of 1688, by Gaspar Fagel – a leading political figure in the States of Holland, and William’s chief spokesman in the Dutch government.3 It was further edited and translated into English by Gilbert Burnet, an expatriate Scottish cleric who had become close confidant and adviser to William and Mary, and who was to play a leading part in orchestrating the acceptance of the new English royal couple.

  Specially commissioned printers worked simultaneously at The Hague, Amsterdam and Rotterdam to print the manifesto at speed, in an unprecedented run of sixty thousand copies.4 To ensure that the invasion and its aftermath went according to plan, enormous care was taken to conceal the contents of the pamphlet even from those sympathetic to William’s cause until immediately before the invasion, with Bentinck keeping all copies under lock and key in his personal lodgings. He subsequently arranged, through his agents, for stocks of copies to be carried to (and concealed in) key locations across England and Scotland, and then authorised their release simultaneously at all these places as the fleet left the Low Countries.

  Enormous care was taken to avoid leaking the contents of the manifesto prior to the Prince’s landing. As soon as he heard of its existence, James
II’s ambassador at The Hague tried to obtain a copy, entirely without success. On 28 September (new style), James’s Secretary of State pressed him: ‘It would be of the greatest importance imaginable to his Majestie to see the Declaration they intend to sett out, as soon as possible, and this I am well assured, that you have us’d your best endeavours to gett it, yet the better to enable you, you are to spare no money, nor stick at any summe, that may procure it.’ It was to no avail. ‘You may imagine I have taken all possible care to come by the Declaration which I hear is on the press,’ the Ambassador responded, ‘but the States printer is not to be corrupted; I have employ’d some to see if any of his servants can be; they are all sworn, and their places so lucrative they will not endanger them.’ Three days later he reported that ‘the manifesto or Declaration can not yet be had at any rate for I have offer’d considerably for it, and you will, I believe, see it there [in England] sooner than we here.’5 In fact, William signed and sealed the final, agreed text of the Declaration on 10 October. On 15 October, the English consul at Amsterdam reported that ‘order is come hither from The Hague for the printing of 20,000 copies of the Prince’s manifest’, and that ‘a proportionable number is printing at Rotterdam and at The Hague’, but that he too was unable to obtain a copy. ‘They are to be distributed at the same time that the Fleet putts to sea.’

  Copies were finally obtained on 20 October. But in spite of the fact that the ambassador dispatched them for England ‘by an express’, his messengers were held at the Dutch coast, ‘nobody being suffer’d to pass that way or by any other till the Prince set sayle’. So although by now packages of the Declaration had been distributed to locations right across Britain to be released as soon as the Dutch were known to have set out, the government in London had still not seen it. On 2 November (old style), when William had already set out, James told the Archbishop of Canterbury he had finally been shown copies, by ‘several persons, to whom they had been sent in penny-post letters, which he had thrown into the fire; but that he had still one copy’. On 3 November, two days before William landed at Torbay, Princess Anne showed Lord Clarendon ‘the Prince of Orange’s Declaration, saying the King had lent it to her, and she must restore it to him tomorrow’.

  Bentinck’s distribution machine launched fully into action on 5 November, and his agents began distributing copies everywhere. Not only was London inundated with copies, but the Declaration was now being spread all over England, and a separate Declaration of the Prince for Scotland was circulating north of the border. Simultaneously, the Declaration in Dutch, French and German was released in the Dutch Republic, the English ambassador reporting that ‘the manifesto is now sold publickly and in all languages’.

  The pamphlet’s coordinated propaganda, and the build-up of expectation before it was finally released, ensured that the Declaration had a major impact, not only in England and the United Provinces but throughout Europe. It was printed in Amsterdam, Edinburgh, The Hague, Hamburg, London, Magdeburg, Rotterdam and York. Copies printed at The Hague bore the official imprimatur of the Prince: ‘Printed at The Hague by Arnold Leers by special order of His Highness’. Altogether, twenty-one editions in the four languages appeared in 1688, eight of them in English. Intended, clearly, for an international as well as an English audience, the Declaration was widely dispersed on the Continent. ‘Many thousand copies’ were sent across the Channel to be ‘consigned to some trusty person in London’. Copies were handed directly to all ambassadors and ministers at The Hague except the English and French representatives. Through copies in the Dutch language, William justified his undertaking to his Dutch subjects on the same grounds he had employed in asking the States General for support. In the German version he used the same general terms he had used in soliciting help from the German Princes. The French translation of the manifesto appealed to Huguenots on the Continent as well as to those who had emigrated to England after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.

  Bundles of free copies were sent to booksellers to be sold at a price set by themselves. Copies were posted through the penny post and sent anonymously to private citizens. Extra copies were produced after the landing by John White of Yorkshire. The first, and for a time the only, English printer of the Declaration, White was rewarded by William after he became King with a monopoly in the city of York and the five northern counties for printing all notices concerning revenue and justice which the government might issue.6

  Outside London, the distribution and reading of the Prince of Orange’s Declaration was the radical intervention which effectively substituted for real hostilities in bringing about the ‘Glorious Revolution’ itself. At Exeter – the first official stop for William and his army en route for London – the Prince’s chaplain, Gilbert Burnet, took over the cathedral and ‘commanded’ the local clergy to sing a celebratory Anglican Te Deum, and then obliged them to listen while he, from the pulpit, ‘read aloud the Prince’s Declaration and reasons for this his expedition’. When Durham was seized by local gentry sympathetic to William’s cause on 6 December, Lord Lumley read out the Prince’s Declaration at Durham Castle in front of most of the gentry of the county. When the Earl of Bath, governor of Plymouth, after holding the town on behalf of King James for five weeks, finally capitulated, he signalled his defection to William’s camp by having the Declaration read to the town’s residents. Chester was seized by the county militia, who supported Prince William, on 14 December. They disarmed James’s military governor, the regular regiment stationed there and two troops of Irish dragoons, ‘then they read the Prince’s Declaration and declared for him’. At Oxford a trumpet was blown at Carfax, and the Declaration was ‘read openly to the multitude by Lord Lovelace’. The students and residents of the city then proceeded to demolish Magdalen College Bridge to stop James’s dragoons getting into the city. So great was the impact of the Prince’s Declaration that it became central to both Jacobite and French propaganda to argue that the people of England had been loyal to their King until their minds were corrupted by reading the Dutch Stadholder’s pernicious manifesto.7

  What, then, was so persuasive about the Declaration? Fundamentally, its achievement was to have succeeded in giving Prince William his own distinctive, measured and rational voice, with which he appeared to engage each individual reader as a reasonable subject or participant. Tone and content are extraordinarily seductive, even today – it is a fine piece of what would now be called ‘public relations’ or ‘spin’.

  Such a direct appeal by the Prince as an individual to the general public as reasonable interlocutors had succeeded magnificently for William’s greatgrandfather, Prince William the Silent, when he took on the might of Spain to champion the right to independence of the Protestant Netherlands in the 1570s.8 A century later, this first Declaration of William III’s (it was to be followed by a succession of widely distributed follow-up documents in a similar vein, tailored closely to unfolding events) won the hearts and minds of the English public at large. It has won the hearts and minds of historians ever since.

  ‘It is most certain and evident to all men,’ the Declaration begins, ‘that the publick peace and happiness of any state or kingdom cannot be preserved where the law, liberties, and customs, established by the lawful authority in it, are openly transgressed and annulled; especially where the alteration of religion is endeavoured.’

  The direct address and matter-of-fact tone of this opening are sustained throughout the lengthy document. The Prince of Orange’s justification for intervention in the affairs of a neighbour state is set against the unreasonable practices of James II’s ‘evil counsellors’, who ‘in an open and undisguised manner’ have subjected the nation to ‘arbitrary government’ – that is, to government which has suspended, ignored and ridden roughshod over the laws of the land and the established Church.

  Under such circumstances, William explained, he could not sit idly by and watch England’s destruction. He had a duty towards the people of the country from which both
his mother and his wife had originated, to come to its assistance in its hour of need.

  Both we ourselves, and our dearest and most entirely beloved Consort, the Princess [Mary Stuart], have endeavoured to signify, in terms full of respect to the King, the deep and just regret which all these proceedings have given us … But those evil counsellors have put such ill constructions on those our good intentions, that they have endeavoured to alienate the King more and more from us, as if we had designed to disturb the quiet and happiness of this Kingdome.9

  It was, then, with the greatest reluctance and humility that the Prince felt he had no alternative but to come to the assistance of a country he felt so closely bound to by bonds of lineage and obligation:

  Since [we] have so great an interest in this matter, and such a right, as all the world knows, to the succession of the Crown; since also the English did in the year 1672, when the States General of the United Provinces were invaded in a most unjust war, use their utmost endeavours to put an end to that war…; and since the English nation has ever testified a most particular affection and esteem, both to our dearest Consort, the Princess, and to ourself, we cannot excuse ourself from espousing their interest in a matter of so high consequence, and from contributing all that lies in us for the maintaining both of the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of these Kingdoms.

  No wonder this version of the intellectual underpinning of the Glorious Revolution has been embraced by all except specialist historians of the period ever since. Here is a worthy political manifesto for the dawn of the Age of Reason – the English Enlightenment. William’s assault on English sovereignty is represented as an entirely reasonable intervention by one well-intentioned party in support of the fundamental rights of the English people. It has seemed convenient to overlook the fact that within only weeks of his arrival in Britain, William had abandoned all pretence that he was intervening altruistically and claimed the throne for himself and his wife. Even before their coronation, the invasion had begun to look more like simple opportunism, with the outcome directly contrary to the expressed aims of the Declaration.