Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [15]
One obvious reason for this historical amnesia is the enduring impact and lasting success of the propaganda offensive launched by William of Orange even before he left Dutch shores. Surviving documents tend to exert a strong influence over retrospective historical interpretation – they are the stuff of which narrative history and interpretation are made. It is all too easy for the reader to be drawn into agendas and interpretations intentionally made part of the original telling. In the case of the so-called Glorious Revolution that shaping influence is especially misleading. For the story of William’s Protestant invasion had been honed and edited with enormous care, fashioned in the telling with great pains, and conscientiously committed to print, before ever the fleet left its Dutch harbour.
While the invasion was still in the early planning stages, English aristocrats sympathetic to William’s cause, and corresponding regularly with his closest Dutch advisers, Willem Bentinck, Everard Weede, Heer van Dijkvelt and Frederick van Nassau, Count Zuylestein, argued that a widely distributed manifesto was vital for the success of any bid for the English throne: if he wanted to keep England ‘in humour’, William must ‘entertain it by papers’. They also provided advice and information on the content and distribution of pamphlets, and established connections with local printers and publishers. Jacobite pamphleteers attributed the ready acceptance of regime change to the Prince of Orange’s ‘debauching’ of the English people with his well-judged propaganda publications. The carefully reasoned case made in the Prince of Orange’s Declaration ‘of the reasons inducing him to appear in armes in the Kingdome of England’ – composed in the greatest secrecy, and then blanket-distributed to all those likely to be affected by the invasion – has shaped the telling of the story of the Glorious Revolution ever since.
As a piece of writing, William of Orange’s Declaration was a masterly effort in collaborative drafting on the part of the Prince, his English and Dutch advisers at The Hague, and selected members of the English expatriate community there. It originated in a series of discussions discreetly held in England in 1687, between Dijkvelt, who had been sent by William to sound out opinion concerning James II’s policies for the English succession, and a group of English aristocrats.2 The final text was produced months ahead of the campaign, during the early autumn of 1688, by Gaspar Fagel – a leading political figure in the States of Holland, and William’s chief spokesman in the Dutch government.3 It was further edited and translated into English by Gilbert Burnet, an expatriate Scottish cleric who had become close confidant and adviser to William and Mary, and who was to play a leading part in orchestrating the acceptance of the new English royal couple.
Specially commissioned printers worked simultaneously at The Hague, Amsterdam and Rotterdam to print the manifesto at speed, in an unprecedented run of sixty thousand copies.4 To ensure that the invasion and its aftermath went according to plan, enormous care was taken to conceal the contents of the pamphlet even from those sympathetic to William’s cause until immediately before the invasion, with Bentinck keeping all copies under lock and key in his personal lodgings. He subsequently arranged, through his agents, for stocks of copies to be carried to (and concealed in) key locations across England and Scotland, and then authorised their release simultaneously at all these places as the fleet left the Low Countries.
Enormous care was taken to avoid