Jonathan Keates - William III & Mary II: Partners in Revolution

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First published 2015

Copyright Jonathan Keates, 2015

Cover design by Pentagram
Jacket art by Conrad Roset

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-141-97688-4

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THE HOUSES OF WESSEX AND DENMARK

THE HOUSES OF NORMANDY, BLOIS AND ANJOU

THE HOUSE OF PLANTAGENET

THE HOUSES OF LANCASTER AND YORK

THE HOUSE OF TUDOR

THE HOUSE OF STUART

THE HOUSE OF HANOVER

THE HOUSES OF SAXE-COBURG & GOTHA AND WINDSOR

It is a Saturday afternoon at the London Library. The issue hall is almost empty, the reading room, so busy earlier in the week, today contains only a handful of dedicated researchers and an agreeably sepulchral quiet pervades the stacks and staircases. Outside, the kind of autumn day described by that eloquent Scots monosyllable dreich dark, cold and damp hangs over St Jamess Square. None of us at our desks, with our iPads, pens, sheaves of lined A4 and little mounds of printed wisdom plucked from the shelves, has any idea of what is about to disturb the peace of communal scholarship. Neither have the four or five readers dozing over learned journals in the semicircle of red armchairs.

From out of the afternoon streets south of the square arises a sound which insists that we sit up and take proper notice of the occasion. It is the music of an Ulster Protestant marching band not one, in fact, but several, converging with inexorable shrillness and precision on the green, fenced space, its plane trees still in leaf. Some of us move sheepishly to the window, ashamed to admit to anything so vulgar as mere curiosity.

The roadway is soon filled with a procession headed by files of smartly uniformed boys and girls trilling fifes and beating drums with a combination of expert nonchalance and focused intensity. There is a sudden halt to these martial strains, as a man in a bowler hat, his orange sash more elaborate than those worn by the band members, steps forward, apparently to address somebody concealed by the greenery behind the railings. A profound, almost desperate respect seizes the listeners. When at last he raises his hat, there are rousing cheers and cries of God save the queen!, then the fluting and drumming resumes and the procession marches smartly off in its tangerine segments towards Regent Street. Aware that the library will close in an hour or so, we return, however reluctantly, to our desks.

Some of us watching the ceremony in the square will by now have made the connection between place, date and celebrants. In two days time it will be the fourth of November, the birthday of the man who, for these marchers and musicians, is still the Deliverer, gallant champion of their liberties, guarantor of their freedom of worship, their saviour from bigotry and persecution. It is entirely in accordance with his personal dislike of the showmanship and public display demanded of royalty that the statue of King William III should be hidden from view in one of central Londons leafiest and least-frequented public spaces. Equally characteristic of posteritys attitude towards him is the fact that this memorial should have fetched up here by accident, almost a century after his death.

The sculptor John Bacon, whose son finished it off, used a fancy portrait by Godfrey Kneller as the model for his presentation of William as a Roman general, complete with cuirass, buskins and laurel wreath. From canvas to bronze the Bacons transferred the kings unforgettable profile, lantern-jawed, hook-nosed, keen-eyed, the countenance of a monarch for whom being royal meant more than sitting for portraits and wearing the right clothes. Theyve taken trouble, too, with the horse. Short in the withers, wide in the rump, with a curly mane and a tail like a fan, this is evidently one of those Spanish steeds so favoured by cavalry commanders on the European battlefields of the seventeenth century.