Flashback, November 1688: William of Orange Invades England

Though invited by Protestant commanders and politicians to assume the British crown, Dutch-born William of Orange was taking no chances. He landed in November 1688 at Torbay, England, with 53 warships,1,700 cannon, 20,000 men, and 7,000 horses—enough to precipitate the most successful invasion of England since William the Conqueror did so in 1066.

Victors not only get to write the histories but even to coin the terms by which these are understood, and the successful conquest (who became William III once he assumed the English throne) only confirms the point. The series of military and political developments that followed, involving the end of the monarch William came to overthrow—his own father-in-law, King James II—came to be called “The Glorious Revolution.”

That “revolution” was meant as a marker in the evolution from “the divine right of kings” proclaimed by James toward a more constrained, constitutional monarchy, setting the seeds for democracy in North America. 

But the ouster of James was far less “glorious” to two groups that had benefited from his policy of toleration: Protestant Dissenters who had taken issue with the Church of England, now experiencing a severe setback, and Roman Catholics, who, especially in Ireland, found themselves at bay in every corner of society for supporting their co-religionist James, who ended up with the dubious distinction of being the last Catholic monarch of England, Scotland and Ireland.

It would also be a mistake to regard William simply as the guarantor of a new tolerance, a royal who ruled through restraint. As a 19^th-century American political boss would put it, he saw his opportunity and took it. The elected ruler of the Dutch Republic, William would much rather govern without someone looking over his shoulder. 

Fortunately for him, the tumultuous political situation in the home country of his wife, Princess Mary of England, presented that opportunity—and James could claim the proper lineage for those concerned about such things. Mary, James’ eldest daughter, was heir to the throne if the king didn’t sire a child, while William’s mother was James's older sister. This made the king his uncle and Mary his cousin as well as his wife.

For all his interest in military affairs, William, at least at this point, did not enjoy a reputation as a commander superior to his father-in-law. James, through his secretary of the navy, the famous diarist Samuel Pepys, had served creditably as Lord High Admiral. He had also won a victory over the Dutch in 1665.

But William had it all over James in craft and guile, holding his own counsel until he could reasonably assess those with whom he came in contact. Other men—very much including James’ older brother, King Charles II—would have been inclined to move slowly in a country where Catholics constituted only 6% of the population. Not James. 

The worldliness, wit, and winking attitude toward matters of the flesh so characteristic of Restoration comedy took their cue from the libertine nicknamed “the Merry Monarch.” As if that weren’t enough, Charles also proved powerfully adept at warding off potentially lethal political blows. 

But James’ obstinacy and arrogance reminded older government officials all too much of his father, and why he ended up executed. What could have been a political masterstroke--a Declaration of Indulgence that exempted Catholics and Dissenters from penal laws, moving the nation toward genuine tolerance--turned into a blunder when he dissolved Parliament, forced clergy and bishops to read the Declaration from their pulpits, and prosecuted the seven bishops who refused to comply.

Nevertheless, even a ruler without James’ undeniable faults might not have avoided sharing his fate, for as a Catholic convert—one who took his faith very seriously—he represented a direct threat to the power and influence wielded by Protestants in both government and the military. His more reluctant supporters were willing to bide their time in the hope that upon the death of 55-year-old James, the throne would pass to his Protestant daughter Mary.

But the announcement of an heir to the aging monarch and his wife, the Catholic Maria of Modena, who successfully gave birth in her late 40s after several miscarriages, still births and deaths in infancy energized the opposition and catalyzed the Resistance of the time. The news came on the heels of more pronouncements indicating that James, unlike Charles, was serious about his faith.

In contrast, out of necessity growing up, William learned how to maintain a veil of discretion, according to Thomas Babington Macaulay in his influential but problematic The History of England, from the Accession of James II: “Long before he reached manhood, he knew how to keep secrets, how to baffle curiosity by dry and guarded answers; how to conceal all passions under the same show of grave tranquility.”

All through 1688, William set the stage for his armada, working swiftly but surreptitiously, without letting key factions supporting him know what was happening on other fronts:

*He hired the most combat-ready soldiers from armies across Europe;

*He worked non-stop on the logistics of the expected campaign, with the help of the breadmakers of Rotterdam and the gunsmiths of Utrecht;

*He secured financial backing from banks, from Huguenots who had carried precious metals with them when they fled religious persecution, and gold equaling a hundred thousand guineas, from secret British supporters—all to go along with what the parsimonious William had put aside for an emergency;

*He exploited the religious resentments of Protestants even as he assured Catholics they had nothing to fear from him—winning the support of key members of the military and Church of England, while telling prominent English Catholics that James’ favoritism would only excite mobs who would perpetrate untold mayhem upon them; and,

*He allowed King Louis XIV to play into his hands, as Protestants all over Northern Europe came to fear that the Catholic “Sun King” would ally himself with an increasingly assertive co-religionist on the English throne.

The conspiracy against James might have unraveled but for perhaps England’s ablest soldier of the time secretly joining their ranks. Two and a half centuries, his illustrious descendant, Sir Winston Churchill, strenuously attempted to explain the conduct of John Churchill during this crisis, but it just won’t wash. It’s hard to do so given Churchill’s desire for preferment and riches; his profession of loyalty to the point of death to James, even as he was plotting to desert the king; and his advice to his monarch to visit Warminster, where he could be kidnapped.

As I explained in a prior post, this lieutenant general can easily be charged with ingratitude, since Charles and James had raised him from humble circumstances to preeminence in the English military. But, for all his justifications to the contrary, opportunism played the decisive role in his switch to William of Orange, who ended up naming him Duke of Marlborough. That opportunism can be seen in John Churchill’s secret letter several years later to James, in an attempt to get back into his good graces.

That letter illustrated nothing so much as Churchill’s lack of insight into political reality. In the interim, James had dismayed his followers by fleeing to France instead of confronting William; by leaving Ireland after losing the Battle of the Boyne; and by being unable to get over the destruction of another fleet, staffed by Louis XIV, before his very eyes.

England avoided a civil war, but because James lost his bid to remain in power, Catholics would continue to be second-class citizens until passage of Daniel O’ Connell’s Emancipation bill of 1829.

Quote of the Day (Robert Southey, on a Costly British ‘Famous Victory’)

“ ‘They say it was a shocking sight  

  After the field was won,    

For many thousand bodies here  

  Lay rotting in the sun;  

But things like that, you know, must be  

  After a famous victory.’”— Robert Southey, “After Blenheim” (1798)  

Robert Southey, who wrote his best work as an early member of the Romantic movement, only to fall off sharply before being named poet laureate nearly two decades later, was born on this date in 1774 in Bristol, England. The eldest son of a draper who fell into poverty and death, he developed his manners at the home of his wealthy aunt. His college friend, fellow Romantic poet, and future brother-in-law Samuel Taylor Coleridge, not long after meeting him, remarked that he was “truly a man of perpendicular Virtue – a downright upright Republican!” (That was "republican" in terms of the style of government, not the political party, he preferred.)

Like friend (and poet laureate successor) William Wordworth, he was a kind of English forerunner of the neo-cons—a youthful radical who, appalled by the excesses of the revolution he had hailed, turned reactionary with age.

“After Blenheim” (sometimes called “The Battle of Blenheim”) was written before his swing to the right. Its stature as one of the greatest antiwar poems in the English language is strengthened by the fact that it was created over a century before WWI made such sentiments widespread. 

I have written a post about Blenheim (or, rather, its victor, Sir John Churchill—otherwise known as the Duke of Marlborough) before. I followed the lead of most histories by analyzing Blenheim’s importance (i.e., checking the continental designs of King Louis XIV of France), but far less about its cost. So, picking up on the poet’s thread about the “thousand bodies” everywhere on the battlefield: Total Allied losses (i.e., troops under the command of the duke and his co-commander, Prince Eugene of Savoy) were 12,000 killed and wounded, with 40,000 killed, wounded and captured for their French and Bavarian opponents.

Like Mark Antony’s “Brutus is an honorable man” in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the powerful connecting element of “After Blenheim” is a refrain that gains in searing irony with each repetition: in this case, the notion that, for all its carnage, Blenheim was a “famous victory.” Many more such victories, the poet suggests, and nobody will be left to appreciate the win.

You can be sure that “After Blenheim” was hardly the favorite poem of the Duke of Marlborough’s descendant and (not so coincidentally) worshipful biographer, Sir Winston Churchill. And you can rest assured that, in the three decades when Southey served as poet laureate, he never wrote anything so critical about his country again.

(The image accompanying this post shows part of the Battle of Blenheim tapestry at Blenheim Palace—the home built by the Duke of Marlborough--by Judocus de Vos.)

Quote of the Day (Edward Creasy, on the Duke of Marlborough, The “First Churchill”)

“There are few successful commanders on whom Fame has shone so unwillingly as upon John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, - victor of Blenheim, Ramilies, Oudenarde, and Malplaquet, - captor of Liege, Bonn, Limburg, Landau, Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, Oudenarde, Ostend, Menin, Dendermonde, Ath, Lille, Tourney, Mons, Douay, Aire, Bethune, and Bouchain; who never fought a battle that he did not win, and never besieged a place that he did not take. Marlborough's own private character is the cause of this.”—Sir Edward Creasy, The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: From Marathon to Waterloo (1851)

On this date in 1704, the Battle of Blenheim, a hinge moment in European history, was fought. The army of “The Sun King,” Louis XIV of France, never previously defeated, was checked on a battlefield in Bavaria by two of the great military commanders in history: Sir John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, and his redoubtable ally, Prince Eugene of Savoy, leading Europe’s Grand Alliance against France and Bavaria. For the first time since King Henry V at Agincourt, an English general had won a great victory on the Continent.

I’ve always thought it was a stroke of genius for Masterpiece Theatre to launch with a show titled The First Churchills. Nothing could be more calculated to win the fascination of Americans than a reference to one of the architects of “the special relationship” between Great Britain and the U.S.—in William Manchester’s wonderfully evocative phrase, the “last lion” who stood in the way of Nazi domination of the world.

“All men are worms, but I do believe that I am a glow-worm,” Sir Winston Churchill wrote. He was, indubitably, a bookworm, which makes me all the more convinced that he must have come across the assessment of his illustrious ancestor, Sir John Churchill, in Sir Edward Creasy’s 19th-century bestseller, The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World.

Had I been Winston, researching my biography of my illustrious ancestor, I would have been practically standing on my feet and applauding through most of that long, glorious first sentence I quoted. Indeed, that was the feeling one would have come away with after sitting through all 12 episodes of The First Churchills, based on the Prime Minister's five-volume biography of the general.

(More than a decade after this filial labor of love, written during his years out of power in the 1930s, Churchill must still have been harking back to this book: one volume of his World War II memoirs is titled The Grand Alliance, perhaps a not-so-unconscious evocation of the multinational force led by his ancestor that, like the one he formed part of, helped to defeat Europe’s greatest Continental power.)

The costume drama was an Anglophile’s delight—12 episodes about a stalwart commander who stuck to his proverbial guns in the turbulent royal court of his time, aided only by his loving but sharp-tongued wife Sarah (the phrase I recall about her is a “torpedo in petticoats”).

I don’t think the writers of the show read Creasy on Marlborough, for if they had they might have painted a portrait of the hero with far more warts. True, he consistently demonstrated absolute mastery in the field—the “cool head” hailed by Voltaire—but these must be weighed against a “private character” with faults that were, in Creasy’s words, “of a peculiarly base and mean order,” including:

* Treachery and ingratitude—Creasy takes Marlborough to task for turning on the man who first noticed and promoted him, King James II. Historian A.L. Rowse and the creators of The First Churchills absolved the general for betraying his patron, claiming that he saw the Catholic James as a threat to English liberty. Maybe—but why, then, did Marlborough assure James of his undying loyalty only a few days before committing to William and Mary?

* Disloyalty—As William of Orange discovered, Marlborough couldn’t be bought, only rented. After the so-called Glorious Revolution, the new monarch learned that Marlborough was still secretly corresponding with James II, wanting to stay on his good side just in case the exiled king came to power again. William didn’t dismiss Marlborough then and there because he figured he could still make use of the talented soldier.

* Treason—Marlborough and his ally under William and Anne, Sidney Godolphin, seem to have been playing footsie with England’s rivals. In 1694, a British attack on the French port of Brest was foiled after Louis received intelligence of the planned landing. The English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay claimed that Marlborough leaked the military secret to James. Though recent historians have divided over the issue, Creasy appears to have accepted Macaulay’s version of events.

And that isn’t the end of it. For a Victorian, Creasy was pretty blunt on the role of sex in Marlborough’s ascent. Not only was the foundation of the family’s wealth built on the fact that his sister Arabella was mistress of James, but Marlborough himself as a young man was a “boy toy”—or, in Creasy’s wonderful phrase, “the paid lover of one of the fair and frail favorites of Charles II.”

The latter uttered what I think remains the definitive judgment on the future hero. Catching the handsome young soldier in bed with royal mistress Barbara Villiers, the Countess of Castlemaine, Charles barked (rather good-naturedly, I think, under the circumstances): “Go, you are a rascal, but I forgive you because you do it to get a living.”