On his deathbed, Charles converted to Catholicism and did not forget his girlfriends, telling James not to ‘let poor Nelly starve’. James became king. ‘He would have been a very good king,’ said Sarah Churchill, a courtier of the queen, ‘if it hadn’t been for Popery.’ James signed a Declaration of Indulgence for non-Protestants, using it to liberate Catholics while he built up his army and arrested dissidents. Opposition seethed around the dashing but callow Monmouth, who fled to Holland. When Monmouth invaded England with just eighty-five followers, William warned James, whose general, John Churchill, easily crushed the invasion. James then beheaded his nephew; yet his heir remained his Protestant daughter Mary, married to William of Orange.
Charming the Dutch but unable to warm up William, the genial, pretty Mary suffered miscarriages and the death of a baby, the result of their consanguineous marriage. James tried to divide husband and wife by warning his daughter about William’s affair with her courtier Elizabeth Villiers. Mary ambushed William coming out of his mistress’s bedroom, but he promised to give her up – hardly a concession since the stadtholder preferred the companionship of a handsome officer, Hans Bentinck, who had nursed him when he was ill with smallpox.
Seven dissident English grandees approached William just as Queen Maria took the waters at Bath and fell pregnant. In June 1688, to Catholic jubilation and Protestant disbelief, the queen, attended by Hugh Chamberlen with his secret forceps,* gave birth to a son, a Catholic heir. James had not allowed his daughter Anne or his Protestant courtiers to attend, sparking a birther conspiracy theory that a changeling had been smuggled into St James’s Palace. Mary turned decisively against her father to ‘save Church and State’, and the seven noblemen signed a coded letter to William inviting him to invade. William mustered his fleet.
James, foolish as ever, turned down Louis’s offer of military support. As Mary waited in The Hague, William sailed with 250 ships and 35,000 men, including ‘200 Blacks brought from the Plantations of the Netherlands in America’, and landed at Torbay, Devon.
William advanced slowly. Lord Churchill, James’s commander, defected (later rewarded by William with the earldom of Marlborough), followed by Princess Anne, who was intimate friends with Churchill’s wife Sarah. James, heartbroken that both his daughters had betrayed him, panicked, throwing the Great Seal into the sea so that his enemies could not call Parliament. But he was captured by fishermen who roughly searched his underwear. William warned his uncle James that he could not guarantee the king’s safety. Pepys, navy secretary, arranged the ship that conveyed Queen Maria and her son to Europe.* As William entered London, he let James escape to France where he set up a rival court, his followers known as Jacobites. While the
In return, William III approved a Bill of Rights that solved the lethal conundrum that had paralysed England during fifty years of state failure. It agreed a balance of power between a powerful Parliament, the noble oligarchs and the monarch, who kept control of the executive.*
No one knew how this new arrangement would work. Kings remained the chief rulers of England for another century, able to appoint governments and wage war – and might have remained so if more of them had been masterful warlords like William.
The Dutchman delivered the stability, the rule of law and the creative energy needed to forge a world power. He oversaw the creation of the Bank of England and, realizing that the English coinage was dangerously debased, launched the Great Recoinage, which was managed by an English luminary, Isaac Newton. Now fifty-three, Newton had been given a sinecure wardenship of the Royal Mint, but its management was so incompetent that he agreed to run the vital recoinage himself as master, a highly lucrative position, earning a percentage of every coin produced.
