How drunken Cumbrian double agent tried to sabotage Glorious Revolution
Netherby-born Viscount Richard Graham traitorously conspired to help Louis XIV invade England. When William of Orange rumbled the plot, tipsy Dick sacrificed his friends to save his own neck
It was shortly after midnight on a bitterly cold New Year’s Day in 1691. A graceful fishing smack was attempting to slip unseen past the deep-water port of Tilbury-on-Thames. Suddenly, a swift vessel packed with armed men headed out from the shore and intercepted the humble, red-sailed fishing boat.
The Government’s informers were right. Soldiers who clambered aboard found a well-dressed, florid-faced man who looked important even if he was at that moment cowering behind some sacks of ballast.
The wobbly grandee was Richard Graham, the former MP for Cockermouth and Cumberland. He was a baronet’s son from Netherby in the north of the county who grew up to become England’s Foreign Secretary, a close adviser to the King and the bearer of the showy title Viscount Preston.
Now this grand statesman, a habitué of the glittering courts of Europe, was devastated. He also looked rather foolish, surrounded as he was by the pathetic remnants of a half-finished meal of roast beef, mince pies and wine that he had been handing out of a seasonal hamper to his accomplices. Only moments before, the Viscount’s party had been convinced that, after a nervous twenty-four mile journey downriver, they were about to escape from England undetected.
But instead of freedom, Preston knew his life was now in the balance. In the hold the soldiers found a bundle of letters tied with a lead weight. They were slung together in such a way that they might be easily jettisoned over the side in just such an emergency. But the nobleman was so surprised when the search party came over the ship’s rail that he failed to react and he did nothing to dispose of the incriminating documents.
This was unfortunate because what the letters contained was enough to ensure his execution: a treasonous invitation to the French King Louis XIV to invade Britain and topple the eighteen-month old Government of Protestant King William III.
The politician who normally spent his days at court extravagantly bewigged, clad in petticoat breeches and suits of ribbed silk, was arrested, returned to London, thrown into the Tower and condemned to death. To save his own neck, Preston would do something so awful that it would destroy his reputation forever, as we shall see. It was a dizzying fall for the man who only months before had been the political strategist, intimate confidant and all-powerful spymaster for William’s predecessor, the Catholic King James II. So why did Viscount Preston take the extraordinary step of seeking to invite a military intervention by a foreign power?
To understand why this desperate episode took place it is vital to grasp the stupendous scale of upheaval Britain had been going through over the previous six years. In February 1685 the stiff, short-tempered and zealous Catholic convert, James II, every inch the former army officer, had succeeded at the age of 52 to the throne of England, Ireland and Scotland on the death of Charles II, his elder brother. Charles had become King in the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy following the period of Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth.
The moment he became king, James insisted on doing the very thing his brother Charles II had promised would not happen again - he rapidly began pushing measures aimed at restoring the freedom of worship for Catholics.
It was a disastrous policy not only because of the widespread hatred of Catholics in the country, but also the common belief in the elaborate conspiracy theory that Catholics were actively plotting the overthrow of the Anglican Church and the English State and wanted to replace it with a Catholic tyranny.
They feared England would become a mere satellite of Louis XIV’s regime in France and the Pope in Rome. It was difficult to dismiss this as a mere conspiracy theory given the evidence of genuine Catholic subterfuge that kept emerging, most notably the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 that came close to killing the entire ruling class and King James I.
Unfortunately, James was too stupid and impetuous to grasp the deep-seated fear of “popery” - the doctrines, practices, and ceremonies associated with the Roman Catholic Church - that existed in Stuart England.
Naturally, both the English and Scottish Parliaments refused to pass James’s pro-Catholic measures. He bone-headedly tried to impose them by decree. In response, senior Protestant nobles contrived James’s removal. They secretly invited the staunch Protestant William, Prince of Orange, a strong military leader and de facto ruler of the Netherlands, to invade the country that became known as the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688.
From the Catholic point of view, 1688 was not so much a Glorious Revolution as a Dutch Invasion.
The Protestant takeover prompted a fierce backlash from supporters of the displaced Stuarts. They began to organise an armed underground movement known as the Jacobite conspiracy that would periodically try to restore the Catholic House of Stuart to the British throne in the coming century. Throughout this period, Richard Graham adopted the role of a double agent.
The paradox was that Viscount Preston was a Protestant, and on the face of things it seems odd that he should risk his life to restore the Catholic James II to power. But, despite his religion, Preston was passionately in favour of retaining the Stuart monarchy because of his own family’s loyalties, his education and his belief in High Tory ideology.
Preston thought it was essential to maintain the traditional hierarchical structure of society. He hated the individualistic, unchecked greed of Dutch commercial culture that William had brought with him. Graham feared it would destroy England’s a sense of community and its religious values. The vast majority of Cumberland and Westmorland’s upper classes agreed with Preston’s view.
The two northern counties had remained strongly Royalist during the English Civil Wars forty years before. The north-west was also home to the highest number of registered English Catholics until well into the 18th century. This remained true despite stiff Government fines for recusancy levied on people that failed to conform to Protestant forms of worship.
Outwardly, Richard Graham might seem the perfect courier to act as the link man between the conspirators and the exiled King James. He had managed to ingratiate himself with the new King William. Graham had given the impression that he was happy to remain in high office under the new Protestant regime without revealing the truth - that he was really on James’s side. Graham had also served as a diplomat at Louis XIV’s court in Versailles.
He had retained the trust of the French King who had loaned James the St Germain palace about twelve miles west of Paris to set up his court in exile. But the flaw in all this is that Richard Graham was not a natural plotter.
Graham lacked the ruthlessness and nerve of a conspirator and, as the pressures and contradictions involved in showing two faces to the world began to tell, he vacillated and increasingly took refuge in alcohol.
This is an extract from a new book, People of the Sacred Valley. You can pick up a copy from the New Bookshop, Main Street, Cockermouth, Bookends in Keswick or Carlisle and Sam Read in Grasmere.
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