Glorious Revolution
William of Orange lands an invasion army at Brixham in Torbay
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The soldiers stepping ashore included Dutch, French, Brandenburger, Swedish, and Finnish contingents.
Guy Fawkes Day, by the English calendar
William of Orange came ashore unopposed at Brixham, in Torbay on the south Devon coast, on 15 November 1688 in the Gregorian calendar — 5 November under the Julian calendar England then used.
James II was still king that morning, and his forces did not contest the beachhead. The English date gave William's Protestant propaganda an unusually resonant anniversary.
Whose army it was
The National Army Museum identifies the landing force as 14,000 Dutch, French, Brandenburger, Swedish, and Finnish soldiers; an Oxford scholarly account gives 15,000. It was a multinational expedition, neither an exclusively Dutch army nor an English opposition movement.
Royal Museums Greenwich describes horses being put over the ships' sides and made to swim to the shelving beach.
What William said he wanted
His printed Declaration stated that the expedition's declared design was to obtain a free and lawful Parliament. He did not proclaim himself king at Torbay.
The Royal Collection notes that paintings showing a formal welcome by local deputies are imaginary — his arrival surprised them.
By 9 November Old Style — 19 November Gregorian — William had reached Exeter and established his camp there.
Sources
Researched 24 Aug 2026 6 sources not yet audited Date corrected
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →
Date corrected. The research places this at 1688-11-15.
What the sources leave uncertain
- The date is 5 November in the Julian calendar then used in England and 15 November in the Gregorian calendar. The ISO date follows the slug's leading Gregorian date.
- Institutional and scholarly estimates put the army at approximately 14,000–15,000, not 20,000.
- “The Glorious Revolution begins” is a periodization choice: planning, propaganda and the first failed sailing preceded the landing.