The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (51 page)

The Bank of England began to issue notes within a few years of its founding and became a deposit bank. It was one of the most important pillars of the new monarchy because it tied the propertied classes to the revolutionary settlement. If James II were restored, it was hardly likely that he was going to repay the money the Whig Bank owed to its investors. In the same period, around the mid-1690s, Lloyd’s coffee house became the best place in London to find insurance for ships and cargo. Lloyd’s reputation would grow over the next 300 years to become the premier insurance market in the world.

But the same year the Bank of England was founded, in the middle of the war, Queen Mary died of the smallpox epidemic. William was heartbroken and had to be carried fainting from her deathbed. He was prostrate with grief for weeks afterwards, unable to prevent himself from breaking down when he received Parliament’s message of sympathy at her loss. In his wife’s memory he commissioned Christopher Wren to remodel Greenwich Palace as a naval hospital, and on his own deathbed it would be discovered that he wore a miniature painting of her next to his heart.

Her death unleashed a good many forces that had been held in check–Mary at least had been James II’s daughter. There was a rash of assassination attempts against the man the Jacobites considered to be an illegitimate king, and the Commons thought it necessary to draw up a second Bond of Association, as in Elizabeth’s day, to protect him and the Protestant succession.

Grief drew William and his sister-in-law Princess Anne back together. They had become estranged owing to William’s suspicions about John Churchill’s loyalties to James II, which had got Churchill, now Earl of Marlborough, dismissed from the army in 1692 and sent to the Tower. Since he and his wife Sarah were Princess Anne’s closest friends, a great coldness had grown up between the two sisters by the time of Queen Mary’s death. But Anne presently began to act as her brother-in-law’s hostess, and relations became more cordial between William and Marlborough, who would carry on the fight against France after the king’s death.

As the century neared its end, William, whose health had never been good, had become exhausted by military campaigning and by his constant shuttle diplomacy. He had begun his reign with a mixed ministry of Tories and Whigs in a bid to unite the nation, but the effect of the Jacobite plots (whose authors were all Tories) and of the Tory dislike of the war was that a decade later his ministers were all Whigs, a ministry that came to be known as the Junto. The Tories objected to the expense of a long land war and of a large permanent army, which they said was thoroughly un English. In contrast the Whigs, with their commercial interests, continued strenuously to support the war as the only way to keep continental ports free from the French. To the Tories William now seemed emphatically to be a Whig king. A third Triennial Act was passed, which closed the loopholes which Charles II had exploited, and prevented any Parliament lasting longer than three years. His progressive ideas allowed the Licensing Act to lapse in 1695, which meant that newspapers could no longer be censored by the government. In combination with the Toleration Act, this enhanced the sense that England was an extraordinarily free country compared to the rest of western Europe. By the 1720s the political philosopher Montesquieu would describe the English constitution as one of the wonders of the world. The most thriving, creative and impertinent press in the world had been given the conditions in which it could flourish, an extra watchdog to safeguard the liberties of the English.

At the 1698 general election, however, with the country tired after nine years of war, the Tories under Robert Harley (after whom Harley Street is named) won a majority in the House of Commons, forcing William to dismiss the Whigs and cut back the army to a mere 7,000 troops. This turned out to be premature, however, for in 1700 an extremely important event took place that altered the balance of power in Europe: the ailing, childless King of Spain Charles II passed away.

The question of what should happen to the vast Spanish Empire had been hanging over Europe for decades since it had become clear that Charles II would never produce an heir. Until he died, in theory there were three candidates for the throne of Spain, two of whom were unwelcome to England and Holland. One was the dauphin or heir to the French throne, whose mother was Charles II’s sister, the other was the Archduke Joseph, heir to the Habsburgs, whose mother was another of Charles II’s sisters. Should either of these men succeed they would enlarge their own territories far beyond what was consistent with the balance of power. France or Austria would become significantly top-heavy if either acquired not just Spain, but ten provinces in the Netherlands, the Duchy of Milan, Mallorca, Mexico (which then included California and much of Texas), all of South America except Brazil and Guiana, Cuba, Trinidad and other parts of the West Indies and the Philippines, not to mention the silver and gold mines of the Spanish Empire.

Ever since the Treaty of Ryswick William of Orange had been negotiating with the emperor and Louis XIV to find an equitable way of making sure that the enormous Spanish Empire should not be left to either power. The upshot was a Secret Partition Treaty in 1698, by which the main powers, the empire, France and England, agreed that on the death of Charles II a third heir, the empress’s grandson, who was the Electoral Prince of Bavaria, would become the new King of Spain. The unexpected death of the electoral prince the following year scuppered that plan, and a Second Secret Partition Treaty was drawn up in March 1700 whereby the emperor’s second son, the Archduke Charles, would become king.

But this neat solution failed to take the ideas of Charles II into account. When he died in October 1700, it was discovered that he had left the whole Spanish Empire to his great-nephew, Louis XIV’s grandson Philip of Anjou. Philip was despatched south to become Philip V of Spain, and a new war, the War of the Spanish Succession, broke out. French troops began to invade the Spanish Netherlands, occupying its barrier fortresses and ports.

It was a major setback for William III. All he had battled for, in his determination to restrict the power of Louis XIV, had been swept away. Meanwhile in his unwieldy adopted country the Tory reaction was in full throttle. The Tories would not vote a penny for supplies for the new war. In their view the government should focus on the pending English succession crisis not the Spanish, after the death in July of Princess Anne’s only surviving child, the eleven-year-old Duke of Gloucester. The Tory Parliament was determined to drive home the point that England was not the servant of the Dutch king but the other way round. Its attitude to William became positively insulting when it asked the king to exclude all foreigners from the Privy Council and passed a series of acts to limit his powers still further by preventing foreigners from holding office or sitting in Parliament. MPs even attempted to circumscribe the king’s freedom of movement by stopping him from leaving England without the permission of Parliament. William threatened to abdicate and return to Holland, but he was persuaded to remain and the legislation continued. Though he had made no attempt to interfere with the judiciary, a new statute prevented judges being removed except by act of Parliament, and in 1701 the Act of Settlement was passed which removed the crown from James II and his Catholic family, and stipulated that if William and Anne died without heirs it should pass to Sophia, Electress of Hanover, the Protestant granddaughter of James I, daughter of Elizabeth of Bohemia, the Winter Queen, and her heirs. The act also laid down that all future kings and queens must be members of the Church of England, a requirement that remains valid to this day.

In the autumn of 1701, however, the ostrich-like Tories were forced to take their heads out of the sand and wake up to the reality of Louis XIV’s intentions. On 6 September, when James II drew his last breath at St Germain, Louis broke the Treaty of Ryswick–by which he had acknowledged William III as the rightful King of England–and instead recognized James II’s son, known to history as the Old Pretender, as James III.

Louis had made a major miscalculation. The idea that the King of France should decide who was the King of England brought Tory and Whig together to vote for war. To William’s relief England threw herself into a new Grand Alliance of the English, the Dutch and the Habsburg Empire. William recalled his Whig ministers and began to increase the army once more. There was nothing he liked better, he said, than war. As the new year got under way, he was eagerly anticipating the campaign. But it was not to be. Out riding one misty morning at Hampton Court on 20 February 1702 his horse tripped over a molehill and the king fell, badly breaking his collarbone. For anyone in a less run-down state of health than William, the break would have been unimportant. But the stress of being his own chief minister in Holland and England, and a life of unrelenting toil, led to his death on 8 March. Even though the Jacobites at home and abroad toasted ‘the little gentleman in black velvet’ who had brought about his death, the crown went not to the Pretender but to Princess Anne.

Queen Anne was the last of the Stuarts to sit on the English throne. She was a dumpy, badly educated little woman, but her Englishness and sociable nature made a pleasant contrast to her cold and difficult brother-in-law. Her keen interest in the Church of England ensured that many potential Jacobites among the clergy or the Tories saved any further plotting for after her death. The new queen was supremely unathletic, indeed immobile, suffering from gout so badly that she is the only monarch who has ever had to be carried to her coronation. But paradoxically it was during Anne’s reign that the genius of her intimate friend Marlborough made England renowned for her military prowess, as the queen presided over victories which smashed to smithereens the hitherto unbreakable power of Louis XIV. Thanks to Marlborough’s triumphs, England acquired the territories which constituted her first empire and transformed her into a formidable international presence.

Anne’s reign not only coincided with the whole of the twelve-year War of the Spanish Succession. It was also the beginning of a century whose most prominent characteristic was its cult of reason. England’s Glorious Revolution, when a mystical notion of Divine Right gave way to government by contract, had been a significant herald of this cultural change. The European phenomenon of the Enlightenment, as infatuation with logic was called, encouraged the belief that every problem, political, philosophical, practical, could yield to the application of reason. Only after the French Revolution revealed that reason could also have its dark side when taken to extremes did the fixation on logic begin to fade.

But such issues were far above the head of Queen Anne, who did not cultivate the company of thinkers. Simple domestic pleasures–card games, visiting gardens and intimate friendships–were her preoccupying interests. In 1702 her best friends were still John Marlborough and his wife, the imperious Sarah Jennings, who had dominated her since their schooldays. But it was extremely fortunate that Marlborough in effect now became ruler of England, for Anne’s reign opened with the country in serious danger. It would be Marlborough whose gifts as a military strategist saved England from a French-controlled puppet king. For while the French and the allies were roughly equal in number; Louis’ army was the greatest fighting machine the world had seen for centuries, honed in battle over forty years. On William’s death Marlborough not only took over the Dutch king’s role as commander-in-chief of the Anglo-Dutch army, but also assumed William’s all-consuming mission to destroy the French.

At stake was more than just the question of who dominated Europe. If Louis were to overrun Holland, as looked more than likely since the Spanish Netherlands to the south were now completely under French control, an invasion of England to put his Catholic candidate James III on the throne might be only days away. That would be the end of the Protestant monarchy, and of all the rights and freedoms the Glorious Revolution had enshrined.

Though England had at last produced a general in Marlborough skilful enough to defeat the Sun King, to begin with things did not look at all promising. Marlborough was considered to be one of the best staff officers in the English army, but he still had a reputation for being unscrupulous, over-ambitious and untrustworthy.

Worse still, at the start of 1704 the situation suddenly became desperate. The Elector of Bavaria declared himself for Louis and his grandson Philip V and allowed French troops into his country, thus opening up to them the valley of the Danube and the road to Vienna. With the aid of the Bavarians, the French were sweeping all before them so completely that they were seriously threatening to take the emperor Leopold I prisoner. If that happened Louis would have won, because the English and Dutch could not have carried on the war without the empire’s soldiers.

Half the emperor’s army, which should have been fighting the French, was putting down a revolt in his possessions in Hungary. The French were poised to capture Vienna and claim victory. From every quarter their armies were streaming, getting ready with the Bavarians for their last push. It seemed that nothing and nobody could prevent the fall of Vienna, for in the days before troop trains the 250 miles separating it from the rest of the allied army in Holland seemed insuperable: the Anglo-Dutch troops would not be able to get there in time.

Against this background of fearful anticipation, while Louis dallied in the great rooms of Versailles supremely confident of victory, Marlborough decided with the unexpected flair of genius to rush his army the 250 miles across Europe. His plan was to reach the French in Bavaria and defeat them before they got to Austria, and that is what he did.

Marlborough had two great problems. First of all, the key element of his plan was surprise. Not a word of where he was going could be allowed to leak out or the French would assemble a larger army in Bavaria to meet him. Therefore no one other than Prince Eugene of Savoy, his trusted opposite number, commander-in-chief of the emperor’s army, was allowed to know about it. For this reason, to escape the notice of French agents and also the summer heat, Marlborough’s army marched during the night and early morning, from three a.m. to nine. But Marlborough also had to keep his destination a secret from the Dutch, because they would have refused to allow him to leave their frontier undefended. Both the French and Dutch therefore believed that Marlborough was off to attack Lorraine or Alsace–until he turned east away from the Rhine, and they realized he was making for Bavaria.

Marlborough’s journey was a breathtaking feat of organization. At each halt, fresh horses, food and guns met the troops whose morale was thereby maintained at a high level, and a new pair of boots awaited every soldier at Heidelberg. In similar fashion to Henry V, Marlborough was popular because he always looked after his men. Unlike many generals, he always led personally from the front, and he was well known, again unlike so many of his more callous contemporary commanders, for loathing unnecessary bloodshed. Moreover he never fought a battle unless he believed he could win it.

Marlborough’s rendezvous with Prince Eugene and the Emperor Leopold’s forces was across from the little village of Blindheim (Blenheim) on the upper Danube in Bavaria. All at once the French had to rush their troops there, forced to turn their attention away from capturing Vienna in order to prevent the allies from overrunning Bavaria. As the French looked across at the English in their distinctive red and white coats, massing more and more thickly in the marshy ground surrounding a little stream called the Nebel, the turn of events must have been alarming. The English were supposed to be by the North Sea in Holland, sixty days’ march away according to conventional calculations. Yet here they were in the heart of Bavaria menacing them with their drums and their bloodthirsty roars.

Never had more hung on a battle for the allied commanders. For Marlborough it was the fate of England, for Prince Eugene it was that of his master the emperor. By 12 August the two greatest soldiers of their day, Prince Eugene, tiny, erect and exquisitely dressed, Marlborough always rather untidy and black with dirt from his forced march, had finished their earnest conference in a small white tent. Surprise had been the theme of this operation and now they decided to attack at dawn. The French still outnumbered the allies by 8,000 men. But by the suddenness of their onslaught and superior tactics the allies broke through the enemy lines to the central command post, causing the Elector of Bavaria to flee. The day was theirs. Twenty-three thousand French soldiers died and the allied forces took 15,000 prisoners. Marshal Tallard had to surrender too. For twenty years the French had been unconquerable in pitched battle; at Blenheim their reputation for invincibility was destroyed.

Marlborough, with his habitual casualness, scribbled a message of victory in pencil on the back of a restaurant bill and sent it to his wife, who like the rest of England was waiting anxiously for news. It took eight days for the news to reach London, but when it became known that Marlborough had defeated the Sun King and had prevented what everyone considered to be the imminent invasion of England, the country went wild with joy. Printers’ presses were besieged with orders for facsimile copies of his note. So great a victory was it deemed to be that a special service was held at the new St Paul’s built by Sir Christopher Wren and an enormous sum of money (plus a dukedom) was voted to Marlborough by Parliament. In gratitude Anne also gave him much of the land where the medieval royal palace of Woodstock had formerly stood in Oxfordshire, and the architect Vanbrugh was commissioned to design a palace worthy of the nation’s saviour. It was called Blenheim.

This great victory had a beneficial effect in respect of Scotland. Anglo-Scottish relations had been in poor shape since the disastrous attempt by Scots to launch their own colonization programme at Darien in Panama in the time of William and Mary. The Darien scheme had been their answer to the English Navigation Laws which prevented Scots from trading with English colonies, but the lives of all the settlers were lost either to disease or to Spanish hostilities, as the Spaniards considered it to be their territory. The failure of the English government and the English colonies to send supplies to the ill-fated colonial experiment, or to do anything to help the Scots against the Spanish, left a residue of extreme ill-will. The Scots had duly taken their revenge in 1704. The external danger which England faced from Louis XIV obliged Queen Anne to agree to the Bill of Security, under which the Scottish crown would be given to a separate Protestant candidate unless Anne’s successor on the English throne devolved his or her powers to executives from the Scottish Parliament.

The idea of another king in the north made Westminster distinctly uneasy: James III had only to convert to Protestantism and the Bill of Security would offer an opening for his return. But in the wake of Blenheim and the capture of Gibraltar by Admiral Rooke in 1705 the English government felt strong enough to raise the stakes with Scotland. Unless the Scots accepted the very beneficial proposals for Union now set out, and abandoned their plans for a separate monarchy, every native of Scotland settled in England or serving in the armed forces would be seized and held in prison as an alien. After Christmas 1705, what was more, no Scottish goods, manufactures or livestock would be allowed into England.

Just to show they were in earnest the government began massing on the borders of Scotland troops that were no longer required to be at the ready against Louis XIV. Ruin faced the Scots, but wealth and prosperity awaited them if they would surrender their ancient independence. There was little choice. An agreement was hammered out, formalized in October 1707 in the Act of Union, providing for one united Parliament and for taxation and coinage to be the same in both countries. The Scots obtained forty-five seats in the House of Commons at Westminster and sixteen seats in the House of Lords. They were permitted to maintain their separate legal system and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which the coronation oath would require the monarch to defend. Henceforth the prospect of lucrative trade with the colonies was open to all Scottish manufacturers. In the event the inhospitable nature of their own country, their gritty national character and their appetite for hard work meant that for the Scots the chief attraction of the English colonies was as places to emigrate to. Scots men and Scots women played a role out of all proportion to their numbers in constructing the British Empire.

From 1707 onwards, England, Scotland and Wales were known as Great Britain, and James I’s Union Jack, composed of the combined crosses of St George and St Andrew, finally became the national flag. Anne thus became the first Queen of Great Britain. But the extreme distaste with which the majority of the Scots viewed the Union is indicated by the fact that during the next forty years Scottish Protestants did nothing to stop two attempts by Catholic Highlanders to put Catholic Pretenders on the English throne.

The years which followed Blenheim were marked by a string of astonishing victories for Marlborough and Prince Eugene–Ramillies, Oudenarde and Turin. The Sun King’s grip on Europe was steadily weakened, almost all the Spanish Netherlands were taken over by the allies, and the French were driven out of Italy, enabling Leopold’s son the Archduke Charles to be established in Milan and Naples. The harrying of Louis’ grandson Philip V continued so successfully that Barcelona was captured, followed by Madrid, and the archduke was then proclaimed Charles III of Spain by the allied armies–only for the Spanish to beat the allies at the Battle of Almanza in 1707 and restore Philip to the throne. In 1711 the unexpected death of Charles’s brother, the new emperor Joseph I, made the archduke the emperor Charles VI. The allies were now far less eager to see Charles made King of Spain, as they had no wish for the Habsburg Empire to combine with the Spanish. As a result the fighting dragged on with little enthusiasm.

At the beginning of Anne’s reign a Tory government had been in office under Marlborough, with his close friend the Cornish politician Sidney Godolphin as lord treasurer, who was in charge of finding the money for the war, and Daniel Finch, Earl of Nottingham, a typical Tory High Churchman, as secretary of state. As the conflict continued, Godolphin and Marlborough found themselves increasingly alienated from their own party and moving closer to the Whigs because of their deeper commitment to the hostilities. To keep the Whigs onside, Marlborough and Godolphin found themselves beating off High Tory attempts to end the loophole allowing Dissenters to hold office by occasionally taking communion in the Anglican Church. But when they prevented a Bill against Occasional Conformity passing, Nottingham and his supporters angrily withdrew from government. While the Tories increasingly made ‘the Church in danger’ their rallying cry–playing on the fears of the Tory queen–Marlborough found it much simpler to govern with Whig ministers who never criticized the war. This earned him the undying hatred of his old party. They watched and waited and sharpened their knives, but as yet they could do nothing.