Truths about 1690 and all that

controversies and myths which surround a problematic tercentenary.

THERE are not many dates which still serve as slogans after three

centuries; but 1690 is one. It is a four-figure word that can still

argue with the force of some four-letter ones.

It becomes a folk artform on Ulster gable ends; it keeps evil company

with the initials of IRA terrorism and retaliatory insult among the

graffiti of Lowland Scotland. North and south of the Boyne it will

provoke many a sermon as next July approaches. There will be very Irish

reminders (even from those paying lip-service to the more recent

Republican mythology of 1916) that we should forget all that. Yet it is

a safe bet that the 300th anniversary of the battle near Drogheda will

be well remembered next July. There would be more sense in advice about

the tone and style of the commemoration.

There are triumphalist myths of 1690, once even dearer to the

Anglo-Irish Ascendancy in Dublin than to Ulster Presbyterians. And there

is their inevitable historical legacy of resentment and reaction. But

truth can be stranger than mythology. Three truths about 1690 deserve to

be recognised, understood, and (by those so minded) celebrated.

First, 1690 was the year that decided whether England's Glorious

Revolution of 1688 (with all its implications for the English-speaking

world of parliamentary government, civil liberty, and religious

tolerance) was to succeed or not.

Secondly, the episodes of 1690 most celebrated or resented in Ireland

and parts of Scotland were even more important in a European civil war

than in an Irish one.

And thirdly, 1690 settled the future course of Scottish history in a

direction rather different from that originally contemplated by King

William, himself half a Stuart and married to a Stuart.

There are highbrow as well as lowbrow myths about 1690. One is that

for King Billy (and his white horse) the excursion to the Boyne was a

tiresome interlude between the celebration of the Glorious Revolution

and William's return to his life's work of frustrating the French. Like

most myths, it has an element of truth, but it ignores both the

complexity and uncertainty of the English and European aftermath of

1688.

A very good, if rather crotchety Scots historian summed it up well:

Professor Andrew Browning, who built up Glasgow University's reputation

in history on either side of the Second World War. ''Of the enthusiasm

with which the Revolution had at first been acclaimed, scarcely a trace

remained at the beginning of 1690 . . . Jacobitism stalked unchallenged

in the streets.'' The year began with ''depressing chaos''. It was to

end (in Browning's words again) with the House of Commons accepting its

responsibilities as part of a great European coalition.

The chaos was well dramatised by the better known earlier historian

(and a Scot at one remove) T. B. Macaulay. Admittedly, that great

literary and Whig historian had dramatic gifts which he deployed to the

full. His history makes 1690 sound like 1940: but in a sense it was --

not least when the English fleet lost command of the Channel and

invasion threatened just as William prepared to encounter the ex-King

James VII and II (his father-in-law) in Ireland.

It is from the debacle at Beachy Head (when the English let the Dutch

bear the brunt of a lost sea battle) that Macaulay's history moves to

his purplest passages about his hero's campaign in Ireland. It was in

the same month, too, that Louis XIV's General Luxembourg seemed to have

won a near-decisive battle at Fleurus near Charleroi, where later armies

were to clash in later wars. As a battle, the Boyne was overshadowed by

the campaign in the Low Countries, much as Alamein was dwarfed in scale

by Stalingrad and the other battles of the Russian front. But, like

Alamein, its strategic importance was disproportionate to the numbers

engaged -- not much more than a full house at Ibrox or Parkhead.

Historians used to argue about whether these battles long ago were in

wars of nations or in wars of religion. They were not quite either, but

with elements of both, and are best seen as civil wars on a European

scale, sometimes with all the conflicts of loyalties that civil wars

inevitably bring, sometimes linked to Europe's recurring pattern of

dynastic power struggles. The Irish war, even the Jacobite plots in

England and Scotland, were part of a European war that extended from the

Low Countries and Germany to the Pyrenees and the Danube.

Whose side was the Pope on at the Battle of the Boyne? Answer: King

Billy's. The Pope of the day, Alexander VIII, was on the side of the

''Holy Roman'' (in fact Hapsburg and German) Empire, thanks partly to

the bitter quarrel of his predecessor, Innocent XI, with Louis XIV and

the Gallican style of French Catholicism. And the Empire belonged to

King William's grand alliance.

Whose side were the French on? They fought both at the Boyne and in

the Irish war that went on till Aughrim in 1691, that battle far in the

west that more than two centuries later inspired W. B. Yeats to a

memorable poem. Answer: both sides.

Within the European civil war, whose sieges and set-piece battles went

on in Belgium and on the Rhine, were little civil wars: not only the

fierce Irish one and the little Scots one that petered out in 1690 as

the clans quarrelled, Fort William was built, and Claverhouse went

unreplaced, but the French one where Louis XIV's Huguenot victims fought

back in the coalition against him -- much as the Irish ''Wild Geese''

were later to do on the other side.

And far across Europe Hungarian Calvinists rather hoped Louis XIV

would do well; any enemy of the Emperor (who treated them much as Louis

treated the Huguenots) was an ally of theirs. He was, of course, no more

devoted to their cause than the British were a few years later when they

gave fitful support to the French Protestant guerrilla war in the

Cevennes: and not far away on the Danube Protestant princes and soldiers

fought in what could be portrayed as the Empire's war for Christendom

against the Turks.

The modern emphasis is to play down the religious and ''ideological''

element. In his recent book on the Auld Alliance, for example, Stephen

Wood suggests that the British ''Huguenot'' regiments were neither

wholly French nor wholly Protestant, in contrast to Macaulay's rhetoric

about the last words to them of Marshal Schomberg (whose tomb is in St

Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin). ''Gentlemen, there are your

persecutors,'' he is said to have said, pointing to the troops of King

Louis.

No doubt there were Mo Johnstons in the Protestant team, not just

among the ''Huguenot'' mercenaries but those in German or Danish employ.

On the other side, ex-King James held the support of some Protestant

Jacobites and personal links remained: John Churchill (later Duke of

Marlborough) followed up the Boyne with an effective campaign in

south-west Ireland, an area of great strategic importance to Britain in

that war and many later ones. His defection had been decisive in the

Glorious Revolution: but his sister-in-law was the wife of the greatest

Jacobite leader in Ireland, the Lord-deputy Tyrconnel.

But the reaction against romantic Whig liberalism can go too far. The

little war in Ireland was strategically vital (as Ireland would be to

Britain again in the French Revolutionary war, the Kaiser's war, and

Hitler's one) but it was also part of a wider battle of ideas.

That the ideas of civil and religious liberty were very partial in

their application (for example, to the defeated majority in Ireland) or

limited in their effect does not invalidate them. William III was a man

far ahead of his time in his personal tolerance and in his appreciation

of the way that local patriotism and freedom (like that of the Dutch)

depended on alliances which involved the idea of a common European

interest. It was an idea which made religious tolerance desirable, even

unavoidable. Louis XIV (despite the achievements and graces of French

society) might have been credited not only with claiming that ''L'etat,

c'est moi'' but that ''L'Europe, c'est moi.'' His system demanded a

despotism that (as the Huguenots and the Pope discovered in different

ways) demanded control of the spiritual as well as the temporal; and

British and Irish Jacobitism inevitably became no more than a pawn in

the French power game.

How apt it would be if, in the year when Glasgow will be the cultural

capital of Europe, its citizens (without distinction of creed) were to

add a non-sectarian stroll to the Orange Walk and lay a garland or two

on the statue of the Great European of 1690.

TOMORROW: The tercentenary of Presbyterianism