The King Over the Water

A Complete History of the Jacobites

Desmond Seward

• Publisher: Birlinn
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781788853071
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia britannica

"An engaging look at the violent struggle of the surprisingly diverse Jacobites... Swift and cinematic with neatly sketched character portraits." — Financial Times This is the first modern history for general readers of the entire Jacobite movement in Scotland, England and Ireland, from the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688 that drove James II into exile to the death of his grandson, Cardinal Henry, Duke of York, in 1807. The Battle of Culloden and Bonnie Prince Charlie's flight through the heather are well known, but not the other risings and plots that involved half of Europe and even revolutionary America. Based on the latest research, The King over the Water weaves together all the strands of this gripping saga into a vivid, sweeping narrative, full of insight, analysis and anecdote. "Few causes have aroused a more gallant response from the peoples of these islands than the Honest Cause, " writes Desmond Seward, "whether they were fighting for it at Killiecrankie, Prestonpans or Culloden, at the Boyne, Aughrim or Fontenoy, or dying for it on the scaffold." "Highly readable, with brilliantly rendered characters, and thrilling tales of deceit and espionage."— Military History Monthly "A bracingly revisionist history." — Telegraph "Seward's detailed descriptions of the Princes, Princesses, Kings, and Queens create a sense of theatre and allow the reader to fully immerse themselves into the dramatic events of the period... an engaging and easy read." — Scottish Field "A rollickingly, splendidly chronological history." – Herald "Seward's clear-sighted examination of the Jacobite movement shows how close it came to succeeding." — Scotsman "This lively book is a welcome addition." — BBC History

PART ONE

James II – The Lost Throne

1

James, Duke of York – Heir to the Throne?

This is the heir; come let us kill him, and seize on his inheritance.

Matthew, xxi:33

History is full of wicked uncles who rob a nephew of his inheritance. Wicked nephews are rarer. The outstanding example is William, Prince of Orange, who stole the crown of Great Britain from his mother’s brother, King James II – not only his uncle but his father-in-law.

Early in autumn 1677 Princess Mary, elder daughter of James, Duke of York, who was the heir to the throne, burst into tears when told she must marry her cousin William. She cried until bedtime and all next day. Fifteen years old, her only education other than embroidery had been to play the spinet, apart from reading her Bible and that pious work The Whole Duty of Man. Although brought up as a Protestant by command of her uncle Charles II, she did not want to leave her Catholic father and stepmother.

Twelve years older than Mary, four our inches shorter, skeletal, roundshouldered, eagle-nosed and racked by asthma, William seldom spoke and rarely smiled. Even Bishop Burnet, who admired him, deplored his coldness and reserve. Despite a Stuart mother, his English was poor, and he spoke with a thick Dutch accent. Nevertheless, the marriage took place in November.

Three years before, the French ambassador had told Mary’s father to fear such a marriage as he feared death – warning that the Prince of Orange would one day become England’s idol and take away his crown. When that day came, James quoted a line from the Bible: ‘I repent that I gave my daughter to him for he sought to slay me.’¹

Protestant inheritance, Catholic heir

As a boy James had been imprisoned by Parliament, escaping just before the execution of his father Charles I in 1649. In exile, service with the French army under the great Marshal Turenne taught him to think in terms of military discipline for the rest of his life. He took part in the savage skirmishes in and around Paris that crushed the Fronde – France’s last challenge to absolutism before the Revolution.

Soon after the Restoration, in 1660, he married Anne Hyde, the daughter of his brother Charles II’s chief minister, the Earl of Clarendon, by whom he had two children – Mary, who married the Prince of Orange, and Anne, who married Prince George of Denmark. Two years after the death of his first wife in 1671, he took a new one, Mary of Modena.

In 1676 he became a Catholic, but in secret. Four years later, however, he told his friend George Legge that he could no longer hide his religion and had resolved by God’s grace never to do so damnable a thing. If helpful in the next world, such firmness would be a handicap in this one.

His conversion was greeted with a horror that found expression in the Popish Plot of 1678. This was an imaginary conspiracy invented by Titus Oates who claimed that, bankrolled by Spain, the Pope and the Jesuits were about to invade England, kill King Charles and every Protestant, and put James on the throne. Forty innocent Catholics went to the scaffold. During what became known as ‘the Exclusion Crisis’ of 1679–81, the Whigs, who used the plot to dominate the House of Commons, passed a bill to stop James from succeeding his brother. If he became king, ‘a total change of religion within these kingdoms would ensue’.

Seventeenth-century England’s fear of Catholicism cannot be exaggerated – the nearest modern parallel is Islamophobia. On 5 November, ‘Gunpowder Treason Day’, parsons thanked God for saving ‘our Church and State from the secret contrivances and hellish malice of Popish Conspirators’. The recent Fire of London was supposedly among the contrivances, while people still shuddered at the memory of the fires of Smithfield lit by Bloody Mary, terrifyingly recalled in Foxe’s Booke of Martyrs, or at how Irish Catholics had massacred Protestants in 1641. It was easy for them to believe that there really had been a Popish Plot.

Catholics formed two per cent of the population at most (if 25 per cent in some areas of Lancashire), but included a fifth of the peerage and a tenth of the gentry, which made them seem more numerous than they really were. These ‘recusants’ kept secret chapels in their manor houses – the only places other than embassies where Mass could be heard – insisting on their tenants and servants being Catholics too. A tenant farmer or kitchen maid with a grudge might ruin them by reporting the presence of a chaplain. They also ran a highly efficient network for smuggling priests into the country and moving them from one safe house to another, and for sending children to be educated abroad.

Despite the dread of Catholics, eventually their more level-headed fellow countrymen saw through Titus Oates’s lies, realising that the Popish Plot had never existed. The Tories (as they were starting to be known) grew alarmed by Whig ambitions, and the Lords threw out the Exclusion Bill. Once again James was heir to the throne.

In his portraits, James’s hatchet-face with its lantern jaw is stiff and humourless. So was the man. Yet his arch-critic Gilbert Burnet thought him truthful, loyal and fair minded, if ‘bred with strange notions of the obedience due to princes’.² He inspired respect among many who met him. ‘I do affirm he was the most honest and sincere man I ever knew, a great and good Englishman’, wrote the Earl of Ailesbury, one of his gentlemen in waiting.³ The diarist John Evelyn agreed, declaring he was somebody on whose word you could rely, while Samuel Pepys, who worked with James at the Admiralty, always remained a devoted supporter.

Frequently harsh, James did have a kindly side. When he became king, learning that the dramatist William Wycherley had spent seven years in a debtor’s prison, he paid Wycherley’s debts and gave him a pension of £200 because he had so much enjoyed his play The Plain Dealer.

James’s second wife, Mary of Modena, fifteen years old when they married, was a great beauty, with dark Italian eyes, jet black hair and a shapely figure, who, despite shedding tears on first seeing him, grew to love him deeply. High-spirited, intelligent, fluent in English, French and Latin, she developed into a Catholic of the narrow sort, beloved by Papists but loathed by Protestants.

Mary’s devotion to James was surprising since he was unfaithful. During his first marriage he had had two sons by the pale, sharp-witted Arabella Churchill, the elder of whom was created Duke of Berwick. In 1680 Catherine Sedley, even plainer and notable only for a wit as savage as Nell Gwynne’s and making her lover feel sinful’, became his main mistress. James’s brother laughed that his women were so ugly that the priests must have given them to him as a penance. To be fair, someone who saw Arabella’s legs when she fell off her horse could not believe that ‘such exquisite limbs’ belonged to Miss Churchill’s face.

James’s other amusement was horses and hounds. Pursuing the fox instead of the hare, he enjoyed hard riding as much as hound work and pioneered English fox hunting. When in London he went to the theatre, but without the same enthusiasm as his brother.

A Tory Church of England

During Charles II’s last years, when the Whigs were a broken faction, the old Cavalier party or Tories (which meant most landed gentry and Anglican clergy) rallied to James as heir to the throne. They saw him as a bulwark against another Civil War and, despite his Catholicism, as a defender of their Church.

An attractive form of Christianity, with its dignified liturgy, scholar divines and parson poets, a shared persecution during the Civil War and the Interregnum had endeared the Church of England to the Cavalier gentry, who had sheltered its priests, heard its outlawed services and taken its Sacrament at their manor houses behind locked doors. At the Restoration in 1660, ‘Church and King’ had become every Tory squire’s slogan.

The Church of England presided over the nation’s faith and morals. As most academics, schoolmasters and tutors were Churchmen, it largely shaped public opinion, with even the humblest parson’s sermon making an impact since everybody was bound by law to attend their parish church on Sunday. In its modest way it was almost as intolerant as the Church of Rome, loathing the Dissenters who had harried it during the Interregnum (that period of Republican rule between Charles I and II), seeing Quakers as lunatics and Papists as tools of the devil. Furthermore, a ‘Test Act’ proscribed that no non-Anglican could hold municipal office or become a Justice of the Peace unless he had taken Communion in his parish church, with the result that local government was monopolised by the Tory gentry.

Significantly the Anglican clergy had developed a cult of the Stuarts, commemorating the anniversary of His Sacred Majesty Charles I’s martyrdom. Some, it was said, spoke less in their sermons about Jesus Christ than they did about the Royal Martyr. They preached ‘passive obedience’ – that disobedience to a king could never be justified under any circumstances. Whosoever wore the crown was holy. As ‘The Vicar of Bray’ recalls,

Unto my Flock I daily Preach’d,

Kings are by God appointed,

And Damn’d are those who dare resist,

Or touch the Lord’s Anointed.

Not only parsons thought like this. So did Tory squires, sons of the Cavaliers, who, even when questioning royal policy, regarded the monarchy as an inviolable inheritance bestowed by God.

2

King James II and VII, 1685–1688

When Royal James possest the Crown

And Popery grew in fashion

‘The Vicar of Bray’

James became king following the death of his brother, Charles II, in February 1685, and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 23 April by Archbishop Sancroft of Canterbury, swearing to defend the Church of England though declining to take Communion. The coronation service was magnificent, with noble music that included anthems by Blow and Purcell. But there were ill omens. Too big, the crown slipped down over the king’s face and the canopy borne above him collapsed. Even so, both Houses of Parliament seemed devoted to their new sovereign. A thanksgiving service was added to the Book of Common Prayer for ‘the day when His Majesty began his happy reign’.

Two failed rebellions

In April, the Earl of Argyll, who had been sentenced to death in 1681 for treason but had escaped, returned to Scotland and tried to raise a rebellion with a few hundred men, sending round the ‘fiery cross’ (a burning cross at the sight of which clansmen were supposed to make ready for war). He did not deign to say whom he wanted as king, merely flying a banner inscribed ‘No Popery’. Few joined him, not even Cameronian fanatics (Scottish Covenantors who followed the teachings of the Presbyterian Richard Cameron). His rising was speedily crushed and on 30 June 1685 at Edinburgh’s Mercat Cross he died face upward beneath the ‘maiden’ – a Scottish forerunner of the guillotine.

Argyll had intended his rising to coincide with a rebellion by James, Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s natural son. A glamorous if shallow figure, whom at one time some had hoped might become king, Monmouth landed at Lyme Regis on 11 June to raise a force of West Country peasants. Declaring that he had a better right to the crown, he called his uncle James a usurper and accused him of planning to destroy Protestantism, poisoning King Charles and starting the Fire of London.

England rallied to James, however, and the duke’s motley army was cut to pieces by Lord Churchill at Sedgemoor on 6 July. The duke himself was swiftly caught, tried, condemned and beheaded....