The King’s commissioners met with the Prince of Orange at Hungerford on 8 December, and the following day William named his terms for a truce. All Catholics were to be dismissed from government and an amnesty granted to those who had supported William. Parliament must be summoned, and the Prince of Orange would be allowed to come to London while it sat. In the meantime the expenses of his army must be met out of the public revenue.
If James had been willing to accept these terms, he might have retained his throne. It was inevitable that Parliament would demand that the Prince of Wales be brought up as a Protestant but, if the King had swallowed this, there was a chance that his son would be recognised as his heir. William’s more ardent supporters were certainly appalled that he could conceive of a settlement that left the baby’s rights intact.
Late on the night of 9 December the Queen and her child slipped unseen out of the palace and were in France within twenty-four hours. The following afternoon James heard from his commissioners, but he still remained determined to follow the Queen. Realising what the King had in mind, the Earl of Ailesbury begged him to reconsider, but James would not listen. He told the Earl, ‘If I should go, who can wonder after the treatment I have found?’ naming his daughter’s desertion as a key factor in his thinking. Undeterred, Ailesbury urged the King to march with a body of horse to Nottingham. He argued that ‘Your daughter will receive you or she will not. If the latter, and that she retires perhaps towards Oxford, all will cry out on her; if she doth stay to receive your Majesty, you will be able to treat honourably with the Prince of Orange’.135 It was fortunate for Anne that the King rejected this advice, so she was never given this dilemma.
Towards midnight on 10 December James left the palace and headed for Kent, where a boat was waiting for him. However, before the ship set sail, it was boarded by a party of local fishermen, who mistook James for a Catholic priest and carried him off as their prisoner to the Queen’s Head inn at Faversham. Meanwhile in James’s absence London had threatened to degenerate into anarchy, with anti-Catholic riots resulting in the destruction of much valuable property. When a committee of peers and bishops learned on 13 December that James was in custody they resolved to bring him back to the capital, even though the Common Council of London had recently invited William of Orange there as well. On 16 December James had been much heartened to be acclaimed by the crowds as he drove back into London and he now looked forward to meeting William at ‘a personal conference to settle the distracted nation’.136
By now, however, William had decided it was too late for an arrangement of that kind. He had been delighted to hear that James had fled, and had at once decided to go to London, rather than meeting with Anne at Oxford. While on his way he was appalled when it emerged that James had been detained in Kent, and he was still more upset by the King’s return to London. At Windsor William had a conference with his supporters. He rejected advice from extremists to imprison James in the Tower or remove him to Holland, saying that Mary ‘would never bear it’, but he resolved to send his father-in-law out of London. Accordingly soldiers were despatched to Whitehall, where James was sleeping, and the King was informed that William expected him to leave the next day. On the morning of 18 December the King set off for Rochester, Kent, protesting bitterly at being ‘chased away from his own house by the Prince of Orange’. That afternoon William entered London, accompanied by a large number of cavalry, and took up residence at St James’s Palace ‘in extraordinary great grandeur’.137
Anne and George returned from Oxford the following day, and William promptly ‘called to see them at the Cockpit’. By now some people were disquieted by the way the King had been treated, calling his eviction a ‘gross violation’. Burnet, who had come over from Holland with the Prince as his chaplain, noted in concern that ‘compassion has begun to work’ but Anne, for one, appeared proof against this emotion. One report even claimed she went to the theatre that evening, bedecked in orange ribbons.138
For the moment, no one could tell how the situation would be resolved. The deadlock was broken by the King. As he explained to Lord Ailesbury, he was convinced that if he remained in England he would be imprisoned in the Tower ‘and no King ever went out of that place but to his grave’.139 Since William had seen to it that his father-in-law was lightly guarded at Rochester, James was able to make another escape on the night of 23 December, and this time he made it to France. The next day a committee of peers agreed that a Convention Parliament should meet in a month’s time. William was invited to take over the administration of government in the interim, and he agreed to this on 28 December.
Events had moved very fast, and a backlash against William was only to be expected. One influential Member of Parliament told Clarendon that he had welcomed William on his arrival in the West Country, ‘thinking in a free parliament to redress all that was amiss; but that men now began to think that the Prince aimed at something else’. While Anne’s feelings are hard to define, she gave some indication of unease and perhaps even remorse when talking with the Bishop of Winchester. The Bishop told her he had visited her father at Rochester and that though in general he had appeared in good health ‘nothing troubled him so much as his daughter Anne lest she should for grief miscarry’. Since Anne knew that she had in fact been deceiving her father about her pregnancy, this could hardly fail to touch her conscience, but unfortunately our source for this story deliberately omitted her response, noting only ‘she concluded that discourse thus: “If he had not gone so suddenly to Rochester, she would have sent to him”’.140
It is probably safe to say that Anne had never thought that the Prince of Orange might gain the throne following his invasion. Certainly Sarah Churchill maintained that the possibility had not occurred to her. ‘I do solemnly protest that … I was so very simple a creature that I never once dreamt of his being king’ she wrote in her memoirs. ‘I imagined that the Prince of Orange’s sole design was to provide for the safety of his own country by obliging King James to keep the laws of ours, and that he would go back as soon as he had made us all happy’.141 Yet while one can be sure that Anne had not foreseen that William would be crowned, it is less easy to know what sort of settlement she had anticipated. She was unlikely to have been satisfied by any settlement that left her brother’s right to the crown intact, although she could hardly have conceived that her father would agree to his son being disinherited. Perhaps she envisaged a solution along the lines proposed by Charles II back in 1681 whereby James would retain the nominal title of King but would be banished for life. William and Mary would serve as regents, and then, since the Prince of Wales would be rejected as an imposter, on James’s death, Mary would become Queen. On the other hand, Anne may not have thought things through in such detail.
Fortunately for Anne, by taking flight her father had ensured that his son’s claims could be ignored. On 24 December Clarendon had suggested that in accordance with William of Orange’s Declaration, an enquiry should be set up into the birth of the Prince of Wales. At this Lord Wharton exploded, ‘My Lords, I did not expect … to hear anybody mention that child who was called the Prince of Wales. Indeed I did not; and I hope we shall hear no more of him’.142 With that the matter was dropped.
Despite his earlier insistence that his expedition had not been motivated by personal ambition, William was aware that he now had a chance of grasping the crown, allowing him to rule England either jointly with Mary, or even as sole monarch. As yet he had to be circumspect, but he was angered by the very idea that Anne might try to thwart his aspirations. William had always had difficulty accepting the fact that Anne had a better right than him to the throne. In 1679 he had made a revealing slip when he described himself as ‘the third heir to the crown’.143 He forgot he was actually fourth in line, after James, Mary, and Anne. Apart from this, William had long been troubled by the prospect that if