The most recent invasions of England (not 1066)

Transcript

When was the last successful invasion of England?

If you said 1066, well, insert QI klaxon here. That's the obvious trap answer.

If you said Fishguard in 1797, five points for your history knowledge, but minus fifty for geography, because Fishguard's in Wales.

I hate videos that force you to watch 10 minutes of waffle before answering the question, so I'll say right now: it was arguably either here in Brixham in 1688, or perhaps here, just a short distance up the south Devon coastline in Teignmouth, in 1690. Unfortunately though, a certain degree of waffle is inevitable because answering the question inevitably depends on some semantic hair-splitting over what exactly counts as an invasion, let alone a successful one.

And, fair warning: this video features a lot of meta-waffle beyond even that. Because I'm honestly less interested in simply recounting the story of the military events than pondering why so many British people, myself included, either don't think of 1688 as a 'proper' invasion, or don't even really know about it at all. But before I sink too deep into that meta stuff, let's quickly recap the events in Brixham.

This obelisk supposedly marks the exact spot where the Dutch prince William of Orange, Stadtholder of Holland, stepped ashore on the 5th November 1688, along with over 20,000 troops. These troops had sailed from Hellevoetsluis in a hostile fleet far bigger than the Spanish Armada of a century prior, pushing 500 ships. Meeting no resistance to their landing in poor defenceless Devon, they proceeded to march up towards London. Sweeping aside the valiant defensive efforts of King James II's forces in battles near Wincanton and Reading, the warmongering Dutch reached London and chased James out of town, whereupon William of Orange crowned himself William III of England and William II of Scotland.

In short, then, a foreign ruler with a load of foreign troops sailed over, marched in, kicked out the existing monarch and took over as king himself - a series of events which I think most people would readily and unambiguously describe as a successful military invasion, or conquering of the country. So why does this story hold such a low visibility in the popular consciousness, as opposed to the myth of England being unconquered since 1066?

Here, we divert into the meta-waffle. On the bright side, you've got some footage of the very pretty fishing town of Brixham to enjoy during the meanwhilst.

I suppose first I should confront the question of whether this myth really exists at all, or whether I'm just attacking a straw man? And I must admit, googling for examples didn't turn up much - if anything it found more examples using the 'it wasn't 1066!' framing to introduce discussion of 1688 than it did people expounding this supposed myth.

But look at this way: if I interviewed 1000 random people on the street as to what happened in English history in 1066 and 1688, I'm convinced a decent majority would immediately reel off William the Conqueror, the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest, for the former, whereas only a small minority would be able to correspondingly tell me about William of Orange, Brixham and the Glorious Revolution. Maybe I can't prove this, but I'd be amazed if anyone out there watching seriously disagreed with me on that.

Hell, I've got a history degree, and I was only barely aware of it. I had heard of the Glorious Revolution but I just sort of had a dim sense it was just some sort of domestic monarchical musical chairs; I certainly didn't associate it with a 20,000 strong invasion force.

Now you might think this reflects rather poorly on my history degree, but in fairness history degrees are really not about teaching you 'what happened' in all of history. There's simply rather too much of it for that to be possible, and this wasn't an era that I particularly studied. They're more about teaching how to research, interpret, evaluate and contextualise different narratives of history. And it turns out that the arguably false interpretation I had of the Glorious Revolution was no accidental result of simple ignorance, but a very deliberately cultivated narrative.

With that in mind let's look again at the story of the invasion.

In 1685, James II acceded to the English throne, setting the country on course for a constitutional crisis. He soon set about expanding his personal standing army, contrary to all norms and precedent, and as a Catholic, started purging Protestants from senior positions in court, in the military, in universities and so on, appointing Catholics in their place. When Bishops objected, he had them arrested. When Parliament objected, he discontinued their meetings entirely, claiming divine right to rule absolutely, a notion that the rather recent Civil War had supposedly just overturned. His wide-ranging assault on democracy was obvious.

Worse, he then substituted a fake baby as his son and heir, ensuring that a Catholic dynasty could indefinitely continue to subjugate a population that was overwhelmingly Protestant. And with the Catholic King Louis XIV of France pursuing rampantly expansionist aggression across Europe, it was surely only a matter of time before James dragged England into unwanted wars to support the French.

Faced with this intolerable threat to the religious and democratic liberties of the English people, a coalition of figures, from across the political spectrum of Whigs and Tories, and including many nobles as well as a senior Bishop sent a letter to William of Orange in July 1688 pleading for his help. William was married to James' daughter Mary, a Protestant. The letter informed William that "nineteen parts of twenty of the people throughout the kingdom" wanted rid of James, and that, as such, were he to land with a small force, the overwhelming majority of the English army, Parliament and the population at large would welcome and support his arrival.

William accepted this invitation. He assembled some 5-6000 British troops who were exiled in the Dutch republic, and supplementing this force with some of his own soldiers, sailed to Brixham. As promised, mass desertions from James' army ensued, with only a tiny number of Irish regiments briefly skirmishing against William at Wincanton and Reading, barely even warranting the label of battles. The bulk of England's forces duly welcomed their saviour from Papist tyranny, flocking to his side.

When cowardly James fled to France, William and his wife Mary - who, remember, had previously been the legitimate heir of James, anyway - were appointed as joint monarchs, ensuring a proper succession of the English and Scottish crowns; stable protection for the Church of England and all its adherents against Catholic oppression; and the restoration of parliamentary democracy from a renegade dictatorial monarch. Because, before becoming king, William had to agree to a new Bill of Rights and a new Coronation Oath which ensured that neither William nor any future monarch could ever rule without parliament's say-so.

Clearly then, this barely qualifies as an invasion, let alone a 'conquering'. It was more of a domestic coup, albeit with some foreign support - foreign support which was explicitly invited by the establishment and heartily welcomed by the people. Little wonder we don't remember it as 'the Dutch Conquest'. Quite unlike the Norman Conquest, this was more of a revolution, almost bloodless, and undertaken for the most glorious of reasons - hence going down in history as the Glorious Revolution.

Same sequence of events, two very different narratives. And history - as an academic discipline - is not about recounting a sequence of events, far more about weighing up the relative merits of different narratives.

I dare say the majority of you have already realised that neither of my narratives was exactly, quote-unquote, The Truth. I was of course deliberately distorting both of them to extreme degrees of bias. But neither was entirely false or fictional, either.

In fact, about the only thing I said which is generally considered to be outright factually untrue is the idea that James' son was a substitute. Modern scholarship tends to believe his son was genuinely his, a legitimate heir. Everything else, while I put it in the most shamelessly biased terms imaginable, has at least some basis in fact. While I don't condone anti-Catholic language like talk of Papist tyranny and such like, James did implement pro-Catholic policies, those policies were frequently unpopular, and he did indeed prorogue Parliament when they tried to rein him in on that front.

Whether or not it is strictly true that 19 out of 20 English people wanted James overthrown, I obviously can't say, what with all those people being far too dead to do any sort of opinion poll, but it is true that that is what William was told.

Likewise, the idea that the army, nobility and people in general so immediately and overwhelmingly threw their support behind William was very overstated. Many hedged their bets, at least at first, not wishing to take sides until they were sure which side would win. But it is undoubtedly true that enough of James' army deserted for William's progress to London to be very straightforward. The total casualties of both sides in both battles put together only runs into the dozens, not the hundreds, let alone thousands. (Of course, this notion of almost-bloodless revolution is only true when one carefully restricts the playing field to England - Scotland and Ireland were a very different story.)

Anyway, I don't have the time in this video, or the expertise, to go back through the story for a third time, this time weighing up every aspect with proper nuance and impartiality. But hopefully by this point you get the general idea, which is that it's possible to put a very un-invasion-like spin on William's invasion.

And when you consider that British royals were only allowed to marry Catholics again in 2013, and are still not allowed to actually be Catholics themselves, you can probably see why elements of the latter narrative have tended to have primacy over the former, for the last three centuries or so. Why the Glorious Revolution is known by that name and not as the Dutch Conquest; why the invasion is downplayed to the point that people often don't realise it happened at all; why the Queen herself came to unveil a monument to an occasion when a foreign army came in and overthrew a previously reigning monarch, the sort of event you might otherwise assume she'd not be terribly keen on bigging up; and why a pub in Brixham is called the Prince William and advertises itself as a 'classic British pub' without any hint of irony.

As someone who's neither religious, monarchist or nationalist, I frankly find the whole thing rather hilariously disingenuous. For my money, the fact William was invited, and the fact lots of people preferred him to James, don't make it any less of an invasion. But I won't tell anybody else how to think. Conquest, coup, revolution? You can decide.

On rather safer ground, it also explains why part of the Torbay ring-road is called Hellevoetsluis Road, which I have to sheepishly admit, is actually what prompted me to look into this in the first place. What can I say. I love maps.

Anyway, if you made it through all of that historiographical meta-waffle, you'll probably be pleased to know the story of Teignmouth's invasion of 1690 is somewhat simpler.

Actually, it was a relatively direct historical 'aftershock' to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Remember I mentioned that Louis XIV was getting expansionist and there was an assumption that fellow Catholic James would ally with him in great European wars? Well, that cut both ways.

For all William was keen to frame his installation as English king as a matter of satisfying the domestic English demands and wishes, he obviously had his own geopolitical agenda. Chief amongst which was making sure England was allied against France. There aren't many better ways of ensuring the English king allies with you than simply becoming the English king yourself...

So it was, in the Nine Years War of 1688 to 1697, England and Scotland aligned with the Dutch Republic, Holy Roman Empire and Spanish Empire against Louis XIV's France. On July 10th, 1690, the French won a comprehensive victory at the naval Battle of Beachy Head, finding themselves with complete control over the English Channel as a result.

Seemingly on a whim, the French admiral Tourville decided to indulge in a spot of raiding, and headed to Torbay, site of William's landing two years earlier. As far as I know this wasn't a deliberately symbolic choice - probably more a practical choice, what with Torbay being a nice sheltered spot for a large fleet to hang out, but don't quote me on that.

Seeing that Torbay itself was seemingly quite well defended, Tourville decided to send only a small detachment on a fake attack mission there, while a bigger force snuck round the corner of Hope's Nose to Teignmouth. The ships bombarded the town with cannons - here you can see some cannonballs discovered by the Victorians when they came to rebuild St Michael's Church, which dated back to Saxon times but had been wrecked in this bombardment.

As Teignmouth reeled and burned from this offshore bombardment, 700 or so French troops came ashore, easily swept aside the 100 or so English militia defending the place, and spent the next 12 hours ransacking, looting, burning and generally trashing the place. History records no fatalities, as the townsfolk were apparently able to flee up into the hills, but 116 houses and ten ships were burnt, and two churches ruined. Hundreds were left homeless. A nationwide appeal raised £11,000 to help rebuild the town and port. Teignmouth now has a 'French Street' in memory of this event.

If there's some debate about whether William's invasion counts as an invasion, there probably isn't here: a nation that's officially at war landing their soldiers and burning a town to the ground can't really be spun as a domestic revolution or whatever else.

There is some debate about whether it counts as a successful one, though. If you think a successful invasion requires capturing the capital and conquering the country then clearly it wasn't successful, but I'm not sure that's really in the definition. To me, burning a whole town down counts as a pretty successful piece of warfare. Ironically though, the French weren't convinced that it was a success: Tourville faced criticism for failing to capitalise on the victory at Beachy Head, and was relieved of his command by King Louis. It is perhaps a fair point: the French navy really should have headed round towards Ireland to cut off William from his troops across the Irish Sea, where they were busy engaged in the extremely-not-bloodless-at-all business of conquering Ireland. Even if they hadn't managed that, with complete control of the English Channel, burning down a fairly small place like Teignmouth rather than assaulting a major naval base like Portsmouth or Plymouth, was a pretty insignificant achievement.

What do you think? Should either or both of these count as successful invasions of England? Or perhaps you have an even more recent candidate. Let us know in the comments.

That's all for this video. I would once again like to stress even more than I normally do that I really don't know much about this topic or period of history, and even if I had been an expert in it, which I'm not, it is completely impossible to do justice to in a youtube video of this length. A full contextualisation would require going through the English civil war, the last century or so of pan-European religious warfare, etc, etc. It's impossible, so please go easy on me for my oversimplifications and ommissions. As a now-Torbay-based channel, I was really just more keen to talk about Brixham's little claim to fame and why it's not such a big amount of fame as you might rather expect it to be.

Apologies for the lack of videos in recent months, it's been far too bloody hot to go traipsing around with a tripod. I've much preferred to spend my free time just going to the beach. I honestly don't expect to make another one any time terribly soon, either, but if you did enjoy this video, then why not subscribe, just in case I make any more. Cheers.

The most recent invasions of England (not 1066)

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