On Guy Fawkes Day, 1688, Europe invaded England, in the shape of 20,000 Dutch, German, Danish, French, Swedish, Finnish (in bearskins), Polish, Greek and Swiss troops. They came in 500 ships – a fleet more than twice the size of the Spanish Armada that had failed to invade a century before, to the day. It would be the biggest seaborne invasion in European waters until D-Day. Landing at Torbay, the Dutch were shocked by the filthiness of the country but were amused to be welcomed with apples and cider and shouts of ‘God Bless You!’ They marched slowly but inexorably on London in what was to be the most transforming invasion – part conquest, part liberation – since 1066. The invaders’ aim was to pull the Three Kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland into a European struggle to stem the spreading dominance of France. The improbable outcome of this struggle was to transform the weak, turbulent islands from ‘European laughing stock to global great power’.1 ‘Britain’ came into being, not only through the creation of the United Kingdom of Scotland and England in 1707, but by making the very concept of ‘Britishness’ meaningful to its inhabitants. The main cause and consequence of this transformation has been called ‘the second hundred years war’ – a Franco-British duel through six great wars between 1689 and 1815, which scorched the whole planet and left the two main participants utterly changed. France would find its dominance of Europe unexpectedly challenged and undermined, its role outside the Continent stubbornly countered and then destroyed, and eventually its state and society revolutionized. Little England was no more: the next three centuries would see unremitting efforts to ‘punch above its weight’, and make its will prevail in Europe and the wider world.
CHAPTER 1
England is worth conquering, and whenever there is a probability of getting it, it will surely be attempted. When the people are . . . weak, cowardly, without discipline, poor, discontented, they are easily subdued; and this is our condition . . . nothing can be added to render them an easy prey to a foreigner unless a sense of their misery and hate of them that cause it make them look on any invader as a deliverer.
ALGERNON SIDNEY, political writer1
A Nation which hath stood its ground, and kept its privileges and freedoms for Hundreds of Years, is in less than a Third of a Century quite undone; hath lavishly spent above 160 Millions in that time, made Hecatombs of British Lives, stockjobb’d (or cannonaded) away its Trade, perverted and then jested away its Honour, Law, and Justice.
Political pamphlet, 17192
In a Europe devastated by more than a century of ferocious religious conflicts, culminating in a Thirty Years War (1618–48) that had killed millions, France, emerging from its own internal conflicts in the 1650s, became the pre-eminent power by reason of its population, armed force, wealth and cultural influence. The embodiment of that power was Louis XIV, who acceded to the throne at the age of four in 1643 and reigned for seventy-two years. Of the fifty-four years when he effectively ruled, thirty-three were years of war. His life was dedicated to ensuring that the king dominated France – culturally and politically – and that France dominated Europe. This was a time when war and predation were normal conditions. The métier de roi – the king’s job – was to direct these conflicts, burnishing his gloire and that of his dynasty and realm, whose prosperity and security were the prizes of his strength and cunning.
Louis XIV dominated Europe less by force of intellect or character – he was hard-working rather than brilliant – than by the length of his reign and his tireless devotion to promoting an image of majesty. Artists, writers, architects, musicians and priests were enrolled, to create (as Louis himself wrote) ‘an extremely useful impression of magnificence, power, wealth and grandeur’. Versailles, practically complete by 1688, provided a setting that impressed all Europe. It has long been believed – and Louis’s own comments lend support – that his motivation was a reckless thirst for glory. This is not wholly false, but la gloire must be understood to include overtones of ‘renown’, even ‘duty’. Unlike some British historians, French historians argue that France under Louis was following no grand strategy, whether to seize the Spanish Empire or to gain territory up to what would later be claimed as France’s ‘natural frontiers’ – the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Rhine. He and his entourage certainly believed in his right as Europe’s greatest monarch to aggrandize his kingdom and dynasty, and to equal or surpass the great men of history – he was hailed as an ‘Augustus’, a ‘new Constantine’ or ‘new Charlemagne’. These vague and potentially unlimited ambitions, manifested in imperious words and belligerent acts, rallied most of Europe against him. That Britain was dragged into this maelstrom was Louis’s part in British history. That, against the odds, Britain came to lead the coalition against Louis was its part in his. His personal support of the Stuarts – part chivalry, part piety, part Realpolitik – caused durable bitterness within and between the Three Kingdoms, and made conflict with France inevitable.
THE SUN KING
Louis XIV by H. Rigaud.
It is up to you to become the most glorious king there has ever been.
CARDINAL MAZARIN to Louis XIV3
Louis XIV was the curse and pest of Europe . . . this high-heeled, periwigged dandy, strutting amid the bows and scrapes of mistresses and confessors . . . disturbed and harried mankind during more than fifty years of arrogant pomp.
WINSTON CHURCHILL4
By the early 1680s Louis and his ministers could contemplate Europe with satisfaction.
France . . . is naturally fortified against foreign attack, being almost surrounded by seas, by high mountains, or by very deep rivers. She produces an abundance of the things needed for man . . . She has an unusual perfection as a state . . . and her inhabitants are almost infinite in number, robust and generous, born for war, frank and disciplined.5
The largest population in Europe – 20 million and rising – made France a giant among pygmies. Spain had only 8.5 million; the countless city states, bishoprics and principalities of Germany totalled 12 million, but with a mosaic of vulnerable micro-states on France’s eastern marchlands; the United Provinces of the Netherlands, nearly 2 million; the Scandinavian kingdoms, between 2 and 3 million combined. Well down the pecking order came the ‘Three Kingdoms’, with a total population of 8 million and falling, and reckoned by the French foreign ministry to constitute Europe’s sixth-ranking power, their government revenues one-fifth those of France, their armies a quarter the size of Sweden’s.
France’s natural strength was consolidated by hard labour. In the 1670s the great minister Colbert had built a larger navy than the Dutch or the English. The army, over 200,000 strong, dwarfed all others. The engineer Marshal Vauban built a vast ring of fortresses, which made the kingdom a protected space and, as can be seen from the many still standing, the most fortified country in the world, able to fight nearly all its wars on foreign soil. Nature and labour were seemingly confirmed by Divine Providence, which favoured France in war and diplomacy, bountifully creating a power vacuum into which Louis had stepped. The old Habsburg enemy, which had once ruled both the Spanish and the Holy Roman empires, was now divided between Madrid and Vienna. Spain, though its colonies were temptingly rich, was in decline. The Empire, fragmented and ravaged by war and religious conflict, was assailed by the Turks, who in 1683 were besieging Vienna. Louis seemed to represent the future: absolute royal authority, professional administration, and religious uniformity. French officials and pamphleteers became accustomed to describing any state that opposed them as ‘arrogant’ and ‘pretentious’, so rightful did their superiority appear.
The Three Kingdoms, after the restoration of their Euro-Scottish dynasty the Stuarts in 1660, had gravitated towards the Bourbon sun. They had not fully emerged from their own share of the religious and military cataclysm that had sundered Europe, and which had cost Charles I his head and 250,000 of his English and Scottish subjects, and an incalculable number of Irish, their lives.6 The return of Charles II from French exile had been popular at first, after the Puritan republic of ‘Fanatics’ (as their enemies commonly called them). Charles and his brother James, Duke of York, worked to consolidate their restoration by moving towards a modern absolutist regime, bypassing the archaic nuisance of Parliament. This needed French support, including grants of money, sometimes delivered personally to Charles by his valet.7 The French were concerned by England’s budding commercial and naval success, and wanted an ally on the British thrones. Charles’s senior mistress, Louise de Penancouët de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, was a useful agent of influence: the French expatriate writer Saint-Evremond suggested that ‘the silk ribbon round her waist holds France and England together’. Charles did not need such pleasurable inducements: his ‘mental map of Europe had its centre not in England at all, but France’.8 He helped to start Louis’s aggressive war in 1672 against the Dutch, England’s national enemy. But this war, far from cementing an Anglo-French alliance, seemed sudden proof that the real threat came from France. The French army was alarmingly successful, while their navy was believed to have deliberately shirked battle so that the British and Dutch would destroy each other. French sailors reportedly ‘bragged that after they had Holland, they hoped to have England’.9 English opinion felt they had been duped into serving Louis’s aggressive designs, with the connivance of a francophile court. As one MP put it, ‘Our main business is to keep France out of England.’10 Charles assured Louis that he was ‘standing up for the interests of France against his whole kingdom’.11 Astonishingly, Louis revealed the details of his dealings with Charles to the parliamentary opposition – which he was also bribing. His strategy (he acted similarly in Holland) was to stir the embers of the Civil War in order to keep the Three Kingdoms weak.
Many at home and abroad assumed that the Stuarts’ power depended on the support of Versailles. Ironically, given his eventual fate, James II of England and VII of Scotland (who succeeded Charles in 1685) moved somewhat out of the French orbit, realizing that Louis would sacrifice the Stuarts if it suited him. Although he appointed a French crony, the Marquis de Blanquefort, alias Earl of Feversham (whose brother commanded the French army in 1688) to command his new mercenary army, raised for internal use, and sent an Irish Catholic with a French title, the Marquis d’Albeville, to represent him at the crucial post of The Hague, he did not intend to become wholly dependent, like his brother, on France. His strategy was to avoid expensive European wars while using sea power to counter the French in North America, consolidating his possessions there into a vast private domain – New York already belonged to him – and using the income to become independent of his parliaments. Those of Scotland and Ireland could be ignored, and that of England subverted.
Religion was crucial. The struggle that had convulsed Europe since Luther and Calvin was tilting towards a victory for Catholicism, and hence, so many thought, for monarchs. Louis XIV considered Catholicism the pillar of his power, as well as the source of divine favour. Pressure on France’s remaining 1.5 million Protestants mounted during the 1680s, ending the relative tolerance that had previously caused English religious Dissenters (Presbyterians, Quakers, Baptists) to praise France in contrast to the persecution they suffered in England. Soldiers were billeted on Protestant families to make life unbearable – the infamous dragonnades. In October 1685, Louis, the ‘New Constantine’, proclaimed victory over the dwindling ‘Huguenots’ (the insulting nickname for Protestants) by revoking the 1598 Edict of Nantes, which had supposedly recognized their religious, civil and political rights in perpetuity. He declared that the ‘so-called reformed religion’ no longer existed in his realm. Hence, there could be no public or private Protestant worship, and no marriage or inheritance. All schools and churches were to be demolished. This was the most popular act of his reign, producing ‘explosions of joy’ among his Catholic subjects, including the court writers La Bruyère, La Fontaine and Racine. Crowds demolished Protestant churches and desecrated cemeteries. There was some armed resistance. The minister of war Louvois ordered: ‘take very few prisoners . . . spare the women no more than the men’.12 Protestant refugees flooded into Holland and Britain, bringing harrowing stories of persecution. At the behest of the French ambassador, one of the most influential published accounts was seized and burnt by the English government.
This trauma across the Channel darkened the first months of James’s reign, when in February 1685 he became the Catholic king of Europe’s largest remaining Protestant realm. Like several other circumspect northern princes, Charles and James had moved towards Catholicism, partly for personal and family reasons – the influence of their French mother – but also because they shared the universal view that Catholicism buttressed royal authority. Charles’s position was mainly political, but James was genuinely Catholic. In either case, their combination of religious and secular power was stigmatized by their opponents as ‘Popery’. It was all the more alarming in the light of the persecution in France, which James approved of. The choice, as one peer put it, was ‘whether I will be a slave and a Papist, or a Protestant and a free man’.13 Rebellions against James broke out in Scotland and in the West Country, where Charles I’s illegitimate Protestant son the Duke of Monmouth proclaimed himself king. The risings were quickly and harshly suppressed. A woman was burned at the stake for harbouring a traitor, and some 300 men were hanged, drawn and quartered: the execution grounds were awash with body fluids. James’s aim was to legalize Catholicism in his kingdoms. He tried to both charm and bully Anglicans into an alliance with Catholics against the turbulent Dissenters, even meeting every MP individually. When this failed, he switched desperately to an opposite strategy: to create an alliance of Catholics and Dissenters against the Anglican establishment by offering toleration to both. He dared not end the exclusion of Catholics from Parliament, but instead took steps to pack the House of Commons with Dissenters. He sacked two-thirds of Anglican JPs and Lords Lieutenant and appointed a disproportionate number of Dissenters and Catholics to positions of military and political power: Catholics included a Secretary of State, the acting Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Lord Chancellor, and the commander of the fleet. A Jesuit, Father Edward Petre, joined the Privy Council. James intended Catholicism to attain equality with the ‘established’ church, with its own bishops, parishes, tithes and colleges. This meant displacing Anglicans: for example Magdalen College, Oxford, was ordered to elect a Catholic president, and when its Fellows refused they were all expelled.14 Mass was publicly celebrated at the Chapel Royal, and a papal nuncio received. Some hoped and many feared that in the fullness of time the whole country would, like France, be brought back to Catholicism. James’s strategy became suddenly more credible when in June 1688 a male heir, who took precedence over his Anglican half-sisters Mary and Anne, was born and baptized a Catholic. The rumour spread that the baby was not genuine, but had been smuggled into the queen’s bedroom in a warming-pan.
It is often assumed that James’s ambitions were limited, that popular fears of ‘Popery’ were bigotry and hysteria, or that even if he was seeking absolute power, he could never have succeeded. But some authoritative recent accounts conclude on the contrary that his bold aims were ‘not only perfectly feasible but close to being attained’.15 That seemed the way Europe was going. Denmark and Sweden had been the latest to lose their representative assemblies. James’s policies threatened Britain with another bout of religious mayhem and civil war. It would be doubly threatening if he had French support: ‘Our jealousies of Popery, or an arbitrary government, are not from a few inconsiderable Papists here, but from the ill example we have from France.’16
That Louis XIV was on the march as the self-appointed champion of Catholicism alarmed his Protestant neighbours. It also worried Catholic princes, including the most Catholic of all, Pope Innocent XI, whose ecclesiastical authority within France had been flouted. He was so angry at Louis’s cooperation with the Turks that he excommunicated him in 1687. Louis was accused by Protestant and Catholic opponents alike of aiming at ‘universal monarchy’. This implied hegemonic religious and secular authority, made credible by French hints of Louis’s ambition to be elected Holy Roman Emperor. British Protestants were happy to ally with Catholic states that opposed him. Louis’s defenders, including some recent historians, have dismissed these fears as paranoia. His ambitions, they argue, were essentially defensive, asserting his dynastic rights and rounding out France’s frontiers.
This ‘defensive’ perspective, of course, depended on which side of Vauban’s grim new ramparts you were standing. The French policy of using dubious legal claims backed by armed force to secure every strategic ‘gate’ to their territory – including Lille (detached from the Spanish Netherlands), Metz, Strasbourg (formerly a free city of the Empire) and Franche-Comté – meant that their neighbours were increasingly vulnerable: ‘gates’ allow access both ways. In recent years, Savoy, the Spanish Netherlands, several German states, Tripoli, Algiers and Genoa had all suffered French aggression. It was no secret that France coveted the Spanish Netherlands (most of modern Belgium), Lorraine and the Rhine frontier. In petty matters the French aimed not merely to dominate but to humiliate. The nominally independent Duke of Savoy was forbidden to go on holiday to Venice, and the Duke of Mecklenburg, another independent ruler, was imprisoned when visiting Paris as a tourist. Among the peace conditions offered to Holland in 1672 – and rejected – was the demand that every year a Dutch delegation should bring Louis a gold medal humbly thanking him for giving them peace. The French government behaved as a law unto itself, using (as a modern French specialist puts it) ‘sometimes threats to intimidate a neighbour, sometimes violence to impose French will’.17 It was impossible to say where its future ambitions might lead.
One of the minor victims of Louis’s imperiousness had been the independent principality of Orange, a small Protestant enclave in Languedoc, which in 1682 was occupied, with the usual accompaniment of looting and rape, by Louis’s dragoons, experts in low-intensity anti-Protestant operations. Protestants in England were alarmed and outraged. So was the young prince of the little state, Guillaume d’Orange, as Louis had intended. When his envoy went to complain, Louis’s minister threatened him with the Bastille. The idea – and it proved a very bad one – was to punish Guillaume for being a nuisance to France in his other persona, Willem III van Oranje. His family, Counts of Nassau in Germany and Princes of Orange in France, derived their prominence from the strange office ofstadhouder (or stadholder) of the Dutch Republic, partly elective and partly hereditary, and always resented by the republican oligarchy. A stadholder was appointed in emergencies by the provinces of the Republic to direct the government and command the armed forces. The house of Orange–Nassau had provided stadholders for several provinces since Willem I (‘the Silent’) had led the struggle against Spain that had created the Republic in 1579. There had been no stadholder from 1650 until 1672. In that year, Louis, abetted by Charles II, had invaded the Republic, and the young Willem III had been appointed stadholder for life to command the resistance. The French had only been halted when the Dutch flooded the approaches to Amsterdam. Bourgeois trading interests, especially in Amsterdam, had subsequently made a deal with France, one of their largest markets. Charles II had married his brother James’s eldest daughter Mary to Willem (a grandson of Charles I) in 1677 in the hope of influencing him out of another conflict with France; but the marriage worked the opposite way too – it gave Willem a legitimate voice in the foreign policy of Britain.
The second hundred years’ war: phase 1, 1688–1745
By 1687 Louis would no longer demean himself by conciliating Dutch ‘cheese mongers’ and ‘herring fishers’, especially as buying their produce was draining French gold. Trading agreements were disdainfully cancelled, threatening the Dutch, not least their pro-French mercantile oligarchy, with ruin. When they protested, 100 Dutch ships were seized in French ports. The very existence of the Republic was again threatened. It was clear that a major war was looming between France and Holland, which would probably involve much of Europe. The Dutch response was desperate, risky and decisive: the biggest enterprise in their history.18 They had to stop Britain and its navy – Europe’s largest by the 1680s – from again joining with the French, and if possible to bring that navy, and whatever other resources of men and money could be raised, to their side. Their fears seemed confirmed when James signed a naval agreement with France in April 1688. Willem arranged to be invited by domestic opponents of James to intervene by force in English politics. The habitually quarrelsome Dutch provinces and cities agreed to provide money, men and ships for Willem to invade England and force James to ‘be useful to [his] friends and allies, and especially to this state’.19 Louis’s Catholic enemies, the Pope, the Emperor and the king of Spain, tacitly approved, on condition that British Catholics were not harmed. The Dutch blandly maintained that they were only planning a punitive raid against the Barbary pirates, but the French ambassador solemnly warned on 9 September 1688 that any act against James II would be regarded by Louis as ‘an act of war against his own crown’.20 This made things worse, as it finally convinced the Dutch that there really was a Franco-British alliance.
France’s failure to take action to prevent the Dutch invasion of England is of fateful historic importance, and yet it remains mysterious. One reason is James’s estrangement from Louis. He might have had French military and naval help had he been willing to accept satellite status. But he was reluctant to depend on Louis. One might detect unease in his remark to the French ambassador that ‘he was so confident of [Louis’s] friendship that he would never be jealous of his greatness and he would like him to conquer all of Germany’.21 Another reason is that Louis, at this crucial moment, had his attention drawn to seemingly more important events far away to the south-east, which were permanently redrawing the map of Europe. The Holy Roman Empire, his enemy, had begun to win its long war with the Turks. As recently as 1683 (to the ill-concealed delight of the French) the Ottoman army had been besieging Vienna: this raised the thrilling possibility that the Habsburgs would lose the Imperial crown, enabling Louis to become the ‘protector’ of central Europe, and perhaps Emperor too. But the Turks were thrown back, and in 1686 the Imperial army took Buda, ‘the bastion of Islam’. Protestants and Catholics alike celebrated throughout Germany – but not in France. The Venetians attacked the Turkish province of Greece (incidentally wrecking the Parthenon by blowing up the gunpowder stored inside); and Christian armies fanned out into the Balkans. In Istanbul, the disgraced sultan was deposed. The huge Turkish fortress Belgrade fell on 6 September 1688, and the Turks forever ceased to be a threat. This stunning victory meant that Imperial forces would be free to move west, to defend the spongy statelets along the Rhine. The French, determined to forestall them, decided to strengthen their military position in Germany and encourage the Turks to keep fighting. One of Louis’s marshals explained that
The Court was quite undecided which gambit would be best to take; to support James about to be attacked or to prevent the Turks from making peace . . . which the next moment would bring down on us all the forces of the Emperor . . . M. de Louvois [the powerful minister of war] decided upon the second gambit . . . nothing was more important for us than to make a diversion to keep the Turks in the war.22
So the French fleet concentrated in the Mediterranean, and troops were sent, not to attack the Dutch and defend the Stuarts, but to mount ‘a great offensive of intimidation’ in the Rhineland.23 On Louis’s direct orders, troops began systematic devastation of the Palatinate as a warning to potential enemies and to create a scorched-earth barrier against attack. Heidelberg, Mannheim, Spire, Worms and other towns were sacked and burnt. The result persuaded the Turks to keep fighting, but created outrage in Germany and a general rallying of Europe against France.
Both Louis and James and their advisers were fatally slow to appreciate the seriousness of the threat Willem posed. They assumed the English navy could stave off any invasion.24 The French calculated that even if there were an invasion of England (their ambassador did not think one imminent) it would cause violence and chaos that would long keep Willem occupied. It is even possible that Louis was willing to tempt the Dutch into this dangerous trap, simultaneously punishing James for his hostile actions in North America. James did eventually ask the French to bring a fleet to Brest in case of emergency, but they did nothing effective to help him. According to a French agent of the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, the French, having sent their ships to the Mediterranean and troops to the Rhine, ‘were not in a position to give much help’, but they told London that they were refusing it until James toed the line and signed an alliance with France.25 So James had the worst of all worlds: hints of future French support spurred his Dutch and English enemies into action, but the support never materialized.
Louis and James were right that an invasion of England was highly dangerous. Willem was taking a ‘stupendous gamble’, the very rumour of which provoked a run on the Amsterdam stock exchange. The fleet, seen off by cheering, praying and weeping crowds, was vulnerable to naval attack and stormy winter weather, and it sailed ‘in defiance of all common sense and professional experience’.26 At its second attempt to beat the weather, it was blown down the Channel to Torbay by winds that kept James’s navy stuck in the Thames estuary. The landing was followed by several days of nervous fence-sitting by the English nobility, and no response at all in Scotland. But soon there were armed meetings and declarations in the Midlands and North. Nottingham declared that ‘We count it rebellion to resist a king that governs by law, but . . . to resist [a tyrant], we justly esteem it no rebellion, but a necessary defence.’27 Riots against James and Popery broke out, most seriously in London, where Catholic embassies and their chapels were attacked. Disturbances persisted for weeks. It was rumoured that Irish Catholic troops had burned down Birmingham and were massacring Protestants. This disorder radicalized the situation. What had begun as a military pronunciamento turned into a ‘Glorious Revolution’ in December when James, after a nervous breakdown that caused his army commanders to abandon him, sent his wife and son to France, threw the Great Seal of the kingdom into the Thames, and – firmly escorted to the coast by the Dutch – sought asylum from Louis XIV.
The Sun King’s enemies breathed a sigh of relief. An Italian Protestant wrote, ‘the Dutch by this enterprise have greatly contributed to the public welfare and liberty of Europe’.28 Willem marched his troops into London, tactfully placing English and Scottish regiments of the Dutch army in the van. He threatened to return to Holland unless given the crown, and the so-called Convention Parliament invited him to ascend the ‘vacant’ throne as William III, with his wife as Queen Mary II. In return, he accepted a Declaration of Rights. This, which became the Bill of Rights, restricted the powers of the Crown and entrenched those of Parliament. William believed that he had a providential mission to save European freedom from French ‘universal monarchy’, and he had invaded in order to recruit Britain into the struggle. For this overriding purpose, he wanted the greatest unity he could achieve in his new kingdom. Otherwise, the French expectation that he would be engulfed by another British civil war might come true. If native cooperation meant accepting the permanent involvement of Parliament in political life, so be it. He would have to manage as he did with the States General in Holland. The crucial question was financing the war. For a start, William presented a bill for£663,752 for his invasion. The English Parliament would only agree – unlike under previous monarchs – to vote short-term financial and military powers to the Crown. The consent of the House of Commons was now required every year, and so parliament became ‘an institution, rather than an event’.29 Warfare, not ideology, transformed English politics.
WILLIAM OF ORANGE
William III.
I see that this people is not created for me, neither am I for this people.30
William III was to prove one of the ablest, most important, least loved and most forgotten of British monarchs. He undoubtedly changed British history: perhaps that is the reason – the British cherish those who symbolize continuity. He was half Stuart through his mother, and English was his rusty maternal tongue. His succession to the British crowns had always been a possibility. Physically sickly, he was given a careful education and brought up to expect high responsibilities early. In 1672, in his early twenties, he was commanding Dutch forces against Louis XIV’s invasion. Despite long experience, the ‘stadholder-king’ never became an outstanding soldier, but tireless determination made him a formidable politician and diplomat. His unpopularity came from his dour and taciturn nature and his understandable preference for competent and trustworthy Dutch troops and advisers. But its main cause was the unprecedented ordeal of war he imposed on Britain.
Many who had welcomed William’s intervention found his accession to the throne deeply troubling, for it flouted the principle of hereditary monarchy by divine right. Charles I had been beheaded, but his son had succeeded him; whereas James and his son were still alive, and had simply been replaced. Did this mean that Parliament, or the people, or armed force, could impose and dismiss monarchs as they wished? Did it mean the end of legitimate government founded on secure legal principle and divine sanction? What about Scotland and Ireland, which were separate kingdoms? Might it not open the gates to endless conflict, reigniting the nightmarish civil wars of the 1640s and 50s? So within weeks the consensus against James gave way to a spectrum of quarrelling factions, from Divine-Right ‘Tory’ loyalists to disappointed radicals. Even a century later the meaning of 1688, given new point by the French revolution, could still cause profound disagreement. The pro-Stuart ‘Jacobite’ opposition to the new monarch and his successors would persist for half a century in England, for longer in Scotland, and longer still in Ireland. Much blood would be shed; and the ‘rage of party’ would last and leave scars that could still ooze three centuries later.
Yet 1688, only vaguely remembered by the British people, was the beginning of a new era. Never again would a monarch rule as the Stuarts had tried to do. Parliament, and the principles of representation and consent, became permanent foundations of the State; indeed, Parliament acquired an effective sovereignty that in theory it still possesses. Censorship laws lapsed. Greater religious toleration was supported by William in the hope of increasing unity for the coming war and soothing his Catholic allies Spain and the Empire. The result, in the words of the philosopher-politician John Locke (an opponent of the Stuarts who now returned from exile), was that toleration ‘has now at last been established by law in our country. Not perhaps so wide in scope as might be wished for . . . Still, it is something to have progressed so far.’31 The danger of an absolutist state based on religious uniformity, whether Anglican, Puritan or Catholic, was no more.32 This was a milestone in the evolution of English political and cultural identity, with its emphasis on moderation, compromise and the middle way, and its increasing conviction that Britain – more precisely England – was different.
Yet the domestic story of 1688 is not the whole story; not even the main story. In Craig Rose’s words, ‘the most revolutionary aspect of the revolution [was] a radical reorientation of England’s foreign policy’.33 The political settlement and the State structures that emerged in Great Britain – and, with tragically different results, in Ireland – were not a consequence of domestic choices alone. William was ready to make concessions in Ireland as in Scotland and England. Catholic Ireland could possibly have reached ‘an accommodation with William III [and] some form of political and religious independence’.34 In that case, the history of the islands would have been very different. But the French belatedly decided to support a Stuart counter-revolution with ships, men and money, igniting the British civil war they had expected and hoped for. In March 1689, a French naval squadron, money, arms and 8,000 troops arrived at Kinsale and Bantry Bay. Louis sent James with them, rather than let him wallow in self-pity at the palace-in-exile at Saint-Germain. The English and Scottish parliaments agreed to William’s demand to declare war on France. The ‘second hundred years war’ began.
Ireland was James’s springboard to reconquer Great Britain, for his pro-Catholic policy in the 1680s had won support among its Catholic nobility, and he was cheered in Dublin. But the battle was not to be simply an Irish or even a British one: Ireland became as much a European battleground as Flanders or the Rhineland, and the future of the Three Kingdoms depended on external forces. James knew his best hope was to gather Irish troops and cross over to Scotland, where he also had formidable support. The Dutch invasion had ignited a revolution in Scotland more extreme and violent than in England. The Edinburgh parliament declared squarely that James had ‘forfaulted’ the crown – no mealy-mouthed talk of ‘vacancy’ – and the Lowland Presbyterians embarked on an unceremonious and often violent demolition of the Episcopalian church, ejecting clergy and bishops and purging the universities. William had little choice but to accept Presbyterianism (which was anyway close to his own Calvinist views) as the new Church of Scotland. But this mainly urban, Lowland initiative alienated the Episcopalian or Catholic loyalties of the patriarchal, largely feudal, society of the Highlands, and the Episcopalian clergy and lairds turned to King James as the only way of protecting themselves against Presbyterian extremism. A tiny army of Jacobite highlanders under Viscount Dundee – a hard-bitten mercenary, later romanticized as ‘Bonnie Dundee’ – won a brief pyrrhic victory over a Scots–Dutch force at Killiecrankie in July 1689, at which Dundee was killed. This inspired the last major Latin epic written in Scotland.35 Further advance was stopped short in August by a Presbyterian force at Dunkeld. The clans were given an ultimatum to submit to William’s authority: one clan that missed the deadline was the Macdonalds of Glencoe, so thirty-eight of them were massacred by Campbell soldiers in February 1692. Scottish Jacobitism was far from dead, however, as the future would show.
James had missed the chance of uniting with Dundee because he was delayed in Ireland besieging Derry and Eniskillen. The siege of Derry (subsequently renamed Londonderry), that legend of Ulster Protestantism, began when thirteen apprentices shut its gates against James’s troops. Derry’s resistance from April to July 1689 against its French-led besiegers was ‘the turning-point of the British war of succession’.36 The Comte d’Avaux, an experienced diplomat sent by Louis as James’s minder, abandoned the idea of invading Scotland, deciding to prolong the struggle in Ireland. The golden rule of French policy in Ireland or Scotland, whether under the Bourbons, the revolutionaries of the 1790s, or Napoleon, was to mount the noisiest diversion by creating the greatest mayhem at the least cost to themselves. The results were gratifying. William III had to divert first-class troops from Flanders and then come over himself, enabling the French to win a crushing victory at Fleurus in the Spanish Netherlands on 21 June 1690.
Much depended on the outcome when the rival kings met at the River Boyne, on the road north from Dublin, on 1 July. The largest and most famous battle in Irish history, it was also the most European battle ever fought in these islands, the offshoot of a war also being fought in Flanders, Catalonia and the Rhineland. The Williamite army was principally Dutch, Danish and Huguenot, eked out with unreliable English rookies, many of whom fell sick and ‘died like rotten sheep’.37 The core of the Jacobite army of 20–30,000 men were 7,000 French, German and Walloon troops in French service. Both armies were commanded by actual or former soldiers of Louis XIV – the Williamites by a Marshal of France, Friedrich von Schomberg (only one of whose staff officers spoke English); the Jacobites by the Comte de Lauzun.38 As he reconnoitred the field, William’s shoulder was grazed by a cannonball, which tore his coat and shirt (‘It’s well it came no nearer,’was his typically laconic comment). Rumour spread that he had been killed. When it reached France, there was spontaneous drinking and dancing in the streets; a crowd at Versailles forced its way into the palace courtyard and lit a bonfire under Louis’s window. The Boyne was not devastating – each side lost a few hundred men (including Marshal Schomberg, who led the Huguenot attack with the cry ‘Allons, messieurs, voici vos persécuteurs!’) – but it was decisive. The Williamites pushed across the river, and the Jacobite retreat became a rout, which French officers subsequently blamed on their Irish infantry.
Everything could have changed on 10 July, when the French navy won its greatest victory over the Anglo-Dutch fleet at ‘Cap Bézeviers’ – Beachy Head. This was a confused action in which the British failed to support the Dutch, and so had to send an abject apology to the States General, with the offer to pay for the repair of their ships and compensate the families of the men killed.39 Louis was delighted that ‘I now find myself master of the Channel after having defeated the English who prided themselves for several centuries on being its masters’, and Te Deums were sung.40 The victory not only enabled the French to maintain communications with Ireland, but also raised the possibility that they could isolate William there and even invade England in his absence. But, to the fury of Louis, his admirals would not attempt anything so aggressive. The fleet had sustained damage and many of the crews were sick. The French navy was stronger on paper than at sea, and its commanders seem to have had no strategy at all. James’s lieutenant in Ireland, the Earl of Tyrconnel, was to say that ‘the want of a squadron of French men of war in St George’s Channel has been our ruine . . . [William] could have sent hither neither forces nor provisions, and [his] army would have starved’.41William soon returned to the Netherlands, and James left hastily for France to seek reinforcements and to urge an invasion of England. But after the Boyne Louis was less ready than ever to risk a major commitment of troops to Ireland – indeed Lauzun’s brigade was fetched home. As for England, the French confined themselves to setting fire to Teignmouth. When in 1692 the French did decide to mount an invasion, it was too late.
James’s departure from Ireland was regarded by generations of embittered Jacobites as desertion. His army fled to the western ports, supplied by the French navy. The following year, a new commander, the Marquis de Saint-Ruth, fetched from slaughtering Protestant rebels in the south of France, decided to force a decision, destroying the bridges behind his army and digging in at Aughrim, near Galway. In July 1691 a bloody battle was fought. Saint-Ruth was decapitated by a cannonball, and the Jacobites crumbled and fled, losing 7,000 men to the Williamite army commanded by the Dutch general Baron van Ginckel (created Earl of Athlone) and later by the Huguenot Marquis de Ruvigny (created Earl of Galway). Although Limerick, under the Marquis de Boisseleau, sustained a short siege, most Irish leaders were now as eager to accept terms as the Dutch were to offer them. A Treaty of Limerick, offering pardons and religious liberty, was signed with Ginckel in October 1691. A French relief squadron appeared three weeks too late. The French sought to withdraw their soldiers and as many Irish recruits as they could muster to fight on the Continent. The treaty allowed 15,000 Irish soldiers – the famous ‘Wild Geese’ – to sail for France, where they paraded before James II and served France under his banner, confident of a quick and victorious return. William, eager to calm Ireland down and concentrate on Europe, was happy with a moderate treaty. However, a continuing Jacobite guerrilla war in parts of the country, fed by the hope of another French-backed invasion, made the Treaty of Limerick a dead letter, and led the Irish parliament to pass laws aimed at breaking the economic and social power of the Catholic aristocracy. These ‘penal laws’ were to poison Irish–British relations for generations.
EXILES: HUGUENOTS AND JACOBITES
The revocation of the Edict of Nantes brought some 40–50,000 Huguenots to the British Isles, and the Glorious Revolution caused almost as many Jacobites to leave for Europe, especially France. Many of these were soldiers or sailors. About 25,000 troops, mainly Irish, followed James to France. Marshal Vauban estimated that about 20,000 Protestant soldiers and sailors left France. Refugees and their descendants fought on opposite sides for generations, sometimes face to face. Jean-Louis Ligonier became commander in-chief of the British army in 1757. Irish and Scottish Jacobites were to provide two Marshals of France and eighteen generals, and acquire a near monopoly of command in French colonies – like their countrymen in those of Britain. Jacobites settled at the exiled Stuart court at Saint-Germain (west of Paris), in western seaports, and in Paris itself. Irish Catholics acquired prominent positions in shipping, slave-trading, and wines and spirits, practically creating cognac, the high-quality brandy distilled for export to London and Dublin.42 London had the largest settlement of Huguenots, concentrated in Spitalfields and Soho. Some became shareholders or directors of the new Bank of England. The famous Spitalfields silk industry used new techniques from Tours and Lyons. Refugees made important contributions to every branch of craft and fashion, notably as gold- and silversmiths, clockmakers, gunsmiths, cabinet-makers, printers, translators, publishers, engravers, sculptors, and hatters – cardinals in Rome had their red hats made by Huguenot refugees in Wandsworth.43
Britain at the Heart of Europe, 1688–1748
This war is for the defence and protection of the laws libertys customs and religion as well papist as protestant from the barbarous and avaricious tiranny and invasion of the French king.
SIR RICHARD COCKS, 169544
We took this war in hand to assert the liberties of Europe, and, to encourage us to carry it on, we have the examples, ancient and modern, of nations that have resisted great monarchies, and who have worked out their freedom by patience, wisdom and courage.
CHARLES DAVENANT, 169545
The wars on which the Three Kingdoms had brusquely embarked – the Nine Years War (also known as the War of the League of Augsburg) and then, after a brief lull, the War of the Spanish Succession – were the most sustained intervention they had ever made in European politics. British troops ventured further into Europe than they ever did again until 1945. The cost and suffering revived support for the Stuarts. Yet the link the Glorious Revolution had created – and which Louis XIV continually confirmed – between resistance to France and resistance to the Stuarts meant that the war ‘against popery and slavery’ and ‘for the liberties of Europe’ could not easily be abandoned. France – for whom the conflict with Britain was only one aspect of the struggle, though an increasingly important one – also suffered grievously. In 1688 Louis had expected fighting to last a few months, but it persisted for nearly twenty-five years. By the end, all the combatants were exhausted, and Louis was not alone, as he approached death, in being convinced that war was a divine punishment on him, his dynasty and France.
Both wars became wars of attrition. Huge armies (not seen again until Napoleon’s day) were long to assemble, hard to move and hard to feed; they had to disperse with the approach of winter. Movement was further constrained by long defence lines, anticipating the trenches of 1914–18, and numerous fortresses, especially in Flanders, so that a year’s campaigning might focus on besieging one or two fortresses, or simply occupying territory to seize food and cash. Large areas were deliberately ravaged to make them incapable of sustaining an enemy army. Battles were sometimes hideously bloody, but were rarely decisive, and so rulers and generals often tried to avoid them. Little of the gruelling fighting in Flanders, the Rhineland, and Spain remains, therefore, in national memories. From the Nine Years War – the first and most obscure of various conflicts that have been suggested as the ‘real first world war’ – only a few vaguely familiar names from memorial plaques or regimental colours remain. They fail to evoke the intense horror of the huge close-range killing matches. For the French, the names of a few naval swashbucklers who singed the king of England’s wig, such as Jean Bart, still adorn warships, streets and bars. In retrospect, the most decisive and important campaign was William III’s victory in Ireland, because it confirmed the Anglo-Dutch union as the political, financial and military core of the anti-French alliance.
Belatedly, the French made a serious effort to try to reverse the Glorious Revolution in the first of many attempts to invade that would continue until the climax under Napoleon. In 1692, 30,000 French and Irish troops, nominally commanded by James II, assembled in Normandy. But in May the French navy met an Anglo-Dutch fleet nearly twice their size off Barfleur, at the battle of La Hougue (for the British La Hogue). The French fought with skill and courage, and withdrew successfully under cover of night and fog. But winds and geography took a hand: most of the fleet was caught on the wrong side of the Cherbourg peninsula, with no fortified base in which to take refuge. At Saint-Vaast harbour, there was hand-to-hand fighting as the British attacked in boats – one British sailor unhorsed a French cavalryman at the water’s edge with his boathook. Despite volleys of musketry fired by King James’s troops from the shore, a dozen French ships of the line and nearly all the invasion transports were burned.46 The British planned a tit-for-tat counter-invasion, including Irish Protestant troops, aiming to raise a Protestant revolt in France, but the navy decided it was not feasible. With mutual invasion abandoned, the Irish troops were marched off to fight on opposite sides of the Rhine and in Flanders. Plots and betrayals on both sides continued, but neither could land a serious body blow. This set a pattern for the next 100 years.
The war was costing a great deal of money, in addition to the disruption of maritime trade on both sides. The British were paying for troops in the Low Countries; the French were fighting simultaneously on four fronts. The British raised taxes and found new means of borrowing, but not without pain or resistance. Many taxpayers, whose grievances were expressed by the ‘Country party’, felt that they were being fleeced to benefit a self-serving clique of William’s Dutch entourage and the ruling Whig ‘junto’, and to enrich the ‘monied men’ of the City of London, ‘enabled to deck their Wives in Velvet . . . while poor Country Gentlemen are hardly able to afford their Wives a Gown of Lindsey Woolsey’.47 Resentment was all the greater among those ‘Tories’ who doubted William’s right to rule, or who felt that he was pushing Britain into a war that had gone far beyond its true interests.1
Without being fully Jacobite, it was possible to see a negotiated return of James or his son as desirable, or just inevitable: William and Mary (who died of smallpox in 1694) had no children, and Anne, the next Protestant heir, had only one surviving son, who was to die in 1700. In these circumstances, not only disaffected Tories in the shires but leading soldiers such as John Churchill, government ministers, and even William and Princess Anne themselves were maintaining more or less discreet contacts with the exile court at Saint-Germain. James’s handicaps in this subtle and duplicitous game were his own personality, increasingly intransigent and devout (he spent much time at the monastery of La Trappe), and the fact that he and his family were puppets of Louis XIV. Few Tories would contemplate a Catholic monarch imposed by France.
France was suffering severely from the effects of war. In 1693–4 it was hit by famine. Though not caused by the war, it was aggravated by the army’s consumption of food and by the disruption of seaborne grain imports from the Baltic. Perhaps 10 per cent of the population – some 2 million people – died. Yet, brutally, an effect of starvation was to force hungry men into France’s unconquerable armies: during the whole war, the French did not lose a major land battle. The absolutism of the monarchy (which had not summoned the Estates General since 1614) deprived the discontented of a political voice.
By 1696, both sides were nearing exhaustion. Moreover, both were aware that a long-expected geopolitical crisis was looming: the succession to the throne of Spain. Carlos II had been physically weak since childhood, and had never been expected to survive long or produce an heir – a prophecy that the lavish ministrations of his doctors helped to make self-fulfilling. By the mid-1690s, he was clearly nearing his end. The leading claimants to the succession were a French prince (Louis’s grandson) and an Austrian archduke. This meant that not only Iberian Spain itself, but also its possessions in Italy, the Netherlands and the Americas could swing either into the Bourbon or into the Habsburg camp. The hazards of births and deaths might even unite the whole into a single Franco-Spanish or Austro-Spanish monarchy. This would make a further, even more far-reaching European war inevitable. It was necessary either to prevent it or to prepare for it.
The Nine Years War, now a stalemate, was wound up in 1697 by the Treaty of Rijswijk, principally negotiated between the French and the Anglo-Dutch – a sign of the new importance of Britain in European affairs. Territorially, there were few changes. Politically, Louis recognized William and Mary as monarchs and promised to give no further help to the exiled Stuarts. James’s Irish troops in France were disbanded, leaving thousands destitute. Jacobites were outraged, but in fact, recognition of William was afaçade. The Stuarts remained at Saint-Germain, the Jacobite diaspora remained active, and the Irish troops were incorporated into the French army. France celebrated, with firework displays and the slogan ‘Louis XIV Gives Peace to Europe’.48 But at court the treaty was viewed as a defeat, especially after so many glorious victories and triumphant Te Deums. Marshal Vauban thought it ‘infamous’.49 Louis’s own conclusion was that ‘I sacrificed the advantages I gained in the war . . . to [the needs] of public tranquillity.’50 In any case, it was all to be fought over again in another war that has been proposed as ‘the real first world war’, the War of the Spanish Succession.
William and Louis, the would-be arbiters of Europe, first tried to prevent this further war by agreeing to carve up the Spanish domains. However, the ailing Carlos was determined not to see his empire divided, so in October 1700 he bequeathed the whole to the sixteen-year-old Duc d’Anjou, Louis’s grandson, and thereupon died. William wrote that ‘if this Will takes effect, England and the Republic are in the greatest danger of being completely lost’.51 France would dominate the Low Countries, the Mediterranean and the Americas. Louis and his ministers, after intense discussion, concluded that ‘it was the will of Heaven’, not only that Anjou should be king of Spain, but that he should remain in line of succession to the throne of France too. After this ‘bold, brash, arrogant challenge’52 they acted fast, perhaps in the belief that the British and Dutch were too weak to respond. In December 1700, Philippe d’Anjou, now Felipe V of Spain, left Versailles clutching instructions for kingship written for him by Louis. French soldiers and advisers followed him to Madrid, seemingly to make Spain and its empire a French protectorate. French troops surrounded the ‘barrier fortresses’ in Spanish Flanders – held under treaty by the Dutch to protect the Republic’s security – and took their garrisons prisoner. Louis was ready for war to secure an immense dynastic triumph for the House of Bourbon.
The Spanish succession affected all of southern and western Europe, raising more than ever the spectre of French ‘universal monarchy’. William feared that the fruits of his twenty-eight years of struggle had been lost ‘in a single day without firing a shot’,53because Tories in Britain and Republicans in Holland preferred to make a deal with Louis. After Rijswijk, to William’s chagrin, a parsimonious and anti-military parliament had reduced the British army to 7,000 men. However, the French now seriously mishandled the situation, combining provocation with delay, and giving their opponents both cause and time to prepare resistance. The most flagrant example was that when James II died in September 1701, Louis, against the advice of his ministers, publicly recognized his son as James III and VIII, breaching the Treaty of Rijswijk. The British immediately severed diplomatic relations. William’s sudden death, after a fall from his horse, in March 1702 did not halt the march to war as Queen Anne ascended the throne. In May Britain declared war, leading as before a coalition that included the Dutch, the Empire, Denmark, Brandenburg and several smaller states.
In some obvious ways this was to be a continuation of the Nine Years War, focusing mainly on the Low Countries and the upper Rhine, with other fronts in Spain and Italy. But a great difference was that Spanish America was now at stake, with significant implications for British trade and prosperity, and so there was also fighting across the Atlantic. Another difference was that during the Nine Years War the French had won all the battles but had not managed to win the war. This time, the Allies won the great battles but could not knock out France. These huge and bloody contests, the most terrible of the whole century – Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, Malplaquet – were associated with the unsettling brilliance of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough.
Blenheim (the anglicized name of the Bavarian village of Blindheim) was fought on 13 August 1704, when Marlborough, to save the Holy Roman Empire from probable defeat, marched into southern Germany. He moved far and fast, yet managed to keep his army in a state to fight. This was made possible by his painstaking organization of supply, and his ability to pay cash for food and fodder, with wagons of money provided by the City of London. At Blenheim, for the first time in at least half a century, a French army was destroyed: half its men were killed, wounded, prisoners or dispersed; its artillery, its regimental colours and its commander were captured. In an afternoon, France lost its position in Germany and its military superiority over the Continent.54 In Versailles no one knew what had happened: dispatches remained unanswered. News trickled through in scribbled letters from captured officers to their families; but for some days no one dared to tell Louis. According to Voltaire, it was left to the Marquise de Maintenon, his morganatic wife, to break the news ‘that he was no longer invincible’.55 Two years later, in the Low Countries, Marlborough won the no less crushing victory of Ramillies, which excluded France from the Spanish Netherlands, and then Oudenarde, which led to the fall of the great fortress of Lille and began to open the way for a march on Paris. Malplaquet in 1709, where the death-toll was comparable with the terrible first day of the Somme in 1916, shocked all the combatants, and increased suspicion of Marlborough’s strategy.
MALBROUCK S’EN VA–T–EN GUERRE
Marlborough . . . was the most fatal man for the greatness of France that had been seen for several centuries . . . He had . . . that calmness of courage in the midst of tumult . . . that the English call a ‘cool head’.
VOLTAIRE56
Until the advent of Napoleon no commander wielded such widespread power in Europe. Upon his person centred the union of nearly twenty confederate states. He held the Grand Alliance together no less by his diplomacy than by his victories. He rode into action with the combinations of three-quarters of Europe in his hand.
WINSTON CHURCHILL.57
John Churchill, Earl and later Duke of Marlborough, is not just England’s most brilliant general, he is England’s only brilliant general. His greatest successors – as well as being mostly from Scotland or Ireland – exude dour, dutiful and taciturn competence, even the greatest of them, Wellington, epitome of the stiff upper lip. Marlborough was quite different: a courtier first, a soldier and politician second, a handsome charmer always. His breathtaking ambition and bland duplicity – he abandoned James II and then when serving William intrigued with the Jacobites (which brought him a spell in the Tower) – did not prevent him from being generally liked. Though he had gained some military experience alongside the French in Flanders, his successes came less from professional expertise than from boldness of conception, ruthless offensiveness, efficiency of preparation, tactical inventiveness, and rapidity of reaction. He led a British army (of mainly German soldiers) deeper into the Continent than ever. He was victorious in four of the biggest battles of the century. However, the expense and carnage of these battles (in which about a quarter of all combatants were casualties) caused alarm at home and in Holland. Marlborough, whose avarice was almost as legendary as his prowess, was accused of corruption and prolonging the war out of self-interest. In particular, his wish to invade France itself, and march on Paris, was prevented. Whether this would have brought disaster or decisive victory can never be known.
He became the most famous Englishman of his time, and a legendary figure in France. The still well-known song ‘Malbrouck s’en va-t-en guerre’ (the tune is roughly that of ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’) testifies to this, as did the use of his name – sometimes rendered as Malbougre – to frighten naughty children. The son of a Dorset squire, he became the wealthiest British subject ever; a duke, a prince of the Holy Roman Empire, and the owner of the greatest palace of the age, Blenheim, for which his heirs still deliver each year to the monarch, as rent for the royal manor of Woodstock, a fleur-de-lys banner symbolizing his victories.
A war of such intensity was bound to have domestic consequences. Revolts broke out in Scotland and in the Protestant Cevennes, in south-eastern France. Both were encouraged and subsidized by the other side, but not effectively supported. The most important consequence of the conflict for Britain was the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707. Scots had to chose between facing a dangerous world as the junior but privileged partner of England, or as a minor and expendable auxiliary of a European coalition. With the choice influenced by English threats to treat Scotland as a foreign country, and by bribes from London, the Scottish parliament chose union.
As in the previous war, France was grievously hit by famine. A sudden steep drop in the temperature in 1708–9 – long remembered as le grand hiver – destroyed seedlings, buds, vines and trees. The following year’s harvest was inevitably disastrous. Hunger led to disease. Rising food prices caused a general economic slump. The city of Lyons went bankrupt. Taxes were unpaid; wine and salt duties uncollected. This halted the French war machine. Starving people rioted, attacking markets, convents and chateaux. Louis took the unprecedented step of appealing directly to his subjects. His letter, read in every church, assured them that ‘my tenderness for my peoples is no less lively than for my own children’, but insisted that the Allies had made impossible demands exposing France to invasion and dishonour, and so even greater efforts must be made. With more or less good grace, courtiers sent even more of their silverware to the mint, and a new tax was levied. This convinced many foreigners that France would fight on, and that its absolute monarchy was more resilient in war than a tumultuous parliamentary system like Britain’s.
For if the House of Commons was an effective means of national mobilization, it was also effective at expressing discontent. Taxation, financial instability, disruption of trade, and the feeling that true British interests were being ignored increased criticism of the Whig ministers and Marlborough by Tories and crypto-Jacobites. This mattered when Queen Anne too changed her position. A new Tory ministry, led by Robert Harley, later Earl of Oxford, and Henry St John, later Viscount Bolingbroke, began secret peace negotiations. The first disavowable contacts were made in 1711 through a London-based French Catholic priest, François Gaultier, and an enterprising Cambridge poet, pamphleteer and diplomat Matthew Prior, who had previously run an effective spy network at the exiled Stuart court. Harley survived being stabbed on 8 March 1711 at a cabinet meeting by a shady French ‘refugee’ – a unique event even in Franco-British history. ‘Matt’ Prior was one of the most unusual of many highly unusual Franco-British go-betweens. Queen Anne disliked using someone of ‘very meane extraction’ as an envoy – his rise had begun when as a child he was discovered reading Latin behind the bar of his uncle’s London pub. But he was too useful to neglect, and his central role caused the subsequent agreement to be known as ‘Matt’s peace’. Secret negotiations took place at his London house. In Paris he was welcomed literally with open arms, having a torrid affair with a libertine aristocratic nun, Claudine de Tencin, described as ‘the beautiful and wicked canoness’, later one of the century’s foremost women intellectuals, and mother of the philosopher d’Alembert. Marlborough was dismissed, and his army ordered to take no further offensive action – a decision of which the French were informed before the Allies. London’s insistence on peace saved France from probable invasion, and permitted Louis to die undefeated.
The Treaty of Utrecht was signed in April 1713. It ended a period of extreme instability in European affairs, marked by religious conflict, territorial changes, unstable monarchical succession and protracted wars. Since 1688, nearly 2 million soldiers had been killed. The danger of French hegemony had receded. The union of the crowns of France and Spain was forbidden by the treaty, although Felipe kept the Spanish crown, and Spain later became France’s main ally in future wars with Britain. The Spanish Netherlands were ceded to Austria, safeguarding Holland. Britain had clearly become one of the dominant powers. France again recognized its Protestant succession and this time expelled the Stuarts. Britain gained large tracts of North America, Gibraltar, Minorca and a hopefully lucrative trading concession – the asiento (permission to supply slaves and send one annual trading ship to Spanish South America). France demolished the fortifications and harbour of that nest of privateers Dunkirk, and accepted a resident British ‘Commissary and Inquiror’ to ensure they were not rebuilt – a perennial source of ill feeling.
The political wind shifted in both France and Britain, confirming that Utrecht was a watershed. The death of Queen Anne in 1714 was followed by the peaceful succession of her Protestant cousin, Elector Georg of Hanover, as George I. He regarded the Tories as crypto-Jacobite enemies. Harley and Prior were arrested, and Bolingbroke fled to France, where he became for a time chief adviser to the Stuart Pretender and gained an inflated reputation as a political thinker. In September 1715, Louis XIV died, unmourned by his long-suffering people: he had turned France, it was said, into a vast poorhouse. That Louis XV succeeded his grandfather at the age of two guaranteed a long period of caution under the regency of his cousin the Duc d’Orléans; doubly cautious as the king of Spain had a possible claim to the French throne whatever treaties might say. With both France and Britain headed by potentially vulnerable rulers, it was sensible to avoid conflict and agree not to encourage each other’s rivals. This rapprochement came too late to head off an abortive Jacobite rebellion led by the Earl of Mar in 1715, but it did thereafter lead to a period of peace and even alliance for twenty years. This began in 1716, under the auspices of the Regent’s adviser Cardinal Dubois, who arranged a casual encounter with the soldier and politician Lord Stanhope when buying books at The Hague. Stanhope’s vision of an Anglo-French alliance was a brave attempt to entrench peace. The entente continued under Cardinal Fleury and Sir Robert Walpole in the 1720s, but with less ambitious aims. Walpole wished to keep out of Continental wars, while Fleury was delaying a more ambitious policy until France recovered her strength.
This Franco-British ‘alliance’ was certainly of benefit to Europe. Their desire to avoid war spread to their allies, clients and neighbours. But this ‘new European order’, as Lucien Bély calls it, was shaken by the grinding tectonic plates in eastern Europe, as Russia and Prussia grew increasingly aggressive, and Sweden, Poland, Turkey and even the Empire faltered. Every political accident, especially those caused by disputed monarchical succession, provided a pretext for predation. Fleury knew that good relations with Britain were unpopular at court and in the army. France was still the European giant. Its monarchy seemed more powerful and stable than that of Britain, subject to perennial party quarrels and disputed succession. France was able to muster its strength faster and without public dissent. Its foreign trade was increasing rapidly while Britain’s was stagnant; and its navy was growing. Fleury broke off the entente as soon as he felt France was strong enough: in 1731 London was informed that the two countries’ interests were too far apart for them ‘to deliberate together upon the affairs of Europe’.58 By the late 1730s France was again, as the king of Prussia declared, the ‘arbiter of Europe’, and fears of its hegemonic ambitions, and its support for Stuart counter-revolution, revived.
Walpole was determined to keep out of the War of the Polish Succession (1733–5): ‘Madam,’ he famously told the queen, ‘there are 50,000 men slain this year in Europe, and not one Englishman.’59 But friction over trade and colonies was less easy to avoid. Clashes in Spanish America between illegally trading British merchant ships and Spanish ‘coastguards’ – in effect, licensed pirates – began the ‘War of Jenkins’s Ear’ in 1739, after a British sea captain had an ear sliced off to teach him respect for Spanish orders. France, as an ally of Spain, was resigned to being drawn in. However, the situation was transformed when in 1740 Prussia took advantage of a dispute between rival pretenders to the Austrian throne to invade the province of Silesia – hence the War of Austrian Succession. Britain and France at first became involved in this free-for-all only as ‘auxiliaries’, lending troops to their respective allies Austria and Bavaria. So although the battle of Dettingen (1743) was the last time a British king, George II, commanded an army in battle – against the French, of course – he was acting as Elector of Hanover and his British regiments fought under the Hanoverian flag, provoking patriotic grumbling. The war soon turned into the depressingly familiar and forgettable series of campaigns in central Europe, the Low Countries and Italy. When it eventually ended in 1748, the only significant change was that Prussia kept Silesia.
However, for France and Britain other issues emerged, and turned the Silesian quarrel into another Franco-British duel. The conflict between them was more clearly than ever extending beyond Europe. The most important British operation of the war was in North America: the seaborne capture in June 1745 of the fortress of Louisbourg, commanding the mouth of the River St Lawrence, though this was eventually exchanged at the peace table for Madras, captured by the French. In Europe, the French won a notable victory over the British at Fontenoy. Finally, and most importantly, the war made possible the last and most formidable Jacobite rebellion, the ‘Forty Five’, France’s best chance of reversing 1688.
FONTENOY, 11 MAY 1745
Fontenoy: the greatest Franco-Irish victory over the British.
Tirez les premiers, messieurs les Anglais!
COMTE D’ANTERROCHES, commander of Garde Française
Cuimhnigi ar Luimneach agus feall na Sasanach! (Remember Limerick and English treachery!) War cry of the Irish Brigade
Fontenoy (now in Belgium) is largely forgotten in England, just as Blenheim is rarely emphasized in France. British, Dutch and German troops under the Duke of Cumberland were beaten by the French commanded by Marshal Maurice of Saxony. It stands out from the interminable account of eighteenth-century carnage for three reasons. It was the last time a French king symbolically led his army in battle. This made Louis XV for a time ‘le Bien Aimé’, and, judged Napoleon, gave the Bourbon monarchy a new lease of life. It was also the proudest victory of the Jacobite Irish over the British, ‘the greatest of Irish battle honours’ commemorated into the twentieth century in Ireland and among Irish Americans.60 And the invitation to the English to fire first is one of the most famous French battlefield stories.
The Irish ‘Wild Geese’ were a notable presence in the French army, though, as theoretically the British army in exile, they carried the Cross of St George on their colours, wore red coats, and used English as their language of command. All armies employed foreign troops from poorer regions of Europe that had a surplus of males: Swiss, Germans, Scots, Irish and Croats were all reputed soldiers. The Irish were distinctive in being, like the Huguenots in the British army, also political and religious exiles. Jacobites were present in many parts of Europe, including Spain, Austria and Russia. In France they were most numerous and fulfilled a special role, as an invasion and counterrevolutionary force in waiting. Irish nobles whose estates had been confiscated found honourable careers serving the kings of France. Charles O’Brien, Viscount Clare, became a Marshal of France, and as governor of Languedoc had a heavy hand with rebellious Protestants. Many families served for generations, and several (such as the Dillons, Shees, Clarkes, Lallys and MacMahons) became members of the French nobility. Fontenoy was the high noon of the Irish Brigade: its six regiments found themselves face to face with British – including Protestant Irish and Scottish – units and saved the day for France. On the British side, the Black Watch, their advance supposedly led by their chaplain Adam Ferguson (later professor at Edinburgh and a leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment), also created a heroic and specifically ‘British’ legend. James Campbell was reported to have killed nine men with his broadsword before having his arm shot off by a cannonball. That the regiment, raised for police duties in Scotland, had been lured abroad by a trick, and had mutinied, could be forgotten.61
It was the encounter of the Garde Française and the Foot Guards that produced the famous invitation to fire first. As a gallant gesture, it encapsulates the idea of eighteenth-century war as la guerre en dentelle (war in lace) – a succinct reference to elaborate uniforms, to aristocratic style, and to the fallacious supposition that it was not very lethal. The story also suggests courtesy between French and English gentlemen, who, after many hard-fought battles, had developed, if not affection, then respect. However, there is no less a suggestion that this courtesy was a kind of taunt. Muskets were inaccurate, and the killing range of their bullets short. The first volley, when the muskets had been carefully loaded in advance, was the most effective, and could even be decisive. The side that fired first, at longer range, wasted that advantage and made itself vulnerable. The side that held its fire could come close while the enemy was reloading and fire a more deadly volley. So the apparent courtesy is also a grim, and mutually understood, joke – a characteristic French mixture of gallantry and levity.
France and the Young Chevalier, 1744–6
Although the King is in no way involved in the project the young Prince Charles Edward has . . . had the boldness and resolution to execute, it is . . . always politic to profit from every occasion to embarrass the enemy.
MARSHAL DE NOAILLES, 174562
Had they thrown in ten thousand men in time . . . France would soon have seen all the western world her own.
Old England newspaper, October 174563
Scotland after the Act of Union was not a contented country. Acrimony between Episcopalians and Presbyterians broadly reflected both the cultural difference between Highlands and Lowlands and the political divide between Jacobites and Whigs. Wars with France had increased taxation. Customs and Excise were unwanted consequences of Union. Smuggling and other lawless activity multiplied. Valuable trade with the Continent, and especially with France, was disrupted by privateering and naval action. The unwillingness of Scots to accept hardship for the sake of British monarchs was shown luridly in 1736, when Captain Porteus, of the Edinburgh city guard, was lynched after he fired on an unruly crowd at the execution of a smuggler, and several days of rioting ensued.
Contenders for power had to decide whether to scramble for new opportunities in the wider British polity, or look to the other potential patrons – the exiled Stuarts and the French. Among the first who looked to London were the ambitious and talented Dalrymples, politicians, soldiers and diplomats, who helped govern Scotland for James II and then for William. Thereafter, they helped to govern Britain for the Hanoverians. John Dalrymple, 2nd Earl of Stair, was a successful and ‘insolent’64 ambassador in Paris, where he managed the post-Utrecht rapprochement and kept a wary eye on the Jacobites. Also aligned with the Hanoverians were some great clans, notably the Campbells, and city corporations such as that of Glasgow. Least willing to compromise were Episcopalian lairds, backed by a disestablished clergy. The feudal authority of the clans, their warrior values and Gaelic culture, were incompatible with the egalitarian Presbyterianism and commercialism of the Lowland towns. Episcopalians always formed the great majority of active Scottish Jacobites.65
Discontent could only become politically formidable through the Stuarts and the French. Rarely did either show much ability or daring. Abortive conspiracies, cancelled invasions and failed rebellions were their hallmark. During the Franco-British rapprochement after Utrecht, the Stuarts had to move their once brilliant court from the splendours of Saint-Germain to independent Lorraine, then to papal Avignon, to Spain and finally to Italy. Their cause waned. One conspiracy was even betrayed to London by the French government. Yet they retained sympathy in France, as well as being potentially useful. The French provided funds and arranged marriages to maintain a supply of Pretenders. The War of Austrian Succession revived Stuart prospects. Even before it was officially declared, Versailles made plans for invasion – ‘an enterprise on which depends the fate not only of England, but even the whole of Europe’.66 A royal proclamation was drawn up in advance assuring ‘la nation anglaise’ (sic) that the French were not coming as enemies, but at the invitation of ‘good and faithful Englishmen’, to ‘throw off the foreign yoke’ and restore their rightful king.67
The first plan was for a surprise attack on London. But the British were warned. FranÇois de Bussy, their most highly placed agent in France, sold them the details for £2,000. The illegitimate son of a minor courtier and a noble lady, his mother’s connections enabled him to enjoy a successful diplomatic career, but his pedigree ruled out promotion to ambassador. Resentment may have played a part in his treason, but money was the immediate motive when Lord Waldegrave recruited him in Vienna. His lavish spending aroused suspicions, but he was never exposed, and was even posted to London in the 1760s. His tip-off led to hasty naval defence measures. These, and bad weather, aborted the plan as the French invasion force approached the Kentish coast in March 1744.
Prince Charles Edward Stuart, grandson of James II, aged twenty-five, charming, ruthless, and querulous when drunk (which was fairly often), resolved to force the French to try again. He was encouraged by adventurous Irish and Scottish advisers, prominent among them Anthony Walsh (known by the French as ‘Gouelsch’) of Saint-Malo, the ringleader of a wealthy Irish lobby of shipowners and slave-traders, who offered ships and money. Their patriotism was whetted by the prospect of distracting the British navy to allow a clear run for their privateers. Walsh was also promised a peerage. In June 1745, Charles and a few followers sailed in two warships provided by Walsh, without Versailles knowing what was afoot. A parting letter to Louis in Charles’s big childish hand justified his escapade and promised that ‘if [Your Majesty] makes me succeed, you will find in me a faithful ally’.68 After a brush with an English warship, he reached the Western Isles, then raised the Stuart standard at Glenfinnan, on the mainland, on 19 August.69He assured wary sympathizers that rebellion could succeed, because substantial French help was imminent. As Lord George Murray, who became his military commander, later observed, ‘certainly 4,500 Scots had never thought of putting a king upon an English throne by themselves’.70 Charles’s promises, eloquent appeals to honour and self-interest, and feudal compulsion by his aristocratic supporters, assembled a small army of around 1,800 men, which rose to a peak of 5,000 by the end of the year.71
Louis and his advisers pondered.72 It was not evidently worth their while to make a major effort to restore the Stuarts, whose promised gratitude might never materialize. A Catholic restoration would revive old fears among France’s Protestant allies in Germany, including Prussia. Was restoration possible anyway, especially in all three kingdoms? The Jacobites were quarrelsome, unreliable, indiscreet and grossly over-optimistic: ‘one must not believe that the whole Nation is easily and quickly giving up the principles of the 1688 revolution which the majority still regard today as the base and foundation of their liberties’. On the other hand, it was a tempting opportunity to create a diversion, forcing London to recall troops from Flanders and ships for home defence, and panicking the City of London. If prolonged civil strife ensued, Britain would be neutralized and its Continental allies left unsupported. So it was worth sending arms, money and even troops. But where? Cautious voices advised against another attempt to invade England: there would be no chance of success unless major forces were committed, which was risky and would weaken France on the Continent. One (well-paid) pessimist was Bussy, who declared that a landing near London would be doomed. The safest option was Ireland, where there would be widespread support and the Spanish navy could join with the French. But bolder voices, favoured by Louis XV, prevailed. Prince Charles has long been condemned for misleading his followers with promises of French aid. But he was right in thinking that they would not stand aside. The Marquis d’Eguilles was sent to Scotland as Louis’s envoy. French ships ferried in money and supplies. Encouraged by the news of the startling Jacobite victory at Prestonpans on 21 September, the royal council agreed on 14 October to land an army in England with the aim of restoring the Stuarts. On 24 October this was formalized in the Treaty of Fontainebleau, though it was not guaranteed how much of the British Isles would be restored to Stuart rule. Money and troops were requested from Spain, Sweden, the Papacy, Genoa and Switzerland.
British ministers had known that invasion was in the offing. Few were frightened by Charles’s escapade in Scotland, even after his victory at Prestonpans. Nor did they take seriously the notion of a Jacobite revolt in England. But they were fearful of a French landing in a country denuded of troops: ‘London is theirs as soon as they can march to it’, in the view of Field-Marshal Wade.73 The government, ‘obsessed with their role as Good Europeans’,74 were reluctant to withdraw forces from the ‘struggle for European liberties’ on the Continent. In September they at last ordered the Duke of Cumberland and much of his army back from the Low Countries. But it would take weeks to arrive. Charles urged his reluctant followers to march into England. He wanted to trigger a Jacobite rising there, to make certain the French would invade. He promised his men that French troops would land early in December – news he had received from his brother in Paris. D’Eguilles confirmed that the French were minded to invade, but only if the Jacobite rising spread to England. So in November the Scots marched south.
French preparations were advancing briskly in November and early December. Walsh had been commissioned to procure ships. The Duc de Richelieu, one of France’s leading generals, was appointed commander – proof of the importance of the enterprise. Men and artillery assembled at Dunkirk, Calais and Boulogne. Voltaire, France’s principal expert on Britain, was commissioned to draft a propaganda leaflet explaining that Louis XV was only invading to ‘help’ both a worthy prince and ‘the healthiest elements’ of the English nation, in order to ‘pacify England and Europe’ and ‘unite two nations’ – the English and the French – ‘who ought to respect each other’.75 As a first token of this help, 1,000 men under a Scottish officer in the French army, Lord John Drummond, landed at Montrose on 7 December. They were principally the Royal Écossais regiment, reinforced with Scots soldiers from units of the Irish Brigade (but no Irish, it was decided – the Scots detested them). D’Eguilles was offering bets that the French had already landed in England or would arrive within days.76 Meanwhile, in Paris, officers were saying their farewells and promising to celebrate Christmas, or at least New Year, with Prince Charles in London.
But Charles’s army, which had arrived almost without opposition at Derby, had turned back north on 5 December. Charles considered his Scots as expendable in a daring gamble to bring out the English Jacobites, bring in the French, and restore his family to St James’s Palace. But the Scottish commanders and their men naturally had different priorities – they wanted to live to fight another day, in Scotland, where a guerrilla war, with French aid, could defend their homes. By now they realized that the Prince’s assurances that English Jacobites would join them – optimists had predicted a mass enrolment of students from that home of lost causes, Oxford – were illusory. The Scots did not know that the Hanoverian troops facing them had just been ordered south to defend London (where there was widespread panic and a run on the Bank of England), that men were being diverted to defend the English coast, that beacons had been set up to signal a French landing, and that horses and cattle were being driven off to deprive invaders of transport and food.
Subsequent debate as to whether the retreat north was necessary prudence or fatal loss of nerve misses the vital point: the decisive events took place not at Derby, but at Dunkirk. Launching an invasion proved more complicated than anyone expected. Some 300 vessels had to be requisitioned from all along the Channel coast, which took time and could not be kept secret. There were insufficient officers and cannon, which Richelieu claimed prevented him from ordering embarkation early in December when he arrived to take command. Then came both bad weather and bad news – of the Jacobite retreat from Derby. British naval units and privateers sailed inshore to ravage assembling invasion convoys, causing Richelieu increasing misgivings. But then came favourable weather from 20 to 24 December: southerly winds which could have blown at least part of the invasion force from Calais and Boulogne to Kent while keeping the British navy out of action. This, in retrospect, was their best chance. Not for the first or last time, a French commander poised to invade hesitated to take the supreme risk. Richelieu missed his chance.77
When he held a council of war on 5 January to plan another attempt, it was black comedy. Having shifted operations from Dunkirk to Boulogne, the French discovered that the tides would allow only a few ships at a time to leave harbour, which meant that the British would pick them off as they emerged. They would have to shift again to Calais and Ostend. The final attempts, on 13 January and 6–8 February, were cancelled because the British navy was out in force. By then, everyone was simply going through the motions to save face. Voltaire wrote to console his friend Richelieu: ‘whatever happens [you] will have the honour of having undertaken the most glorious expedition in the world . . . Either I shall attend you soon or I shall go and pay court to you in London. I shall see you crowning a king and making [Louis XV] again the arbiter of Europe.’ But he added significantly, ‘All this would have been done if one had been able to leave on the 25th [December]. On such things hang the fates of empires!’78
On this philosophical note, the fate of the Jacobite rebellion was sealed. All that was left were its death throes. The Scots commanders wanted to retreat into the far north, but Charles refused, for familiar reasons:
What opinion will the French and Spaniards then have of us, or what encouragement will it be to the former to make the descent for which they have been so long preparing, or the latter to send us any more succours?79
Almost as these words were uttered, Richelieu gave up and returned to Paris, and his troops marched back to Flanders. French diplomats hinted that they might abandon the Jacobites if the British price were right.80 Meanwhile, they managed to get a ship through to Aberdeen with a few dismounted cavalrymen, but other attempts, and ships carrying money to maintain Charles’s army, were intercepted. This precipitated the final drama, because with no money to pay his hungry and deserting soldiers, Charles insisted on a last stand at Culloden on 16 April 1746. D’Eguilles preferred not to witness the massacre: ‘I retired in haste to Inverness, there to burn all my papers and think over the means for preserving for your Majesty that portion of the [Franco-Scottish] troops which might survive the action.’81 The French had always worried that Scottish or Irish officers in their service who had been sent to Scotland might be executed for treason if or when the enterprise failed. Drummond’s troops surrendered at Culloden and were given quarter, but their future, and that of d’Eguilles, looked grim. Strong representations – backed up by the arrest, effectively as hostages, of all British subjects in France without passports – were needed to secure their eventual release. France’s final gesture was to send ships to rescue Charles. He owed his legendary escape to Skye to Flora MacDonald, but from there to France to the courage of French sailors. The rest of the Jacobite army, given no quarter, were hunted down. Versailles pressed for clemency, and the British conceded that they would pardon all except those previously involved in the 1715 rising.
The ’45, a disaster for the Jacobite cause, was far from profitless for France. A small investment of arms, men and money (less than 5 million livres) had forced British, Dutch and German troops to be hastily shipped to Britain, weakening the Allies in Flanders. So, as Charles’s little army was trudging to its doom, the French were capturing Brussels (which netted 20 million livres), and they went on to threaten Holland.82 Tying up the British navy had allowed French privateers to land a rich haul of prizes. The British had also been unable to reinforce North America. British vulnerability had been made visible to all Europe. The French were in a somewhat stronger position to negotiate the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, ending the War of the Austrian Succession.
These compensations cannot mask the historic failure of France’s best-ever opportunity to reverse the Glorious Revolution and undermine Britain’s power inside and outside Europe. If tides and weather, as so often, played a part, there was also an intellectual obstacle. France’s rulers had no agreed view of their interests and priorities. Some saw the Low Countries as the focus, others Germany, or the Mediterranean, or even Canada. So they could not work out what to do about Britain. The first difficulty, as the clear-minded Noailles pointed out, was that if France restored the Stuarts, they might well be forced by Parliament and people to adopt an anti-French policy: so why bother? Should Versailles instead aim to break up the Three Kingdoms, and make Scotland or Ireland a French protectorate? Some Jacobites advocated this as a panacea for France’s global problems, but sustaining such a presence in the British Isles would have required open-ended military, naval and financial commitments. And how would other European states react to such a change in the balance of power?
So in 1745 Versailles dithered, and effectively settled for exploiting the Jacobites as a diversion. Richelieu and Walsh were left struggling to slip a few regiments across the Channel in fishing boats and privateers, while the French navy, splendidly aloof in Brest, was concentrating on quite another enterprise: preparing a fleet of seventy ships and 3,500 soldiers to cross the Atlantic and try to recapture Louisbourg: they put cod before conquest. Here is a poignant epilogue to the ’45: this fleet sailed two months after Culloden, it was ravaged by sickness, its commander died, his successor tried to commit suicide, and 2,300 men perished from scurvy off the Canadian coast – more than were killed at Culloden. What if they had been sent to Ireland or Scotland instead?
SYMBOLS
Both countries’ patriotic symbols emerged from their ‘hundred years war’. There is little evidence for the common French claim that ‘God Save the King’ was originally written by Jean-Baptiste Lully for Louis XIV as ‘Dieu protège le Roi’, though it does seem to have emerged from earlier words and music. In its modern form it was arranged by Thomas Arne and performed in September 1745 at the Drury Lane theatre to raise morale at the worst of the Jacobite crisis. James Thomson’s ‘Rule Britannia’ was written in 1740, and David Garrick’s ‘Hearts of Oak’ in 1759, the ‘Year of Victories’ in the Seven Years War. The ‘Marseillaise’ was composed in its present form at Strasbourg in 1792 by a young officer, Rouget de Lisle, but its most famous phrases – including the stirring refrain ‘Aux Armes, Citoyens! Formez vos bataillons’ – were taken from verses that appeared during the explosion of anti-English writings published during the Seven Years War. The ‘sang impur’ which was to ‘abreuver nos sillons’ was not originally that of the Austrians and Prussians in 1792, but from that ‘perjured race’ the English, in 1757.83 That the colours of the two national flags are basically the same is probably not a coincidence. The Union Flag was of course progressively put together from the banners of St George, St Andrew and St Patrick as the struggle with France brought about a consolidation of the three kingdoms into one. The Tricolour, invented by La Fayette in 1789, was probably inspired in part by the red, white and blue of the American flag, which had developed from the British.
The End of the Beginning
In the sixty years between the Glorious Revolution and the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, the Three Kingdoms had been transformed by their participation in, and ultimately leadership of, a coalition against the French superpower. Britain had become a great power, whose armies had, at times, won great victories, and whose navy could claim, with occasional lapses, to rule the waves. It had created systems for raising money to fund these expensive ambitions. Trade and colonies fed, and were expanded by, this new power, and were soon to revolutionize the whole economy. The political system of Crown, Parliament and Church, and the union of two of the Three Kingdoms, had solidified. Political culture, and in the long run a sense of national identity – officially defined three centuries later as ‘concepts of rights and duties, toleration, fair play, freedom of speech and of the press etc.’84 – are largely developments of these years, in plain contrast to the extremism, violence and instability of previous history.
At the time of Aix-la-Chapelle, France remained, in spite of the blood and treasure expended by and against her, the dominant Continental state. Prussia was friendly, Spain was ruled by a Bourbon, and Austria had become less of a threat. Voltaire told Frederick II of Prussia that France was like ‘a very rich man surrounded by people who, little by little, come to ruin. He buys up their property cheaply.’85 France had absorbed Roussillon, Franche-Comté, Alsace and half of Flanders; it would soon take Lorraine and Corsica. Being so much bigger and stronger, the French monarchy had not needed to change its fundamental institutions. Seen from Versailles, Britain was a growing threat, increasingly involving the world beyond Europe. But it was not the sole, or even the main, preoccupation. For most Frenchmen, Austria and the Holy Roman Empire were the hereditary enemy. Holland and, early on, Spain were almost as hateful. Realization that something significant had happened to Britain aroused both interest and disapproval. Marc Fumaroli writes that there had been since 1688 a ‘metaphysical dimension’ in the quarrel between France and Britain.86 But it needed another century to reach its climax.
ON HIS MOST CHRISTIAN MAJESTY’S SERVICE
The end of the war and the return of diplomatic relations with Britain brought Louis XV a very personal satisfaction, and his mistress Madame de Pompadour considerable relief. The secretary of the British embassy explained on 26 April 1749:
His Majesty it seems has an utter aversion to his Mistresses bearing Children . . . this your Royal Highness will allow is a Circumstance of a very delicate nature, for a Lady to manage with any dexterity, especially as His Majesty is thought to have a great affection for her Person; in spite of all her Care and precautions, she was not long since alarm’d, with terrible apprehensions of her being pregnant, and His Majesty was said to be much disconcerted about it . . . I had a Commission given me about the same time . . . to procure from England, as it is not a manufacture of this Country, 300 or more, of those preventive machines, made use of by the Gallant tho’ prudent young Gentlemen of this age; I was desired for fear of search or seizure as Counterband, to have them directed for H.M.C.M., and I expect them with great impatience, tho’ my merchant was startled at the quantity, and begg’d a few days extraordinary to provide them; I am almost tempted to ask an exclusive priviledge for the importing of them into France, and think it would be a very genteel way of raising a fortune.87
The jocular term redingote anglaise – ‘English riding coat’ – was used later in the century (among others, by Casanova), and was succeeded in the nineteenth by capote anglaise (with a similar literal meaning), which remains in common use.
MONEY:
Waging War with Gold
The Wars of these times are rather to be Waged with gold than with Iron.
WILLIAM PATERSON, founder of the Bank of England88
He who has the longest purse will wear the longest sword.
The Monitor, 6 September 176589
Between 1688 and 1815 Britain stood up to France – a country with twice its territory, twice its Gross National Product even in 1788, and three times its population – in six of the twelve greatest wars in history. To understand how this was possible we have to understand money. Both Britain and France were wealthy countries, with a much higher Gross Domestic Product per capita than many Third World countries today. Both spent an unprecedented amount of money on their mutual conflict. But from the early 1700s onwards, Britain managed when necessary to outspend France, devoting as much as five times the proportion of its GNP to war as its enemy.90 It could thus sustain its own armed forces (especially the navy), also counteracting French strength by hiring foreign troops (often half the manpower of ‘British’ armies) and subsidizing allies.
Pitt’s resort to the Bank of England epitomizes the relationship by which British world power was financed.
Military Expenditure
Although British peacetime expenditure was generally lower, it was always able to outspend France at times of greatest effort.
The total cost to Britain of the ‘hundred years war’ was well over £2,000 million, in eighteenth-century prices.91 To put such sums in perspective, the total annual national income of England in the 1680s has been estimated at £60 million, and the Gross National Income of Great Britain in the 1810s as £300 million.2 The annual revenue of the British Crown, £4 million in the 1680s, had risen to £8 million by 1760; and to £16 million by 1795. The revenue of the French Crown was similarly ratcheted up: in 1726, it was 181 million livres (£7.9 million), and in 1788, 471 million (£20 million). Both countries were spending around three-quarters of state revenue directly or indirectly on war. Astonished observers at home and abroad repeatedly warned that the financial strain, and particularly the growth in debt, was unsustainable and would lead to disaster. It did: in both America and France (which defaulted on its public debt six times in seventy years) it provoked revolution.
Britain: ‘Breaking windows with guineas’92
Revenue is the chief occupation of the State. Nay, more, it is the State.
EDMUND BURKE93
Britain fought France from 1689 to 1815 by raising taxes by 1,600 per cent and increasing borrowing by 24,000 per cent.94 Taxes rose fast. During the Nine Years War they doubled, and by the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, tax as a proportion of national income had nearly tripled since 1688.95 Over the whole period of the ‘hundred years war’, taxation rose five times faster than economic growth. Tax was always a source of furious debate, periodic riot, and constant evasion, especially through smuggling. As Burke put it, ‘To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.’ Yet political problems within Britain itself were manageable. The historic result was not mass revolt (though riots were not infrequent) but rather total dependence of the Crown on Parliament. Parliamentary consent and supervision legitimized taxation. England was a single political, legal and administrative unit, so no regional or corporate tax privileges existed, unlike in most of Europe. Consequently, it was broadly accepted that taxes were fair and honest. When wars seemed to be a response to the French or Spanish threat, or when they seemed to be in the national interest – defending or expanding colonial possessions and trade – their cost was accepted as necessary and even beneficial, and the level of compliance was ‘remarkable’, especially by comparison with France and other states.96
Up to 1713 the main source of revenue was land tax, which reached 20 per cent of income. This was subsequently overtaken by a range of excise duties – on drink, tobacco, tea, glass, legal documents, hair powder, playing cards, even bachelors – collected by a professional bureaucracy with sweeping powers. These duties were far from popular. The wit Sidney Smith famously denounced a system which meant that ‘the dying Englishman, pouring his medicine, which has paid 7 per cent, into a spoon which has paid 15 per cent, flings himself back upon his chintz bed, which has paid 22 per cent, and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a licence of a hundred pounds’. Yet indirect taxation was relatively stealthy. Moreover, Parliament was equitable and prudent enough to put a large part of the burden on the relatively wealthy. It did not tax food (though it did beer – the biggest single yielder), and it spared the Celtic fringe. Growth in the economy, especially in overseas trade and manufactured goods, made customs and excise more bearable and easier to collect. A national system of poor relief, by far the most extensive in Europe, cushioned the most vulnerable. Despite the baroque stories of exploitation and incompetence that colour popular views of the eighteenth century, the reality is that taxpayers were relatively law-abiding, the revenue system efficient, and state administration cheap and ‘remarkably uncorrupt’.97
Tax revenue, however, could never meet wartime surges in expenditure: governments had to borrow to meet roughly three-quarters of the cost.98 The public debt went from £3 million in the 1680s to £ 100 million in 1760, £300 million in 1796, and £745 million by 1815. By 1715 half of tax revenue went to paying the interest, and by 1815, 60 per cent. This required a more sophisticated financial system than ever before, by which short-term liabilities – in effect, IOUs from government departments – were replaced by long-term, low-interest bonds. During the 1690s, ministers, MPs, and businessmen studied Dutch and Venetian methods. Experiments, and mistakes, were made with lotteries and life annuities, appealing to the public’s taste for a flutter and a nest-egg. In 1694, William Paterson, a ‘persistent Scot’,99 and an Englishman, Michael Godfrey, had their plans for a Bank of England (modelled on the Bank of Amsterdam) approved by Parliament: an event of truly historic importance. Immediately, in 1695, the Bank proved its worth by saving the government from a collapse of its credit, and enabled it to keep paying for the war until peace came two years later. Not only did it lend the government money, it also became the mainstay and regulator of England’s whole financial structure. Financing war against France transformed the City, through the sale of permanent, interest-bearing government bonds. Parliamentary control was the indispensable underpinning of credit. It made default unlikely (not least because many MPs were bondholders), and it voted the taxation necessary to cover regular interest payments. As confidence grew, the rate of interest the government had to pay fell from 14 per cent in 1693 to 3 per cent in 1731.100 Though there were crises and scares throughout the period, Britain, in the Duke of Newcastle’s words, would never default ‘as long as land lasts and beer is drunk’.101 The combination of the House of Commons and the City of London was to create a world power.
In spite of endless pessimistic predictions, Britain was not bled dry by the effort: on the contrary. Investment in tax-free government stock, which could be freely traded, provided a secure means of saving. The growth of government borrowing, and the financial institutions servicing it, stimulated financial modernization. The City grew into the world’s financial centre, and three centuries later remained the bedrock of the British economy, described in 2005 as the greatest concentration of brain and computing power on the planet. The wars against France and its main ally Spain permitted Britain to gain the lion’s share of Europe’s trade with the outside world, for which the City provided credit and insurance. This trade became the dynamo of the Industrial Revolution (below, page 145). After Waterloo the British had by far the highest per capita income in Europe, some 30 per cent higher than the French. As with the United States in the twentieth century, war paid.
BLOWING BUBBLES
[Law] pretended he will set France higher than ever she was before, and put her in a condition to give the law to all Europe; that he can ruin the trade and credit of England and Holland whenever he pleases; that he can break our bank whenever he has a mind, and our East India Company.
EARL OF STAIR, British ambassador, 1719102
John Law of Lauriston was a professional gambler and an economic visionary. Faro and Lansquenet were his specialities – simple games requiring memory, mental arithmetic and nerve. Forced to flee from London in 1701 after a questionable duel, he travelled the Continent and settled in Paris, where his card-playing prowess opened aristocratic doors. He convinced the Regent that he had a ‘system’ to solve France’s debt problem. The recent wars had burdened France and Britain with unprecedented liabilities. Louis XIV had left 600 million livres in short-term debts, and 2 billion in long term; and the treasury was bare. It was generally believed that these debts would cause disaster, and make it impossible to wage war. Whichever country could reduce them would gain a political and strategic advantage. Law’s suggestion was more subtle than the usual French expedients of locking up creditors and refusing to pay, which though effective made future loans problematic. Instead, in 1716 he founded a bank able to emit paper currency like the Bank of England – the Banque Générale – and in 1717 an overseas trading company – the Compagnie d’Occident – whose mouth-watering prospects would induce Crown creditors to exchange their bonds for shares, thus privatizing the public debt and stimulating the whole economy. He also organized an unprecedented effort to entice skilled British workers to France.
Success depended on producing a tempting rise in the Compagnie’s share price, which duly occurred, and fed off itself as the public scrambled to buy. The government allowed Law to take over the Compagnie des Indes, awarded his bank the right to collect taxes, and enforced the use of its currency notes. In short, Law now headed a huge privatized agency monopolizing State finance and overseas trade. He became one of the greatest men in France, controller-general of finance, and owner of several estates and property in Paris, including one-third of the opulent Place Vendôme, where he lived. A new word, millionnaire, was coined to describe the leading profiteers from his ‘system’.
In England, Law’s exploits aroused envy and alarm: France seemed to be reducing its debts, and would be able to start another war while Britain languished. So Law’s scheme was copied. The South Sea Company, set up to benefit from the concessions won in the Treaty of Utrecht to supply slaves and goods to South America, began in 1719 to encourage state creditors to exchange government debt for shares. In London, as in Paris, the scheme worked wonderfully, the share price rose by 700 per cent in six months, and 85 per cent of the public debt was privatized.
The Paris and London companies were both competing for the same international speculative capital. Their trading prospects were equally inadequate to support their paper value. Things began to unravel early in 1720, when sensible Dutch investors began to sell. Law struggled to keep his share price rising, falsifying profit forecasts, printing more money, and buying back shares. This postponed disaster, but made it all the more spectacular when it came in the summer. Furious mobs of dowagers and ex-millionaires stormed Law’s offices in the Rue Quincampoix. He narrowly escaped as his carriage was smashed to pieces. Simultaneously, the South Sea Company’s shares crashed in London amid general panic. Suicides rose 40 per cent. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was sent to the Tower of London, and Law’s business partners to the Bastille.
The consequences of the crashes were both less and more than might appear. Finance and the economy were not devastated in either country. Sir Robert Walpole in England and the Regent in France were able, in very different ways, to restore financial calm. Both governments had greatly reduced their debts at the expense of gullible investors – one reason why ministers protected Law and permitted him to escape from France. His family subsequently became members of the French nobility. In both countries, the financial establishment went back to business. But there was a crucial difference: in London the Bank of England emerged strengthened, as it took over and salvaged the South Sea Company. This was the City’s first ‘big bang’, and regulation was introduced to make investment safer. Consequently, English public finance became ‘more honest, as well as more efficient, than that of any other country in Europe’.103 But in France, the idea of a state bank was discredited for generations, paper money was rejected, and financial modernization halted. It seemed obvious that an absolutist monarchy would always cheat. Silver and gold became perennially short, as people hoarded coins: France became literally a country of hidden treasure, even into the twentieth century. The crash ruined the French credit market ‘for at least a century’.104 The Crown resumed the crude old methods of absolutism, repudiating hundreds of millions of livres of debts. The dominance of the financiers (a hybrid species of businessman, civil servant and courtier, who purchased their offices) and their complex and cumbersome methods was restored. France’s military effort was handicapped, as was its economic growth. The monarchy itself was in the long run undermined. So John Law occupies a special place in Franco-British history.
France: The Insolvent Landlord
How is it that, of two landowners, one having 10,000 a year in income, and the other more than 40,000, the former, who has more debts, can raise more cash?
HENRI-LEONARD BERTIN, controller-general of finance, I759105
French officials such as Bertin and independent commentators too were ‘stupefied’ and ‘obsessed’ by British financial power.106 They considered it a conjuring trick by which wealth was produced on paper without any real backing, such as land or gold. They hoped to find a way of exposing the deception, and bringing the whole structure of British power tumbling down.
French state finance was marked by complexity and inequality.107 The tax system, an accretion of personal and property taxes and duties, was riddled with the entrenched historical privileges of provinces and corporations. Taxes were badly assessed, with no regard for ability to pay, and were impossible to collect in full. Evasion was blatant by rich and poor alike. France’s richest individual, the Duc d’Orléans, announced that he ‘always arrange[d] things’ with the relevant official.108 Prosperous tenant farmers pretended to be labourers. Thousands of the poor fought a guerrilla war with revenue men to smuggle duty-free salt. The system was so complex, according to the banker and royal minister Necker, that only one or two men in each generation understood it. Consequently, despite the myth of a nation groaning under the burden, France was under-taxed: when the revolution broke out in 1789, levels were one-third those in Britain. But mistrust of a system seen as unjust and unaccountable meant that raising rates or improving efficiency was always politically fraught. Open political conflict over taxation began in the 1750s, owing to the costs of the Seven Years War, and continued spasmodically until the fall ofthe monarchy.
Crown revenues were managed by the financiers, who collected taxes on behalf of the Crown (as farmers-general and receivers-general), managed budgets (as treasurers of various ministries and regions) and provided loans. Their profits came from commission, from investing money belonging to the State in private business activities, and by making high-interest advances to the Crown on the security of future tax revenue. This often amounted to lending the king his own money. When the Crown was desperate for gold and silver in wartime, their position was strong. Afterwards, ministers traditionally tried to redress the balance by arresting large creditors, accusing them of fraud, imposing huge fines backed up by the galleys and the pillory, or simply by repudiating or writing down what they owed, as they did 1759, 1760 and 1770. This meant that future loans carried a sizeable risk premium. The French Crown in the 1780s had to pay double the interest paid by the British109 – in other words, could raise only half the amount of money for an equivalent cost.
The opacity of the system was a source of power for insiders who could navigate the labyrinth, find sources of credit and make themselves indispensable. Financial dynasties such as that of the four Pâris brothers, who rose from humble origins, or the Crozat family, were admired and resented. Proof of their opulence and ambition is still visible in their great chateaux with huge English-style parks, and their Paris mansions. The Elysée Palace was built by Antoine Crozat for one of his daughters. They were patrons of music, literature and science. Crozat built up one of the world’s greatest private art collections – over 400 paintings and 19,000 drawings. There were few comparable profiteers in eighteenth-century Britain.
The financiers had to be powerful at court as the friends, paymasters and even fathers-in-law of princes, courtiers and politicians. Crozat married one of his granddaughters to the Comte (later Duc) de Choiseul, Louis XV’s ablest minister, who in turn arranged a series of marriages between French and Habsburg financiers. A succession of Louis XV’s mistresses had their expenses generously paid by the Pâris brothers. In 1745, they provided the king with a new lover: a woman of intelligence and refinement who could get inside the king’s head as well as his bed. Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson was the daughter of one of the Pâris’ junior employees and god-daughter of one of the brothers – perhaps, indeed, his own illegitimate child.110 She was married off to one of their gentlemanly hangers-on to provide respectability, educated, dressed and, aged twenty-four, carefully introduced to the king at a masked ball. He took the bait, and she became the Marquise de Pompadour, her estate and title bought with Pâris money. She was the lynchpin of a financial-military-sexual complex that dominated politics for nineteen years, including the period of the Seven Years War. Her principal successor as royal mistress, the Comtesse du Barry, had connections with contractors to the navy. To put it mildly, such a system was not easy to reform: too many important people profited. It took the revolution, which guillotined twenty-eight of the great financiers, to change it.111
Moreover, it worked, in a way. Contracting out revenue collection (for example to the notorious farmers-general or to local authorities) saved Versailles a huge administrative burden, and the many privileged bodies (the Church, the provinces, the cities and thefinanciers themselves) could be politely forced to provide loans and extra contributions. However, global wars created unprecedented demands. In 1759 and 1770 traditional remedies were applied: defaulting on payments and forcibly reducing interest. But the need for money forced the Crown to look beyond domestic sources to the bankers of Amsterdam, Geneva, Germany and even (clandestinely) London. These could not be bullied in the usual way, and to default on such debts would be disastrous. Given France’s record, lenders demanded a sizeable risk premium. Even then, the prudent treasurers of the wealthy German cities avoided French loans ‘like the plague’, though they eagerly bought British bonds. So Versailles – whether by necessity or ineptitude is unclear – was reduced to very expensive expedients. It sold life annuities – presumably it was attracted by the idea of the debt automatically dying out. But astute Genevan bankers invested hundreds of millions in the names of carefully selected girls as young as four, who were given special medical supervision. France was still paying out vast sums during the revolution, and – had the system not collapsed – would have paid 400–500 per cent in total interest well into the nineteenth century.112
By the 1780s, the Bourbon monarchy had reached a financial impasse. It had to pay more for its loans than Britain because it did not inspire trust, and yet it had lost the authority and self-confidence to default on them. Indeed, Louis XVI on his accession had vowed not to do so. The budget was in deficit, largely because of interest payments on war debt. The Crown could not raise taxes without arousing angry political resistance. The implications were urgent and fundamental.”113 Who was responsible for state debt? Should it be repudiated (devasting lenders) or honoured (burdening taxpayers)? Would repudiation strengthen or weaken France in relation to Britain? Would it cause civil and foreign conflict? Did a solution require despotic authority or greater accountability, perhaps with elected assemblies on British or American lines? Who had the right to raise taxes? Who represented the nation? The cost of the struggle against Britain thus created formidable political and ideological problems, which as we shall see in Chapter 4, ended in revolution. In the words of one politician, ‘We only made the revolution to become masters of taxation.’”114
1 ‘Whigs’ were those, often wealthy nobles, who had opposed the Stuarts, welcomed the Glorious Revolution, and supported William and his Protestant successors. ‘Tories’, often smaller gentry, retained at least some loyalty to the Stuarts, were pillars of the Anglican establishment, and resented the Whig oligarchy and its expensive policies.
2 There is no easy way of translating eighteenth-century into twenty-first-century prices, as commodities move at different rates, and patterns of consumption change. To have a feel for eighteenth-century prices in modern terms therefore means multiplying them by a range of figures: from 50 (roughly the increase in the sterling price of gold since the early eighteenth century) to 300–400 (for basic commodities), up to 500–1,000 (for rents and incomes). Exchange rates were stable. The pound sterling – 20 shillings (20s), each of 12 pence (12d) – was worth approximately 23 livres tournois from the late 1720s until the collapse of the French currency early in the revolution. The metric franc germinal (of 1795) returned to near the pre-revolutionary rate: 24 to the pound, which was maintained until the First World War.