The Last Revolution Page 11

  That summer James set off on a grand tour of the West Country. Along the way he would accompany the Queen to take the waters at Bath. Since Mary of Modena, now over thirty, ‘had been four years without that prospect of giving an heir to the crown, it was conceived the Bath might conduce to it’.12 The prospect of a Catholic heir to the throne was not one most English men and women wished even to contemplate; fortunately it seemed remote. From Bath the King planned to move on to Oxford, where a second university crisis had arisen.

  The President of Magdalen College had died. Why did the universities matter so much to James? Not only because Magdalen was one of the richest colleges in Europe, but because the universities filled English pulpits with the men who would preach the faith of the next generation. James instructed Magdalen fellows to elect a Catholic convert named Farmer.

  It so happened that Farmer was unsuitable on more than religious grounds: he had been seen French-kissing a woman in the Lobster Tavern in Abingdon. Ignoring the King, the fellows of Magdalen met ten days after the Declaration for Liberty of Conscience to elect a Protestant, Dr Hough. In June the Ecclesiastical Commission arrived to investigate, again under the ominous chairmanship of George Jeffreys, who turned out to be in his most truculent mood. When one of the fellows argued, at the hearing, that church benefices were freehold property and could not be removed by the King, Jeffreys shouted, ‘Officers, take him away, he is mad!’13 Dr Hough refused to yield up his keys; Jeffreys sent for a locksmith and had the doors of the president’s lodge forced open. The under-porter who ‘couldn’t find’ the spare key was sacked.

  Giving up on Farmer, James instructed the Fellows to elect Samuel Parker, High Church Bishop of Oxford, who in the eyes of most Protestants might as well have been a Catholic. It was to impose this choice that he arrived at the college in person on 2 September.

  The King recorded in his memoirs that he addressed the college ‘with something more warmth than ordinary’.14 His actual words were:

  ‘You have been a stubborn, turbulent college. You have affronted me in this. Is this your Church of England loyalty? ... Get you gone; know I am your King; I will be obeyed; and I command you to be gone. Go and admit the Bishop of Ox[ford], Head, Principal – what d’ye call it? – of the College.’15

  Bonrepaus, a French diplomat in his travelling court, was astonished at the King’s flushed face. James, he wrote back to Paris, ‘s’est mis dans un fureur extraordinaire et transporté de colère’. Maybe the strains of office were starting to tell on a man who had never taken easily to supreme command. To Whigs, this was just the sort of behaviour that should be expected from an arbitrary monarch. The removal of the Magdalen fellows was ‘an open piece of robbery and burglary, when men ... came and forcibly turned men out of their possession and freehold’.16 For Tories it was almost worse. Oxford was the Cavalier stronghold, the site of Charles II’s victory in the Exclusion Crisis. There was nowhere more pointed for James to show his contempt for his old allies. The Magdalen affair was a direct assault on the church James had pledged to protect.

  By the autumn of 1687 James had contrived to overturn all the norms of English politics. He had driven Tory and Whig together, while his coalition of Catholics and Dissenters was an alliance of incompatible opposites. The Restoration settlement, however unsatisfactory, had come apart; le païs des révolutions was returning to chaos. What did the future hold? No one knew any more. Tories rebelling against the King? It seemed impossible, but there would be no acceptable outcome for them if James continued on this path. Either they would face a Catholic, arbitrary state, or the Commonwealth returning in triumph.

  Or war. No one could rule out war with twenty-seven years of uneasy quiet at an end. And to one observer of English affairs, at least, war might have seemed the most dangerous outcome of all. He was the man whose wife stood to inherit whatever mess James created – the man Dartmouth had warned James against, and who had signalled his own interest in England to William Temple in the garden at Honslaerdyck eleven years earlier, William of Orange.

  XIII

  ‘THE PRINCE OF ORANGE’S OPINION’

  The Prince of Orange had not stood by as England’s political settlement unravelled. He already had an envoy in England at the time James made his Declaration for Liberty of Conscience. John Evelyn met Everard van Weede, Lord of Dijkvelt, and thought him ‘a prudent and worthy person’.1 He was certainly an energetic one. When he returned to the Hague in late May, Dijkvelt carried with him letters to the Prince from every disenchanted corner of the English political landscape. There were messages from the sacked Hyde brothers, from the Whig Earls of Shrewsbury and Devonshire, from many of the aristocrats who, just two years before, had processed into Westminster Abbey to see James crowned. James’s younger daughter, Princess Anne of Denmark, sent a characteristically melodramatic message through John Churchill that she was ‘resolved, by the assistance of God to suffer all extremities, even to death itself, rather than be brought to change her religion’.2 Several of the letters exuded a whiff of conspiracy.

  As he took stock of the developing crisis in England, William had one overriding priority. It was the vision which guided him in everything: the need for a European alliance to check Louis of France. The Dutch year of disaster had resulted from alliance between France and England. There was no prospect more worrying than James’s slide into Catholic policies which could only, in the end, leave him reliant on France.

  Or drag England back into a civil war which would make his wife’s inheritance a battlefield. At the start of his uncle’s reign, William’s point of view might have been much like that of English Tories: a short Catholic interregnum would do no harm so long as James did not upset the status quo and Mary inherited soon. But the status quo was now decisively upset. The prospect which faced William and his circle of advisers – Dijkvelt, his old tutor Zuylestein and Caspar Fagel, the shrewd Pensionary of Haarlem – could not have been more disturbing.

  On the other hand, there was little for the moment that William could actually do. He was not a King. He had no army or navy of his own. The year before, Amsterdam had even blocked his attempts to bring the United Provinces into the League of Augsburg which united the Empire, Bavaria and Spain against Louis. His relations with them had rarely been worse. Nor, for that matter, did he have any formal reason to interfere in English affairs. Indeed, out in the Far East the United Provinces and England were actually at war as their respective East India Companies competed over trade in Bantam and India.

  The death of Mary of Modena’s mother at least provided the opportunity to despatch Zuylestein on a second mission. The immediate question was whether there was any chance that James’s unlikely new coalition of Catholics and Dissenters could yield him a compliant parliament. James seemed prepared to go to any lengths to achieve this. He had instructed his agents to ask all parliamentary candidates three questions: Would they repeal the penal and Test laws if elected? Would they vote for men pledged to do so? And would they maintain the King’s Declaration of Liberty of Conscience? If James managed to rig a parliament pledged to this programme then anything was possible. With a parliament at his beck and call the King could establish whatever political and religious settlement he wanted. Objections to prerogative power would fall away. ‘Blows given by Parliament are deadly ones’, the Whig Lord Mordaunt, a friend of John Locke, warned in one of the letters Zuylestein brought back three months later. James might even try to alter the succession.

  As William began cautiously to involve himself in the English situation, his own actions were being scrutinised, in their turn, by one of the most skilful diplomats in Europe. The French ambassador to the Hague, the Comte d’Avaux, was exceptionally well-connected in the United Provinces; he was astute, subtle, and alive to all nuances of the three-cornered diplomacy between the United Provinces, France and England. It was d’Avaux who had so carefully nurtured relations between Amsterdam and France (the city’s main trading partner) that Amsterdam blocked
all warmongering by the Stadholder. That August the Prince requested funding for 25 ships and 9,000 extra sailors. He was turned down, but d’Avaux immediately guessed what was on William’s mind. ‘I have no doubt’, he wrote to his master on 15/25* August,

  ‘that by this the Prince of Orange planned to put himself in a position to cross over to England with a strong fleet, either in the event of the King of England’s death, or if some revolt broke out while he was still alive.’3

  D’Avaux also watched William forging links with the exiled community. Previously the exiles had tended to share Dutch republicans’ view of the Stadholder as a closet autocrat who would like nothing better than to achieve absolute power himself. Now, they started making their way to the Hague ‘some by one way, some by another, but nearly all by back routes as if they wanted to conceal themselves’.

  ‘These English told the Prince of Orange that he had no time to lose, & that if the King of England overcame the obstacles he found in the last parliament on the religious issue, the Prince of Orange’s position would be completely lost.’4

  Gilbert Burnet arrived to join the Prince’s circle. Burnet, ‘the most interested, confident, busy, man, that ever his nation produced’, in one hostile opinion, was the famous Scottish author of The History of the Reformation of the Church of England. He soon became William’s self-appointed expert on all matters British, while his nephew, James Johnstone, gathered information for the Prince at home. William Carstares, a Scottish exile who had been tortured after the Rye House Plot,* became William’s personal chaplain. In England, Henry Sidney, brother of the Whig martyr Algernon Sidney and himself a languid courtier, worked to build networks of support for the Prince. Suddenly, for all England’s disaffected politicians, William had become ‘the great wheel which ... must give life and motion to any great project’.5

  The Prince still had to wait, though. No one was suggesting a full-blown invasion of England. Such a coup had not been pulled off since William the Conqueror six hundred years earlier. The Spanish attempt a century before had ended in disaster, and, besides, there was little chance the Francophile and peace-loving merchants of Amsterdam would agree to any such venture. As for armed intervention without the support of his own country, Monmouth had shown the folly of raising a banner on English soil and trusting to the ‘fanatics’ to provide an army. And while the letters Zuylestein brought back in September revealed the feverish mood now gripping England, the advice they contained was equivocal. Could James manufacture the parliament he needed? A ‘timorous and desponding’ Lord Mordaunt thought ‘it is best erring of the surer side, and conclude that a parliament may sit’. Daniel Finch, Earl of Nottingham, thought James’s chances too close to call, however (‘To guess right is rather luck than wisdom’), while Halifax, still more sanguine, seemed sure the King had bitten off more than he could chew:

  ‘The great design cannot be carried out without numbers; numbers cannot be had without converts ... Upon this foundation I have no kind of apprehension, that the legislative power can ever be brought to pursue the present designs.’6

  Halifax also suggested a possible reason for the King’s ill temper at Oxford. The West Country journey, he thought, was partly intended to assess progress towards a compliant parliament, and ‘we do not hear’, he wrote to William the day before James’s meeting at Magdalen, ‘that his observations or his journey can give him any great encouragement to build any hopes upon’.7

  Nonetheless it was time for William to make some positive statement on the English crisis – if not to show his hand fully, then to remind everyone that he was a player in the game. James had been pressing him ever since Liberty of Conscience to come out with a letter of support ‘[which] I think I have reason to expect from you, for the good of the monarchy, as well as our family’.8 In November 1687, James raised the stakes again by promoting the Catholic convert Sir Roger Strickland to command his navy and admitting six new Catholics to his Privy Council, among them Tyrconnel, his Lord Deputy of Ireland, and the Jesuit Father Petre. And in the same month, the Prince of Orange broke cover. He did so under the veil of an open letter from Caspar Fagel to the Scottish Dissenter James Stewart, with whom Fagel had been carrying on a correspondence about the merits of Liberty of Conscience. There was no doubt, however, that the letter was intended as a public statement: 50,000 copies were run off Dutch presses in three languages. It was entitled Their Highness the Prince and Princess of Orange’s Opinion About a General Liberty of Conscience, and while it allowed the need for freedom of conscience (William was already walking a tightrope between his radical and Tory supporters) the Prince of Orange decisively stated his opposition to repeal of the Test Act.

  Lord Dover, a Catholic, thought that James had now passed a point of no return. ‘If his Majesty get not a parliament to take off the Test within six months,’ he wrote, ‘he will go out of England.’9 But perhaps Dover was looking further ahead than most. Fagel’s letter was no more than a signal of interest on William’s part, after all, and for the moment it was still unclear how the Prince could intervene. Equally, there was still a chance he would not have to. James was aging. He had tried to convert his eldest daughter Mary, but without success. There had been no change in the succession so far.

  That, perhaps, was the final hope of Whig and Tory, and of the Prince of Orange, for Mary’s succession would solve the problem. So long as that glimmer of hope remained, so long as the English could look forward to a Protestant future with no fear of a Catholic dynasty, there was still a chance that the crisis in England would resolve itself.

  XIV

  ‘WHAT PASSION CANNOT MUSIC RAISE AND QUELL’

  In times of political uncertainty there was always consolation in music.

  Long afterwards, in a world which became ever darker for him as events unfolded, Roger North still found comfort in his musical memories:

  ‘The remembrance of these things is delight, and while I write methinks I play. All other employments that filled my time go on account of work and business: these were all pleasure.’1

  The feast of St Cecilia, patron Saint of music, was celebrated each year on 22 November. For several years, London’s musical community had turned it into their annual celebration, bringing together both ‘masters and lovers of music’, music-loving gentlemen like Roger North and professionals like Henry Purcell, to enjoy ‘a splendid entertainment’ in Stationer’s Hall, tucked away behind Ludgate Hill. It had become the custom for a St Cecilia’s Day Ode to be composed each year by one of the musicians, and for the celebrants to enjoy ‘a performance of music by the best voices and hands in town’.2 On 22 November 1687, the musical community gathered at Stationer’s Hall as usual amid rumours that this year’s composer would present a piece which, in its modernity and range, surpassed anything heard in England before.

  That would have been the main topic of conversation in the hall and Henry Purcell, already England’s most famous composer at the age of twenty-nine, would have been at the centre of a noisy group. Music was going through a period of dramatic change. Roger North, an enthusiastic amateur, recorded how ‘the old English Music’ first lost popularity in a rage for French fashion, as London fell for the dance rhythms of Louis XIV’s court composer, Jean-Baptiste Lully. More recently, though, another change had taken place. ‘The town came off the French way,’ North recalled, ‘and fell in with the Italian, and now ... of all foreign styles, the Italian most prevails.’3 The influence of Arcangelo Corelli, whose sonatas first reached London in 1681, ‘cleared the ground of all other sorts of musick whatsoever’.

  Henry Purcell had made himself expert in the old English style in his early set of string Fantazias. He had mastered the old-fashioned full anthem as well as more modern forms; he had written keyboard works, chamber music, sacred hymns and ballads for the alehouse. He had also absorbed new ideas with a voracious musical intelligence, first writing vivacious French chaconnes and pavanes, then, in 1683, making the move to ado
pt Italian forms. Composers in Italy were stretching the range of music, using melody as a kind of narrative, and developing a piece through a series of different ‘movements’, each labelled according to its pace and mood. In 1683 John Playford published Purcell’s twelve Sonatas of Three Parts, including a glossary for musicians of those ‘terms of art unusual to him as adagio, grave, largo, allegro, vivace, piano’. A preface explained that the composer planned

  ‘a just imitation of the most fam’d Italian masters; principally, to bring the seriousness and gravity of that sort of musick into vogue, and reputation among our countrymen, whose humour, ‘tis time now, should begin to loath the levity, and balladry of our [French] neighbours.’4

  Even Roger North, conservative in many of his tastes, could appreciate the advance in complexity that Italian music offered. His brother Francis, the Lord Keeper, lived at the north-east corner of Covent Garden, where the family gathered for musical evenings, Francis playing the treble viol while Roger (despite his ‘want of the knack of keeping time’) played bass. To Covent Garden Purcell had come, bringing ‘his Italian manner’d compositions,’

  ‘and with him on the harpsichord, myself and another violin, we performed them more than once, of which [Roger North added rather stuffily] Mr Purcell was not a little proud, nor was it a common thing for one of his dignity to be so entertained.’5

  Apart from musical developments, however, there was much else for the musical community to discuss (quite apart from gossip such as the recent death of the actress Nell Gwynn, once mistress of Charles II). Musicians had been affected, like everybody else, by the political changes in England. The court had always been the centre of English musical life. James, however, had set up his own musical establishment at his infamous Catholic chapel, under the direction of a Roman, Innocenzo Fede, and Westminster Abbey had been neglected. In his capacity as organ tuner, Henry Purcell had reported that summer that ‘the organ is so out of repair that to cleanse, tune and put in good order will cost £40 and then to keep it so will cost £20 per an. at the least’.6 He was not the only London musician whose pay was now badly in arrears. The St Cecilia’s Day gathering of music lovers was a symptom of how music was drifting from court to town – and James’s Catholic establishment had done much to accelerate the change.