William III & Mary II (Penguin Monarchs) by Jonathan Keates

Author:Jonathan Keates
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141976884
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-02-09T16:00:00+00:00

4

A Lonely Crown

Classicists, convinced that everything of value in Western culture happened in the ancient Mediterranean before the Common Era, like to remind us that we owe our democracy to the Greeks. Such a condescending view, in England at least, is entirely unjustified by the facts of the case. These are that during the course of six or seven hundred years, from the days of the Saxon kings to the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the nation evolved its own form of popular sovereignty in the shape of a parliament whose members, over the generations, were almost entirely unconscious of the glories of Periclean Athens and the age of Socrates and Plato. The words ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic’ found their way into the language as Elizabethan and Jacobean parliaments grew more confident of their powers and significance in relation to the crown. To the horrified astonishment of other states, this elected assembly would end up not only waging war on its sovereign but putting him on trial, finding him guilty of crimes against the people and sentencing him to public execution.

Far from owing anything to the Greeks, modern democratic governmental systems across the world take their origin from the compromises reached with the English parliament by King William III – so patiently and presciently, whatever his private anger or frustration – during the 1690s. As a result of this achievement, England became a state in which popular representation, however limited the franchise, acted as a bulwark against tyranny, managed the national exchequer, proposed and enacted all new legislation and formed a permanent central element within the executive. As such, its example was a crucial inspiration both to the Americans in 1775 and the French in 1789, though each would far prefer to ignore such indebtedness in favour of a founding myth of national exceptionalism.

Among English monarchs, in this sphere as in others, William is the ultimate Aunt Sally for partisan historians, a king who could never get anything right. Forsaking England in pursuit of foreign wars, he never got to know his people. He was monomaniacally absorbed with squeezing taxes out of Parliament to fund these military adventures. He dragged the nation into a theatre of European affairs from which it gained no genuine advantage and are still rueing the consequences. For the sake of all this, he cynically exploited party divisions, contributing to the political acrimony and contention clouding the reign of his sister-in-law and successor, Queen Anne. All these accusations have been flung at William and none of them is wholly deserved. The practical wisdom he shared with Mary taught him to make the best, as king, of the circumstances and human resources at his disposal. Since there was no question that either would be permitted to reign without Parliament, William very quickly learned to focus his skills on cultivating a relationship with both Houses which, if not always harmonious, could produce some sort of profitable outcome. In the presence of the assembled peers and MPs, he appeared charming and

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