Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [17]
Bundles of free copies were sent to booksellers to be sold at a price set by themselves. Copies were posted through the penny post and sent anonymously to private citizens. Extra copies were produced after the landing by John White of Yorkshire. The first, and for a time the only, English printer of the Declaration, White was rewarded by William after he became King with a monopoly in the city of York and the five northern counties for printing all notices concerning revenue and justice which the government might issue.6
Outside London, the distribution and reading of the Prince of Orange’s Declaration was the radical intervention which effectively substituted for real hostilities in bringing about the ‘Glorious Revolution’ itself. At Exeter – the first official stop for William and his army en route for London – the Prince’s chaplain, Gilbert Burnet, took over the cathedral and ‘commanded’ the local clergy to sing a celebratory Anglican Te Deum, and then obliged them to listen while he, from the pulpit, ‘read aloud the Prince’s Declaration and reasons for this his expedition’. When Durham was seized by local gentry sympathetic to William’s cause on 6 December, Lord Lumley read out the Prince’s Declaration at Durham Castle in front of most of the gentry of the county. When the Earl of Bath, governor of Plymouth, after holding the town on behalf of King James for five weeks, finally capitulated, he signalled his defection to William’s camp by having the Declaration read to the town’s residents. Chester was seized by the county militia, who supported Prince William, on 14 December. They disarmed James’s military governor, the regular regiment stationed there and two troops of Irish dragoons, ‘then they read the Prince’s Declaration and declared for him’. At Oxford a trumpet was blown at Carfax, and the Declaration was ‘read openly to the multitude by Lord Lovelace’. The students and residents of the city then proceeded to demolish Magdalen College Bridge to stop James’s dragoons getting into the city. So great was the impact of the Prince’s Declaration that it became central to both Jacobite and French propaganda to argue that the people of England had been loyal to their King until their minds were corrupted by reading the Dutch Stadholder’s pernicious manifesto.7
What, then, was so persuasive about the Declaration? Fundamentally, its achievement was to have succeeded in giving Prince William his own distinctive, measured and rational voice, with which he appeared to engage each individual reader as a reasonable subject or participant. Tone and content are extraordinarily seductive, even today – it is a fine piece of what would now be called ‘public relations’ or ‘spin’.
Such a direct appeal by the Prince as an individual to the general public as reasonable interlocutors had succeeded magnificently for William’s great-grandfather, Prince William the Silent, when he took on the might of Spain to champion the right to independence of the Protestant Netherlands in the 1570s.8 A century later, this first Declaration of William III’s (it was to be followed by a succession of widely distributed follow-up documents in a similar vein, tailored closely to unfolding events) won the hearts and minds of the English public at large. It has won the hearts and minds of historians ever since.
‘It is most certain and evident to all men,’ the Declaration begins, ‘that the publick peace and happiness of any state or kingdom cannot be preserved where the law, liberties, and customs, established by the lawful authority in it, are openly transgressed and annulled; especially where the alteration of religion is endeavoured.’
The direct address and matter-of-fact tone of this opening are sustained throughout the lengthy