The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (50 page)

William III was small, asthmatic, dark, almost hunchbacked and unprepossessing in the flesh. But although paintings flatter him, mainly by depicting him on a rearing horse in the heat of battle, they truthfully convey his heroic essence. After Louis XIV William was the single most important individual on the late-seventeenth-century European political stage. For thirty years his tireless activities held back the tide of French domination. His life of struggle, and the treachery he had observed in the highest places–including on the part of his uncle Charles II, who had proposed dividing his nephew’s homeland between himself and Louis XIV–made him highly secretive. He trusted no one other than his small Dutch inner circle. Among them his only real intimate was the Dutch courtier William Bentinck, one of the chief negotiators with the Whigs before the Glorious Revolution. Bentinck was created Duke of Portland by William, with whom he had been friends since boyhood. His devotion to the king was such that when smallpox struck the royal household, killing Queen Mary, Bentinck took upon himself all the most onerous duties of nursing William.

Even after thirteen years in England William’s dependence on his Dutch intimates was undiminished, so that by the end of his life there was considerable English resentment of this foreign influence. His tendency to keep his cards close to his chest was understandable in view of the two-faced behaviour of many of the English. A great many of them, even the Duke of Shrewsbury–one of the immortal seven who had invited him to succeed James II–brazenly hedged their bets from the moment William became king and corresponded with the king-in-exile James II at St Germain in Paris. The truth was that, though the revolutionary settlement was destined to endure, at its beginning no one could predict that it would. Even the heiresses to the throne, Queen Mary and the future Queen Anne, continued to have pangs of guilt about usurping their father and their half-brother. Throughout William’s reign Princess Anne wrote to her father clandestinely.

Moreover, despite all they owed to William, the senior bishops in the Church of England were very ungrateful. Now that Protestantism stood in no danger, the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, and the Bishop of Bath and Wells allowed themselves the luxury of refusing to take a new oath of allegiance to William and Mary on the ground that they were not the rightful heirs. Since there had to be an archbishop who recognized the new monarchs, the non-juring (or swearing) Sancroft was replaced as the Primate of All England by the low-church John Tillotson. Though the Non-Jurors party of the Church proved to be small and insignificant, much of the clergy and indeed many of the Tories remained secretly wedded to the cause of James II. Known as Jacobites (after the Latin form of James, ‘Jacobus’), they found it impossible to abandon their allegiance to the divinely ordained Stuart line of kings, for all James’s unsatisfactory religious beliefs.

The Anglican clergy’s behaviour was also a reaction to William III’s Dutch Calvinism (it was much the same as Presbyterianism). From the beginning of his reign it had been clear that the new king’s sympathies were with establishing a broader Church through a Comprehension Act. But, though this was defeated and the penal code against the Roman Catholics remained, the 1689 Toleration Act officially recognized the principle that people should be allowed to practise their religions in ways other than those of the state Church. It permitted Protestant Dissenters to have their own dedicated buildings so long as they believed in the Trinity. In fact, as a result of the act, with the exception of Roman Catholicism toleration of every religion became the custom in England. Even Unitarians worshipped in their plain rooms undisturbed.

The English were also increasingly keen to make sure that the Dutch king understood that he was the servant of the House of Commons. Thus instead of Parliament granting an income for life, William and Mary received a sum that was renewed on an annual basis. Likewise, though the king could keep a standing army, he had to apply to Parliament each year for it. Both these acts had the effect of ensuring that Parliament met each year.

After Whitehall was destroyed by fire on the night of 4–5 January 1698, William spent a good deal of time with his fair, handsome wife at the newly built Kensington Palace, which they preferred to Hampton Court, even though Christopher Wren had improved it for them. And as a modern residence in the countryside near the hamlet of Kensington, it made a pleasant contrast to the dirty old Palace of Whitehall which sprawled everywhere and which had become such a den of iniquity under Mary’s uncle, Charles II. Queen Mary’s unaffected manner endeared her to her fellow countrymen, and she introduced them to the Dutch tulip, to paintings of Dutch seascapes, to blue and white china, and to building in brick after the Dutch fashion. Neat geometric Dutch gardens, using topiary and water features which were so popular in Holland, became all the rage. The royal couple’s garden may be seen at Kensington Palace beside the orangery, another novelty which Queen Mary brought to England and which enabled her to grow ornamental oranges in honour of William of Orange.

Calling a halt to Louis XIV’s territorial aggrandizement had been William III’s great mission for almost all his adult life. He was not really interested in the English crown except as a means of bringing England’s considerable weight on board the coalition against France. Fortunately this war was in England’s interests. King William’s War began in 1689 in Ireland, where William’s father-in-law James II had landed at Kinsale with a small French army. (It is therefore sometimes also known as the War of the English Succession.) Being largely Catholic most of the country supported James’s cause, but that did not mean that Ireland was pro-English. The opposite was true. Their ultimate objective was not so much to put James back on the throne of his forefathers as to assert Irish independence and drive the hated Scots and English settlers out of the lands they considered with some justice to have been stolen from them. To this end they began to burn the settlers’ cattle and homes over their heads, forcing them to barricade themselves into the cities of Londonderry and Enniskillen. But no amount of brutality could break the Protestants’ nerve, nor could a diet of only rats and cats as their food ran out. Londonderry held firm until June 1689, when a fleet from England arrived on Lough Foyle, and the siege, like that of Enniskillen, was raised. Thanks to these and other successes, the north of Ireland was made secure for William. James was forced to meet his son-in-law at the River Boyne, two miles above Drogheda, in July 1690.

Announcing that he had not come to Ireland to let the grass grow under his feet, William III drew up his army the other side of the River Boyne from James. All William’s soldiers wore an orange sash, the colour of the House of Orange. (Such sashes may be seen to this day on Protestant Ulstermen during what is known as the marching season in July, when they commemorate their victories under ‘King Billy’.) Though William was gravely wounded in the shoulder by one of the cannon balls James’s troops sent over, he remained impassive and, crossing the river, his forces soon put James to flight.

William was very generous with his terms. By the Treaty of Limerick all Irish soldiers could either disband, enlist under William or follow their leader the Earl of Lucan to France. But the treaty also permitted the Roman Catholics ‘such privileges in the exercise of their religion as were consistent with the law or as they had enjoyed in the days of Charles II’. William allowed no fewer than 11,000 Irishmen to depart for France. They became the celebrated Irish soldiers known as the Wild Geese who would be the backbone of many a royal continental regiment and stalwarts of the Stuart cause. But the Protestant Irish who had seized control of Parliament were less forgiving. The violent deeds of the past century were too recent to forget, so the religious toleration the treaty guaranteed was never ratified. In fact a new penal code was enforced against the Catholics which was more disabling than before.

Although Ireland had been subdued the day before the Battle of the Boyne, the French Admiral Tourville had won such a crushing victory over the Dutch and English fleets at Beachy Head that for two years England was at the mercy of a French invasion. Fortunately when the fighting between the French and English moved from Ireland to the Netherlands, and the English armies under William began to hold down the French, the threat never materialized. And after the English victory at the Battle of La Hogue in 1692 English ships once again controlled the Channel.

But William and Mary’s sovereignty still had to be enforced in Scotland. As befitted the home of Scottish kings, the cause of the Stuarts continued to have immense emotional appeal there, particularly among the Catholic Highlanders, and would do so for the next fifty years. As keen Presbyterians, the Lowlanders on the other hand had every reason to dislike James II, and a Convention of the Scottish estates formally offered William and Mary the crown. But a breakaway group was formed when the Scottish Kirk abolished bishops once more, and a new Church full of exiled bishops, the Episcopalians, became a source of Jacobitism. Its members, together with the Highland clans under John Graham, Viscount Dundee (a cousin of the great Marquis of Montrose), rose in a pro-Stuart rebellion at the end of 1689, only to fade away when Dundee was killed at the Pass of Killiecrankie.

Once the rebels were back in their shielings, the government in London decided that the Highland clans must finally be brought to heel. Their chiefs were the key: they had complete control over their clans, which they treated like an enormous family–in fact in Gaelic the word clan means children. If all the chiefs were made to swear an oath of loyalty to William and Mary it would be binding on the whole clan and put an end to further insurrections.

The last day for taking the oath was New Year’s Day 1692. However, on that date, one clan chief still had not made his vow, and that was the head of the Macdonalds of Glencoe. For whatever reason, the Mac Ian as he was known only reached the English garrison at Inverary on 6 January. He had exceeded the deadline by just five days, and that during a traditional holiday period when little business was transacted. But the Lowland authorities were fed up with the wild ways of the Highlanders and were itching to punish their lawlessness. John Dalrymple, the Master of Stair, who was William’s vindictive and self-important minister for Scottish affairs, wrote to London, demanding that an example be made of the clan. He said it was necessary for ‘the vindication of public justice to extirpate that set of thieves’. William himself signed the order commanding the Macdonalds to be rooted out, but Dalrymple’s was the sinister hand that added the note that the ‘affair should be secret and sudden’. The soldiers ‘were not to trouble the government with prisoners’.

Dalrymple’s henchman Argyll put the affair into the hands of his clansmen, the Campbells, enabling them to use legal means to avenge themselves on their hereditary enemies, the Macdonalds. On 1 February 120 Campbells disguised as government soldiers arrived somewhat mysteriously in the desolate valley of Glencoe and billeted themselves on the Macdonalds. Their orders were to secure all the exits out of the valley and in a few days’ time to kill all its inhabitants, even the children. Meanwhile the Campbells relied on the ancient laws of Highland hospitality to ensure that they themselves came to no harm. On 13 February banked turf fires provided the only dim light for a cold-blooded atrocity. As the Macdonalds slept peacefully under their green plaids, the Campbells rose up and butchered thirty-eight of the people who had been their hosts for almost a fortnight.

Three-quarters of the Macdonalds, mainly women, managed to escape, warned by the Campbells’ use of the gun instead of the silent bayonet. Nevertheless very many of them perished with their tiny children amid the cruel February snows as they fled in their thin nightclothes. Almost miraculously, though, those Macdonald women who did escape mostly turned out to be pregnant with boys. Several months later many young Macdonalds came into the world to revive their clan. This evil deed blackened the name of the Campbells for generations and caused such a scandal that it finished the Master of Stair’s career, forcing him to retire from William’s government.

Once Scotland and Ireland were subdued the king could give all his attention to the fighting in the Netherlands. In 1695 his perseverance paid off at last when he captured the border fortress of Namur and finally put a stop to the expansion of French territory. By 1697 Louis had accepted that it was checkmate, at least temporarily, and the two sides signed the Peace of Ryswick. Louis withdrew his support of James II, recognized William as King of England and returned all of his conquests since 1678, except for Strasbourg and Landau. With the Treaty of Ryswick William had for the first time dented Louis’ ambitions, an achievement he owed to England’s participation in the war.

One of the reasons for England’s success was that the country now had very deep pockets from which to fund the war, on account of the founding of the Bank of England in 1694. This was the brainchild of the ingenious financier and Whig politician Charles Montagu, chancellor of the Exchequer and another of the seven who had signed the invitation to William of Orange to become King of England. King William’s War was much more expensive than any other previous conflicts for the numbers it put into the field and because of how long it lasted. The feeding and clothing of thousands of soldiers abroad for eight years ultimately cost £40 million. The usual way of paying for wars had been through the land tax, a charge by the acre on those who owned land. Not only was this immensely unpopular with Tory squires, who tended to be land rich and cash poor, but it soon became clear that it was impossible to fund such a large-scale war as this through taxation.

Charles Montagu hit upon the idea of a permanent loan to the government. Previously the Treasury had relied on short-term loans from the goldsmiths, the chief government lending agents, which had to be paid back immediately and were extremely expensive. This time the money was to be lent by the public, and in less than a fortnight the required sum, to be known as the National Debt, had been raised and was to be loaned to the government on a permanent basis. This would yield for its lenders–wealthy City people and some ordinary merchants–an annual return of 8 per cent interest, which the government was to pay through taxation.