Sir Arthur Travers

November 5, 1688. A Dutch fleet of over 400 ships put an army ashore in Devon, and within seven weeks the King of England had fled the country and a foreign prince was running it. The English call it the Glorious Revolution. In almost any other context you would call it a successful foreign invasion. And the landing date is not a coincidence. November 5 was already the national Protestant holiday, commemorating deliverance from the Gunpowder Plot. Whether the weather allowed it or William timed it, the propaganda value was enormous and nobody involved missed it. Here is why it happened. James II was a Catholic king of a Protestant country, which England had tolerated on one condition, which was that it was temporary. His heirs were his two Protestant daughters by his first marriage, Mary and Anne. The plan was to wait him out. Then he started putting Catholics into the army and into government office, he suspended laws by royal prerogative, and in 1687 he dismissed Parliament rather than let it block him. And in June 1688 his second wife gave birth to a son. That changed everything. A Catholic male heir took precedence over Mary and Anne, and the temporary situation became permanent. A Catholic dynasty, indefinitely. Thirty days later, seven men signed what is known as the Invitation of the Seven, written in code, telling William of Orange that their condition was worsening and they were less able to defend themselves. It is worth being precise about that document, because it gets oversold. It did not invite William to take the throne. It was an assurance that if he came, people would rise. Seven signatories out of an entire political nation is not a national mandate, and historians have argued for three centuries about whether it conferred any legitimacy at all. William's motives were Dutch, not English. France under Louis XIV was the existential threat to the Dutch Republic, and there was a real prospect of England being pulled into a Franco-English alliance against it. An England on his side instead was worth an invasion. The force he assembled was not a token escort. Around 463 ships, roughly 10,700 regular infantry, 3,660 cavalry with their horses, artillery, about 5,000 volunteers, and over 9,000 crew, with thousands more men aboard. English and Scottish exiles, plus German, Swiss, Swedish and other mercenaries. That is roughly twice the size of the Spanish Armada a hundred years earlier. The plan was to land on the east coast. Easterly winds made that impossible, and the same winds that stopped him going east also pinned the Royal Navy in the Thames and let him run down the Channel unopposed. That wind became known as the Protestant Wind. The fleet came into Torbay and the troops landed at Brixham in Devon on November 5. The infantry was ashore by midnight, the cavalry took two days, and the artillery went round by water to Exeter because the Devon roads were useless. Then almost nothing happened for a fortnight. William entered Exeter on November 9 and very few local gentry came in to join him, partly because Monmouth's rebellion in the same part of the country three years earlier had ended with the Bloody Assizes and a lot of executed West Countrymen. People were waiting to see. Devon nobles came over on November 15. After that it accelerated. James had around 19,000 men at Salisbury on November 19 and a Royal Army of about 30,000 in total, which on paper was more than enough. He never fought with it. There was skirmishing, a clash at Wincanton and a fight at Reading on December 7 that left over fifty dead, and that is close to the whole military history of the revolution in England. Ireland and Scotland are a completely different and far bloodier story. What destroyed James was desertion. His officers went over, his nobles went over, his own daughter Anne went over, and John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough, went over. An army whose commanders will not fight is not an army. James lost his nerve, tried to flee, was caught in Kent, was brought back, and was then deliberately allowed to escape, because William very much did not want a captive anointed king on his hands. He went into exile on December 23. Dutch troops occupied London until the spring of 1690. The settlement is where it becomes constitutionally enormous. The Parliament elected in January 1689 decided that James had forfeited the throne by fleeing, which was a legal fiction everyone agreed to use because nobody wanted to say out loud that Parliament had deposed a king. The Declaration of Right became the Bill of Rights, with royal assent in December 1689. No standing army in peacetime without Parliament's consent, no taxation without Parliament, no suspending laws, free elections, free speech in Parliament, frequent Parliaments. Most of those claims were not new and had appeared in the Petition of Right in 1628. The genuinely new thing was that the succession itself had been negotiated with Parliament, which killed the divine right of kings in England as a working doctrine. And then the bill arrived. Britain got William's war. The Nine Years War started immediately and ran to 1697. Then the War of the Spanish Succession, which I posted about on the 1st, then the War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years War, the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. Between 1689 and 1815, Britain was at war with at least one major power in 86 of those 127 years. Paying for that is what built the modern British state. England copied Dutch financial institutions, the Bank of England was founded in 1694 specifically to fund the war, and the national debt became a permanent instrument rather than an emergency measure. That financial machinery is a large part of why a middling island kingdom ended up running a quarter of the planet. A Dutch prince landed in Devon on Gunpowder Treason day with 400 ships, and England got a constitution, a central bank and 127 years of war out of it.