Although James’s approach to his armed forces was but one aspect of his general policy, the importance of the army as a means of repression in both interregnum England and Louis XIV’s France gave it particular prominence. Monmouth’s rebellion had illustrated the frailty of county militias, and James allowed the militia to wither on the vine during his reign, a fact which may actually have worked to his disadvantage in 1688. He maintained his regular English military establishment at just short of 20,000, the figure it had risen to as a result of the rising. He did not substantially raise it till the spring of 1688, when he recalled the Anglo-Dutch brigade, sending one each of its regiments to England, Ireland and Scotland. With the fear of Dutch invasion that autumn he added extra troops to existing establishments and raised new regiments, giving his English army a theoretical strength of something over 34,000 men. Even this was not an unreasonably large force for a country the size of England: the French had some 100,000 regulars at the same time, and even little Hesse-Cassel had more than 10,000.91 Such comparisons, however, were not uppermost in the minds of James’s parliamentary critics, who were reluctant to maintain the army even at its October 1685 size: this hostility led James to prorogue and eventually to dissolve Parliament.
The establishment of a Roman Catholic troop of Life Guards accorded with James’s policy of assisting his Catholic subjects as best he could, although the Earl of Ailesbury maintained that its captain was so venal that he would gladly have enlisted a Turk if he had the £40 entrance fee to hand. What caused more concern was James’s use of the prerogative to enable Catholic officers to serve, and indeed Sir Edward Hales, defendant in Godden v. Hales, was a colonel of infantry. Modern research has not identified that swelling torrent of Catholic officers described by some contemporaries, and even the 1688 expansion did not take the proportion above 11 per cent. There were, naturally enough, regimental exceptions: Sir Edward Hales’s Regiment had sixteen Catholics out of thirty-seven officers.
Perhaps more serious was James’s practice of depriving officers who opposed him in Parliament in 1685, or who subsequently crossed him, of their commissions. They were not always replaced with Catholics, but lost the money they had paid for their commissions, and he was thus ‘attacking the sanctity of property and acting without tact’.92 Overall, between the spring of 1685 and the autumn of 1688 James had increased the size of the English army and done much to improve its efficiency. Yet in the process he had ‘disobliged’ many Protestant career officers. This might not, in and of itself, have turned them into rebels. But as they glanced across St George’s Channel, as Englishmen so often have, they saw a truly alarming process at work: the wholesale purging of the Irish army and its replacement by a Catholic force.
The Irish army was theoretically distinct from its English and Scots cousins. It was not only smaller and far worse equipped than the English army, but traditionally reflected the ascendancy of the Protestant minority over the Roman Catholic majority. James sought to reform it for two reasons: it urgently needed bringing up to date, and it was only fair, as he put it, ‘that the roman catholics, who had tasted so deeply of his sufferings, should now, in his prosperity, have at least a share of his protection’.93 It would have been a dangerous enough task in the first place, and for James to entrust it to Dick Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell and Sarah Churchill’s brother-in-law, made it explosive.
Tyrconnell, appointed lieutenant general in Ireland in 1685, and then lord lieutenant in place of Clarendon in January 1687, was the scion of an ‘old English’ family that had been settled in Ireland for centuries. Proud, prickly and presumptuous, he quickly set about dismissing Protestant officers from the militia and regular army alike and replacing them with ‘old English’ Catholic officers, and jettisoning Protestant rank and file in favour of Catholics. Robert Parker, one of the best witnesses for Marlborough’s campaigns, was a Protestant from Kilkenny who had joined the Irish army as a private in 1683, but in the summer of 1687 Tyrconnell held a great review on the Curragh of Kildare and young Parker found himself dismissed. He was on his way to join the Dutch army in 1688, but a chance encounter with his old company commander in London saw him back in the army after the Glorious Revolution, in Lord Forbes’ Regiment of Foot, later the Royal Regiment of Ireland.94
We can be sure that it was never Tyrconnell’s plan to create an Irish Catholic army which could be shipped across to coerce the English. He was far more interested in redistributing power in Ireland, and it is even possible that, after the death of James II, he wished to declare Ireland an independent state. Although his ‘new modelling’ drew in a few experienced professional officers, it had little time to take effect, and so the Irish army of 1688 was in fact far worse trained than the force that Tyrconnell had begun to reform three years before. Moreover, even if James and Tyrconnell never intended to use the Irish Catholic army in England, Protestant Englishmen were wholly unconvinced. Yet again, as they saw it, property rights and religious sensibilities were trampled upon, and God alone knew where the business would stop. Even the London Gazette, the government’s own information organ, became infected by the prevailing sense of near-panic:
Bristol, March 6 [1688]. There are arrived in all these Western parts great multitudes of disaffected English protestants from Ireland, whose condition is most deplorable; from whom we have an account that at Dublin the Protestants were all disarmed. And their horses taken from them, and many of them plundered and cruelly treated by the soldiers, who had likewise seized both the cathedrals and the college; and all ships and passengers bound for England were stopped, and their goods and plate that was found on board taken away. In Munster, Leinster and Connaught the protestants are disseized of their inheritances, as well as plundered of their arms, horses and goods, and many of the chiefest amongst them imprisoned … 95
Just as Tyrconnell’s camps on the Curragh were intended to bring his army together for training (as well as to expel Protestants), so James’s annual military camps on Hounslow Heath had a purpose that was in part innocent. The heath, conveniently midway between Windsor and Whitehall, stood at the intersection of the Great West, Great North and Portsmouth roads, and an army based there could respond to landings in any direction. The camp also represented an opportunity to draw regiments together from individual garrisons and carry out standardised drill and some large-scale training. There was a mock fort, stormed regularly to the delight of spectators, and a chance for officers, when they could drag themselves away from London (captains were only expected to inspect their men every three days or so), to grasp the rudiments of An Abridgement of the English Military Discipline, a 1686 update of a drill-book first issued under Charles II. Simply getting regiments from across the land into camp on the right day showed the growing maturity of the army’s fledgling central administration, with William Blathwayt and his clerks coordinating arrivals. Once the troops were in camp, James personally took a close interest in their dress, drill and training.
There was more to Hounslow Heath than solid military preparation. The camp also served to show the City of London that there were troops near at hand, and there were, as John Evelyn tells us, ‘many jealousies and discourses of what was the meaning of this encampment’.96 James saw the camp, at least in part, as a means of rattling the coercive power at his disposal in its scabbard. There were certainly times when he was prepared to use his army to dragoon opposition, and we should not be surprised that Londoners feared that they would be next. Trelawney’s Regiment was quartered in Bristol in 1685 and 1686 because of the city’s whiggish sympathy, and dragoons were posted to Lancaster, Warrington, Liverpool and Preston, though not in ‘the honest town of Wigan’. There were cases when soldiers arrived to help towns elect the right Members of Parliament, and were sometimes given voting rights to help the process along.97
A combination of factors – amongst them the replacement of some officers of the English army, the purging of the Irish army, fears about the army’s role as a political instrument, and m
istrust of James’s policy overall – helped focus a military conspiracy against him. In the case of some officers, like Churchill and the Earl of Craven, colonel of the Coldstream Guards and Carolina proprietor, opposition to the king was sharpened by fears that his policies were damaging their interests in North America. In February 1687 Churchill, as a governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, delivered to the king the company’s formal complaint that nothing was being done to protect the North American colonies from French encroachments. The historian Stephen Saunders Webb may overstate the case when he declares that Churchill was ‘the leading exponent of English imperial expansion’. There is, though, no doubt that his belief that English interests in North America were not well served by royal policy was another significant difference between himself and James, and that his views were shared by the influential, efficient and upwardly mobile Blathwayt.98
Those involved in the conspiracies against James II risked their lives and fortunes, and so took good care to minimise written evidence of their deeds, thus complicating the historian’s task. We can easily enough say what the conspiracy was not. There was no attempt to subvert the majority of the army’s officer corps, still less its rank and file. There was never any hope of using the army in a military coup to overthrow the king. In fact the bulk of James’s army never directly opposed him, but the military conspiracy ensured that it was unable to fight against William of Orange because of the paralysing defection of its leaders. This defection, organised by men close to James, who knew his failings, fatally loosened his grip on power. It is possible that a stronger character would have withstood the repeated hammer blows of personal betrayal, but James did not. The flaws in his character, so clearly revealed during his brief reign, would destroy him.
Bishop Burnet, who had close connections to some of those involved, believed that at the heart of what he called ‘the design’ were ‘three of the chief officers of the army, Trelawney, Kirke and the Lord Churchill. They all went into it, and Trelawney engaged his brother, the bishop.’99 Ailesbury, on the other side of the fence, agreed with this. He tells us that he and Feversham went to the king, and begged him
to clap up seven or eight of the heads of them and with the most humble submission I ventured to name the Prince of Denmark, the Dukes of Ormonde and Grafton, Lord Churchill, Mr Kirke, Mr Trelawney &c., but as it was found, and fatally, that the king could not resolve and, if he had, in all probability the army would have stood by him.100
There were two nerve centres of conspiracy. The ‘Treason Club’, whose members met at the Rose Tavern on Russell Street in Covent Garden to smoke, drink and mutter, included a number of whiggish professional soldiers and politicians like Richard Savage, Viscount Colchester, Thomas Wharton (later to inherit his father’s peerage and emerge as a Whig grandee) and Thomas Langston, sometime major of Churchill’s Royal Dragoons and now commanding Princess Anne’s Horse. Charles Godfrey, who had served with Churchill in France and later married his sister Arabella, kept Churchill abreast of movements in the Rose.
The ‘Tangerines’ were the other main group, although the term strictly speaking comprised all Tangier veterans, given to musing on old times over their tokay and damning the government. Key conspirators included Percy Kirke and Charles Trelawney, as well as Langston, a Tangier veteran and intermediary with the Treason Club. Another Tangerine was John Cutts, a veteran of the Imperial service, where he had been the first man to plant a standard on the walls of Buda, a wholly characteristic act for a man soon to be known as ‘Salamander’, after the mythical creature which lives in fire. He had just published a book of Poetical Exercises and was a lieutenant colonel in the Anglo-Dutch Brigade, providing useful contact with disaffected officers in that body.
Some regiments were, naturally, more disaffected than others. The officers of 1st Foot Guards, who might have been expected to provide a mainstay for the regime, seem to have followed the lead of their colonel, the Duke of Grafton, who was not simply a member of the Cockpit circle but Barbara Villiers’ son, and who felt that his performance in 1685 had been poorly rewarded. He was governor of the Isle of Wight, and one of his captains, Lionel Copley, was deputy governor of the important port and arsenal of Hull.101 There were a number of naval officers like George Byng, Mathew Aylmer and Arthur Herbert in the conspiracy, but it was naturally more difficult to get naval plotters together.
Neither of these groups turned its attention to practical treason till the summer of 1688, as they could do little until they knew that William was indeed planning to invade. Events moved fast that summer. On 10 June 1688 James’s queen gave birth to a son, rendering the temporising policies of men like Halifax irrelevant, for there was now a good chance that James would have a successor who would not reverse his policies. Churchill, we are told, ‘was summoned to attend’ the birth as a witness, but although he was ‘sent for in a very particular manner … he had received some intimations before, and was purposely out of the way’.102 The bishops were acquitted on 30 June, and on that very day the Earls of Devonshire, Danby and Shrewsbury, Bishop Compton, Edward Russell and Henry Sidney, sent a letter to William of Orange assuring him that ‘nineteen parts of twenty’ throughout the kingdom wanted a change in government, and ‘much the greatest part of the nobility and gentry’ were ‘as much dissatisfied’. If William acted quickly, they were confident that the army would not fight because its members were ‘so discontented’.103
The army was in camp on Hounslow Heath, and conditions for spreading discontent amongst selected officers could scarcely have been better. Indeed, James’s own policy of canvassing officers for their support for repeal of the Test Acts actually worked against his own interests. The majority of army officers, then as now, were apolitical, and resented being invited to make political choices either way. When James asked Captain Sandys of the Blues, who had fought bravely at Sedgemoor, what he thought of the repeal, the captain replied gruffly: ‘I understand Your Majesty well enough. I fear God and honour the king, as I ought, but I am not a man that is given to change.’104
By mid-1688 the fact that the Prince of Orange was considering an invasion was an open secret. On 19 August Dr Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury, warned John Evelyn that ‘there would suddenly be some great thing discovered. This was the Prince of Orange intending to come over.’105 On 18 September Evelyn reported that ‘the Dutch make extraordinary preparations both at sea and land’, and on 7 October he declared that:
To such a strange temper, and unheard of in former times, was this poor nation reduced, and of which I was an eyewitness. The apprehension was (and with reason) that His Majesty’s forces would neither at land or at sea oppose them with that vigour requisite to repel the invader.106
John Churchill was at the very centre of the plot, and this is not a comfortable admission for some biographers. Winston S. Churchill, indeed, described the conspiracy against James as ‘The National Counter-Plot’ so as to stress both its national and its reactive character. Like most of the professional soldiers involved in it, Churchill relied primarily upon his army pay, and so the much-feared purge of the English army after the Irish model would strike at his fundamental interests. He had already seen loyal men who obstructed James have their careers blasted. Then, in early 1688 the Earl of Oxford, ‘the noblest subject in England and, as Englishmen loved to say, in Europe’, refused, as lord lieutenant of Essex, to appoint Catholics to public office. ‘I will stand by your Majesty against all enemies to the last drop of my blood,’ he declared. ‘But this is a matter of conscience and I cannot comply.’ He was deprived of his county lieutenancy and of the colonelcy of the Blues, where the Duke of Berwick replaced him.
In the fate of men like Somerset and Oxford, grandees who could survive well enough without royal favour, Churchill sensed a foretaste of his own. He was not willing to become a Catholic, and had told James so, though in less jocular terms than Percy Kirke, who warned the surprised monarch that he had given the Emperor of Morocco first refusal, and so if
he was going to convert to anything it would be to Islam. One evening before dinner in the autumn of 1685, we are told, James and Churchill walked round the Deanery Garden at Winchester. James had that day been carrying out the traditional ceremony of touching those afflicted by scrofula, known as the King’s Evil, and at Winchester he had performed the ceremony attended by Catholic priests.
James asked Churchill what he thought people made of his carrying out the ceremony in this way. Churchill replied that they feared it might be paving the way for the restoration of Catholicism. The angry James snapped back that he had given his word that all he sought was religious toleration. Churchill then said:
What I spoke, sir, proceeded purely from my zeal for your majesty’s service, which I prefer above all things next to that of God, and I humbly beseech your majesty to believe no subject in all your three kingdoms would venture further than I would to purchase your favour and good liking; but I have been bred a Protestant, and intend to live and die in that communion; above nine parts of ten of the whole people are of that persuasion, and I fear (which excess of duty makes me say) from the genius of the English nation, and their natural aversion to the Roman Catholic worship, some consequences which I dare not name, and which it creates in me a horror to think of.