On Monday 20 July 1789, Henry Beaufoy, MP for Great Yarmouth, moved the third reading of a bill he had sponsored through the House of Commons for instituting a perpetual commemoration of the 1688 Revolution. The bill was a relatively simple one, seeking merely to insist that in December every year, clergy in the Church of England would read out the Bill of Rights, thereby reminding their congregations of the events that had seen James II expelled and William III and Mary II installed as monarchs.

Beaufoy’s bill had to compete with other rather more urgent measures. These included one for continuing an Act passed in the previous session for regulating the shipping of enslaved people in British ships from the coast of Africa; and another for granting over £20,000 towards defraying the costs of the Warren Hastings trial, which had commenced the previous year and would continue to annoy the House until 1795. Consequently, it was late in the day when Beaufoy got to his feet and, although his motion carried by 23 votes to 14, it was determined that as the House now lacked the requisite 40 members present to make a quorum, the Commons should adjourn.

Next day, Beaufoy tried again. Once more, there was opposition. During the two days when the bill was debated objections were raised by Sir William Dolben and Sir Joseph Mawbey, the latter arguing that Beaufoy was merely mimicking the Whig Club in seeking popularity, while Henry James Pye considered the measure ridiculous as it would result in two commemorative events each year. Others were warmly in favour, though and, when it came to a division, the motion to give the bill a third reading was carried. Following a failed effort by Mawbey to introduce an amendment granting to each clergyman required to read the declaration 20 shillings, the bill was passed and sent up to the Lords. [Commons Journal, xliv. 543-7]

Beaufoy’s bill had its origins in the centenary celebrations of the Revolution, which had been marked across the country the previous autumn. Like his bill, not everything had proceeded smoothly. Not least, there were obvious rivalries between the clubs and societies heading up the various events. There was even disagreement on precisely when to mark the day. The Revolution Society had chosen 4 November, on the basis that this was both William III’s birthday (and wedding anniversary) and the day that he had made landfall. The Constitution Club, on the other hand, chose to hold its entertainment on 5 November, which chimed with the date chosen by John Tillotson (soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury), when preaching his 1689 commemorative sermon. It also echoed celebrations of the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot and this dinner was rounded off with toasts to the ‘three eights’: 1588 (Armada), 1688 and 1788. [Gazetteer and Daily Advertiser, 6 November 1788]

Aside from somewhat petty disagreements about whether 4 or 5 November was most apt, several of the societies also had strikingly different political outlooks and exhibited fierce rivalry. Speaking at the Whig Club, Richard Sheridan concluded his remarks with proposing a subscription for erecting a monument to the Revolution, which appeared to get off to a fine start with £500 being pledged almost at once. The plan was for the edifice to be located at Runnymede, emphasizing the links between the safeguarding of English liberty with Magna Carta, and the completion of the process with William of Orange’s successful invasion.

Not everyone liked the idea of a physical monument, though, and when the proposal was read out at other clubs, it received either muted or downright hostile responses. Speaking at the Constitution Club’s dinner at Willis’ Rooms, presided over by Lord Hood and featuring around 700 diners, John Horne Tooke made no secret of his contempt for the Whig Club’s plan. It was at this meeting that Beaufoy first raised his idea for a day of commemoration to be legislated for by Parliament, though at least one paper reported that his speech had been drowned out by the noise around him.

Elsewhere, there was more harmony. One of the grandest celebrations of 1688 took part at Holkham Hall in Norfolk, where Thomas Coke (future Earl of Leicester) laid on a spectacular firework display as well as mounting a recreation of William’s landing at Brixham having brought in squadrons of horses and loaded them onto miniature ships, which were launched on a canal. Perhaps the most evocative event, though, was one of many held in London taverns, where an unidentified man, said to be 112 years old, was reported to have been in attendance and chaired by the company. According to the paper he was one of ten centurions residing in the French hospital on Old Street, but at 112 he was likely the only one of them who actually remembered the Revolution taking place. [E. Johnson’s British Gazette and Sunday Monitor, 9 November 1788]

All of this was cast thoroughly into the shade by the very unhelpful timing of the king’s illness, which had commenced that summer but become steadily more acute through October and finally reached a crisis on the symbolic date of 5 November. The Prince of Wales had been on his way to Holkham to take part in Coke’s celebrations, but was forced to turn back after being alerted to the king’s deteriorating condition. At a time when the stalwarts of the Revolution Settlement were trying to make the case for the stability it had provided in settling the throne on the House of Brunswick, the prospect of a king no longer able to fulfil his constitutional functions was a disaster.

By the time Beaufoy finally made his motion in the Commons, the king had recovered but that did not ease the progress of what always seems to have been a rather unwanted bill. Having made its way through the Commons, the measure was presented to a thinly attended House of Lords on Thursday 23 July 1789, and a motion for the bill to be given a first reading was moved by Earl Stanhope – a leading member of the Revolution Society.

Stanhope’s motion was objected to by the Bishop of Bangor, who insisted that a prayer was already said for the Revolution in church each year. Stanhope attempted to argue in favour of the ‘pious and political expediency’ of the bill, insisting that the event was not commemorated satisfactorily in church. [Oracle, 24 July] The Lord Chancellor left the wool sack to enable him to offer his own opinions on the matter, backing up Bangor’s view and arguing the bill to be absurd, before a final contribution was made in favour of the proposed measure by the Earl of Hopetoun. The motion for the first reading was then negatived by six votes to 13, after which the Lords resolved without more ado to throw the unwanted bill out. [Diary or Woodfall’s Register, 24 July; The World, 24 July] Sheridan’s wish for a grand monument met with a similar fate, though an obelisk celebrating the centenary was raised at Kirkley Hall near Ponteland in Northumberland, by Newton Ogle, Dean of Winchester, and another at Castle Howe near Kendal in Cumbria.

As far as commemoration of 1688 was concerned this was far from the end of the story. Two centuries on, the tercentenary witnessed an unusual expression of unity from the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and the Leader of the Opposition, Neil Kinnock. Moving a humble address to the Queen, expressing the House’s ‘great pleasure in celebrating the tercentenary of these historic events of 1688 and 1689 that established those constitutional freedoms under the law which Your Majesty’s Parliament and people have continued to enjoy for three hundred years’, Thatcher was answered by Kinnock, agreeing that it was: ‘a worthy act, not only because it celebrates a significant advance, as the Prime Minister just said, but because it requires us all to consider the character of our democracy…’

Father of the House, Sir Bernard Braine, was next to speak. He welcomed the rare moment of political harmony and underlined the key principal about what 1688 meant to everyone in the chamber:

‘It is the knowledge that the parliamentary system which we jointly serve is greater than the sum total of all who are here at any one time.’

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Further Reading:

John Brooke, King George III (1972)

Journals of the House of Commons

Journals of the House of Lords

In 1760 Thomas Worsley of Hovingham, a close friend of George III’s favourite, the earl of Bute, penned a letter to his friend and patron insisting on his family’s antiquity. In their possession, he claimed, were ‘authentic documents of coming over with William the Conquerer’. Worsley’s concern to prove that he was no johnny-come-lately had originally been seen when he was appointed to the privy chamber back in the 1730s, but he was still clearly concerned to emphasise his suitability at the time of his appointment as surveyor general of the king’s works (thanks to Bute).

He had nothing to worry about. The Worsleys were an old family, who could trace their ownership of estates in Lancashire to at least the 14th century. Another branch of the family, ultimately settled in Hampshire (and on the Isle of Wight), produced a parliamentary dynasty of their own.

Supporting Thomas Worsley’s assertion of descent from a companion of William the Conqueror were accounts in ‘ancient chronicles’ recording the family’s progenitor as the giant Sir Elias de Workesley, who had followed Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy, on ‘crusade’. The 1533 Visitation of Lancashire referred to this character as Elias, surnamed Gigas on account of his massive proportions, and suggested he was a contemporary of William I.

It took some time for the northern Worsleys to establish themselves but by the 15th century a number of distinguished figures had already emerged. The marriage of Seth Worsley to Margaret Booth linked the family to two archbishops of York, Margaret’s uncles, William Booth (archbishop 1452-64) and Lawrence Booth (1476-80). Their son, William, later became dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and towards the end of his life became caught up in the Perkin Warbeck conspiracy, for which he was sent to the Tower.

William Worsley may have conspired against Henry VII, but by the 16th century other members of the family had managed to establish themselves on the fringes of the Tudor court in the retinue of the earl of Derby and it seems to have been thanks to the 3rd earl (Edward Stanley) that Sir Robert Worsley was returned to Parliament in 1553 as knight of the shire for Lancashire. Nine years earlier, he had been knighted at Leith in recognition of his services in the English army. Worsley’s return in 1553 seems to have been somewhat accidental, only occurring as a result of a by-election after one of the other recently elected members had declared himself too ill to serve. By becoming one of the Lancashire knights of the shire, Worsley was following in the footsteps of his father-in-law, Thurstan Tyldesley, who had been elected to the same seat in 1547.

Sir Robert’s son, another Robert, continued the family tradition of following the Derbys by attaching himself to the retinue of the 4th earl (Henry Stanley). A passionate Protestant, as keeper of the gaol at Salford he had numerous recusant (Catholic) prisoners in his care, whom he tried to persuade away from their faith by organising time dedicated to reading from the Bible. How successful that policy was is uncertain, but he found the burden of his role intolerable and by the end of his life he had lost all of his principal estates in Lancashire. Like his father, he seems to have owed his election to Parliament to his patron, Derby, though in his case he was returned for the Cornish borough of Callington.

The best part of a century passed before another Worsley was returned to the Commons. In the interim, having lost their original estates, the family had relocated to Hovingham, near Malton in North Yorkshire. The manor had been acquired by Sir Robert Worsley in 1563 from Sir Thomas Gerard, and the connection was reinforced by the subsequent marriage of the younger Robert to Gerard’s daughter, Elizabeth. In 1685, it was one of the Hovingham Worsleys, Thomas (great-great-grandson of Robert and Elizabeth), who succeeded in being returned for Parliament, where he proved to be ‘totally inactive’.

Inactive he may have been, but this did not prevent him from making his views clear to the lord lieutenant when he was faced with the ‘Three Questions’, framed to tease out opposition to James II’s policies. In response to them he insisted that he would ‘go free into the House, and give my vote as my judgment and reason shall direct when I hear the debates’. This was not at all the response required by the king’s officials, and he was removed from his local offices. He regained them shortly after at the Revolution but it was not until 1698 that he was re-elected to Parliament, again for Malton. In 1712 he was removed from local office again, this time probably on account of his Whiggery.

The older Thomas lived to see the Hanoverian accession, which he doubtless welcomed. Three years before that his son (another Thomas) had been returned to Parliament as one of the Members for Thirsk, after failed attempts in 1708 and 1710. This Thomas Worsley also seems to have played little or no role in the Commons. This was perhaps ironic, given that his marriage to Mary Frankland linked him directly to Oliver Cromwell. Efforts by his father to secure him a government post through the patronage of the earl of Carlisle came to nothing.

The trio of Thomas Worsleys in Parliament was completed by the election for Orford of the second Thomas’s son in 1761. It was this Thomas Worsley, the friend of Bute, who had been so concerned to prove his family’s antiquity. Although he was to sit first for Orford and then (like his forebear, Robert) for Callington, Parliament was not Thomas’s passion. Rather, his interests lay in equestrianism, collecting and architecture. His true claim to fame was rebuilding the family seat at Hovingham, creating the elegant Georgian house that endures to this day, but his dedication to horseflesh was equally strong and he seems to have looked out for suitable mounts for his contacts, the king among them. Writing to Sir James Lowther, 5th bt. (future earl of Lonsdale) in 1763, he mentioned trying out one of Lowther’s horses in front of the king and queen. They liked the animal, but concluded it was not ‘strong enough to carry [the king’s] weight’. [HMC Lonsdale, 132]

Thomas Worsley died in December 1778 at his London residence in Scotland Yard. [Morning Chronicle, 15 Dec. 1778] Just a few months before, he had been contacted by the duke of Ancaster, the lord great chamberlain, requiring him to see to the repair of the House of Lords, which was reported to be ‘in bad condition’. [PA, LGC/5/1, f. 279] By then, he was probably in no fit state to oversee the work.

This Thomas seems to have been the last member of his family to show much interest in national politics until the 20th century. His eldest son, another Thomas, had died four years before him, leaving the inheritance to a younger son, Edward. In 1838 Edward’s nephew, Sir William Worsley, was created a baronet but his interests appear to have been largely confined to his immediate surroundings in North Yorkshire. The 4th baronet was a talented cricketer, serving as captain of Yorkshire, as well as president of the MCC. It was his son, Sir Marcus Worsley, 5th bt., who finally broke the family duck and returned to Parliament, first as MP for Keighley and latterly for Chelsea. In November 1969 he presented a bill to encourage the preservation of collections of manuscripts by controlling and regulating their export. His other chief preoccupation was as one of the church commissioners.

The late duchess of Kent was Sir Marcus’s younger sister. She continued the family’s long tradition of interest in sport (in her case tennis) and quiet dedication to their locality.

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Further reading
Estate and Household Accounts of William Worsley, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral 1479-1497 (Richard III & Yorkist Trust and London Record Society, 2004), ed. H. Kleineke and S. Hovland
VCH Yorkshire North Riding, volume one
Visitation of Lancashire and a part of Cheshire, 1533, ed. William Langton (Chetham Soc. 1876)

On 6 March 1725, Pope Benedict XIII (1724-30) was roused from a period of private prayer with the news that ‘Queen’ Clementina, consort of the exiled James Edward Stuart (to his Jacobite supporters, James III and VIII) had given birth to a son in the Palazzo Muti in Rome. In spite of James and Benedict having decidedly tricky relations, the Pope hurried over to greet the new infant and promptly baptized him Henry Benedict (along with perhaps as many as ten other names).

Unlike his older brother, Charles Edward, Henry Benedict has attracted comparatively little attention. This is hardly surprising given his reputation for caution and his eminently sensible decision not to follow his brother to Scotland in 1745. Instead, it was left to Henry to undertake the thankless but necessary task of remaining in France, rallying support, while Charles tried and failed to regain a crown, and ultimately to organize a ship to rescue the by then rather battered Young Chevalier after his months hiding in the heather.

The failure of the 45 Rebellion no doubt confirmed Henry in his view that further escapades were ill-advised, and helped convince him to follow an alternative path. In 1747, he made the momentous decision to enter the church and was fast-tracked through the clerical ranks, emerging as a Cardinal that summer. It was by no means welcome to his family, though James seems to have become reconciled to it sooner than Charles, writing to ‘My dearest Carluccio’ that he was:

Fully convinced of the sincerity and solidity of his vocation; I should think it a resisting of the will of God, and acting directly against my conscience, if I should pretend to constrain him in a matter which so nearly concerns him. [Kelly, 36]

It seems, in any case, that Henry’s decision was not wholly a surprise, and that plans may have been afoot to have him made a cardinal as far back as 1740. [Corp, 225] James was not minded to agree to a suggestion by Pope Benedict XIV (1740-58) that Henry be made Cardinal Protector of England, Scotland or Ireland, [Corp, 232] though the British press reported that ‘when’ the exiled dynasty was back in possession, Henry was to be sent as Papal Legate. [St James’s Evening Post, 25-28 July 1747]

Henry’s decision to abandon a potential military career did not prevent him from being an occasional focus for disloyalty in England. His birthday, the year after he entered the church, was celebrated by five inebriated students of Balliol College, Oxford, with minor hooliganism committed against staunchly Whig Exeter College, while one of them shouted out ‘God bless King James, God damn King George’. Two of the ringleaders were later sentenced to two years in prison for their actions. [Monod, 276-7]

In stark contrast to his undergraduate fan club, Henry appears to have set about his new vocation with studied seriousness. That he had not altogether forsaken his position as a claimant to the British throne is indicated, though, by his decision to issue a medal with his image on it following the death of his father in 1766, even though Charles (Charles III to the Jacobites) chose not to bother. The same medal was then reissued 22 years later, after Charles’s death, when Henry became (again, according to the Jacobite succession) Henry IX. On the reverse was a diplomatically worded Latin motto, taken from Peter’s first epistle: ‘Non desideriis hominum, sed voluntate dei’, which as Monod observes ‘was so inoffensive as to lack any real seditious import’. [Monod, 88, 91]

As the medal demonstrated, while Henry chose not to do anything to encourage rebellion against his cousin, George III, he was keen to insist on his royal status and to keep up certain rites and standards. Insisting on wearing ermine was one, but perhaps most important, he persisted with the family tradition of ‘touching’ for scrofula, issuing special tokens for people afflicted with the condition. His brother, Charles had touched at least one sufferer while in Edinburgh in 1745 [Brogan, 213, 217]

If Henry trod a cautious path from his entry into the church through to his own ‘succession’ on Charles’s demise, he was unable to prepare for the dramatic changes ushered in by the French revolution. In 1796, Bonaparte invaded Italy, and Pope Pius VI (1775-99) was forced to hand over vast sums to prevent widespread pillaging in and around Rome. Henry made his own contribution by parting with a ruby, once the property of his maternal family, worth an estimated £60,000. [Kelly, 97] The following year, a new invasion force proved less willing to be bought off, and Henry became an exile twice over – quitting his villa outside Rome for Messina, thence to Corfu before finally returning to the Italian peninsula and settling in Venice.

It was there, that the cardinal’s journey in some ways came full circle. Having spent his whole life a representative of a rival dynasty to the ruling Hanoverians, it was to his cousins that Henry was ultimately indebted for saving him from penury. Thanks to an intercession from Cardinal Borgia, contact was made with a sympathetic Catholic gentleman in England, whose contacts ultimately passed the petition for assistance to the king. Advised by William Pitt that Henry ‘the last relick of an Illustrious Family’ was now ‘reduced to a state of distress which bordered on wretchedness’, George concurred that something needed to be done and through Lord Minto, ambassador at Vienna, he offered Henry an annual pension of £4,000. [Hampshire/Portsmouth Telegraph, 30 Dec. 1799] Acknowledging the king’s ‘noble way of thinking’, Henry accepted.

Having been saved from eking out his final days in a state of poverty, Henry was able to focus on the Conclave, summoned following Pius VI’s death in August 1799, and which convened in Venice from the winter of 1799 through to the spring of 1800. While there had been various reports in the British press late the previous year of efforts being made ‘to seat Cardinal York in the Papal Chair’, he seems never to have been a serious candidate for the papacy himself. [Hampshire/Portsmouth Telegraph, 9 Dec. 1799] Rather, it was left to him to play a supporting role in the eventual election of Cardinal Chiaramonti as Pope Pius VII (1800-23). Later that year, he was able to stage a return to Rome, where he lived out his remaining days in comparative luxury.

To the very end, Henry maintained the careful course he had always navigated. In his will of 1802, signed (rather optimistically) Henry Roi, he repeated an earlier declaration that the de jure succession to the British throne lay (after him) with the reigning king of Sardinia. However, on his death five years later he was also careful to acknowledge the assistance he had received from his Hanoverian cousins by returning to George, Prince of Wales, some of the regalia carried overseas by his grandfather, James II and VII, almost 120 years earlier.

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Further Reading:
Stephen Brogan, The Royal Touch in Early Modern England (2015)
Edward Corp, The Stuarts in Italy, 1719-1766: A Royal Court in Permanent Exile (2011)
Bernard Kelly, Life of Henry Benedict Stuart, Cardinal Duke of York (1899)
Paul Kleber Monod, Jacobitism and the English people, 1688-1788 (1989)

Griffin is profiled in more detail in our House of Lords 1660-1715 volumes. Published in 2016 and not yet available online, you can find out more about the publication here.

On 22 January 1689, after a space of almost four years, Parliament returned to Westminster following the elections called in the wake of William of Orange’s invasion. Technically, this was not a true Parliament, but a convention, but most of the familiar elements were there in place to settle the crisis. Initially, attention was concentrated on how best to resolve the question of James II’s decision to flee the country: was the throne vacant or not and, if it was, who should occupy it? Gradually, those in favour of a moderate settlement lost ground to more radical voices, and Lords and Commons agreed ultimately that the throne was vacant and that it should be offered to William and Mary jointly. At the same time enquiries were established to look into some of the controversial actions of the 1680s, in particular the convictions and executions of William, Lord Russell, and Algernon Sidney.

While such great matters of state were being addressed, a less obvious drama was also played out. Before fleeing to the continent in December 1688 James II raised Edward Griffin to the peerage as Baron Griffin of Braybrooke. Griffin was the son of a court official to both Charles I and Charles II and had gone on to inherit his father’s office in 1679. He married Essex, one of the daughters of the earl of Suffolk, and gradually built a reputation for himself as an unquestioning supporter of the Stuarts. That said, Charles II found him irritatingly officious and, in spite of supposedly being related to both William Shakespeare and Sir Francis Bacon (Viscount St Alban), Griffin was believed to be barely literate.

The Revolution proved a trying period for Griffin who had so firmly attached his colours to James II’s mast. He and his son accompanied James to Kent and were deputed to report the news of his departure to William of Orange. On the first day of the Convention, 22 January 1689, Griffin joined his fellow peers in the House of Lords when thanksgivings were ordered for William’s intervention. No objection was made to Griffin’s presence, which was unusual as a new peer appearing in the Lords for the first time. He was back in the chamber on the 23rd and 24th, again apparently without anyone batting an eyelid, or querying why he had not been formally inducted.

It was not until the 25th, on which day there was a call of the House, that Griffin was finally noticed by the earl of Berkeley, who drew the Lords’ attention to the fact that a new member was attending. Griffin stood up and explained the circumstances of his creation, pointing out that his patent was ‘at the door ready to be produced’. The unusual circumstances of Griffin being made a peer prompted a lively debate in the Lords. Some argued that no peer should attend before being formally introduced, while others cited the example of the 1660 Convention, when several Lords, created by Charles II when he was in exile, did precisely that. Most vocal against allowing Griffin his place was Lord Delamer and it looked for a time as if he would not be recognized by the assembly.

Just when it looked as if Griffin might be shown the door, the least likely of supporters emerged in the form of Lord Lovelace, the normally inebriated radical supporter of the Revolution. He sprang forward and – joined implausibly by Delamer – agreed to induct Griffin. Flanked by these two unlikely sponsors, Griffin presented his patent and was admitted to his place as Lord Griffin. According to the earl of Clarendon it was:

the first time, I believe, that ever a peer was introduced, when the King’s authority was pretended to be set aside; and when the Lords did not pretend to be a Parliament

The debates over allowing Griffin to take his place point to the febrile atmosphere in Parliament in January 1689 with the results of the Revolution still a long way off being settled. Griffin was the last person to be made a peer by James II (not counting subsequent ‘Jacobite’ peerages) and although his patent of creation was dated 3 December, several days before James’s first flight from the capital, for the more radical supporters of Revolution there was a lack of legitimacy in someone nominated in those circumstances. Also, at the beginning of the Convention there was no certainty that the result of their debates might not be to invite James back, even if they were to do so with a number of restrictions.

In the event Griffin’s career in the Lords proved to be of short duration. After it was resolved to offer William and Mary the crown Griffin ceased to attend, and he refused to take the new oaths. He appeared in the Lords for the final time at the opening of the next session, on 19 October, only to decline taking the oaths once more. For the next few years Griffin proved a decided nuisance to the regime. He was involved in numerous plots, including the spectacularly ill-conceived ‘Pewter Pot Plot’, and by the mid-1690s had decamped to the court in exile. In 1696 he was outlawed, for failing to appear to answer a treason charge, and stripped of his peerage. In 1708, he attempted to stage a return aboard the Salisbury, the only ship to be captured during James Edward Stuart’s abortive rebellion that year. He was carted off to the Tower, where he died of natural causes in November 1710, after a series of stays of execution. The peerage was eventually restored to his grandson 17 years later.

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Further reading:

The Correspondence of Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon… ed. S.W. Singer (2 vols. 1828)

The History of Parliament: The House of Lords 1660-1715, ed. R. Paley (5 vols. 2016)

In the winter of 1688, the country briefly found itself without a government. Faced with the prospect of an invading army bearing down on London, James II had opted for flight leaving no agreed alternative in place. In some ways this was a problem that had been taxing the minds of senior politicians for some time. Even before the king had fled, in early December an anonymous ‘memorial’ sent to the marquess of Halifax had advised recalling the 1681 Oxford Parliament. It considered this the best solution to the crisis created by William of Orange’s invasion of 5 November, as it was the last

ever soe Freely and Fairely elected Illegally dissolved, and since whose dissolution the liberties, laws and religion of the nation have been undermined.

The proposal, ignoring James’s own Parliament of 1685, underscored the extent of the turmoil facing the country and just how far the king’s authority had crumbled.

This is not to say that James had not tried to find a resolution. In early December, with William’s army firmly established in the country, the king had sent commissioners to the prince offering to summon a new Parliament and to guarantee its safety. In the meantime, he convened meetings of the bishops and peers gathered in the capital. According to one of James’s supporters, the earl of Ailesbury , this latter was ‘what they called in Poland a Senatus Concilium’, but he found the meeting unedifying. In particular, he complained about the earl of Clarendon (James’s brother-in-law), who ‘behaved himself like a pedagogue towards a pupil’ [Ailesbury Memoirs]. Clarendon afterwards joined the steady flow of grandees paying court to William as he made his way steadily towards London.

On 9 December James concluded that he had no options left. He sent Queen Mary and the Prince of Wales into exile and in the small hours of the 10th put his own escape plan into operation. The people of England thus awoke on the 11th to a country lacking a government and with an invading army bearing down on the capital.

Into the vacuum stepped members of the House of Lords gathered in London, joined by a few other members of the Privy Council, to form what came to be known as the ‘Provisional Government’. From the 11th until Christmas Day (with a break in the middle) the transition to a new regime headed by William of Orange was managed by this self-selected assembly. Their first meeting was held at Guildhall in the City of London, where they convened ‘to consider what fit to be done in this present conjuncture’ [Luttrell]. Later on they adjourned to the Council Chamber in Whitehall and other locations in and around Westminster. On one matter, though, some of the procedural sticklers were clear, and that was that the House of Lords itself should not be used for such an irregular gathering.

At the group’s first meeting a sub-committee was appointed to compose a declaration to be sent to William to explain the meaning of the assembly. They resolved to send to the prince undertaking ‘to assist him in calling a free parliament for the settlement of the kingdom’ and to ‘secure the peace in London and Westminster’. On the 12th ‘We the peers of the realm with some of the Lords of the Privy Council now assembled in the Council Chamber’ issued orders to the lieutenant of the Tower of London for releasing some prisoners and securing others, and generally got on with responding to the breakdown in law and order.

The Provisional Government’s programme was interrupted soon after it came into being by news that James had been arrested in Kent. According to one account, after being seized by local fishermen, the king was subjected to a humiliating search ‘even to his privities’. There was a stand-off while the locals debated what to do with him, and ultimately information was conveyed to London and a rescue party was dispatched to bring the unlucky king back to the Capital. Ailesbury, who was one of them, found the king unshaven and ‘looking like Charles I at his trial’ [Miller, 206-7].

James’s return to London presented the Provisional Government with a considerable headache. On the 17th a meeting of a dozen peers debated what to do with the unwanted monarch. Lord Delamer suggested sending him to the Tower, a proposition that was backed by some others, though the duke of Grafton and Lord Churchill both opposed it. All, though, were in agreement that James should not be permitted to go to one of his own residences. On the same day a delegation of bishops waited on James, where Francis Turner of Ely, for one, seemed heartened that the king seemed ready to compromise and that his continuing as king might be possible.

Others were far less willing to accept James’s apparent change of tone, and the question of what to do with James was ultimately answered by William himself. He sent a delegation comprising Halifax, Delamer and the earl of Shrewsbury, to inform the king that it was thought ‘convenient’ for his safety and ‘the greater quiet of the City’ that he should leave Whitehall and be taken to the quiet residence of Ham House, just outside of London. Terrified by the memory of what had happened to his father and that this was simply a precursor to a more severe type of incarceration, James opted not to wait. He staged a second flight, this time almost certainly assisted quietly by William, who wanted nothing better than for James to be out of his way.

The removal of the king forced the Provisional Government to reconvene and left it with the central issue still to be resolved: how to respond to William’s presence in the country (backed by a sizeable professional army)? By now William was making it increasingly clear that he wanted the throne and that if he was not offered it on reasonable terms, he would head for home. At Christmas a resolution was finally arrived at: power would be ceded to William for the time being, while a new Parliament (or more properly Convention) would be called for January 1689. It was that body that was ultimately to resolve that James’s flight constituted abdication and, after much extended horse-trading, to offer the crown jointly to William and Princess Mary (James’s eldest daughter), but with William exercising full executive authority.

Historians continue to debate the true meaning of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ and indeed whether it constituted a revolution at all. Without doubt, the actions of a few senior politicians, who took charge for the space of a few weeks in December 1688, was a significant demonstration of their belief in the dynamic authority of the House of Lords when the apex of the parliamentary trinity (the king) was no more, and there was no House of Commons to join them. In festive terms it might be said that in the absence of an infant in the manger, and with no shepherds to hand, it was left to the Wise Men to take charge.

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Further Reading

Robert Beddard, A Kingdom without a King: Journal of the Provisional Government in the Revolution of 1688

John Miller, James II

Ailesbury Memoirs

Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs… (volume 1)

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Things had not started particularly auspiciously for Mary Beatrice. Daughter of the duke of Modena, which was in effect a client state of Louis XIV’s France, she was a rather pious girl whose early ambition was to have been a nun. At the age of just 15, though, she was selected as the bride of the (much older) widower James, duke of York, to whom she was married by proxy in 1673 (the earl of Peterborough standing in for York). Mary had not been York’s first choice. He had petitioned his brother, Charles II, unsuccessfully, to be allowed to marry Susan Belasyse, but had been turned down. Having considered, and rejected, various alternative European princesses, York eventually settled on Mary, in spite of warnings that she was ‘an ugly redhead’ [TNA, PRO 31/3/129]. He seems to have been unaware that the marriage had gone ahead until fairly late in the day. The news also took others by surprise, Sir Ralph Verney, for one, reporting

Our new Duchess from Modena makes us all wonder, because it was confidently reported that our King had broke it off.

Surprised or not, the choice of a Catholic proved widely unpopular, in spite of efforts to mitigate the situation. The earl of Arlington had been confident that as there was no suitable protestant candidate, Parliament would not object, while the French ambassador had written to his master passing on Charles II’s request that Louis would:

prevail upon the prince and princess of Modena not to raise any difficulties regarding the right to worship or other matters concerning the Catholic religion, and to reassure them that the duke of York will take all measures possible to give his wife advantage in this respect, without causing too much embarrassment to the king in the next parliament [TNA, PRO 31/3/129 ff.1-2]

All this had little effect. Contrary to Arlington’s expectation, there was a last minute intervention by Parliament to convince the king to forbid his brother from consummating the marriage and Bishop Crew of Oxford proved to be the only member of the episcopal bench willing to preside at the formal wedding of York and his new duchess when she arrived at Dover in November 1673. She seems to have been no happier than anyone else, and was reported to have burst into tears on seeing her new husband. [Callow]

Lines relating to Mary by Andrew Marvell in his Advice to a Painter came to appear particularly prescient:

Poor princess! born beneath a sullen star,
To find such welcome when you came so far!
Better some jealous neighbour of your own,
Had called you to a sound though petty throne…

Through the 1670s Mary had to contend with suspicion, in particular at the time of the Popish Plot, when members of the York household found themselves under investigation. She also suffered from a succession of unsuccessful pregnancies and the loss of several children early in their lives (one daughter, Isabella, lived for five years). It was this sad history that helped stoke the general disbelief when in 1688 she finally gave birth to a healthy male child. Doubters seized hold of the ‘warming pan’ conspiracy, which suggested that the pregnancy had been a phantom one (or entirely contrived) and that an orphaned baby had been smuggled into the queen’s bedchamber so that it could be presented as her new prince. Changeling or not, the arrival of James Francis Edward Stuart precipitated the invitation to William of Orange by a select band of discontented courtiers and that winter Mary was spirited out of the kingdom with her son while James II’s grip on power faltered. In December, after a false start, James joined her in France.

From 1688 until her death in 1718 Mary lived in exile, principally at St Germain-en-Laye, the palace lent to James by Louis XIV, but she also spent significant periods at the convent of Chaillot, where she was able to indulge her earlier desire of a more sequestered existence. James’s death in 1701 left Mary in the position of regent to the court in exile. She played a key role in persuading Louis XIV to recognize her underage son as ‘James III’ even though it meant breaking one of the key provisions of the Treaty of Ryswick, which had acknowledged William III’s kingship. She was also a driving force in attempting to have her late husband canonized.

Mary’s active role in ensuring that France declared for her son had significant consequences back in England, and in February 1702 she was made subject to a bill of attainder. This appears to have been something of an afterthought, arising from the debates over the bill attainting her son. In response to it, the earl of Stamford communicated a number of amendments insisted on by members of his committee, which included adding Mary to the bill’s provisions. The committee justified the request:

Because there is as much Danger to be feared from the Practices of Mary Wife to the late King James, as from any Thing this pretended Prince can attempt.

In the event, rather than tack Mary onto the bill attainting James Francis Edward, she was treated to one in her own right. Thus on 12 February the Lords gave a first reading to the bill of attainder against Mary as well, which was passed eight days later. A minority of 14 peers and one bishop (Compton of London) objected to the measure sufficiently to subscribe a protest against it, asserting that:

there was no Proof of the Allegations in the Bill so much as offered before the passing of it, which is a Precedent that may be of dangerous Consequence.

If the attainder had little immediate impact on Mary, stripping her of long lost rights and possessions, what did was her increasingly perilous financial state. Although there were occasional promises of paying money owing to her, the political situation meant that it was never in either William III or Anne’s interest to do much about it. Besides, once James Francis Edward had come of age and was able to assume control of the court in exile, Mary retreated once more. Her remaining years were a fairly sad procession of observing her son try and fail to ‘win back’ his throne in 1708 and 1715, and finally seeing him forced to quit France and take up residence in Italy. She died in penury and was buried at Chaillot. Her tomb was later desecrated during the French Revolution.

RDEE

Further reading:
Andrew Barclay, ‘Mary of Modena’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
John Callow, The Making of King James II: the formative years of a fallen king; and King in Exile: James II, warrior king and saint

The impeachment of the earl of Clarendon in 1667 is little remembered these days; but it was an enormously significant moment both in the history of impeachment, and in Restoration politics. Sacked from the lord chancellorship at the end of August in the aftermath of the naval debacle at Chatham and the hasty conclusion of a peace with the Dutch, Clarendon was clearly in danger of more serious retribution from political enemies who had waited a long time for their revenge, and from former colleagues for whom he could become a convenient scapegoat for military failure. Even the king, whose principal minister Clarendon had been for so long, and who had dithered over his dismissal, was now increasingly irritated by a man whose undoubted talents had always come with an enormous self-assurance bordering on arrogance. Clarendon may have been vulnerable, but he also possessed a still-powerful ally: the king’s brother and heir, James, duke of York, who, infatuated, had married Clarendon’s daughter secretly in 1660.

The events of the autumn of 1667 exemplified several themes that would become familiar in later Restoration politics. One of them was a widespread hostility to York and a desire to ensure that he would never succeed to the throne. It was early on rumoured that the moves against Clarendon were linked to a plan by the king to legitimise his bastard son, the duke of Monmouth, who would then become the heir apparent. Another was the French invasion of the Spanish-held territories in the Netherlands. Spanish and French ambassadors were involved in intrigues on the one side to seek English help in resisting the incursion; on the other to prevent it.

An impeachment had been widely talked of in advance of the opening of the parliamentary session on 10 October, though it was never clear whether it was ever intended to actually carry a prosecution through, or whether it was designed merely to frighten his allies, including York, into quiescence. An address to the king thanking him for Clarendon’s removal, voted by both Houses, was the first indication of action against the former chancellor. On 23 October there were motions in both Houses testing the ground: surprisingly, that in the Commons was unsuccessful, an early indication that Clarendon would not be unsupported. For some time the issue hung in the balance in the lower House. On the one hand, a group of powerful courtiers led a determined campaign to present a case for impeachment to the Lords, with a demand that Clarendon be arrested and imprisoned immediately. On the other, a coalition of defenders including York’s friends, pointed out that no evidence had been produced of an impeachable offence. The impasse developed into a crisis, as Clarendon’s opponents put increasing pressure on his allies, and the word grew that York was the man who was really targeted.

At this point, however, York was laid low with smallpox, a crucial blow to his capacity to fight Clarendon’s corner, and the king may have taken the opportunity to make his hostility to his former servant more explicit, encouraging MPs to support the prosecution. On 8 November the Commons resolved that there was sufficient evidence to proceed to examine a series of accusations, though they were still having trouble with making them appear to be treason. On the 9th, the earl’s supporters struck back, defeating the claim that his alleged advice that the rule of law be suspended during the crisis of the summer had amounted to treason. But on the following day, the House agreed that another claim – that he had betrayed secrets to the king’s enemies – was treason. The rather preposterous allegation– based on a hint from the ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor, anxious to back the side that appeared, at the moment, to be anti-French – had yet to be proved.  But it was enough to enable an impeachment for ‘treasons and other high crimes and misdemeanours’ to proceed, and to be presented to the Lords.

The struggle moved to the upper House, where Clarendon had plenty of defenders. They were soon at loggerheads with the Commons, over the Lords’ refusal to send Clarendon to the Tower. The charges, the peers told MPs, were insufficiently specific to warrant immediate imprisonment.

The impeachment was rapidly developing into a political crisis, with deadlock and procedural wrangling between the two Houses, and the king becoming increasingly infuriated that Clarendon had not just disappeared. Broad hints were dropped that he should leave the country, a step that the earl was deeply unwilling to take, reluctant to appear to admit guilt. It may have been York himself who finally persuaded him to take a boat for France on the evening of Saturday 30th November, leaving behind him a ‘petition’ to the House of Lords which was more of a vindication of his conduct and which when read (though ‘admired for the style’) was regarded as a ‘almost as full of impudent lies as of lines’. Despite his attempt to justify himself, Clarendon’s departure was indeed seen as an admission of guilt, though it seemed at the time the only way to prevent the escalation of a nasty political crisis. Clarendon would never return to England, settling in southern France, most of the time in Montpellier (‘going to Montpellier’ would become a euphemism for the consequences of political failure). He died in 1674.

Clarendon’s fall and exile marked a new phase in Restoration politics, in which the concerns over the character and ideas of the king’s heir grew more explicit and increasingly destructive. 1667 had been the first serious skirmish in a political struggle that would become more serious with the realisation that the duke of York (as well as his wife, Clarendon’s daughter – to Clarendon’s own horror) had converted to Catholicism. It would climax first in the battles over the exclusion of the duke of York from the throne in 1678-81, and then in the crisis of James’s reign and toppling from power in the Revolution of 1688-9.

PS

You can read more about Clarendon’s fall from grace in Paul Seaward’s earlier blogs: Chatham and the failure of English Politics and The Dismissal of Clarendon.

The members of the late 17th-century House of Lords were in no doubt that they were the ‘natural’ governors of the realm next to the king himself. Thus on 11-16 December 1688, for the brief period when the kingdom was left without a monarch following James II’s unexpected flight from Westminster, they were happy to assume this role. James had fled in the wake of the steady advance of William of Orange on the capital and the desertion of so many trusted royal military officers and even his own daughter, Anne. When the king’s absence was discovered six lords spiritual and 21 lords temporal met together in the Guildhall of the City of London to take the order and safety of the realm in their own hands. They derived their authority from ‘an inexpressible authority and jurisdiction kneaded (next to that invested into the imperial crown of England) into the very essence and fundamental constitution of our laws’.

George Savile, marquess of Halifax acted as Speaker and Francis Gwyn was appointed secretary to the assembly. Their first action was to halt the possibility of hostilities between the opposing forces and they sent executive orders, under the authority of ‘the Lords Spiritual and Temporal’, to the general of the royal land forces, the earl of Feversham, and to the admiral of the Navy, Lord Dartmouth, to desist from fighting. These lords spiritual and temporal also signed  the ‘Guildhall Declaration’ in which they declared that in the king’s absence they would assist as far as they could the Prince of Orange in executing the publicly-stated reason for his invasion, the summoning of a ‘free parliament’ to settle the crisis in religion and government.

Over the next few days this irregular meeting of peers and bishops took on the form of an emergency government to maintain order and security. On 13 December nine peers even assembled at three in the morning to give orders to settle disturbances in the capital, following panic that Irish Catholic solders from the disbanded royal forces were marching on London. The provisional government’s proceedings, though, were quickly complicated by the discovery later on the 13th that King James had not made good his escape, but had been detained at the Kentish port of Faversham. The government, after some debate, dispatched three of James’s courtiers to Kent to secure the king and bring him back to Whitehall. The short-lived provisional government’s last meeting took place on 15 December, as James returned to the capital the following day to a rapturous reception and nominally took up power again.

The job of this government was not over, however, as a still disheartened James soon bowed to the implicit threat contained in William’s ‘advice’ that he should leave the capital ‘for his own safety’ and departed for Rochester on 18 December. The lords spiritual and temporal were quickly called on again to assume their roles as advisors, as William of Orange summoned the whole body of the episcopate and the peerage to discuss the best way of convening a ‘free parliament’. It was this second meeting that, after a stormy Christmas debate,  agreed to address the Prince of Orange to take over the government of the realm and to issue writs of summons for a ‘Convention’ – a Parliament to be convened without royal authority – which would later offer the Crown to William and his wife Mary.

CL