The Last Revolution Read online

  When that court finally convened at ten o’clock and Sir Roger Langley announced the verdict, Not Guilty, ‘there was a most wonderful shout, [so] that one would have thought the Hall had cracked’.30 Sir John Reresby remembered ‘the Palace Yard, with the streets near them, was so full of people, and their huzzas and shouts for joy of their lordships delivery so great, that it looked like a little rebellion in noise though not in fact’.31 The cheering spread out through the crowds around Westminster Hall; bells began to ring. Van Citters watched the crowd taunt the loyalist Bishop of Chester, a large man, ‘call[ing] out, he had the Pope in his belly & such like more’, and James’s solicitor, Mr Williams, was manhandled on his way to his carriage. By contrast:

  ‘The jury ... were received with the greatest acclamation ... Hundreds embraced them, wishing them all sorts of happiness and blessings, for their persons and families ... Many of the great and small nobility threw hands full of money among the poor people in driving home, to drink to the health of the King, the Prelates and the Jury ... and bonfires were lighted throughout the whole town and Westminster, and almost before the entrance and in sight of the court.’32

  The bishops’ trial had done something which had once seemed impossible: it had united England, ‘brought all the Protestants together,’ as the Earl of Halifax wrote, ‘and bound them into a knot that cannot easily be untied’. Soon after his release, William Sancroft would send articles to Anglican bishops exhorting ‘a very tender regard to our brethren, the Protestant Dissenters’.33

  The cheering spread out across London. It reached the City. It reached Hounslow Heath, where the King was dining with his army. ‘Tant pis pour eux’, he was heard to mutter; his soldiers cheered in their ranks all around him. Cheering spread out across the country; it seemed as if the revolution had already begun. There was cheering in York, where magistrates ignored an order to suppress bonfires; it was left to a loyalist army captain to take a patrol round and stamp them out. It made no difference. A King who claimed power by prerogative had failed to impose his will. Reviewing troops on Blackheath soon afterwards, James asked a Major if his men would obey orders or throw down their arms. Almost to a man the soldiers hurled their muskets to the grass. ‘Great confusions’, John Evelyn would write in the diary entry for his sixty-eighth birthday that year,

  ‘which threaten a sad revolution to this sinful Nation ... Yet if it be thy blessed will, we may still enjoy that happy tranquillity which hitherto thou hast continued to us. Amen. Amen.’34

  XVII

  ‘TO COME AND RESCUE THE NATION’

  ‘I [am] quite sure’, reported d’Avaux, France’s ambassador to the United Provinces, even before the Queen of England went into labour, ‘that if the Queen of England is delivered of a son, the Prince of Orange will lift the mask ... and stir up trouble in England.’1

  From William’s point of view, the birth of a Catholic heir to James had completely transformed the situation. No longer could he wait for his wife to inherit. He needed to act now or see England drift into the orbit of France.

  It was easy enough to make such a decision, less clear exactly what he could do. There was no chance of a man as cautious as William landing in England with 82 companions, like the Duke of Monmouth. He did not, in the end, trust the English. Why should he? Their politics were factious; their policies vacillated wildly; they were emotional, inconstant, hare-brained. It was easy enough for Earls to write mischievous letters. What he needed was for senior politicians to commit themselves so far that they could not return to James; he needed them to burn their boats.

  In April 1688, at the Hague, William had told Edward Russell, brother of the Whig martyr, and Admiral Arthur Herbert that ‘if he was invited by some men of the best interest and the most value in the nation, who should both in their own name and in the name of others who trusted them, invite him to come and rescue the nation, and the religion, he believed he could be ready by the end of September to come over’.2 That was a gamble on William’s part – there was no certainty at all that he could persuade Amsterdam to support an intervention either by the end of September or at any other time. Nonetheless, William could at least prepare the ground. By now he was in regular contact with most leading English politicians. Henry Sidney had inaugurated a rudimentary code for those closest to the Prince, and William kept a copy of it in his closet:

  Lord Halifax 21

  Lord of Nottingham 23

  Lord Devonshire 24

  Lord Shrewsbury 25

  Lord of Danby 27

  Lord Lumley 29

  Lord of Bath 30

  Bishop of London 31

  Mr Sidney 33

  Mr Russell 35

  The commitment William wanted came on the day the bishops were acquitted. Admiral Herbert had to disguise himself as a sailor to cross the North Sea.* Arriving at the palace he handed the Prince a statement bearing, in place of signatures, seven numbers.

  ‘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 ... ’

  As William unravelled the code-numbers at the end of the letter he learned the names of the ‘Immortal Seven’. A covering letter from Henry Sidney described them as ‘the most prudent and most knowing persons that we have in this nation’. That was rather too generous. Two, Lords Devonshire and Lumley, were middle-ranking Whig peers. Edward Russell and Henry Sidney were cousin and brother respectively to Whig heroes; Sidney, at least, was known as William’s creature. Lord Shrewsbury, who had carried the curtana at James’s coronation, was a talented politician of fitful energy. The main catches were the Earl of Danby, once Charles II’s leading minister, and Henry Compton, Bishop of London. Those two were Tory heavyweights. They alone among the seven would command the respect of men like Edmund Bohun or the Norths.

  Others were conspicuous by their absence. The Earl of Halifax was too subtle to climb down off the fence. Daniel Finch, Earl of Nottingham, another Tory heavyweight, ‘was gone very far,’ Henry Sidney wrote, ‘but now his heart fails him, and he will go no further’.’3 The Hyde brothers had met Zuylestein but neither was trusted by the conspirators with their secret.

  In fact, some Tories wondered whether William’s help was still needed after the acquittal of the bishops. Nottingham wrote that he ‘[could not] imagine that the Papists are able to make any further considerable progress’.4 Now that James had lost his great trial of strength, maybe the Tories could win control again. On the other hand, James’s familiar response to the bishops’ acquittal was to yield no ground. The Ecclesiastical Commission was instructed to prosecute clergymen who had refused to read out the Declaration. The official news-sheet, Public Occurrences Truly Stated, founded early in the year to fight rumour and satire like with like, even did its best to laugh off the bishops’ acquittal: ‘Go, go! Keep your breath to cool your pottage ... Don’t you see the bishops are acquitted? Well! And what’s that?’5

  For his part, the Comte d’Avaux no longer had any doubt that William would intervene in England. On the face of it there seemed little chance that Amsterdam could be talked round in three months, but as a diplomat d’Avaux knew the balance of power was tilting against France. Four years earlier, the Treaty of Ratisbon had established French mastery of Europe, but since then little had gone Louis’s way. The League of Augsburg in 1686 was the first serious coalition against him. Louis’s great commander, the Prince de Condé, died in 1686. It had been a standing assumption of French military and foreign policy that Leopold I, in Vienna, would be too occupied with the Ottomans to throw any real force against France, but Ottoman power was now receding. Vienna was relieved in 1683, and in 1686 Imperial forces captured Buda; Morosini’s raid on Athens was another symptom of Ottoman weakness.
These were subterranean movements in the balance of Europe. No simple chain of causality led to the Glorious Revolution. As if in the motion of one of the Moderns’ great machines, levers shifted, hammers dropped, plates moved slowly into alignment. On 9 May 1688 the Great Elector Friedrich Wilhelm died at Brandenburg. In June the Elector of Cologne also died. Cologne had been a pivotal supporter in the French onslaught on the United Provinces in 1672. Now the Pope backed the Emperor’s candidate, Josef Clement of Bavaria, against Louis’s choice. Charles XI of Sweden had already joined the League of Augsburg. Even Max Emanuel of Bavaria had swallowed dislike of his father-in-law and come to terms with the Empire. Then French spies in Rome obtained evidence that the Duke of Savoy was planning to join the resistance to Louis, and finally, on 6 September 1688, Leopold I’s forces captured Belgrade from the Ottomans. At last he was free to look towards Central Europe.

  To all this, England was, as usual, a sideshow. England weak and divided, England sidelined, had been Louis’s successful policy for more than twenty years now. Louis was engaged in a conflict invisible to the Earl of Danby, or Slingsby Bethel, or any of the other players in the English game. He was looking far ahead to the coming struggle over the Spanish Succession when the enfeebled Carlos II eventually died. It did not matter to him if England slid into renewed civil war; he could rescue James next year. If his nearest European opponent, the Prince of Orange, was tempted into the marshes of English politics, so be it. Better men than William had disappeared there over the last half century, and a League of Augsburg without the United Provinces would leave Louis free to stabilise his European position.

  That was the French King’s strategy, and he knew only one way to achieve it: by force. A year earlier Lavardin, his new ambassador to the Holy See, had swaggered into Rome at the head of 700 armed guards. On a larger scale the Sun King would do the same to Central Europe. If trouble threatened from the United Provinces, then he would frighten the Dutch into submission.

  D’Avaux watched this new policy develop with increasing alarm. D’Avaux knew how to manage the United Provinces: keep the merchants happy and Amsterdam, interested only in trade and peace, would vote down anything that smacked of war. It had worked time and again. It had worked over the Treaty of Ratisbon and the League of Augsburg. It had worked in summer 1687, when Amsterdam stopped William expanding the Dutch navy.

  There had certainly been setbacks. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes had soured Dutch opinion as it had English. D’Avaux had heard of Caspar Fagel’s attempts to improve relations between William and Amsterdam. Nicholas Witsen, the thoughtful and impressive Amsterdam Burgomaster, scholar and traveller, was to be seen more and more often at Het Loo. But there was still no better way to hinder the Prince of Orange than by maintaining good relations with Amsterdam.

  Hence d’Avaux’s shock when Louis abruptly declared trade war on Holland by imposing punitive tariffs on Dutch goods. There could be no more effective way of driving Amsterdam into the Stadholder’s arms. France was by far Holland’s richest export market. French ports like Bordeaux were always full of the Dutch ships which carried their wines, their spirits and salt around Europe. Now the tariffs paid by Amsterdam increased tenfold, and d’Avaux reported that Dutch merchants were being ruined. He knew that Louis had made a mistake. The Amsterdam burgomasters still professed support, wining and dining d’Avaux and drinking toasts to Franco-Dutch friendship, but he could sense the shift in mood. The clamour in many Dutch towns was for retaliatory tariffs against France. It was impossible to exaggerate Dutch anger, d’Avaux wrote to M de Croissy, Louis’s foreign minister. Desperately he begged his master to show some sign of compromise, so foreign to the Sun King but the only chance, as d’Avaux saw it, of maintaining his alliance with Amsterdam.

  For he had no doubt that William was planning something. D’Avaux had agents all over the United Provinces, and from all of them the same reports were coming in.

  ‘In Amsterdam and the other coastal towns of the Republic they [are] working day and night to ready every vessel in port ... Artillery and equipment [is] being drawn from every town in Holland and transported [to the coast] ... by stealth.’6

  In secret, paid for by William’s private funds, a huge invasion force was massing on the Dutch coast. Its target was England.

  XVIII

  ‘AMONG SPECULATORS’

  On the spot where the Amstel had first been dammed was the central square of Amsterdam, surrounded by gabled houses and dominated by a massive new town hall, symbol of the city’s power. Every morning between 10 o’clock and midday, the Dam filled up with knots of excited men who argued, hurried from one group to the next, and interrupted their conversations with swinging hand-claps. Any stranger pushing through the crowd was assailed by bursts of baffling, staccato jargon: talk of liefhebberen (lovers) and contramine (exhausters of the mine), butterflies and options, a much-invoked appeal to Frederick. To most people in Europe – to many Dutchmen, for that matter – what went on here was a mystery as impenetrable as Newtonian mathematics. But as it happened, some of that mystery was about to be dispelled. For this was the Amsterdam stock market, which reconvened at the Bourse in the afternoon, and in 1688 one of the traders, José Penso de la Vega, was engaged in writing the first account of how it worked.

  As if to underline Dutch diversity, de la Vega was a Sephardic Jew who spoke Portuguese, lived in Antwerp and wrote in Spanish. Neatly characterising what was going on on the Dam, he called his book Confusion of Confusions. It opened the lid on a whole new financial world, one where fortunes were made not by tilling the soil, not by selling grain, timber, wool, even luxuries like silk or tea, but by something which to most men and women of the seventeenth century seemed quite inexplicable. For those swinging hand-claps sealed bargains not on real goods but on the future. Dealers had a name for it – wind-handel: trading in the wind.

  Speculation had taken off in Holland before. In 1637 tulip bulbs had become the focus of a national mania. Prices had risen by the hour. Fortunes were made or lost on fractions of bulbs whose buyers would never see or plant them. The subject of the speculative bubble was not, in fact, flowers themselves but value in the abstract. The future could be milked for wealth, the Dutch then discovered, and from it wealth could be induced to pour at a speed unimaginable to patient merchants or long-suffering farmers. When the crash came, however, the Dutch had also discovered a downside. Wealth could be sucked back into the vortex quite as swiftly as it had once spurted from it: a farmer’s life savings or a carpenter’s tools, everything the painter Jan van Goyen owned.

  Shares in the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, had been traded from the day of its foundation in 1602. In the 1680s, as Holland recovered from the French wars and Amsterdam filled up with cash, that share market became the focus of a renewed speculative frenzy. With astonishing speed the financial techniques of Wall Street emerged:* hypothecation, options, prolongation deals and rescounters. Liefhebberen, bull traders in today’s jargon, worked the rising market; contramine were the bears. Traders laid off risk by purchasing a spread of options to buy at fixed prices at a later date. The few regulations were woven into a game of odds with all the baroque complexity of the gambling games which were then sweeping through Versailles and London.

  And it was as gambling that de la Vega described the market’s fascination. ‘It is foolish’, he wrote, ‘to think that you can withdraw from the exchange after you have tasted [the sweetness of the honey] ... He who has [once] entered the circle of the Exchange is in eternal agitation and sits in a prison, the key of which lies in the ocean and the bars of which are never opened.’ De la Vega himself made and lost five fortunes on the Dam, and beyond that semi-regulated market he knew there was a still riskier penumbra of unofficial dealing around the city. By subdividing shares, ‘ducaton’ traders opened speculation to the public. Those

  ‘who cannot gamble a ducaton per point risk a stuiver ... Even children who hardly know the world and at best own a little po
cket money agree that each point by which the large shares rise or fall will mean a certain amount of pocket money for their small shares ... If one were to lead a stranger through the streets of Amsterdam and ask him where he was, he would answer, Among speculators, for there is no corner where one does not talk shares.’1

  For John Locke, the invention of money had twisted human society to a new pitch of sophistication. In Amsterdam, in 1688, risk – ‘the labyrinth of labyrinths’, de la Vega called it, ‘the terror of terrors, confusion de confusiones’ – had driven it to a still higher plane. The social structures of the seventeenth century depended on land ownership or substantial trade. But on the Dam wealth was derived, at unimaginable speed, from something quite different. Through risk, wealth was no longer closed and static, but infinite and dynamic. An economic world was taking shape in which, as de la Vega put it, ‘the fall of prices need not have a limit and there are also unlimited possibilities for the rise’2 – in which there were no boundaries.