London - Edward Rutherfurd [443]
“I’ll tell you exactly what I think,” Lord St James told the still dazed O Be Joyful, as their vessel made its way down the long Thames Estuary. “I think the queen had a miscarriage and that they substituted another baby. Meredith thinks so too.” So did most of England. Medical history has since conceded that the baby was probably legitimate, but as Protestant England turned to William of Orange in 1688, it was widely claimed that the Catholic baby had no right to inherit at all. He had been smuggled in, so the story would finally go, in a warming pan.
Cautious William took his time. On 5 November he landed in the West Country. James went to Salisbury. Parts of the north declared for William; James hesitated. Then James’s best general, gallant John Churchill, went across to William, who marched slowly up to London, and James fled. By January, Parliament had gathered, decided that James, since he had gone, must have abdicated and, after some haggling over terms, offered the Crown to William and Mary jointly. This sequence of quite unheroic events was called the Glorious Revolution.
It was, nonetheless, a great watershed. For with the new settlement, the religious and political disputes which had troubled England for more than a century reached a lasting resolution. The great and final loser was the Catholic Church. William and Mary, if they had no children, were to be succeeded by Mary’s Protestant sister Anne. The Catholic descendants of James were omitted entirely from the succession. Most significant of all, no person in the future who was, or even married, a Catholic could ever sit upon England’s throne. As for ordinary Catholics, they were liable to extra taxes and debarred from any public position whatsoever.
The Puritans too were debarred from most public offices, but were free to worship as they pleased. Mary still hoped they might be included in a somewhat broader Anglican Church.
More subtle, but deeply significant, was the political aspect of the settlement. Though Parliament claimed it was only restating old rights, this was not so. Parliament was to be called at regular intervals – this was made statutory. No army could be raised without its agreement. Free speech was guaranteed. And, as it soon made clear, Parliament would always henceforth ensure the king was short of money, and ultimately subject, therefore, to Parliament’s will. The attempt of the Stuarts to edge England towards an absolute monarchy like the French had failed. Parliament, having won the Civil War, had finally won the peace.
One small political change that a few at Westminster noticed was that from this time the old Earl of St James, who God knows had always been a Tory, started voting with the Whigs. He said to their surprise that he now thought kings should be subject to Parliament. But he never said why.
It was best in Julius’s judgement that the secret of Charles II’s treachery should be quietly buried. “It can do no good to stir that up,” he told Meredith. Nor was O Be Joyful so eager to pursue the matter now that James and his Catholic heirs were gone. The extraordinary and treacherous agreement which had, indeed, been made between the Stuart King of England and his kinsman the King of France, was to remain secret for another hundred years.
One thing was very clear: there was no longer the faintest chance of the English monarch forming any threatening alliances with Europe’s Catholic powers. The English and the Dutch now shared a Calvinist Protestant king whose greatest enemy was Louis XIV of France. The Huguenots like Penny could be certain that the island kingdom was a safe refuge. As for the English, they might still be trading rivals, but the Dutch were now their allies. The two countries had much in common. Their languages were similar and God knew how many Englishmen were descended from the Hollanders’ Flemish neighbours. Catholic