Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [26]
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Royal and Almost-Royal Families: ‘How England Came to be Ruled by an Orange’
There was an event I barely mentioned in my opening account of the Dutch invasion which, to anyone familiar with traditional accounts of the unfolding of England’s ‘Glorious Revolution’, might have been expected to have figured more centrally. In summer 1688, Maria of Modena, Catholic wife of the Catholic English King, James II, gave birth to a healthy male heir. The arrival of Prince James Francis Edward Stuart upset long-established Europe-wide expectations for the English succession, and contributed its own momentum to the unfolding events which culminated in the arrival of William III of Orange in London.
Until summer 1688, James’s eldest daughter by his first wife Anne Hyde, Princess Mary Stuart, was heir to the English throne. In 1677 Mary married the Dutch Stadholder William of Orange, and went to reside at The Hague. So in the second half of the 1680s it was confidently expected across Europe that the English monarchy would pass after James’s death to a Protestant Englishwoman, married to a Protestant Dutchman. The Protestant succession seemed to have been secured, and after the brief, unfortunate interlude of James II’s Catholic monarchy, England appeared once again about to be safely in Protestant hands. And although the Princesses in the Protestant line were proving remarkably unsuccessful at producing healthy heirs, it was devoutly hoped that competing Catholic claimants – notably the Italian house of Savoy – could be consigned to the margins of English history.1
James’s second wife, Maria of Modena, had been pregnant a number of times since their marriage in 1673, and several of these had been brought to term. All her living children, however, had died in infancy. Rumours of another pregnancy began to circulate in January 1688, but they occasioned only a little serious speculation that the English dynastic situation might be altered – another miscarriage or stillbirth was confidently predicted. As the pregnancy advanced, however, and the Queen remained in good health, the possibility of a Catholic Stuart heir once more became a real possibility, and on 10 June (old style) Maria was delivered of a healthy boy, James Francis Edward Stuart.
It was this event that forced the hands of the Dutch Stadholder and his wife, eventually compelling them to lay claim to the English throne by force. So, before we go any further, we need to interrupt this exploration of the patterns of influence and exchange between England and the Dutch Republic to look more closely at royalty, dynasties and the accidents of succession, as these are woven into the social and political fabric of seventeenth-century Anglo–Dutch affairs. Close family connections between the English royal family and their faction, and the Dutch Orange Stadholders and theirs, meant that an unexpectedly close eye was kept by both parties on political developments in the territory presided over by their cousins. As we shall discover, Anglo–Dutch marriages provide many of the clues in this period to the often unexpectedly intimate liaisons between things British and things Dutch.
With the arrival of the Stuart line at the beginning of the seventeenth century, after the death of the husbandless and childless ‘Virgin Queen’, Elizabeth I, the English succession once again looked secure. To the relief of the English public and Parliament, the Protestant King James I, son of Mary Queen of Scots, was married