were asked to contribute to a fund for the exiles. This ‘was long expected, and was at last with difficulty procured to be published, the interest of the French ambassador obstructing it’. The government ordered a book detailing the outrages inflicted on the Huguenots to be burnt by the common hangman, but even Evelyn, a committed royalist, thought that this was ‘no refutation of any facts therein’ but simply showed the French ambassador’s ‘great indignation at the pious and truly generous charity of all the nation’.84
Between 50,000 and 80,000 Huguenots arrived in England, where they were generally welcomed as fellow Protestants, even by the constrictive guilds of the City of London, for the skills they brought. The tales they told confirmed the worst English fears of an absolute monarchy with the stink of incense in its nostrils. Martha Guiscard of Fleet Street ‘came out of France, because Jean Guiscard, her father, was burnt at Nérac, accused of having irreverently received the host’. A wealthy gentleman who had to ‘abandon a great estate [was] condemned to be hanged: and his house demolished, and his woods destroyed’.85 Gilbert Burnet saw all this as ‘a real argument against the cruel and persecuting spirit of popery, wherever it prevailed … the French persecution came very seasonably to awaken the nation’.86 Another contemporary observer thought that: ‘The whole of Europe … is inundated with the enemies of Louis XIV since the expulsion of the Huguenots,’ and even Marshal Vauban lamented that France’s loss included ‘sixty millions of money, nine thousand sailors, twelve thousand tried soldiers, six hundred officers, and its most flourishing manufacturers’.87
English concern at the persecution of the Huguenots had two specific aspects. First, it was carried out without regard to class or wealth: indeed, it was the threat to ‘their property, rights or privileges’ that persuaded many Huguenot noblemen to give up their religion. To nervous Protestant gentlemen across the Channel, the process posed a revolutionary threat to the established social as well as religious order. Second, the regular army was the chosen instrument of terror. Dragoons were often quartered on Huguenot villages with licence to behave abominably, giving the process the name of the dragonnades and founding the verb ‘to dragoon’ in the English language. Armed resistance was crushed remorselessly: the marquis de Louvois told a military commander to ‘cause such destruction in the area’ that the example would teach other Huguenots ‘how dangerous it is to rise against the King’.88
Just as the abused often go on to be abusers, Huguenot exiles were not slow to take vengeance on those they believed responsible for their plight. At the Boyne in 1690 the Duke of Schomberg, himself a Huguenot, and a marshal of France before his exile, shouted to a shaky Huguenot regiment: ‘Allons, messieurs, voilà vos persecuteurs’ – ‘Come, gentlemen, there are your persecutors’ – and it immediately rallied. Conversely, some of the Wild Geese, Irish soldiers who left to serve in France after the collapse of the Jacobite cause in Ireland, behaved just as badly to French Protestants as English Protestants had to them. James’s illegitimate son the Duke of Berwick played a prominent part in suppressing a Protestant insurrection in Languedoc, and assures us that he had a brisk way with prisoners: ‘Revarelle and Catinat, who had been grenadiers in the troop, were burnt alive, on account of the horrid sacrileges they had been guilty of. Villar and Jonquet were broken on the wheel …’89
James quickly dissolved Parliament. He then proceeded to use the royal prerogative to dispense Roman Catholics from the Test Act, with a packed bench of judges finding in his favour in the collusive test case of Godden v. Hales in 1686.* He broke the Anglican monopoly of education by enabling Oxford fellows who became Catholics to retain their posts, and then imposed a Catholic president on Magdalen, the richest of Oxford’s colleges. County lieutenancies and magistrates’ benches were disproportionately reinforced by Catholics, and City livery companies and town councils across England saw the government’s opponents ejected. When the Duke of Somerset refused to conduct the public ceremonial for the reception of the papal nuncio on the ground that it was illegal, James replied: ‘I am above the law.’ ‘Your Majesty is so,’ replied the duke, ‘but I am not.’ He was dismissed from all his offices. Although the process worked almost as much to the advantage of Dissenters as it did to that of Catholics, it affronted Tory Anglicans in England and Protestants of the established Church in both Scotland and Ireland.90 James was alienating the very people who had backed his brother.
In May 1688 James found himself in a direct confrontation with Archbishop Sancroft and six bishops who refused to have an Indulgence, suspending the Test Act and allowing public Catholic worship, read from every pulpit. Tellingly, they would have been joined by Peter Mews, once a captain of royalist horse and a Sedgemoor veteran, had he been well enough to attend the crucial meeting. The bishops were arrested for seditious libel, and when they refused to give bail, arguing that, as peers, they did not need to do so, they were sent to the Tower. It gave the worst possible impression, and even the soldiers on guard there shouted ‘God bless the bishops.’ At their trial they argued that the Indulgence violated the law, which could only be changed by Parliament, and were acquitted. That night there were bonfires and fireworks across London, and even a number of symbolic pope-burnings. It was a substantial public rebuff for James.
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
