Unknown 17th Century Dutch Artist, Embarkation of William
III, Prince of Orange, at Helvoetsluis, c. 1688-99, oil on canvas, Royal
Collection
On 1 November, driven onward at speed by a strong easterly
wind, a vast Dutch fleet left its sheltered harbour at Hellevoetsluis and
sailed out into open waters. At a signal from William of Orange the great
gathering of ships organised itself into a prearranged formation, ‘stretching
the whole fleet in a line, from Dover to Calais, twenty-five deep’. The Dutch
began their mission, ‘colours flying’, the fleet ‘in its greatest splendour’,
‘a vast mass of sail stretching as far as the eye could see, the warships on
either flank simultaneously thundering their guns in salute as they passed in
full view of Dover Castle on one side and the French garrison at Calais on the
other’. As the great flotilla proceeded magnificently on its way, the Dutch
regiments stood in full parade formation on the deck, with ‘trumpets and drums
playing various tunes to rejoice [their] hearts … for above three hours’.
In his diary for the day, Constantijn Huygens junior, William
of Orange’s Dutch secretary, recorded how, the morning after they set sail: ‘We
arrived between Dover and Calais, and at midday, as we passed along the
Channel, we could see distinctly the high white cliffs of England, but the
coast of France could be seen only faintly.’ Constantijn junior, and the other
children of the distinguished statesman, connoisseur, poet and musician Sir
Constantijn Huygens, together with their father, will be important witnesses
and guides as the present book unfolds.
Poised between England and Holland (like other members of
his family he was an outstanding linguist, whose English and French were as
fluent as his native Dutch), Constantijn junior was equally at home in the
élite circles of either country. Like his father and his younger brother, the
scientist Christiaan Huygens, he moved easily between countries, his
international experience proving invaluable to his princely employer.
From the very start, the Dutch fleet achieved its key
strategic aim, creating an unforgettable spectacle, inducing a feeling of shock
and awe in onlookers on either shore. The iconic image of its offensive sortie
into the English Channel was commemorated in countless contemporary paintings
and engravings, still to be found today, on display or in store, in galleries
on both sides of the Narrow Seas. As the seventeenth-century armada made its
way along the Channel, crowds gathered on the clifftops of the south of England
to watch it pass. It was reported that the procession of ships had taken six
hours to clear the ‘straits’.
The departure from Holland and arrival in England of this
great fleet had been contrived with exceptional care, down to the very last
detail. As the foremost historian of this period of Anglo–Dutch relations puts
it, ‘The boldest enterprise ever undertaken by the Republic of the United Netherlands
was stage-managed with exquisite artistry.’ The expedition comprised
fifty-three warships, of which thirty-two were ‘capital ships’ designed for
combat – thirteen with between sixty and sixty-eight guns, seven with between
fifty and fifty-six, and twelve with between forty and forty-eight – the rest
escort ships. There were ten fireships and about four hundred other vessels to
transport troops, supplies and horses. The army was made up of 10,692 regular
infantry and 3,660 regular cavalry, plus gunners of the artillery train and
five thousand gentleman volunteers – expatriate Englishmen, Huguenots and other
sympathisers. On top of this there were 9,142 crew members and a further ten
thousand men on board the transport vessels. William’s plan was that this
spectacular floating combination of forces and resources should avoid naval
engagement at all costs. Like the D-Day landings, this was a huge feat of
transportation, rather than a navy seeking a sea battle.
The munitions, equipment and supplies with which the
expeditionary force was provided were formidable, and state-of-the-art.
According to one eyewitness (who, as usual, may have slightly exaggerated the
numbers), the fleet carried a total of seven thousand horses – mounts for the
3,660 cavalry officers, the Prince, his entourage and the officer and gentleman
volunteers, and draught horses for the carts carrying provisions and
ammunition. Further draught animals were needed to pull the fifty artillery
pieces.
Every possible eventuality had been anticipated. Special
equipment for the venture had been manufactured covertly in Amsterdam, The
Hague and Utrecht. Intelligencers reported in the months preceding the invasion
that the Dutch government had ordered ‘at Utrecht the making of severall thousand
of pairs of pistols and carabins’, while Amsterdam ‘has undertaken to furnish
3,000 saddles’, and ‘they are also night and day employed at The Hague in
making bombs, cuirasses and stinkpotts’. There were ‘muskets, pikes of all
sorts, bandoliers, swords, pistols, saddles, boots, bridles and other
necessaries to mount horsemen; pickaxes, wheelbarrows and other instruments to
raise ground’, and ‘boats covered with leather to pass over rivers and lakes’.
The fleet carried a mobile smithy for shoeing horses and repairing weapons, ten
thousand pairs of spare boots, a printing press, and a large quantity of
printing paper. Additional vessels were hired at Amsterdam to transport hay,
provisions, etc. The wind, Constantijn Huygens recorded in his diary for the day
after the fleet set sail, was steadily easterly, and the weather good.
The one decision that had not been taken by William and his
advisers in advance was whether the fleet would aim to make landfall in the
north of England, in Yorkshire, or in the south-west (in either case avoiding
the English army, which was massed in the south-east). Pragmatically, and to
perplex English intelligence, it was decided to leave that choice to the
prevailing winds. In the event, the wind, which had blown ferociously from the
west for almost three weeks previously, battering the Dutch coast and thwarting
William’s attempt to launch his attack in mid-October, swung round suddenly
(some said providentially) in the final days of October.
Responding to the favourable wind, the invasion fleet
proceeded in the direction of the English coast, headed towards Harwich, as if
to make landfall in Yorkshire. Having sailed just past Harwich, however,
William of Orange, commander-in-chief in person of this mighty flotilla, gave
new orders for it to proceed instead south-westwards, to take full advantage of
the ever-strengthening easterly wind. The English war fleet, trapped in the
Thames estuary by the same wind, watched William’s armada go by twice, helpless
to follow and engage until it was too late.
So the Prince and his highly disciplined Dutch army marched
into London down Knightsbridge, confident that they would meet no resistance,
along a two-mile route lined with Dutch Blue Guards. In the absence of any
actual military drama to mark this final act in the well-orchestrated invasion,
it was an entrance as carefully staged, in a long military tradition of
‘glorious entries’ into conquered cities, as that first entry into Exeter a few
weeks earlier. William again wore white, with a white cloak thrown over his
shoulder to protect him from the heavy rain. There was some consternation when
the Prince, who disliked crowds, did not actually remain at the head of the
cavalcade the full length of the official route to Whitehall, but instead cut
across St James’s Park and gained access to his new residence at St James’s
Palace from its ornamental garden.
Some historians have argued that William’s route across the
park and through the palace gardens was a genuine mistake on his part (leaving
his future subjects, thronged several deep along Whitehall to welcome him,
disappointed). There is, however, a more plausible explanation. William, in a
tradition of Dutch Stadholders going back several generations, was an enthusiastic
amateur gardener, taking a keen interest in the latest garden designs and their
execution at all of his numerous Dutch royal palaces.
Almost twenty years before the invasion, at the time when
William was engaged in consolidating power in the United Provinces for the
house of Orange, a former royal gardener to Charles II, André Mollet, had
published a book on the design and execution of ambitious formal gardens, The
Garden of Pleasure. Lavishly illustrated, with plates depicting the formal layout
of shrubberies, kitchen gardens, flowerbeds and parterres, the book was a
celebration of the garden designs of various European royal estates for which
Mollet had been responsible, including Charles II’s London gardens at St
James’s Palace. Since William of Orange’s own ambitious garden for his palace
at Honselaarsdijk, outside The Hague, was included, we may be sure it was a
‘coffee-table’ book with which the Dutch Prince was familiar.
Mollet’s description of the garden he had created for the
Stuart royal family at St James’s particularly emphasised the originality and
ambition of its design. Because the site was low-lying, with no elevated
viewing point from which ‘Embroidered groundworks and Knots of grass’ could be
admired, the garden designer had instead ‘contrived it into several
Parallelograms, according to its length’. These lozenges were ‘planted with
dwarf-fruit-Trees, Rose-trees, and several sorts of Flowers’. The outer
perimeter of the garden Mollet had marked ‘with Cyprus-Trees and other green
Plants, to make Pallissade’s of about five foot high, with two perforated Gates
to every Square’. The formal avenues were planted with ‘dwarf-fruit-Trees and
Vines; the great Walk on the Right-hand is raised Terras-like, and Turff’t’,
and at their intersections Mollet had designed an imposing fountain, and a
‘Round of grass whereon to set up a Dial or Statue, as also in several places
Cut-Angles, as may be seen upon the Design’. To offset all this formality,
there was also a carefully designed wilderness:
And in regard it falls out, that at one end there happens
to be wild Wood, we have contrived another of green trees over against it, of
which the great Tree which was found standing there in the middle makes the
Head, both of the green Wood and the rest of the Garden; which tree we thought
to leave as a remembrance of the Royal Oak [within whose branches Charles II
reputedly took refuge from Cromwell’s soldiers during the Civil War].
The elegant complexity of the St James’s Palace gardens is
still to be seen in engravings of the period, and on the many surviving London
maps.
When, on his triumphal progress into London, Prince William
came to the edge of St James’s Park, the sight of a garden project about which
he had read, and which was closely related in plan and execution to his own
much-loved pleasure gardens in the Northern Provinces, surely proved
irresistible to him. He had already made more than one detour in the course of
his military advance on London from Exeter, to indulge in a bit of tourism in
the form of excursions to celebrated English stately homes and their formal
gardens.36 Now he simply detached himself from the splendid cavalcade, and
commenced his experience as King-to-be and owner of a string of magnificent
royal palaces and grounds (including St James’s), with a short tour to admire
the park, shrubbery and elegant gardens.
Strategically the advance deployment of Dutch troops, and
the withdrawal of their English counterparts, ensured that London was secured
for William before his arrival, and that King James was at his mercy even
before the Prince himself reached London. The King had indeed been ‘escorted’
out of St James’s by Dutch guards on 18 December, ‘under pretence of keeping
off the rabble’, and taken to Rochester, only hours before William took up
occupancy. Just over a month had elapsed since the invading forces had landed
on English soil. Less than a week later, King James absconded from his
Rochester house-arrest, and left England for France. The Dutch Blue Coats
guarding him had been carefully instructed to let him get away.
The Blue Coats continued to guard Whitehall, St James’s
Palace and Somerset House for many months, ‘to the general disgust of the whole
English army’. The entire London area remained under Dutch military occupation
until the spring of 1690. No English regiments were allowed within twenty miles
of the city. The English and Scots regiments of the States General’s forces,
which had led the triumphal entry (in order not to alarm the citizens of London
too much) were stationed at the Tower and Lambeth. Dutch and German regiments
encamped at Woolwich, Kensington, Chelsea and Paddington, while another crack
regiment was positioned at Richmond, and the Huguenots put up in various parts
of London. As far as possible, the Prince avoided billeting his troops on
private households, and insisted that they behave courteously, and pay for any
goods acquired. Nevertheless, in spite of his efforts to avoid the appearance
of foreign occupation, the continuing presence of large numbers of heavily
armed troops in the city caused growing consternation and unrest.
The Dutch invasion of 1688 was a brilliantly stage-managed
sequence of events, forever vivid in the memory of those who witnessed them. A
number of contemporary diarists record the intensity of their feelings as
events unfolded – whether they were for the overthrow of the Catholic James or
against. John Evelyn (one of those apparently unsure of his own response to the
imminent regime change) had recorded in his diary the sense of dread with which
the news was received in late October that William’s immense fleet was poised
ready to sail. There were ‘tumults’ in London as ‘the rabble’ attacked and demolished
Catholic places of worship. Evelyn reported a ‘universal discontent’, which had
‘brought people to so desperate a passe as with uttmost expressions even
passionately seeme to long for & desire the landing of that Prince, whom
they looked on as their deliverer from popish Tyrannie’. For those like Evelyn
who had lived through the turmoil of the Civil War years, the upheaval caused
by William’s intervention in England’s national affairs seemed all too likely
to herald another period of instability. Figuratively wringing his hands, he
recalled in his diary his fearful state of mind as he witnessed the arrival of
William’s invading army, when ‘To such a strange temper & unheard of in any
former age, was this poore nation reduc’d, & of which I was an Eye witnesse.’
The complexity of the political response to James’s
‘abdication’ and William’s ‘peaceful’ arrival has been much discussed by
historians, particularly since the three hundredth anniversary of the ‘Glorious
Revolution’ was celebrated in 1988. In the end, the decision of the English
people to accept William and Mary as joint monarchs had a good deal to do with
a general reluctance to return to the bad old days of public disorder and civil
unrest. Regime change was preferable to another civil war.
