Once on the throne, James moved quickly to change the balance of political forces in England. His first objective was simply to remove the restrictions placed on English Catholics by the strongly anti-Catholic Protestant majority. Increasingly, however, Catholics were promoted into key positions. Catholic governors were installed in the Channel ports and a Catholic admiral was given command of the Channel fleet. Although Protestant anxiety and opposition mounted swiftly, one important fact stifled overt action: James had no son, and his two daughters, Mary and Anne, were both Protestants. English Protestants, thus, were prepared to await James' death and Mary's succession. And Mary's husband, who would suceed with her to the throne, was William of Orange. William's title to rule came only partially from his status as Mary's husband; in his own right he was also, as the only nephew of both King Charles II and King James II, the next heir after Mary and Anne.
William did not dislike his uncle, but he deeply feared the presence of a Catholic monarch on the English throne, with its implications of an alignment of Catholic France and Catholic England against Protestant Holland. Nevertheless, he, too, was prepared to wait for James to die and his own wife, Mary, to come to the throne. But on June 20, 1688, James' Queen, Mary of Modena, produced a son. The Catholic King had a Catholic heir. This challenge flung down before the Protestants of England turned them immediately to William. Although what happened next was seen by James' supporters (who came to be called Jacobites) as a stroke of monstrous ambition by a ruthless nephew and son-in-law usurping the throne of England, the motive for William's action had almost nothing to do with England and everything to do with France and Europe. It was not that William wanted to be King of England or cared about preserving the liberties of Englishmen or the rights of Parliament; what he wanted was to keep England in the Protestant camp.
The invitation to William to replace his uncle on the English throne was sent to William by seven of the most respected Protestants leaders in England, including both Whigs and Tories. Obtaining the support and permission of the States General of Holland, William embarked a Dutch army of 12,000 men on 200 merchant vessels escorted by 49 warships, almost the entire Dutch fleet. Slipping past the watching English and French fleets, he landed at Torbay on the Devonshire coast. He came ashore behind a banner carrying the ancient creed of the House of Orange, "Je maintiendrai" ("I shall maintain"), to which William had added the words: "the liberties of England and the Protestant religion."
James sent his most skilled military commander and his intimate personal friend, John Churchill, then Earl of Marlborough, to confront William's army, but Marlborough, himself a Protestant, promptly defected to the invaders. So did James' other daughter, Princess Anne, along with her husband, Prince George of Denmark. This broke the King's spirit. Crying, "God help me! Even my own children have deserted me!" he fled unshaven from London, throwing the Great Seal into the river as he crossed the
Thames and embarked for France. There, in the chateau of St. Germain-en-Laye, where he now lies buried, the proud and obstinate monarch lived for thirteen years as a pensioner of Louis. He kept a shadow court and a handful of Irish Guards, all dependent for their daily bread on Louis, whose vanity was gratified by the presence at his feet of a suppliant exiled monarch.
Mary's position in the quarrel between her father and her husband was painful, but, as a Protestant and a wife, she supported William. When she arrived in England, she quickly rejected proposals that she become the sole monarch to the exclusion of her husband. William and Mary were proclaimed joint sovereigns by a Parliament which, in turn, extracted from them a Bill of Rights and other privileges which are today the centerpieces of the British constitution.
Ironically, although the events of 1688 marked an overwhelming change in the political and constitutional history of England, and are referred to as the Glorious Revolution, William did not much care about them. He acquiesced in whatever Parliament asked, in order to keep its support for the struggle in Europe. He left domestic policy in the hands of others while striving to control England's foreign policy himself, coordinating it with Dutch policy and even merging the Dutch and English diplomatic services to act as one. His foreign policy was, simply, war with France, and in taking William, England also took his war. In essence, a trade had been made: Parliament accepted William's war in order to protect the Protestant religion and assert its supremacy; William accepted Parliament's supremacy in order to keep England's support in fighting Louis.
William did not feel at home among the islanders. He hated the English weather, which aggravated his asthma, and he disliked the English people: "I am sure that this people has not been made for me, nor J for it." He longed for Holland. In 1692, when The Hague was holding its annual fair, he sighed, "I wish I were a bird and could fly over." On another occasion, he spoke of Holland, "for which I am longing as a fish for water."
And the English heartily returned William's dislike. They commented on his unsociability, his silence and his surliness toward his English subjects, as well as on his distaste for their habits, their traditions, their parties and politics, and for London. But although he took the witty Elizabeth Villiers as his mistress, Queen Mary remained devoted to him, ruling England in his behalf whenever he was absent from the realm and retiring from politics completely whenever he returned. When she died of smallpox at the age of thirty-two, William mourned her bitterly. He continued on as sole monarch, a childless, lonely man whose heir was Mary's sister, Princess Anne. The French, ever ready to believe the worst of the strange little man who so desperately opposed them, spread rumors that he was in love with the Earl of Albemarle.
What William most disliked about the English was what he regarded as their naive disregard of their own long-term interests and their selfish lack of concern about what happened to Europe; in other words, their wavering commitment to his great cause. As King of England, he bound English interests to the Dutch, but he did not subordinate the one to the other. Instead, as leader of the coalition of Europe, he took an overall view of his role. He began to speak of Europe as an entity, and in his correspondence the objective became "the general interest of Europe."
Predictably, within two years of William's coronation, England was at war with France. The war lasted nine years, the result was inconclusive and the Treaty of Ryswick, being drawn up at The Hague in 1697 at the moment of Peter's visit to Holland, altered no boundaries, although by its terms Louis finally recognized William as King of England. Thereafter, in a brief interlude of peace, Louis and William even worked together to head off the international crisis which would inevitably be precipitated when the feeble King of Spain, Carlos II, died without an heir. The agreed solution was partition, but Carlos upset their plans by leaving his kingdom and empire to Louis's grandson, and the Sun King tore up his treaty with William. William, naturally, refused to accept this merger of the territory and power of France and Spain, and tirelessly began once again to assemble an anti-French coalition.