The Glorious Revolution.
The president asked me to tell him a story.
I’d found the door to the White House ajar. So I wandered in. Made myself a Manhattan. The president was in his bathrobe drinking a double espresso. I suggested that might make it hard to sleep. Nothing good comes from a night awake, I told him. You end up on the Twitter account, saying things you wish you hadn’t.
But he downed the coffee and made another. That’s when he asked me to tell him a story. Loneliness is a bitch.
I decided a true story would serve, there being so much that is false these days.
Long, long ago, across the great ocean, the king was in a sour mood. For James II of England, that was saying something. He was known far and wide to be a disagreeable man. It had been only a short time since his ascension to power. Already he’d made enemies of nearly everyone in the kingdom. Picking fights was his particular talent. He worked in fear and anger the way a sculptor works in marble.
His appointments were an abomination, especially to the honest and capable officials he forced out office to make room for his loyalists. His preference was to rule by decree, even though his supporters held a majority in Parliament. He pronounced his many pronouncements with a theatrical flair. It barbed each one with a particular venom. There were many who had said he would be unfit to rule. The king wasted little time proving them correct.
Most curious was the king’s strange admiration for Louis XIV, the absolutist monarch of France. The king’s allies considered Louis XIV the thug of Europe. James II admired the French king’s ability to take what he wanted, whether it was from neighboring countries or his own subjects. His brother, the previous King of England, had secretly been on the payroll of Louis XIV. There was a growing suspicion that the same was true of James II.
Our story finds the king standing at the bank of the River Thames, scowling at the Great Seal of England in his hands. “What good is it?” he wondered aloud. First the bishops had stood against him, advising him to stop the abuses of power that were dividing the kingdom. So he charged the bishops with sedition. Now the courts had ruled against him in the case. The “so-called judge” had ruled that the power of the crown wasn’t the king’s to use any way he saw fit.
So the king was done with England. Done with governing, and good luck to anyone who tried to do it in his place. Governing required The Great Seal of England. The king held it over the water and let it drop. He allowed himself a bitter laugh as it splashed and then sank into the Thames. A footman said it might have been the only time he’d actually seen the king laugh.
From the start the reign of James II had been filled with chaos. Now it was collapsing entirely. The king’s daughter Mary had married the whip-smart William of Orange, and now his daughter and son-in-law were making their way to London at the head of an army. A bi-partisan coalition had invited William and Mary to take the king’s place on the throne. Even the wind had betrayed the king, blowing the fleet of his daughter and son-in-law easily down the channel from Holland in a maneuver that shouldn’t have been possible that late in the year. The countryside rose in support of William and Mary, and that was it for the king. He escaped to France, where he lived his life in exile experiencing first hand the absolutist monarchy of Louis XIV.
The nation had done all it could to bend a vain and peevish man to the job of being a servant of the people. The willful king had resisted until his monarchy shattered. In December of 1688, the king’s daughter and son-in-law took over the government. It was a reign that many said finally made England great again after a generation of bitter political division. The people ever after referred to it as The Glorious Revolution.
When I finished I asked the president if he noticed any similarities between his administration and what happened in England in 1688. But he was busy using the remote to turn up the volume on his TV. He asked if England was close to Sweden. There’s something going on in Sweden, he told me. The man on TV seems upset about it. Very, very upset.
I could see this wasn’t a moment for history, so I mixed myself another Manhattan. I decided to try and find The Situation Room, which I’d only seen in war movies. I figured the door would be unlocked.
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