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Anne was not to be present to hear any of this. Exploiting her father’s concern for her well-being, she told him that she feared miscarrying if she ventured out of her chamber, and accordingly the King excused her from attending. He told the council that his daughter would have been there but her health did not permit it, and he was ‘loth to hazard one child for the preservation of another’.¹¹⁵

      When Clarendon visited his niece a day later, he found her treating the hearing as a cause for ribaldry. She teased her uncle for having ‘heard a great deal of fine discourse at council, and made herself very merry with that whole affair. She was dressing and all her women about her; many of whom put in their jests’. ‘Amazed at this’, Clarendon resolved to remonstrate with her in private, but over the next few days Anne avoided being on her own with him. When at last he taxed her about it, he was scarcely reassured by Anne’s remark that, ‘She must needs say the Queen’s behaviour during her being with child was very odd’. In public, however, she pretended that she had no worries on this score. When an official deputation presented her on 1 November with copies of the statements sworn before the council, she assured them, ‘My Lords, this was not necessary; for I have so much duty for the King that his word must be more to me than these depositions’.¹¹⁶

      Prior to setting sail, William of Orange issued a manifesto, explaining why he had decided to invade. Entitled the Declaration of Reasons for Appearing in Arms in the Kingdom of England, this document recapitulated the ways in which James had ‘openly transgressed and annulled’ ‘the laws, liberties and customs’ of his realm. ‘To crown all’, there was ‘just and visible grounds of suspicion’ that ‘the pretended Prince of Wales was not born by the Queen’, and therefore William felt compelled to intervene. However, the Declaration insisted that William aimed at ‘nothing … but the preservation of the Protestant religion … and the securing the whole nation … their laws, rights and liberties’. He desired ‘to have a free and lawful Parliament assembled as soon as possible’, with authority not only to debate grievances but to mount an enquiry into the Prince of Wales’s birth.¹¹⁷

      James at once rushed out a proclamation declaring that it was not only illegal to distribute this text but even to possess it. Anne, however, was exempted from the prohibition, for the King lent her his own copy. She may have been comforted to find that it contained nothing to suggest that her father would lose his throne as a result of the invasion, but there is no way of knowing this.

      When the wind at last turned favourable, William and his army set sail on 1 November, landing at Torbay in Devon four days later. He then moved on to Exeter, where he stayed for nearly a fortnight. James promptly ordered his army to go to Salisbury. John Churchill was promoted to be a Lieutenant General, in charge of a brigade, and it was rumoured that Prince George would be named the King’s ‘generalissimo’, though in fact he had decided to turn down any command. After James’s nephew Lord Cornbury defected to William on 14 November, the King’s general Lord Feversham entreated James to come to Salisbury ‘to keep the infection amongst his army from spreading’. Anne, however, was confident that Cornbury would soon be followed by other officers. When Clarendon talked to her of his distress at his son’s disloyalty, she told him that ‘people were so apprehensive of Popery that she believed many more of the army would do the same’.¹¹⁸ Evidently she was counting on James’s forces being so reduced by mass defections that he would have to seek a settlement, rather than deciding the issue on the battlefield.

      At this stage, however, the King appeared determined to fight. Just before he left to join his army on 17 November he was petitioned by eighteen lords and bishops to summon a free Parliament to ‘prevent the effusion of blood’, but James said that this was impossible while a foreign army was in the country. ‘Having taken his adieu of the Queen and of the Princess Anne of Denmark’ he left London in warlike mood, proclaiming his intention ‘to go on directly to the enemy and to give him no quarter’.¹¹⁹ This was the last time Anne saw her father. George accompanied his father-in-law, though Anne knew, as James did not, that he was planning to go over to William when an opportunity presented itself. Anne stayed behind at the Cockpit, uncomfortably close to the Queen at Whitehall. Bishop Compton was also in London, and it had been arranged that he would provide the Princess with a refuge in the capital if the need arose.

      The day after her father’s departure, Anne wrote to William, assuring him she desired ‘your good success in this so just an undertaking’. She explained that her husband was accompanying the King to Salisbury but intended ‘to go from there to you as soon as his friends thought it proper. I am not yet certain if I shall continue here or remove into the city: that shall depend on the advice my friends will give me, but wherever I am I shall be ready to show you how much I am your humble servant’.¹²⁰

      Within days, however, Anne had been thrown into disarray by an unforeseen turn of events. After arriving at Salisbury the King had been afflicted by debilitating nosebleeds, and his spirits had sunk further on hearing that much of the north of England had risen up against him. On 22 November James decided to return to London with his army. He started on his journey the following day, but on the night of 23 November John Churchill defected, taking with him the Duke of Grafton and Colonel John Berkeley – although they were not accompanied by as many common soldiers as they had hoped. If James’s nerve had held, he still had a reasonable chance of beating William in the field, but he was dreadfully shaken by the desertion of key officers. He was particularly shocked by Churchill’s behaviour, having ‘raised him from the mud’.¹²¹

      George had hoped to leave James’s camp with the other men, but he had to wait a while longer. Just as he was mounting his horse to ride towards William, James had invited him to share his coach for the homeward journey. Seated opposite his father-in-law as they jolted down muddy roads, George had to maintain a facade of loyalty for the rest of the day. Every time that news came that another officer had defected, he exclaimed in his execrable French, ‘Est-il possible!’ That evening he had supper with the King at Andover and ‘made it his business … to condemn those that were gone, and how little such people were to be trusted, and sure the Prince [of Orange] could put no confidence in such’. When the meal was over ‘Prince George waited on [James] in his chamber very late’. The King urged George to get some rest, but his son-in-law insisted that he would wait ‘till he saw the King in bed’. Touched by his kindness, James told him ‘he should not forget the respects he paid him’. Yet as soon as the King had retired, George hurried off to find his horse, and he and the Duke of Ormonde galloped westwards to join William. The King was not yet asleep when the news was brought to him.¹²²

      James wished it to be thought that he took the reverse calmly. His authorised biography states that though somewhat ‘troubled at the unnaturalness of the action’, he consoled himself ‘that the loss of a good trooper had been of greater consequence’. He even managed a grim quip, asking sardonically, ‘is est-il possible gone too?’ However, when the Danish envoy, who was in the royal camp at the time, informed Christian V what his brother had done, he reported ‘Your Majesty cannot imagine the King of England’s consternation at this news’.¹²³

      George was able to send a courier to London to tell his wife that he had made his move. For Anne the good news that George had escaped was cancelled out by her horror at hearing that the King was on his way to London, for she dreaded a confrontation with him above all else. Summoning Sarah Churchill to the Cockpit, she ‘declared that rather than see her father she would jump out at the window’.¹²⁴

      When the Queen had heard that John Churchill had abandoned the King, guards had been placed at the doors of Sarah’s lodgings, but their attitude was ‘very easy’, and they scarcely restricted her freedom of movement. On the evening of 25 November further instructions arrived from the King that Sarah and Mrs John Berkeley should be taken into custody but again nothing was done about this, possibly because Anne appealed to the Lord Chamberlain not to execute the order and he ‘suffered himself in complacence to be delayed by the Princess’. The upshot was that Sarah was able to pay a discreet visit to Bishop Compton at his house in Suffolk Street and an escape plan was devised. Further delay would have been disastrous, for after nightfall the Queen received another express from her husband, ordering her ‘to secure the

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