DESCENT OF 1666, THE, the invasion attempted by Charles Stuart (q.v.) in October of that year, defeated within a fortnight of its landing at BARHAM DOWN (q.v.) and remembered in civic memory less as a military episode in its own right than as the second half of a single calamitous month the Commonwealth still calls the Year of the Burning. The Great Fire had consumed the greater part of the City of London in the first week of September; Stuart's agents, working from reports that reached Saint-Germain within days, appear to have judged — wrongly, and by a considerable margin — that a capital half in ashes would not resist a deliverer, and the Pretender landed near Deal on French money and in French company scarcely a month after the last of the fire had been put out.
The judgment was bad soldiering as well as bad politics. A capital recovering from a disaster of that scale had, if anything, more reason to distrust an invader landed with foreign money than less, and the trained bands of Kent, who had seen nothing of the fire at all, disputed the invasion's advance before it had gone a day's march from the coast. The action at Barham Down that ended it is described in full under that heading; it is enough to record here that the two calamities of that autumn, joined only by coincidence of calendar, have fused so completely in the Commonwealth's memory that a countryman asked to date the Year of the Burning will name the Fire and the Descent in the same breath, and not infrequently get the order of the two events the wrong way about.
Stuart himself escaped the field by way of the Downs to a waiting French pink, and lived out the remaining nineteen years of his life at Saint-Germain, a pensioner of the French crown and, by every account that reaches this side of the Channel, an increasingly minor consideration in its counsels. He died there in 1685 without having set foot in England again, and his cause, defeated as much by its own poor timing as by Lambert's dispositions on the down, has since passed from politics into sentiment — an inheritance taken up, with rather better fortune for the sentiment than the politics, by his grandson's generation (see RISING OF 1745, THE). No serious student of the Commonwealth's constitution now regards the Descent as having been, at any point after its first week, a threat to the Frame; its chief historical importance is the accident of timing that has bound it, in the popular mind, to a fire it had nothing whatever to do with causing. (G. M. T.)