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IT WAS INEVITABLE THAT Mary’s father and husband would end up on opposite sides of the political and religious divide and, when it came to it, there was no question which side Mary, the loyal and malleable wife, would choose. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 could not have taken place as smoothly and bloodlessly as it did without her compliance, but the ousting of her father meant that she was castigated as an unnatural daughter.
When Charles II died in 1685, James II succeeded peacefully, against all the odds. With his accession, Mary, as the elder of his two surviving children, became heiress presumptive to the three kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland, and she was served at table on bended knee. This was a privilege that came automatically. Where it was in his power to do more, as he should have done, James did nothing. He gave Mary no extra allowance and sent her no jewels or gifts in recognition of her new dignity. Indeed, Mary’s dowry had never been fully paid and she had a mere £4,000 a year for her own spending money. Out of this, she would ask Frances Apsley, now Lady Bathurst, to buy her the latest fashions in London, although as the leader of society in The Hague she was careful not to ‘bring up such a fashion heer which the purses could not bear’. She gave generously to charity, not least to the thousands of Huguenot refugees fleeing religious persecution and terrible cruelties in Louis XIV’s France.
Paranoid about William’s intentions, James always maintained that he could not be sure that any money he sent for his daughter would not be used against him. After all, had not her husband plotted with the Duke of Monmouth to usurp the crown? It was not true, but James stubbornly clung to the notion of his two Protestant nephews conspiring against him, until Monmouth’s rebellion gave James the chance to end his troublesome life. Mary was not a greedy or acquisitive person, but her father’s meanness, neglecting to give her some token of her new status, must have saddened her.
James had gradually alienated her affections in other ways. He tried to break up her marriage by encouraging English members of her household to spy on William’s nocturnal activities and apprise Mary of his supposed affair with Elizabeth Villiers. Confronted by Mary as he emerged from Elizabeth’s room in the early hours, William hotly denied that anything improper had transpired; it is just possible that the clever and witty Elizabeth, very much in demand on the diplomatic social circuit at The Hague, was an agent for William, and their late-night trysts were debriefing sessions rather than sexual encounters. Wanting to believe him, a weeping Mary threw her arms round her husband and begged his forgiveness. Her malicious, gossiping staff, including her old nurse Mrs Langford, were sent back to England in disgrace.
When Louis XIV took possession of William’s principality of Orange, torturing and killing the Huguenots who had taken refuge there, Mary turned to her father for help. His protests to the French were half-hearted and he excused himself by saying it was not a matter worth going to war over. ‘The only thing I ever asked the King, my father, to do was to use his influence with the King of France to prevent the seizure of the Principality of Orange,’ she recalled sadly. ‘But my father preferred to join with the King of France against my husband.’
Hitherto, Mary had not interfered in politics, but now she began to take an interest. Above all, she was concerned for the Anglican Church in the face of her father’s evident determination to undermine it. She protested to James when Henry Compton, Bishop of London, was brought before the hated Ecclesiastical Commission and suspended when he refused to dismiss Dr Sharp for preaching an anti-Catholic sermon. James rebuked her for meddling in such matters. William and Mary were in favour of religious toleration and, therefore, of the suspension of the penal laws against Catholics and Dissenters. But they could never approve James’s wish to abolish the Test Act, which deprived from office anyone not of the Anglican faith, as they felt it guaranteed the supremacy of the Established Church. When James misused his prerogative and arrested seven bishops for refusing to read his Declaration of Indulgence from the pulpit, Mary had her chaplain write to the Archbishop of Canterbury to express her sympathy, assuring him that she could never condone illegal actions of this kind, since they devalued the monarchy.
James hoped to convert one or both of his daughters to the Catholic faith. Mary promised to read some of the books he sent her, together with the devotional papers of Charles II and her mother. ‘I have found nothing in all this reading but an effort to seduce feeble spirits,’ she wrote, ‘no solid reasoning, and nothing that could disturb me the least in the world, so much that the more I hear of this religion the more pleased I am with my own, and more and more thanks I have to render to my God for His mercy in preserving me in His true faith.’
Gilbert Burnet, a Scottish clergyman who had taken refuge at William and Mary’s court when James came to the throne, read Mary’s responses to her father. ‘It gave me an astonishing joy to see so young a person all of the sudden, without consulting any one person, to be able to write so solid and learned a letter, in which she mixed with the respect that she paid a father so great a firmness, that by it she cut off all further treaty,’ he wrote. ‘And her repulsing the attack, that the King made upon her, with so much resolution and force, did let the popish party see, that she understood her religion as well as she loved it.’
William had always encouraged his wife to play a subservient, frivolous role. He did not invite her to discuss weighty affairs with him, perhaps taking her gay chatter at face value. Burnet was the first to recognize that she possessed a formidable intelligence and he could not praise her too highly. Burnet claims to have raised a matter with Mary that William had never been able to bring himself to discuss with her in all the years of their marriage. Whether Burnet had the audacity to do this of his own volition, was prompted to do so by William whose ambitions it served, or just invented the scene when writing his History of His Own Time after the Revolution to put himself in a good light, is a moot point.
He asked Mary what her intentions towards her husband were when she became Queen. Mary did not understand. Burnet explained that as queen regnant she would have the superior role, while William would merely be her consort. Since he knew their marriage had been ‘a little embroiled’ of late, owing to the Elizabeth Villiers business, he had the temerity to suggest that she should have the real authority vested in her husband, while she should be content to play the lesser role.
It is hard to believe that Mary was so ignorant of English royal custom, but, according to Burnet, the next day she asked him to be present at a meeting with William. She stated that ‘she did not know that the laws of England were so contrary to the laws of God, as I had informed her: she did not think that the husband was ever to be obedient to the wife: she promised him he should always bear rule; and she asked only, that he would obey the command of “husbands love your wives”, as she should do that, “wives be obedient to your husbands in all things.”’ True or not, the incident perfectly describes the role Mary was to embrace in the dual monarchy with William.
Any thoughts of Mary inheriting her father’s crown were thrown into jeopardy by the announcement of Queen Mary Beatrice’s pregnancy, which, coming so many years after her other pregnancies, seems to have taken everyone by surprise. Mary’s initial response to the news was pleasure. There is no evidence to suppose that she was annoyed because a brother would oust her from the succession. ‘I rendered thanks to God that this news did not trouble me in any fashion,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘God having given me a contented spirit and no ambition but to serve my Creator and conserve my honour without stain.’
Mary had no wish to leave her adopted country, where she was loved and happy. She knew that she had a far better life as Princess of Orange than she would as Queen of England. ‘This it has pleased the Lord to make of me contents me and, in the state where I am, I am better able to serve Him than I should have been in a post more eminent.’ All members of the King’s family should rejoice in the fact that he might have a son, she wrote, except that ‘one cannot do so without being necessarily alarmed by the thought of a papist successor.’
If Mary did not want the crown for herself, she recognized that she should feel obliged to want it to please the Prince and to protect her beloved Church of England. ‘Besides the interest of the Church,’ she wrote, ‘the love that I have for the Prince made me wish him all that he merits, and though I regret not to have more than three crowns to bring him it is not my love that blinds me; no, I can see his faults, but I say this because I know also his merits.’
From the evidence of her journal, Mary at first had no thoughts of discrediting the Queen’s pregnancy or of doubting its veracity. In March 1688 all that changed when she received the first of her sister Anne’s letters implying that foul play was intended. The Queen was not pregnant at all, but pretending, presumably with the intention of passing off a changeling as the heir to the throne, so stealing Mary’s birthright and perpetuating the Catholic dynasty. Anne was at pains to warn her sister and brother-in-law not to think of visiting England, implying that their lives would be in danger. Possibly Anne feared that the Princess of Orange would be able to witness for herself the true state of the Queen’s pregnancy, for surely she would permit her dear Lemon to feel her belly?
Unsure what to believe, Mary decided to place her trust in God and wait upon events. Her sister’s presence as a witness at the Queen’s confinement would surely reveal the truth. What Mary probably did not appreciate was that there was a concerted Protestant plot to discredit the pregnancy and throw doubt on the child’s legitimacy from the first and that her sister Anne was very much part of this plot. Throughout her life Anne gave or withheld her presence to great political effect, so that well before her stepmother went into labour Anne had purposefully left for Bath, too far from London to return in time. The truth, however, was important to Mary. Exasperated by her sister’s absence, she compiled an extensive questionnaire for Anne to complete with the details of the birth gleaned from those who had been there. Naturally, Anne’s vague, biased and muddled answers did nothing to assure Mary that the new Prince was indeed her brother.
Three weeks after the birth of James Francis Edward, Prince of Wales, on 10 June 1688, seven prominent Englishmen sent an invitation to the Prince of Orange, inviting him to England to restore liberty and the rule of law. In the letter, they reprimanded him for his public recognition of the Prince. William had gone through the proper formalities, ordering prayers to be said for the child in the Princess’s chapel and sending his cousin, Count Zuylestein, to the English court, ostensibly to offer congratulations, but, more pertinently, to report to William on the state of affairs.
‘We must presume to inform Your Highness, that your compliment on the birth of the child (which not one in a thousand here believes to be the Queen’s) hath done you some injury,’ the seven conspirators wrote. They advised him that this ‘false imposing’ of a fictitious heir, to the injury of the Princess Mary and the nation, must be listed in William’s forthcoming manifesto as one of the chief causes of his ‘entering the kingdom in a hostile manner’.
It is unlikely that William had entertained any idea of armed intervention in England until the pregnancy of the Queen was announced on Christmas Eve, 1687. Now revolution became a real possibility, as Protestant Englishmen looked into the abyss and saw James’s regime perpetuated as a Catholic tyranny on the French model. Whether William believed the hoax theory or not, he could not stand by any longer and watch Mary’s inheritance put in jeopardy. If James were allowed to continue, he would destroy the monarchy. England might even swing back to a republic. Only by having his own hand on the tiller could William bring about the Anglo-Dutch alliance Europe so desperately needed to quell the French. If the English conspirators fondly thought he would go home after he had served their purposes, William at least was never in any doubt that his goal was the crown.
For the moment, William determined to salvage what he could of Mary’s rights and to secure the best out of the situation for his own country. It remained to convince Mary of what was at stake. She had to know what was going on, because if her father were dethroned it would be in her name, as she, not William, was the heir to the throne.
Far away in the Netherlands and dependent on her sister’s reports, surrounded by James’s enemies, Mary was already inclined to believe that the Prince of Wales was a changeling. She recorded in her journal that the eventual return of Zuylestein from England ‘brought only the confirmation of the suspicions that we already had’. She seems to have been genuinely convinced that the child was not her brother, the true heir to her father’s throne. From now on, she never betrayed the slightest doubt that a dreadful ‘trickery’ had been perpetrated on her and the English people.
Queen Mary Beatrice, who had always been so good to Mary, was hurt that in her letters she had ‘never once … taken the least notice of my son, no more than if he had never been born’. James refused to believe that his daughter was acquainted with William’s plans for invasion, writing to her early in October:
This evening I had yours of the 4th, from Dieren, by which I find you were then to go to The Hague, being sent for by the Prince. I suppose it is to inform you of his design of coming to England, which he has been so long a contriving. I hope it will have been as great a surprise to you as it was to me, when I first heard it, being sure it is not in your nature to approve of so unjust an undertaking. I have been all this day so busy, to endeavour to be in some condition to defend myself from so unjust and unexpected an attempt, that I am almost tired, and so I shall say no more but that I shall always have as much kindness for you as you will give me leave to have.
On this same day, Mary heard from her stepmother:
I am much put to it what to say, at a time when nothing is talked of here but the Prince of Orange coming over with an army. This has been said a long time and believed by a great many, but I do protest to you I never did believe it till now very lately, that I have no possibility left of doubting it. The second part of this news I will never believe, that is that you are to come over with him; for I know you to be too good, that I don’t believe you could have such a thought against the worst of fathers, much less perform it against the best, that has always been kind to you, and I believe has loved you better than all the rest of his children.
Convinced that her father was the perpetrator of a Catholic conspiracy to subvert the Protestant succession, Mary had no doubt where her loyalties lay. James would have been cut to the heart had he been able to read her journal, where she admitted that she was an accessory to her husband’s intention to take her father’s crown: ‘The consideration of all this and the thought that my father was capable of a crime so horrible and that, humanly speaking, there was not any other means to save the Church and the State than that my husband should go to dethrone him by force, are the most afflicting reflections and would not be supportable without the assistance of God and a firm and unshakeable confidence in Him.’
Mary’s inner turmoil seemed to derive more from shame at her father’s perceived crime than pity for his impending downfall. As ever, she relied on God to sustain her. Careful not to betray her emotions, Mary assumed an untroubled countenance to the world, ‘for I cannot talk with liberty to anyone except to the Prince, who has seen my tears and has pitied me’.
Later, James’s supporters, the Jacobites, accused Mary of being an unnatural daughter. Her first loyalty, they claimed, should have been to her father. Disobedience to a father was deemed a fundamental breach of both natural and divine law. Mary’s violation of the fifth commandment, ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’, was to become one of the major themes of Jacobite propaganda. But this was to ignore the fact that on marriage a woman’s obedience was transferred from father to husband. Did St Paul not say, ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands as unto the Lord’?
James wrote Mary one last pathetic letter before the invasion, deepening her dilemma:
And though I know you are a good wife, and ought to be so, yet for the same reason I must believe you will be still as good a daughter to a father that has always loved you so tenderly, and that has never done the least thing to make you doubt it. I shall say no more, and believe you very uneasy all this time, for the concern you must have for a husband and a father. You shall still find me kind to you, if you desire it.
There was no question of William taking his wife with him on this dangerous venture. The evening before his departure, the couple had an emotional meeting. He advised her that in the event of his death, she should remarry. Mary was so horrified by the thought of his death that it was ‘as if someone had torn my heart out’. She refused to contemplate remarriage. ‘I assured him that I had never loved any except himself and that I should never love another; besides that, having been married so many years without it having pleased God to bless me with a child, I believed that alone sufficient to prevent me from ever thinking of this that he proposed.’
William had already made his will and the following day he addressed the States-General, thanking them for their loyalty and the support they were offering in his invasion of England. ‘What God intends for me I do not know,’ he told them, ‘but if I should fall, have a care of my beloved wife who always loved this country as her own.’
That afternoon, he and Mary dined together at Honselaersdijck for the last time and she bid him a tearful farewell. A week later, when the mighty fleet was thrown back on Dutch shores by a westerly, ‘popish’, wind, William invited her to Brill. Their meeting was short and, for Mary, the second separation was even more painful than the first. The following day she attended public prayers in the town for the success of the expedition; her husband’s enemies noted that the King of England’s daughter had publicly given her prayers and good wishes to a task force setting out to ruin him.
It was some time before William wrote to her, leaving Mary to hear of his success from others. Disconcertingly, James fled the country and weeks of wrangling followed between William and the English. There was no consensus as to what to do about the vacant throne. Mary spent Christmas and New Year alone in Holland in an agonized frame of mind. She had given up cards and dancing, ‘which had been to me one of the prettiest pleasures in the world’. Her delight at William’s success was blighted by concern for her father. She was glad to hear that he had escaped with his life. Any guilt she felt was outweighed by her steadfast belief that she was acting for God and His Church.
When William eventually summoned her, she was grieved to leave Holland, the country that had become so dear to her, where she had been happy: ‘Yet when I saw England, my native country, which long absence had made me a stranger to, I felt a secret joy, which doubtless proceeded from a natural sympathy, but that was soon checked with the consideration of my father’s misfortunes, which came immediately to mind.’ She was filled with happiness at the prospect of seeing William again, and ‘the thought that I should see my husband owned as the deliverer of my country, made me vain; but, alas, poor mortal! thought I then, from whom has he delivered it but from my father!’