Hands up all who think Britain's last conquest by a foreign power was in 1066. Wrong: it was 1688. Such is history's political correctness that generations of Britons have been taught that the Dutch invasion of 1688 was a “glorious revolution”, in which they rose up and toppled a Catholic king in favour of parliamentary democracy.

The reality, says Lisa Jardine, is that on November 5, 1688, the centenary of the Armada, a fleet four times as large, of 500 ships and 20,000 professional soldiers, landed William of Orange at Torbay and launched an assault on London. Six weeks later, William entered the capital with his army's guns primed for firing. James II's courtiers and generals deserted him, preferring anything rather than a return to civil war. The king was allowed to flee to France; London was under Dutch military occupation for two years. Jardine's contention, in this brilliant example of the new “argued history”, is that, by the end of the 17th century, England and Holland were virtually one civilisation. William's invasion was to preserve this oneness and forestall a Catholic succession and a possible English alliance with France. He accompanied his landing with a highly “dodgy” dossier, declaring that “We cannot excuse ourselves...from contributing all that is in us for the maintaining both of the Protestant religion and other laws and liberties of these kingdoms”.

William claimed the throne for himself. Having long assumed that his wife, Mary Stuart, James's elder daughter, would succeed to it, he was shocked when the king's second wife produced a son in June 1688. He duly summoned the Jewish bankers of Antwerp to finance the ejection of James and his usurpation. He even spread rumours that James's son was a changeling. The glorious revolution was neither glorious nor a revolution. It was a foreign conquest.

I am reluctant to quarrel with Jardine's spirited thesis, but it is only partly true. William had good reasons for invading England but he was invited to seize the throne by the “immortal seven”, including the aristocrats Compton, Devonshire, Danby, Russell and Sidney, no Dutch quislings. Jardine makes almost no mention of this. If her complaint is that Holland was “written out” of 1688, she has done the same for the English rebels.

The prospect of a Catholic monarchy appalled most English as much as William was appalled by his wife's loss of the succession. From the moment the reckless James II imposed Catholic appointees on the army, navy, courts and universities, rebellion was in the air. He dismissed parliament and wrecked his one hope of salvation, that his eventual heir was the Protestant Mary of Orange. The birth of a son (who became the Old Pretender) by a Catholic mother threatened both the English Reformation and the post-Commonwealth settlement.

The coup of 1688 was English as much as Dutch. The Bill of Rights reasserted Magna Carta and rejected for all time a monarch vulnerable to an alien loyalty, the papacy. Parliamentary control over finance was established and paved the way for an emergent democracy. The rebellion may have needed the help of a Dutch usurper but, as Whig historians have long claimed, it was also a revolution.

This coheres with, rather than undermines, the second thesis of Jardine's book, the cultural coalescence of England and Holland in the 17th century. She has delightfully combed the records of the “stadtholder-kings” of the House of Orange, who enjoyed the title of mayors and the lifestyle of holy Roman emperors. They offered refuge to English aristocrats escaping their tempestuous homeland but eschewing the politically risky shores of France.

Nor was it just a refuge. William's wife and mother were both Stuarts. The exiled Charles II made so free with the ladies of the Hague that half Holland must have English blood in its veins. Sleeping with the king was the road to riches, giving added meaning to Jardine's subtitle, How England Plundered Holland's Glory.

Here we are in familiar Schama-with-tulips country and it is lush. As William's army made its way to London, he took a detour to see Lord Pembroke's art collection at Wilton (hardly the act of an invading warlord). On arriving at St James's, he was so eager to inspect its celebrated “Dutch” garden that he forgot to be greeted by the crowds awaiting him in Whitehall.

Jardine has digested the copious correspondence of Dutch courtiers such as Hans Bentinck and Constantijn Huygens and concluded that England was a plunderer. Yet her evidence suggests more of a constant interchange between the two leading trading nations of the day. The walls of St James's, Kensington and Hampton Court were crowded not just with Italian masters but with Rubens, Rembrandt and Jordaens. Bentinck and Huygens spent their wealth buying and selling the same paintings, porcelain and plants as their English friends. The “Dutch Gift” to Charles II on his restoration in 1660 was a sensational 24 paintings and 12 statues, including such masters as Saenredam and Gerard Dou.

Dutch architecture conquered England. Wren's rebuilding of Hampton Court was criticised for being too Dutch and William III had to confess that the plan was his. Here and at Kensington, extensive “his and hers” ranges had to be designed since William and Mary were constitutionally equal. Twin staircases by Verrio elevated the House of Orange to an apotheosis that was more Stuart than Protestant.

The cabinets of Ham, Dyrham and Chatsworth sprouted tulip holders. Windows looked out over geometrical gardens intended to enliven the flat Dutch landscape, their canals lined with the botany of two mercantile empires. Shelves were laden with the discoveries of Newton, Boyle, Hooke and their Dutch correspondents, such as Leeuwenhoek, creator of the microscope.

The picture Jardine paints is of the two dazzling courts atop two nations conjoined in the great cause of European enlightenment. She may not agree, but the date of 1688 emerges from her book both revolutionary and glorious, which makes it the more enthralling.

Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory by Lisa Jardine
HarperPress £25 pp430

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