Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [36]
The double bond, in the period 1641–88, between the ruling houses of England and the Dutch Republic has received far less attention. Yet throughout these years, first Princess Mary (wife of William II) and then her niece, also Princess Mary (wife of William III), exercised significant influence over decision-making on both sides of the Narrow Sea.
We shall never know whether Mary of Modena’s son had been substituted in the lying-in chamber in a warming pan, or was actually of Stuart royal blood. But like many potent myths, the story of the ‘warming-pan plot’, circulating right across Europe, was as powerful as an instrument of history as if it were established fact. Though the story of plots and substitutions is largely discounted by historians today, it was equally widely believed in England and abroad during the fraught summer of 1688, and persisted for a generation afterwards. Since the Queen went on to bear James a daughter in exile in France, the claim that she was incapable of bearing healthy children was plainly false. At the same time, by spiriting away the pretended heir to the throne, James and his wife removed the possibility of any kind of ‘trial’ of whether the supposed Prince of Wales was indeed genuine. An inquiry was started early in 1689, but was dropped on the grounds that it was by now impossible to establish the truth. As a sympathiser with James’s cause wrote in early February 1689:
There is no room for the examination of the little gents title which perhaps will be hearafter the best proof he has of his title that after ‘twas in their power to examine his birth they durst not refer it to a free parliament as was pretended.30
As late as 1712 Queen Anne remained convinced that the baby who had almost ousted her from succession to the throne had been substituted in the delivery room. When her physician David Hamilton told her that he believed ‘that the Pretender was not the real son of King James, with my arguments against it’, the Queen ‘received this with chearfulness, and by asking me several questions about the thing’.31 But by the time of William and Mary’s coronation on 11 April 1689, the legitimacy or otherwise of the baby was immaterial to the arguments mustered to affirm the legal legitimacy of their claim to the throne.
Neither will we ever know whether William of Orange had intended to seize the English throne when he launched his invasion in November 1688. In a later Mémoire, Mary implied that William invaded England with the intention of dethroning James. This may, however, have been her retrospective view of events, since for some years before the invasion she had hoped that William would one day be King. King James himself said on 27 November 1688 that he thought William had come to England to seize the Crown. This remark clearly tells us about the King’s state of mind at the time, but it does not help us decide what were William’s actual intentions. Whatever the case, the public actions of English officials underlined the finality of what William had done. By 18 December, when they knew James was in William’s custody, they began greeting the Prince symbolically and ceremonially as if he were King.32
We do know that as early as 1670, when William paid his visit to England to reclaim the large sums owed to him by the English royal family, he was delighted by the evident enthusiasm of the Protestant party, and their clear approval of the fact that he stood close to the throne in the line of inheritance. On that occasion, the seventy-two-year-old Sir Constantijn Huygens (Constantijn