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History of the English People, Volume VII

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Title: History of the English People, Volume VII

Author: John Richard Green


        
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HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE

by

JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A.
Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford


VOLUME VII

THE REVOLUTION, 1683-1760. MODERN ENGLAND, 1760-1767







London
MacMillan and Co., Ltd.
New York: MacMillan & Co.
1896

First Edition 1879; Reprinted 1882, 1886, 1891.
Eversley Edition, 1896.




CONTENTS


   BOOK VIII

   THE REVOLUTION. 1683-1760


        CHAPTER III
                                                    PAGE
        THE FALL OF THE STUARTS. 1683-1714.            1

        CHAPTER IV

        THE HOUSE OF HANOVER. 1714-1760.             147


   BOOK IX

   MODERN ENGLAND. 1760-1815


        CHAPTER I

        ENGLAND AND ITS EMPIRE. 1760-1767.           273




CHAPTER III

THE FALL OF THE STUARTS

1683-1714


[Sidenote: The King's Triumph.]

In 1683 the Constitutional opposition which had held Charles so long in
check lay crushed at his feet. A weaker man might easily have been led
to play the mere tyrant by the mad outburst of loyalty which greeted his
triumph. On the very day when the crowd around Russell's scaffold were
dipping their handkerchiefs in his blood as in the blood of a martyr the
University of Oxford solemnly declared that the doctrine of passive
obedience even to the worst of rulers was a part of religion. But
Charles saw that immense obstacles still lay in the road of a mere
tyranny. Ormond and the great Tory party which had rallied to his
succour against the Exclusionists were still steady for parliamentary
and legal government. The Church was as powerful as ever, and the
mention of a renewal of the Indulgence to Nonconformists had to be
withdrawn before the opposition of the bishops. He was careful therefore
during the few years which remained to him to avoid the appearance of
any open violation of public law. He suspended no statute. He imposed no
tax by Royal authority. Galling to the Crown as the freedom of the press
and the Habeas Corpus Act were soon found to be, Charles made no attempt
to curtail the one or to infringe the other. But while cautious to avoid
rousing popular resistance, he moved coolly and resolutely forward on
the path of despotism. It was in vain that Halifax pressed for energetic
resistance to the aggressions of France, for the recall of Monmouth, or
for the calling of a fresh Parliament. Like every other English
statesman he found he had been duped. Now that his work was done he was
suffered to remain in office but left without any influence in the
government. Hyde, who was created Earl of Rochester, still remained at
the head of the Treasury; but Charles soon gave more of his confidence
to the supple and acute Sunderland, who atoned for his desertion of the
king's cause in the heat of the Exclusion Bill by an acknowledgement of
his error and a pledge of entire accordance with the king's will.

[Sidenote: New Town Charters.]

The protests both of Halifax and of Danby, who was now released from the
Tower, in favour of a return to Parliaments were treated with
indifference, the provisions of the Triennial Act were disregarded, and
the Houses remained unassembled during the remainder of the king's
reign. His secret alliance with France furnished Charles with the funds
he immediately required, and the rapid growth of the customs through the
increase of English commerce promised to give him a revenue which, if
peace were preserved, would save him from any further need of fresh
appeals to the Commons. Charles was too wise however to look upon
Parliaments as utterly at an end: and he used this respite to secure a
House of Commons which should really be at his disposal. The strength of
the Country party had been broken by its own dissensions over the
Exclusion Bill and by the flight or death of its more prominent leaders.
Whatever strength it retained lay chiefly in the towns, whose
representation was for the most part virtually or directly in the hands
of their corporations, and whose corporations, like the merchant class
generally, were in sympathy Whig. The towns were now attacked by writs
of "quo warranto," which called on them to show cause why their charters
should not be declared forfeited on the ground of abuse of their
privileges. A few verdicts on the side of the Crown brought about a
general surrender of municipal liberties; and the grant of fresh
charters, in which all but ultra-loyalists were carefully excluded from
their corporations, placed the representation of the boroughs in the
hands of the Crown. Against active discontent Charles had long been
quietly providing by the gradual increase of his Guards. The withdrawal
of its garrison from Tangier enabled him to raise their force to nine
thousand well-equipped soldiers, and to supplement this force, the
nucleus of our present standing army, by a reserve of six regiments
which were maintained till they should be needed at home in the service
of the United Provinces.

[Sidenote: Death of Charles.]

But great as the danger really was it lay not so much in isolated acts
of tyranny as in the character and purpose of Charles himself, and his
death at the very moment of his triumph saved English freedom. He had
regained his old popularity; and at the news of his sickness in the
spring of 1685 crowds thronged the churches, praying that God would
raise him up again to be a father to his people. But while his subjects
were praying the one anxiety of the king was to die reconciled to the
Catholic Church. His chamber was cleared, and a priest named Huddleston,
who had saved his life after the battle of Worcester, received his
confession and administered the last sacraments. Not a word of this
ceremony was whispered when the nobles and bishops were recalled into
the royal presence, and Charles though steadily refusing the communion
which Bishop Ken offered him accepted the bishop's absolution. All the
children of his mistresses save Monmouth were gathered round the bed,
and Charles commended them to his brother's protection by name. The
scene which followed is described by a chaplain to one of the prelates
who stood round the dying king. Charles "blessed all his children one by
one, pulling them on to his bed; and then the bishops moved him, as he
was the Lord's anointed and the father of his country, to bless them
also and all that were there present, and in them the general body of
his subjects. Whereupon, the room being full, all fell down upon their
knees, and he raised himself in his bed and very solemnly blessed them
all." The strange comedy was at last over. Charles died as he had lived:
brave, witty, cynical, even in the presence of death. Tortured as he was
with pain, he begged the bystanders to forgive him for being so
unconscionable a time in dying. One mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth,
hung weeping over his bed. His last thought was of another mistress,
Nell Gwynn. "Do not," he whispered to his successor ere he sank into a
fatal stupor, "do not let poor Nelly starve!"

[Sidenote: James the Second.]

The death of Charles in February 1685 placed his brother James, the Duke
of York, upon the throne. His character and policy were already well
known. Of all the Stuart rulers James is the only one whose intellect
was below mediocrity. His mind was dull and narrow though orderly and
methodical; his temper dogged and arbitrary but sincere. His religious
and political tendencies had always been the same. He had always
cherished an entire belief in the royal authority and a hatred of
Parliaments. His main desire was for the establishment of Catholicism as
the only means of ensuring the obedience of his people; and his old love
of France was quickened by the firm reliance which he placed on the aid
of Lewis in bringing about that establishment. But the secrecy in which
his political action had as yet been shrouded and his long absence from
England had hindered any general knowledge of his designs. His first
words on his accession, his promise to "preserve this Government both in
Church and State as it is now by law established," were welcomed by the
whole country with enthusiasm. All the suspicions of a Catholic
sovereign seemed to have disappeared. "We have the word of a King!" ran
the general cry, "and of a King who was never worse than his word." The
conviction of his brother's faithlessness in fact stood James in good
stead. He was looked upon as narrow, impetuous, stubborn, and despotic
in heart, but even his enemies did not accuse him of being false. Above
all, incredible as such a belief may seem now, he was believed to be
keenly alive to the honour of his country and resolute to free it from
foreign dependence.

[Sidenote: James and Parliament.]

From the first indeed there were indications that James understood his
declaration in a different sense from the nation. He was resolved to
make no disguise of his own religion; the chapel in which he had
hitherto worshipped with closed doors was now thrown open and the king
seen at Mass. He regarded attacks on his faith as attacks on himself,
and at once called on the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of
London to hinder all preaching against Catholicism as a part of their
"duty" to their king. He made no secret of his resolve to procure
freedom of worship for his co-religionists while still refusing it to
the rest of the Nonconformists, whom he hated as republicans and
Exclusionists. All was passed over however in the general confidence. It
was necessary to summon a Parliament, for the royal revenue ceased with
the death of Charles; but the elections, swayed at once by the tide of
loyalty and by the command of the boroughs which the surrender of their
charters had given to the Crown, sent up in May a House of Commons in
which James found few members who were not to his mind. His appointment
indeed of Catholic officers in the army was already exciting murmurs;
but these were hushed as James repeated his pledge of maintaining the
established order both in Church and State. The question of religious
security was waived at a hint of the royal displeasure, and a revenue of
nearly two millions was granted to the king for life.

[Sidenote: Argyle's Rising.]

All that was wanted to rouse the loyalty of the country into fanaticism
was supplied by a rebellion in the North, and by another under Monmouth
in the West. The hopes of Scotch freedom had clung ever since the
Restoration to the house of Argyle. The great Marquis indeed had been
brought to the block at the king's return. His son, the Earl of Argyle,
had been unable to save himself even by a life of singular caution and
obedience from the ill-will of the vile politicians who governed
Scotland. He was at last convicted of treason in 1682 on grounds at
which every English statesman stood aghast. "We should not hang a dog
here," Halifax protested, "on the grounds on which my Lord Argyle has
been sentenced to death." The Earl escaped however to Holland, and lived
peaceably there during the last six years of the reign of Charles.
Monmouth had found the same refuge at the Hague, where a belief in the
king's love and purpose to recall him secured him a kindly reception
from William of Orange. But the accession of James was a death-blow to
the hopes of the Duke, while it stirred the fanaticism of Argyle to a
resolve of wresting Scotland from the rule of a Catholic king. The two
leaders determined to appear in arms in England and the North, and the
two expeditions sailed within a few days of each other. Argyle's attempt
was soon over. His clan of the Campbells rose on the Earl's landing in
Cantyre, but the country had been occupied for the king, and quarrels
among the exiles who accompanied him robbed his effort of every chance
of success. His force scattered without a fight; and Argyle, arrested
in an attempt to escape, was hurried on the 30th of June to a traitor's
death.

[Sidenote: Monmouth's Rising.]

Monmouth for a time found brighter fortune. His popularity in the West
was great, and though the gentry held aloof when he landed at Lyme and
demanded an effective parliamentary government as well as freedom of
worship for Protestant Nonconformists, the farmers and traders of
Devonshire and Dorset flocked to his standard. The clothier-towns of
Somerset were true to the Whig cause, as they had been true to the cause
of the Long Parliament; and on the entrance of the Duke into Taunton the
popular enthusiasm showed itself in the flowers which wreathed every
door, as well as in a train of young girls who presented Monmouth with a
Bible and a flag. His forces now amounted to six thousand men, but
whatever chance of success he might have had was lost by his assumption
of the title of king, his right to which he had pledged himself hitherto
to leave for decision to a free Parliament. The two Houses offered to
support James with their lives and fortunes, and passed a bill of
attainder against the Duke. The gentry, still true to the cause of Mary
and of William, held stubbornly aloof; while the Guards and the
regiments from Tangier hurried to the scene of the revolt and the
militia gathered to the royal standard. Foiled in an attempt on Bristol
and Bath, Monmouth fell back on Bridgewater, and flung himself in the
night of the 6th of July on the king's forces as they lay encamped hard
by on Sedgemoor. The surprise failed; and the brave peasants and miners
who followed the Duke, checked in their advance by a deep drain which
crossed the moor, were broken after a short but desperate resistance by
the royal horse. Their leader fled from the field, and after a vain
effort to escape from the realm was captured and sent pitilessly to the
block.

[Sidenote: The Bloody Circuit.]

Never had England shown a firmer loyalty; but its loyalty was changed
into horror by the terrible measures of repression which followed on the
victory of Sedgemoor. Even North, the Lord Keeper, a servile tool of the
Crown, protested against the license and bloodshed in which the troops
were suffered to indulge after the battle. His protest however was
disregarded, and he withdrew broken-hearted from the Court to die. James
was in fact resolved on a far more terrible vengeance; and the
Chief-Justice Jeffreys, a man of great natural powers but of violent
temper, was sent to earn the Seals by a series of judicial murders which
have left his name a byword for cruelty. Three hundred and fifty rebels
were hanged in what has ever since, been known as the "Bloody Circuit,"
while Jeffreys made his way through Dorset and Somerset. More than eight
hundred were sold into slavery beyond sea. A yet larger number were
whipped and imprisoned. The Queen, the maids of honour, the courtiers,
even the Judge himself, made shameless profit from the sale of pardons.
What roused pity above all were the cruelties wreaked upon women. Some
were scourged from market-town to market-town. Mrs. Lisle, the wife of
one of the Regicides, was sent to the block at Winchester for harbouring
a rebel. Elizabeth Gaunt for the same act of womanly charity was burned
at Tyburn. Pity turned into horror when it was found that cruelty such
as this was avowed and sanctioned by the king. Even the cold heart of
General Churchill, to whose energy the victory at Sedgemoor had mainly
been owing, revolted at the ruthlessness with which James turned away
from all appeals for mercy. "This marble," he cried as he struck the
chimney-piece on which he leant, "is not harder than the king's heart."

[Sidenote: James and France.]

But it was soon plain that the terror which this butchery was meant to
strike into the people was part of a larger purpose. The revolt was made
a pretext for a vast increase of the standing army. Charles, as we have
seen, had silently and cautiously raised it to nearly ten thousand men;
James raised it at one swoop to twenty thousand. The employment of this
force was to be at home, not abroad, for the hope of an English policy
in foreign affairs had already faded away. In the designs which James
had at heart he could look for no consent from Parliament; and however
his pride revolted against a dependence on France, it was only by
French gold and French soldiers that he could hope to hold the
Parliament permanently at bay. A week therefore after his accession he
assured Lewis that his gratitude and devotion to him equalled that of
Charles himself. "Tell your master," he said to the French ambassador,
"that without his protection I can do nothing. He has a right to be
consulted, and it is my wish to consult him, about everything." The
pledge of subservience was rewarded with the promise of a subsidy, and
the promise was received with the strongest expressions of delight and
servility. The hopes which the Prince of Orange had conceived from his
father-in-law's more warlike temper were nipped by a refusal to allow
him to visit England. All the caution and reserve of Charles the Second
in his dealings with France was set aside. Sunderland, the favourite
Minister of the new king as he had been of the old, not only promised
during the session to avoid the connection with Spain and Holland which
the Parliament was known to desire, but "to throw aside the mask and
openly break with them as soon as the royal revenue is secured." The
support indeed which James needed was a far closer and firmer support
than his brother had sought for. Lewis on the other hand trusted him as
he could never trust Charles. His own bigotry understood the bigotry of
the new sovereign. "The confirmation of the King's authority and the
establishment of religion," he wrote, "are our common interest"; and he
promised that James should "find in his friendship all the resources
which he can expect."

[Sidenote: Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.]

Never had the secret league with France seemed so full of danger to
English religion. Europe had long been trembling at the ambition of
Lewis; it was trembling now at his bigotry. He had proclaimed warfare
against civil liberty in his attack upon Holland; he declared war at
this moment upon religious freedom by revoking the Edict of Nantes, the
measure by which Henry the Fourth after his abandonment of Protestantism
secured toleration and the free exercise of their worship for his
Protestant subjects. It had been respected by Richelieu even in his
victory over the Huguenots, and only lightly tampered with by Mazarin.
But from the beginning of his reign Lewis had resolved to set aside its
provisions, and his revocation of it at the end of 1685 was only the
natural close of a progressive system of persecution. The revocation was
followed by outrages more cruel than even the bloodshed of Alva.
Dragoons were quartered on Protestant families, women were flung from
their sick-beds into the streets, children were torn from their mothers'
arms to be brought up in Catholicism, ministers were sent to the
galleys. In spite of the royal edicts which forbade even flight to the
victims of these horrible atrocities a hundred thousand Protestants
fled over the borders, and Holland, Switzerland, the Palatinate, were
filled with French exiles. Thousands found refuge in England, and their
industry established in the fields east of London the silk trade of
Spitalfields.

[Sidenote: James and the Parliament.]

But while Englishmen were looking with horror on these events in France
James was taking advantage of the position in which as he believed they
placed him. The news of the revocation drew from James expressions of
delight. The rapid increase of the conversions to Catholicism which
followed on the "dragonnades" raised in him hopes of as general an
apostasy in his own dominions. His tone took a new haughtiness and
decision. He admitted more Catholic officers into his fresh regiments.
He dismissed Halifax from the Privy Council on his refusal to consent to
a plan for repealing the Test Act. He met the Parliament on its
reassembling in November with a haughty declaration that whether legal
or no his grant of commissions to Catholics must not be questioned, and
with a demand of supplies for his new troops. Loyal as was the temper of
the Houses, their alarm for the Church, their dread of a standing army,
was yet stronger than their loyalty. The Commons by the majority of a
single vote deferred the grant of supplies till grievances were
redressed, and demanded in their address the recall of the illegal
commissions on the ground that the continuance of the Catholic officers
in their posts "may be taken to be a dispensing with that law without
Act of Parliament." The Lords took a bolder tone; and the protest of the
bishops against any infringement of the Test Act expressed by Bishop
Compton of London was backed by the eloquence of Halifax. Their desire
for conciliation indeed was shown in an offer to confirm the existing
officers in their posts by Act of Parliament, and even to allow fresh
nominations of Catholics by the king under the same security. But James
had no wish for such a compromise, and the Houses were at once
prorogued.

[Sidenote: The Test set aside.]

The king resolved to obtain from the judges what he could not obtain
from Parliament. He remodelled the bench by dismissing four judges who
refused to lend themselves to his plans; and in the June of 1686 their
successors decided in the case of Sir Edward Hales, a Catholic officer
in the army, that a royal dispensation could be pleaded in bar of the
Test Act. The principle laid down by the judges "that it is a privilege
inseparably connected with the sovereignty of the King to dispense with
penal laws, and that according to his own judgment," was applied by
James with a reckless impatience of all decency and self-restraint.
Catholics were admitted into civil and military offices without stint,
and four Catholic peers were sworn as members of the Privy Council. The
laws which forbade the presence of Catholic priests in the realm or the
open exercise of Catholic worship were set at nought. A gorgeous chapel
was opened in the palace of St. James for the use of the king.
Carmelites, Benedictines, Franciscans, appeared in their religious garb
in the streets of London, and the Jesuits set up a crowded school in the
Savoy. The quick growth of discontent at these acts would have startled
a wiser man into prudence, but James prided himself on an obstinacy
which never gave way; and a riot which took place on the opening of a
Catholic chapel in the City was followed by the establishment of a camp
of thirteen thousand men at Hounslow to overawe the capital.

[Sidenote: Scotland and Ireland.]

The course which James intended to follow in England was shown indeed by
the course he was following in the sister kingdoms. In Scotland he acted
as a pure despot. At the close of Charles's reign the extreme
Covenanters or "wild Whigs" of the Western shires had formally renounced
their allegiance to a "prelatical" king. A smouldering revolt spread
over the country that was only held in check by the merciless cruelties
with which the royal troops avenged the "rabbling of priests" and the
outrages committed by the Whigs on the more prominent persecutors. Such
a revolt threw strength into the hands of the government by rallying to
its side all who were bent on public order, and this strength was
doubled by the landing and failure of Argyle. The Scotch Parliament
granted excise and customs not to the king only but to his successors,
while it confirmed the Acts which established religious conformity. But
James was far from being satisfied with a loyalty which made no
concession to the "king's religion." He placed the government of
Scotland in the hands of two lords, Melfort and Perth, who had embraced
his own faith, and put a Catholic in command of the Castle of Edinburgh.
The drift of these measures was soon seen. The Scotch Parliament had as
yet been the mere creature of the Crown, but servile as were its members
there was a point at which their servility stopped. When James boldly
required them to legalize the toleration of Catholics they refused to
pass such an Act. It was in vain that the king tempted them to consent
by the offer of a free trade with England. "Shall we sell our God?" was
the indignant reply. James at once ordered the Scotch judges to treat
all laws against Catholics as null and void, and his orders were obeyed.
In Ireland his policy threw off even the disguise of law. Catholics were
admitted by the king's command to the council and to civil offices. A
Catholic, Lord Tyrconnell, was put at the head of the army, and set
instantly about its re-organization by cashiering Protestant officers
and by admitting two thousand Catholic natives into its ranks.

[Sidenote: The High Commission.]

Meanwhile in England James was passing from the mere attempt to secure
freedom for his fellow-religionists to a bold and systematic attack
upon the Church. He had at the outset of his reign forbidden the clergy
to preach against "the king's religion"; and ordered the bishops to act
upon this prohibition. But no steps were taken by them to carry out this
order; and the pulpits of the capital soon rang with controversial
sermons. For such a sermon James now called on Compton, the Bishop of
London, to suspend Dr. Sharp, the rector of St. Giles'-in-the-Fields.
Compton answered that as judge he was ready to examine into the case if
brought before him according to law. To James the matter was not one of
law but of prerogative. He regarded his ecclesiastical supremacy as a
weapon providentially left to him for undoing the work which it had
enabled his predecessors to do. Under Henry and Elizabeth it had been
used to turn the Church of England from Catholic to Protestant. Under
James it might be used to turn the Church back again from Protestant to
Catholic. The High Commission indeed which had enforced this supremacy
had been declared illegal by an Act of the Long Parliament, and this Act
had been confirmed by the Parliament of the Restoration. But it was
thought possible to evade this Act by omitting from the instructions on
which the Commission acted the extraordinary powers and jurisdictions by
which its predecessor had given offence. With this reserve, seven
commissioners were appointed in the summer of 1686 for the government
of the Church with the Chancellor, Lord Jeffreys, at their head. The
first blow of the Commission was at the Bishop of London whose refusal
to suspend Sharp was punished by his own suspension. But the pressure of
the Commission only drove the clergy to a bolder defiance of the royal
will. The legality of the Commission and of its proceedings was denied.
Not even the Pope, it was said, had claimed such rights over the conduct
and jurisdiction of English bishops as were claimed by the king. The
prohibition of attacks on the "king's religion" was set at nought.
Sermons against superstition were preached from every pulpit; and the
two most famous divines of the day, Tillotson and Stillingfleet, put
themselves at the head of a host of controversialists who scattered
pamphlets and tracts from every printing press.

[Sidenote: James and the Tories.]

It was in vain that the bulk of the Catholic gentry stood aloof and
predicted the inevitable reaction which the king's course must bring
about, or that Rome itself counselled greater moderation. James was
infatuated with what seemed to be the success of his enterprises. He
looked on the opposition he experienced as due to the influence of the
High Church Tories who had remained in power since the reaction of 1681,
and these he determined "to chastise." The Duke of Queensberry, the
leader of this party in Scotland, was driven from office. Tyrconnell, as
we have seen, was placed as a check on Ormond in Ireland. In England
James resolved to show the world that even the closest ties of blood
were as nothing to him if they conflicted with the demands of his faith.
His earlier marriage with Anne Hyde, the daughter of Clarendon, bound
both the Chancellor's sons to his fortunes; and on his accession he had
sent his elder brother-in-law, Edward, Earl of Clarendon, as
Lord-Lieutenant to Ireland, and raised the younger, Laurence, Earl of
Rochester, who had long been a minister under Charles the Second, to the
post of Lord Treasurer. But the sons of Hyde were as staunch to the old
Cavalier doctrines of Church and State as Hyde himself. Rochester
therefore was told in the opening of 1687 that the king could not safely
entrust so great a charge to any one who did not share his sentiments on
religion, and on his refusal to abandon his faith he was deprived of the
White Staff. His brother Clarendon shared his fall. A Catholic, Lord
Bellasys, became First Lord of the Treasury, which was again put into
commission after Rochester's removal; and another Catholic, Lord
Arundell, became Lord Privy Seal; while Father Petre, a Jesuit, was
called to the Privy Council.

[Sidenote: The Tory Nobles.]

The dismissal of Rochester sprang mainly from a belief that with such a
minister James would fail to procure from the Parliament that freedom
for Catholics which he was bent on establishing. It was in fact a
declaration that on this matter none in the king's service must oppose
the king's will, and it was followed up by the dismissal of one official
after another who refused to aid in the repeal of the Test Act. But acts
like these were of no avail against the steady growth of resistance. If
the great Tory nobles were staunch for the Crown, they were as resolute
Englishmen in their hatred of mere tyranny as the Whigs themselves.
James gave the Duke of Norfolk the sword of State to carry before him as
he went to Mass. The Duke stopped at the Chapel door. "Your father would
have gone further," said the king. "Your Majesty's father was the better
man," replied the Duke, "and he would not have gone so far." The young
Duke of Somerset was ordered to introduce into the Presence Chamber the
Papal Nuncio, who was now received in State at Windsor in the teeth of a
statute which forbade diplomatic relations with Rome. "I am advised,"
Somerset answered, "that I cannot obey your Majesty without breaking the
law." "Do you not know that I am above the law?" James asked angrily.
"Your Majesty may be, but I am not," retorted the Duke. He was dismissed
from his post, but the spirit of resistance spread fast. In spite of the
king's letters the governors of the Charterhouse, who numbered among
them some of the greatest English nobles, refused to admit a Catholic to
the benefits of the foundation. The most devoted loyalists began to
murmur when James demanded apostasy as a proof of their loyalty.

[Sidenote: James and the Nonconformists.]

He had in fact to abandon at last all hope of bringing the Church or the
Tories over to his will, and in the spring of 1687 he turned, as Charles
had turned, to the Nonconformists. He published in April a Declaration
of Indulgence which suspended the operation of the penal laws against
Nonconformists and Catholics alike, and of every Act which imposed a
test as a qualification for office in Church or State. A hope was
expressed that this measure would be sanctioned by Parliament when it
was suffered to reassemble. The temptation to accept the Indulgence was
great, for since the fall of Shaftesbury persecution had fallen heavily
on the Protestant dissidents, and we can hardly wonder that the
Nonconformists wavered for a time or that numerous addresses of thanks
were presented to James. But the great body of them, and all the more
venerable names among them, remained true to the cause of freedom.
Baxter, Howe, and Bunyan all refused an Indulgence which could only be
purchased by the violent overthrow of the law. It was plain that the
only mode of actually securing the end which James had in view was to
procure a repeal of the Test Act from Parliament itself. It was to this
that the king's dismissal of Rochester and other ministerial changes had
been directed; but James found that the temper of the existing Houses,
so far as he could test it, remained absolutely opposed to his project.
In July therefore he dissolved the Parliament, and summoned a new one.
In spite of the support he might expect from the Nonconformists in the
elections, he knew that no free Parliament could be brought to consent
to the repeal. The Lords indeed could be swamped by lavish creations of
new peers. "Your troop of horse," Lord Sunderland told Churchill, "shall
be called up into the House of Lords." But it was a harder matter to
secure a compliant House of Commons. No effort however was spared. The
Lord-Lieutenants were directed to bring about such a "regulation" of the
governing body in boroughs as would ensure the return of candidates
pledged to the repeal of the Test, and to question every magistrate in
their county as to his vote. Half of them at once refused to comply, and
a string of great nobles--the Lords of Oxford, Shrewsbury, Dorset,
Derby, Pembroke, Rutland, Abergavenny, Thanet, Northampton, and
Abingdon--were dismissed from their Lord-Lieutenancies. The justices
when questioned simply replied that they would vote according to their
consciences, and send members to Parliament who would protect the
Protestant religion. After repeated "regulations" it was found
impossible to form a corporate body which would return representatives
willing to comply with the royal will. All thought of a Parliament had
to be abandoned; and even the most bigoted courtiers counselled
moderation at this proof of the stubborn opposition which James must
prepare to encounter from the peers, the gentry, and the trading
classes.

[Sidenote: The Attack on the Universities.]

Estranged as he was from the whole body of the nobles and gentry it
remained for James to force the clergy also into an attitude of
resistance. Even the tyranny of the Commission had failed to drive into
open opposition men who had been preaching Sunday after Sunday the
doctrine of passive obedience to the worst of kings. But James who had
now finally abandoned all hope of winning the aid of the Church in his
project cared little for passive obedience. He looked on the refusal of
the clergy to support his plans as freeing him from the pledge he had
given to maintain the Church as established by law; and he resolved to
attack it in the great institutions which had till now been its
strongholds. To secure the Universities for Catholicism was to seize the
only training schools which the English clergy possessed as well as the
only centres of higher education which existed for the English gentry.
It was on such a seizure however that James's mind was set. Little
indeed was done with Cambridge. A Benedictine monk, who presented
himself with royal letters recommending him for the degree of a Master
of Arts, was rejected on his refusal to sign the Articles; and the
Vice-Chancellor was summoned before the Privy Council and punished for
his rejection by deprivation from office. But a violent and obstinate
attack was directed against Oxford. The Master of University College,
Obadiah Walker, who declared himself a Catholic convert, was authorized
to retain his post in defiance of the law. A Roman Catholic named Massey
was presented by the Crown to the Deanery of Christ Church. Magdalen was
the wealthiest College in the University; and James in 1687 recommended
one Farmer, a Catholic of infamous life and not even qualified by
statute for the office, to its vacant headship. The Fellows
remonstrated, and on the rejection of their remonstrance chose Hough,
one of their own number, as their President. The Ecclesiastical
Commission declared the election void; and James, shamed out of his
first candidate, recommended a second, Parker, Bishop of Oxford, a
Catholic in heart and the meanest of his courtiers. The Fellows however
pleaded that Hough was already chosen, and they held stubbornly to their
legal head. It was in vain that the king visited Oxford, summoned them
to his presence, and rated them as they knelt before him like
schoolboys. "I am King," he said; "I will be obeyed! Go to your chapel
this instant, and elect the Bishop! Let those who refuse look to it, for
they shall feel the whole weight of my hand!" It was seen that to give
Magdalen as well as Christ Church into Catholic hands was to turn
Oxford into a Catholic seminary, and the king's threats were
disregarded. But they were soon carried out. A special Commission
visited the University, pronounced Hough an intruder, set aside his
appeal to the law, burst open the door of his president's house to
install Parker in his place, and on their refusal to submit deprived the
Fellows of their fellowships. The expulsion of the Fellows was followed
on a like refusal by that of the Demies. Parker, who died immediately
after his installation, was succeeded by a Roman Catholic bishop _in
partibus_, named Bonaventure Gifford, and twelve Roman Catholics were
admitted to fellowships in a single day.

[Sidenote: James and William.]

With peers, gentry, and clergy in dogged opposition the scheme of
wresting a repeal of the Test Act from a new Parliament became
impracticable, and without this--as James well knew--his system of
Indulgence, even if he was able to maintain it so long, must end with
his death and the accession of a Protestant sovereign. It was to provide
against such a defeat of his designs that he stooped to ask the aid of
William of Orange. Ever since his accession William had followed his
father-in-law's course with a growing anxiety. For while England was
seething with the madness of the Popish Plot and of the royalist
reaction the great European struggle which occupied the whole mind of
the Prince had been drawing nearer and nearer. The patience of Germany
indeed was worn out by the ceaseless aggressions of Lewis, and in 1686
its princes had bound themselves at Augsburg to resist all further
encroachments on the part of France. From that moment war became
inevitable, and in such a war William had always held that the aid of
England was essential to success. But his efforts to ensure English aid
had utterly failed. James, as William soon came to know, had renewed his
brother's secret treaty with France; and even had this been otherwise
his quarrel with his people would of itself have prevented him from
giving any aid in a struggle abroad. The Prince could only silently look
on with a desperate hope that James might yet be brought to a nobler
policy. He refused all encouragement to the leading malcontents who were
already calling on him to interfere in arms. On the other hand he
declined to support the king in his schemes for the abolition of the
Test. If he still cherished hopes of bringing about a peace between the
king and people which might enable him to enlist England in the Grand
Alliance, they vanished in 1687 before the Declaration of Indulgence. It
was at this moment, at the end of May, that James called on him and Mary
to declare themselves in favour of the abolition of the penal laws and
of the Test. "Conscience, honour, and good policy," wrote James, "bind
me to procure safety for the Catholics. I cannot leave those who have
remained faithful to the old and true religion subject to the oppression
under which the laws place them."

[Sidenote: The King's hopes.]

But simultaneously with the king's appeal letters of great import
reached the Prince from the leading nobles. Some, like the Hydes, simply
assured him of their friendship. The Bishop of London added assurances
of support. Others, like Devonshire, Nottingham, and Shrewsbury,
cautiously or openly warned the Prince against compliance with the
king's demand. Lord Churchill announced the resolve of Mary's sister
Anne to stand in any case by the cause of Protestantism. Danby, the
leading representative of the great Tory party, told the Dutch
ambassador plainly to warn William that if James was suffered to pursue
his present course, and above all to gain control over the Parliament,
he would leave the Catholic party strong enough at his death to threaten
Mary's succession. The letters dictated William's answer. No one, he
truly protested, loathed religious persecution more than he himself did,
but in relaxing political disabilities James called on him to
countenance an attack on his own religion. "I cannot," he ended, "concur
in what your Majesty desires of me." William's refusal was justified, as
we have seen, by the result of the efforts to assemble a Parliament
favourable to the repeal of the Test. The wholesale dismissal of
justices and Lord-Lieutenants through the summer of 1687 failed to
shake the resolve of the counties. The "regulation" of their
corporations by the displacing of their older members and the
substitution of Nonconformists did little to gain the towns. The year
1688 indeed had hardly opened when it was found necessary to adjourn the
elections which had been fixed for February, and to make a fresh attempt
to win a warmer support from the dissidents and from the country. For
James clung with a desperate tenacity to the hope of finding a compliant
Parliament. He knew, what was as yet unknown to the world, the fact that
his Queen was with child. The birth of an heir would meet the danger
which he looked for from the succession of William and Mary. But James
was past middle life, and his death would leave his boy at the mercy of
a Regency which could hardly fail to be composed of men who would undo
the king's work and even bring up the young sovereign as a Protestant.
His own security, as he thought, against such a course lay in the
building up a strong Catholic party, in placing Catholics in the high
offices of State, and in providing against their expulsion from these at
his death by a repeal of the Test. But such a repeal could only be won
from Parliament, and hopeless as the effort seemed James pressed
doggedly on in his attempt to secure Houses who would carry out his
will.

[Sidenote: The Trial of the Bishops.]

The renewed Declaration of Indulgence which he issued in 1688 was not
only intended to win the Nonconformists by fresh assurances of the
king's sincerity, it was an appeal to the nation at large. At its close
he promised to summon a Parliament in November, and he called on the
electors to choose such members as would bring to a successful end the
policy he had begun. His resolve, he said, was to make merit the one
qualification for office and to establish universal liberty of
conscience for all future time. It was in this character of a royal
appeal that he ordered every clergyman to read the Declaration during
divine service on two successive Sundays. Little time was given for
deliberation; but little time was needed. The clergy refused almost to a
man to be the instruments of their own humiliation. The Declaration was
read in only four of the London churches, and in these the congregation
flocked out of church at the first words of it. Nearly all the country
parsons refused to obey the royal orders, and the Bishops went with the
rest of the clergy. A few days before the appointed Sunday Archbishop
Sancroft called his suffragans together, and the six who were able to
appear at Lambeth signed a temperate protest to the king in which they
declined to publish an illegal Declaration. "It is a standard of
rebellion," James exclaimed, as the Primate presented the paper; and the
resistance of the clergy was no sooner announced to him than he
determined to wreak his vengeance on the prelates who had signed the
protest. He ordered the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to deprive them of
their sees; but in this matter even the Commissioners shrank from
obeying him. The Chancellor, Lord Jeffreys, advised a prosecution for
libel as an easier mode of punishment; and the Bishops, who refused to
give bail, were committed on this charge to the Tower. They passed to
their prison amidst the shouts of a great multitude; the sentinels knelt
for their blessing as they entered its gates, and the soldiers of the
garrison drank their healths. So threatening was the temper of the
nation that his ministers pressed James to give way. But his obstinacy
grew with the danger. "Indulgence," he said, "ruined my father"; and on
the 29th of June the Bishops appeared as criminals at the bar of the
King's Bench. The jury had been packed, the judges were mere tools of
the Crown, but judges and jury were alike overawed by the indignation of
the people at large. No sooner had the foreman of the jury uttered the
words "Not guilty" than a roar of applause burst from the crowd, and
horsemen spurred along every road to carry over the country the news of
the acquittal.

[Sidenote: The National discontent.]

James was at Hounslow when the news of the verdict reached him, and as
he rode from the camp he heard a great shout behind him. "What is that?"
he asked. "It is nothing," was the reply; "only the soldiers are glad
that the Bishops are acquitted!" "Do you call that nothing?" grumbled
the king. The shout told him that he stood utterly alone in his realm.
The peerage, the gentry, the bishops, the clergy, the universities,
every lawyer, every trader, every farmer, stood aloof from him. And now
his very soldiers forsook him. The most devoted Catholics pressed him to
give way. But to give way was to reverse every act he had done since his
accession and to change the whole nature of his government. All show of
legal rule had disappeared. Sheriffs, mayors, magistrates, appointed by
the Crown in defiance of a parliamentary statute, were no real officers
in the eye of the law. Even if the Houses were summoned members returned
by officers such as these could form no legal Parliament. Hardly a
Minister of the Crown or a Privy Councillor exercised any lawful
authority. James had brought things to such a pass that the restoration
of legal government meant the absolute reversal of every act he had
done. But he was in no mood to reverse his acts. His temper was only
spurred to a more dogged obstinacy by danger and remonstrance. "I will
lose all," he said to the Spanish ambassador who counselled moderation;
"I will lose all or win all." He broke up the camp at Hounslow and
dispersed its troops in distant cantonments. He dismissed the two judges
who had favoured the acquittal of the Bishops. He ordered the
chancellor of each diocese to report the names of the clergy who had not
read the Declaration of Indulgence. But his will broke fruitlessly
against a sullen resistance which met him on every side. Not a
chancellor made a return to the Commissioners, and the Commissioners
were cowed into inaction by the temper of the nation. When the judges
who had displayed their servility to the Crown went on circuit the
gentry refused to meet them. A yet fiercer irritation was kindled by the
king's resolve to supply the place of the English troops whose temper
proved unserviceable for his purposes by drafts from the Catholic army
which Tyrconnell had raised in Ireland. Even the Roman Catholic peers at
the Council-table protested against this measure; and six officers in a
single regiment laid down their commissions rather than enrol the Irish
recruits among their men. The ballad of "Lillibullero," a scurrilous
attack on the Irish recruits, was sung from one end of England to the
other.

[Sidenote: The Invitation.]

Wide however as the disaffection undoubtedly was the position of James
seemed fairly secure. He counted on the aid of France. His army,
whatever signs of discontent it might show, was still a formidable force
of twenty thousand men. Scotland, disheartened by the failure of
Argyle's rising, could give no such help as it gave to the Long
Parliament. Ireland on the other hand was ready to throw a Catholic
army in the king's support on the western coast. It was doubtful too if
in England itself disaffection would turn into actual revolt. The Bloody
Assize had left its terror on the Whigs. The Tories and Churchmen,
angered as they were, were still hampered by their horror of rebellion
and their doctrine of non-resistance. Above all the eyes of the nation
rested on William and Mary. James was past middle age, and a few years
must bring a Protestant successor and restore the reign of law. But in
the midst of the struggle with the Church it was announced that the
Queen was again with child. The news was received with general unbelief,
for five years had passed since the last pregnancy of Mary of Modena,
and the unbelief passed into a general expectation of some imposture as
men watched the joy of the Catholics and their confident prophecies that
the child would be a boy. But, truth or imposture, it was plain that the
appearance of a Prince of Wales must bring on a crisis. If the child
turned out a boy, and as was certain was brought up a Catholic, the
highest Tory had to resolve at last whether the tyranny under which
England lay should go on for ever. The hesitation of the country was at
an end. Danby, loyal above all to the Church and firm in his hatred of
subservience to France, answered for the Tories. Compton answered for
the High Churchmen, goaded at last into rebellion by the Declaration of
Indulgence. The Earl of Devonshire, the Lord Cavendish of the Exclusion
struggle, answered for the Nonconformists, who were satisfied with
William's promise to procure them toleration, as well as for the general
body of the Whigs. The announcement of the boy's birth on the 10th of
June was followed ten days after by a formal invitation to William to
intervene in arms for the restoration of English liberty and the
protection of the Protestant religion. The invitation was signed by
Danby, Devonshire, and Compton, the representatives of the great parties
whose long fight was hushed at last by a common danger, by two recent
converts from the Catholic faith, the Earl of Shrewsbury and Lord
Lumley, by Edward the cousin of Lord Russell, and by Henry the brother
of Algernon Sidney. It was carried to the Hague by Herbert, the most
popular of English seamen, who had been deprived of his command for a
refusal to vote against the Test.

[Sidenote: James and France.]

The Invitation called on the Prince of Orange to land with an army
strong enough to justify those who signed it in rising in arms. An
outbreak of revolt was in fact inevitable, and either its success or
defeat must be equally fatal to William should he refuse to put himself
at its head. If the rebels were victorious, their resentment at his
desertion of their cause in the hour of need would make Mary's
succession impossible and probably bring about the establishment of a
Commonwealth. On the other hand the victory of the king would not only
ruin English freedom and English Protestantism, but fling the whole
weight of England in the contest for the liberties of Europe which was
now about to open into the scale of France. From the opening of 1688 the
signs of a mutual understanding between the English Court and the French
had been unmistakeable. James had declared himself on the side of Lewis
in the negotiations with the Empire which followed on the Treaty of
Augsburg. He had backed Sweden in its threats of war against the Dutch.
At the instigation of France he had recalled the English and Scotch
troops in the service of the States. He had received supplies from Lewis
to send an English fleet to the coast of Holland; and was at this moment
supporting at Rome the French side in the quarrel over the Electorate of
Cologne, a quarrel which rendered war inevitable. It was certain
therefore that success at home would secure James's aid to France in the
struggle abroad.

[Sidenote: William's Acceptance.]

It was this above all which decided the action of the Prince, for the
ruling passion in William's heart was the longing to free Europe from
the supremacy of France. It was this too which made his enterprise
possible, for nothing but a sense of their own danger would have forced
his opponents in Holland itself to assent to his expedition. Their
assent however once gained, William strained all his resources as
Admiral and Captain-General to gather a fleet and a sufficient force
under pretext of defence against the English fleet which now appeared in
the Channel, while Brandenburg promised to supply the place of the Dutch
forces during their absence in England by lending the States nine
thousand men. As soon as the news of these preparations reached England
noble after noble made his way to the Hague. The Earl of Shrewsbury
brought L2000 towards the expenses of the expedition. Edward Russell,
the representative of the Whig Earl of Bedford, was followed by the
representatives of great Tory houses, by the sons of the Marquis of
Winchester, of Lord Danby, of Lord Peterborough, and by Lord
Macclesfield, a well-known High Churchman. At home the Earls of Danby
and Devonshire prepared silently with Lord Lumley for a rising in the
North. In spite of the profound secrecy with which all was conducted,
the keen instinct of Sunderland, who had stooped to purchase continuance
in office at the price of a secret apostasy to Catholicism, detected the
preparations of William; and the sense that his master's ruin was at
hand encouraged him to tell every secret of James on the promise of a
pardon for the crimes to which he had lent himself. James alone remained
stubborn and insensate as of old. He had no fear of a revolt unaided by
the Prince of Orange, and he believed that the threat of a French
attack on Holland itself would render William's departure impossible. At
the opening of September indeed Lewis declared himself aware of the
meaning of the Dutch armaments and warned the States that he should look
on an attack upon James as a war upon himself.

[Sidenote: James gives way.]

Fortunately for William so open an announcement of the union between
England and France suited ill with the plans of James. He still looked
forward to the coming Parliament, and the knowledge of a league with
France was certain to make any Parliament reluctant to admit Catholics
to a share in political life. James therefore roughly disavowed the act
of Lewis, and William was able to continue his preparations. But even
had no such disavowal come the threat of Lewis would have remained an
empty one. In spite of the counsel of Louvois he looked on an invasion
of Holland as likely to serve English interests rather than French and
resolved to open the war by a campaign on the Rhine. In September his
troops marched eastward, and the Dutch at once felt themselves secure.
The States-General gave their public sanction to William's project, and
the armament he had prepared gathered rapidly in the Scheldt. The news
of war and of the diversion of the French forces to Germany no sooner
reached England than the king passed from obstinacy to panic. By drafts
from Scotland and Ireland he had mustered forty thousand men, but the
temper of the troops robbed him of all trust in them. Help from France
was now out of the question. There was nothing for it but to fall back,
as Sunderland had for some time been advising him to fall back, on the
older policy of a union with the Tory party and the party of the Church;
and to win assent for his plans from the coming Parliament by an
abandonment of his recent acts. But the haste and completeness with
which James reversed his whole course forbade any belief in his
sincerity. He personally appealed for support to the Bishops. He
dissolved the Ecclesiastical Commission. He replaced the magistrates he
had driven from office. He restored their franchises to the towns. The
Chancellor carried back the Charter of London in state into the City.
The Bishop of Winchester was sent to replace the expelled Fellows of
Magdalen. Catholic chapels and Jesuit schools were ordered to be closed.

[Sidenote: William's Landing.]

Sunderland pressed for the instant calling of a Parliament. But it was
still plain that any Parliament would as yet be eager for war with
France and would probably call on the king to put the Prince of Orange
at the head of his army in such a war. To James therefore Sunderland's
counsel seemed treachery, the issue of a secret design with William to
place him helpless in the Prince's hands and above all to imperil the
succession of his boy, whose birth William had now been brought by
advice from the English lords to regard as an imposture. He again
therefore fell back on France which made new advances to him in the hope
of meeting this fresh danger of an attack from England; and in the end
of October he dismissed Sunderland from office. But Sunderland had
hardly left Whitehall when the Declaration of the Prince of Orange
reached England. It demanded the removal of grievances and the calling
of a free Parliament which should establish English freedom and religion
on a secure basis. It promised toleration to Protestant Nonconformists
and freedom of conscience to Catholics. It left the question of the
legitimacy of the Prince of Wales and the settlement of the succession
to Parliament. James was wounded above all by the doubts thrown on the
birth of a Prince; and he produced proofs of the birth before the peers
who were in London. But the proofs came too late. Detained by ill winds,
beaten back on its first venture by a violent storm, William's fleet of
six hundred transports, escorted by fifty men-of-war, anchored on the
5th of November in Torbay; and his army, thirteen thousand strong,
entered Exeter amid the shouts of its citizens. Great pains had been
taken to strip from William's army the appearance of a foreign force,
which might have stirred English feeling to resistance. The core of it
consisted of the English and Scottish regiments which had remained in
the service of the States in spite of their recall by the king. Its
foreign divisions were representatives of the whole Protestant world.
With the Dutchmen were Brandenburgers and Swedes, and the most brilliant
corps in the whole army was composed of French refugees.

[Sidenote: The National Rising.]

The landing seemed at first a failure. The country remained quiet.
William's coming had been unexpected in the West, and no great landowner
joined his forces. Though the king's fleet had failed to intercept the
expedition it closed in from the Channel to prevent William's escape as
soon as he had landed, while the king's army moved rapidly to encounter
him in the field. But the pause was one of momentary surprise. Before a
week had passed the nobles and squires of the west flocked to William's
camp and the adhesion of Plymouth secured his rear. The call of the
king's forces to face the Prince in the south no sooner freed the
northern parts of England from their presence than the insurrection
broke out. Scotland threw off the royal rule. Danby, dashing at the head
of a hundred horsemen into York, gave the signal for a rising. The York
militia met his appeal with shouts of "A free Parliament and the
Protestant religion"; peers and gentry flocked to his standard; and a
march on Nottingham united his forces to those under Devonshire who had
mustered at Derby the great lords of the midland and eastern counties.
Everywhere the revolt was triumphant. The garrison of Hull declared for
a free Parliament. The Duke of Norfolk appeared at the head of three
hundred gentlemen in the market-place at Norwich. At Oxford townsmen and
gownsmen greeted Lord Lovelace and the forces he led with uproarious
welcome. Bristol threw open its gates to the Prince of Orange, who
advanced steadily on Salisbury where James had assembled his forces.

[Sidenote: Flight of James.]

But the king's army, broken by dissensions and mutual suspicions among
its leaders, shrank from an engagement and fell back in disorder at his
approach. Its retreat was the signal for a general abandonment of the
royal cause. The desertion of Lord Churchill, who had from the first
made his support conditional on the calling of a Parliament, a step
which the king still hesitated to take, was followed by that of so many
other officers that James abandoned the struggle in despair. He fled to
London to hear that his daughter Anne had left St. James's to join Danby
at Nottingham. "God help me," cried the wretched father, "for my own
children have forsaken me!" His spirit was utterly broken by the sudden
crash; and though he had promised to call the Houses together and
despatched commissioners to Hungerford to treat with William on the
terms of a free Parliament, in his heart he had resolved on flight.
Parliament, he said to the few who still clung to him, would force on
him concessions he could not endure; while flight would enable him to
return and regain his throne with the assistance of French forces. He
only waited therefore for news of the escape of his wife and child on
the 10th of December to make his way to the Isle of Sheppey, where a hoy
lay ready to carry him to France. Some rough fishermen however who took
him for a Jesuit prevented his escape, and a troop of Life Guards
brought him back in safety to London. His return revived the hopes of
the Tories, who with Clarendon and Rochester at their head looked on the
work of the Prince of Orange as done in the overthrow of the king's
design of establishing a Catholic despotism, and who trusted that their
system would be restored by a reconciliation of James with the Tory
Parliament they expected to be returned. Halifax however, though he had
long acted with the Tories, was too clear-sighted for hopes such as
these. He had taken no part in the invitation or revolt, but now that
the revolution was successful he pressed upon William the impossibility
of carrying out a new system of government with such a sovereign as
James. The Whigs, who had gone beyond hope of forgiveness, backed
powerfully these arguments; and in spite of the pledges with which he
had landed the Prince was soon as convinced of their wisdom as the
Whigs. From this moment it was the policy of William and his advisers to
further a flight which removed their chief difficulty out of the way. It
would have been hard to depose James had he remained, and perilous to
keep him prisoner; but the entry of the Dutch troops into London, the
silence of the Prince, and an order to leave St. James's filled the king
with fresh terrors, and taking advantage of the means of escape which
were almost openly placed at his disposal James a second time quitted
London and embarked on the 23rd of December unhindered for France.

[Sidenote: The Convention.]

Before flying James had burnt most of the writs convoking a new
Parliament, had disbanded his army, and destroyed so far as he could all
means of government. For a few days there was a wild burst of panic and
outrage in London, but the orderly instinct of the people soon
reasserted itself. The Lords who were at the moment in the capital
provided on their own authority as Privy Councillors for the more
pressing needs of administration, and quietly resigned their authority
into William's hands on his arrival. The difficulty which arose from the
absence of any person legally authorized to call Parliament together was
got over by convoking the House of Peers, and forming a second body of
all members who had sat in the Commons in the reign of Charles the
Second together with the Aldermen and Common Councillors of London. Both
bodies requested William to take on himself the provisional government
of the kingdom, and to issue circular letters inviting the electors of
every town and county to send up representatives to a Convention which
met on the 22nd of January 1689. In the new Convention both Houses were
found equally resolved against any recall of or negotiation with the
fallen king. They were united in entrusting a provisional authority to
the Prince of Orange. But with this step their unanimity ended. The
Whigs, who formed a majority in the Commons, voted a resolution which,
illogical and inconsistent as it seemed, was well adapted to unite in
its favour every element of the opposition to James, the Churchman who
was simply scared by his bigotry, the Tory who doubted the right of a
nation to depose its king, the Whig who held the theory of a contract
between King and People. They voted that King James, "having endeavoured
to subvert the constitution of this kingdom by breaking the original
contract between King and People, and by the advice of Jesuits and other
wicked persons having violated the fundamental laws, and having
withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, has abdicated the Government, and
that the throne is thereby vacant." But in the Lords where the Tories
were still in the ascendant the resolution was fiercely debated.
Archbishop Sancroft with the high Tories held that no crime could bring
about a forfeiture of the crown and that James still remained king, but
that his tyranny had given the nation a right to withdraw from him the
actual exercise of government and to entrust his functions to a Regency.
The moderate Tories under Danby's guidance admitted that James had
ceased to be king but denied that the throne could be vacant, and
contended that from the moment of his abdication the sovereignty vested
in his daughter Mary. It was in vain that the eloquence of Halifax
backed the Whig peers in struggling for the resolution of the Commons as
it stood. The plan of a Regency was lost by a single vote, and Danby's
scheme was adopted by a large majority.

[Sidenote: Declaration of Rights.]

But both the Tory courses found a sudden obstacle in William. He
declined to be Regent. He had no mind, he said to Danby, to be his
wife's gentleman-usher. Mary on the other hand refused to accept the
crown save in conjunction with her husband. The two declarations put an
end to the question, and it was settled that William and Mary should be
acknowledged as joint sovereigns but that the actual administration
should rest with William alone. It had been agreed throughout however
that before the throne was filled up the constitutional liberties of the
subject must be secured. A Parliamentary Committee in which the most
active member was John Somers, a young lawyer who had distinguished
himself in the trial of the Bishops and who was destined to play a great
part in later history, drew up a Declaration of Rights which after some
alterations was adopted by the two Houses. The Declaration recited the
misgovernment of James, his abdication, and the resolve of the Lords
and Commons to assert the ancient rights and liberties of English
subjects. It condemned as illegal his establishment of an ecclesiastical
commission, and his raising of an army without Parliamentary sanction.
It denied the right of any king to suspend or dispense with laws, as
they had been suspended or dispensed with of late, or to exact money
save by consent of Parliament. It asserted for the subject a right to
petition, to a free choice of representatives in Parliament, and to a
pure and merciful administration of justice. It declared the right of
both Houses to liberty of debate. It demanded securities for the free
exercise of their religion by all Protestants, and bound the new
sovereign to maintain the Protestant religion as well as the laws and
liberties of the nation. "We do claim and insist on the premises," ran
the Declaration, "as our undoubted rights and liberties; encouraged by
the Declaration of his Highness the Prince, we have confidence that he
will perfect the deliverance he has begun and will preserve our rights
against all further injury." It ended by declaring the Prince and
Princess of Orange King and Queen of England. The Declaration was
presented to William and Mary on the 13th of February by the two Houses
in the Banqueting Room at Whitehall, and at the close of its recital
Halifax, in the name of the Estates of the Realm, prayed them to receive
the crown. William accepted the offer in his own name and in that of
his wife and declared in a few words the resolve of both to maintain the
laws and to govern by advice of Parliament.

[Sidenote: Lewis and the Revolution.]

But William's eyes were fixed less on England than on Europe. His
expedition had had in his own eyes a European rather than an English
aim, and in his acceptance of the crown he had been moved not so much by
personal ambition as by the prospect which offered itself of firmly
knitting together England and Holland, the two great Protestant powers
whose fleets held the mastery of the sea. But the advance from such a
union to the formation of the European alliance against France on which
he was bent was a step that still had to be made. Already indeed his
action in England had told decisively on the contest. The blunder of
Lewis in choosing Germany instead of Holland for his point of attack had
been all but atoned for by the brilliant successes with which he opened
the war. The whole country west of the Rhine fell at once into his
hands; his armies made themselves masters of the Palatinate, and
penetrated even to Wuertemberg. The hopes of the French king indeed had
never been higher than at the moment when the arrival of James at St.
Germain dashed all hope to the ground. Lewis was at once thrown back on
a war of defence, and the brutal ravages which marked the retreat of his
armies from the Rhine revealed the bitterness with which his pride
stooped to the necessity.

[Sidenote: The Grand Alliance.]

But his reception of James at St. Germain as still king of England gave
fresh force to William's efforts. It was yet doubtful whether William
would be able to bring England to a hearty co-operation in the struggle
against French ambition. But whatever reluctance there might have been
to follow him in an attack on France with the view of saving the
liberties of Europe, the stoutest Tory had none in following him in such
an attack when it meant simply self-defence against a French restoration
of the Stuart king at the cost of English freedom. It was with universal
approval that the English Government declared war against Lewis. It was
soon followed in this step by Holland, and the two countries at once
agreed to stand by one another in their struggle against France. But it
was more difficult to secure the co-operation of the two branches of the
House of Austria in Germany and Spain, reluctant as they were to join
the Protestant powers in league against a Catholic king. Spain however
was forced by Lewis into war, for he aimed at the Netherlands as his
especial prey; and the court of Vienna at last yielded to the bait held
out by Holland of a recognition of its claims to the Spanish succession.

[Sidenote: Scotland and the Revolution.]

The adhesion of these powers in the spring of 1689 completed the Grand
Alliance of the European powers which William had designed; and the
union of Savoy with the allies girt France in on every side save that of
Switzerland with a ring of foes. Lewis was left without a single ally
save the Turk; for though the Scandinavian kingdoms stood aloof from the
confederacy of Europe their neutrality was unfriendly to him. But the
energy and quickness of movement which sprang from the concentration of
the power of France in a single hand still left the contest an equal
one. The empire was slow to move; the court of Vienna was distracted
with a war against the Turks; Spain was all but powerless; Holland and
England were alone earnest in the struggle, and England could as yet
give little aid in it. One English brigade indeed, formed from the
regiments raised by James, joined the Dutch army on the Sambre, and
distinguished itself under Churchill, who had been rewarded for his
treason with the title of Earl of Marlborough, in a brisk skirmish with
the enemy at Walcourt. But for the bulk of his forces William had as yet
grave work to do at home. In England not a sword had been drawn for
James. In Scotland his tyranny had been yet greater than in England, and
so far as the Lowlands went the fall of his tyranny was as rapid and
complete. No sooner had he called his troops southward to meet William's
invasion than Edinburgh rose in revolt. The western peasants were at
once up in arms; and the Episcopalian clergy, who had been the
instruments of the Stuart misgovernment ever since the Restoration, were
rabbled and driven from their parsonages in every parish. The news of
these disorders forced William to act, though he was without a show of
legal authority over Scotland. On the advice of the Scotch Lords present
in London he ventured to summon a Convention similar to that which had
been summoned in England, and on his own responsibility to set aside the
laws passed by the "Drunken Parliament" of the Restoration which
excluded Presbyterians from the Scotch Parliament. This Convention
resolved that James had forfeited the crown by misgovernment, and
offered it to William and Mary. The offer was accompanied by a Claim of
Right framed on the model of the Declaration of Rights to which the two
sovereigns had consented in England, but closing with a demand for the
abolition of Prelacy. Both crown and claim were accepted, and the
arrival of the Scotch regiments which William had brought from Holland
gave strength to the new Government.

[Sidenote: Killiecrankie.]

Its strength was to be roughly tested. On the revolt of the capital John
Graham of Claverhouse, whose cruelties in the persecution of the Western
Covenanters had been rewarded with high command in the Scotch army and
with the title of Viscount Dundee, withdrew with a few troopers from
Edinburgh to the Highlands and appealed to the clans. In the Highlands
nothing was known of English government or misgovernment: all that the
Revolution meant to a Highlander was the restoration of the House of
Argyle. To many of the clans it meant the restoration of lands which had
been granted them on the Earl's attainder; and the zeal of the
Macdonalds, the Macleans, the Camerons, who were as ready to join Dundee
in fighting the Campbells and the Government which upheld them as they
had been ready to join Montrose in the same cause forty years before,
was quickened by a reluctance to disgorge their spoil. They were soon in
arms. William's Scotch regiments under General Mackay were sent to
suppress the rising; but as they climbed the pass of Killiecrankie on
the 27th of July 1689 Dundee charged them at the head of three thousand
clansmen and swept them in headlong rout down the glen. His death in the
moment of victory broke however the only bond which held the Highlanders
together, and in a few weeks the host which had spread terror through
the Lowlands melted helplessly away. In the next summer Mackay was able
to build the strong post of Fort William in the very heart of the
disaffected country, and his offers of money and pardon brought about
the submission of the clans.

[Sidenote: Massacre of Glencoe.]

The work of peace was sullied by an act of cruel treachery the memory of
which still lingers in the minds of men. Sir John Dalrymple, the Master
of Stair, in whose hands the government of Scotland at this time mainly
rested, had hoped that a refusal of the oath of allegiance would give
grounds for a war of extermination and free Scotland for ever from its
dread of the Highlanders. He had provided for the expected refusal by
orders of a ruthless severity. "Your troops," he wrote to the officer in
command, "will destroy entirely the country of Lochaber, Locheil's
lands, Keppoch's, Glengarry's, and Glencoe's. Your powers shall be large
enough. I hope the soldiers will not trouble the Government with
prisoners." But his hopes were disappointed by the readiness with which
the clans accepted the offers of the Government. All submitted in good
time save Macdonald of Glencoe, whose pride delayed his taking of the
oath till six days after the latest date fixed by the proclamation.
Foiled in his larger hopes of destruction Dalrymple seized eagerly on
the pretext given by Macdonald, and an order "for the extirpation of
that sect of robbers" was laid before William and received the royal
signature. "The work," wrote the Master of Stair to Colonel Hamilton who
undertook it, "must be secret and sudden." The troops were chosen from
among the Campbells, the deadly foes of the clansmen of Glencoe, and
quartered peacefully among the Macdonalds for twelve days till all
suspicion of their errand disappeared. At daybreak on the 13th of
February 1692 they fell on their hosts, and in a few moments thirty of
the clansfolk lay dead on the snow. The rest, sheltered by a storm,
escaped to the mountains to perish for the most part of cold and hunger.
"The only thing I regret," said the Master of Stair, when the news
reached him, "is that any got away."

But whatever horror the Massacre of Glencoe has roused in later days few
save Dalrymple knew of it at the time. The peace of the Highlands
enabled the work of reorganization to go on quietly at Edinburgh. In
accepting the Claim of Right with its repudiation of Prelacy William had
in effect restored the Presbyterian Church to which nine-tenths of the
Lowland Scotchmen clung, and its restoration was accompanied by the
revival of the Westminster Confession as a standard of faith and by the
passing of an Act which abolished lay patronage. Against the Toleration
Act which the king proposed the Scotch Parliament stood firm. But though
the measure failed the king was as firm in his purpose as the
Parliament. So long as he reigned, William declared in memorable words,
there should be no persecution for conscience' sake. "We never could be
of that mind that violence was suited to the advancing of true religion,
nor do we intend that our authority shall ever be a tool to the
irregular passions of any party."

[Sidenote: The Irish Rising.]

It was not in Scotland however but in Ireland that James and Lewis hoped
to arrest William's progress. Ireland had long been the object of
special attention on the part of James. In the middle of his reign, when
his chief aim was to provide against the renewed depression of his
fellow-religionists at his death by any Protestant successor, he had
resolved (if we may trust the statement of the French ambassador) to
place Ireland in such a position of independence that she might serve as
a refuge for his Catholic subjects. It was with a view to the success of
this design that Lord Clarendon was dismissed from the Lord-Lieutenancy
and succeeded in the charge of the island by the Catholic Earl of
Tyrconnell. The new governor, who was raised to a dukedom, went roughly
to work. Every Englishman was turned out of office. Every Judge, every
Privy Councillor, every Mayor and Alderman of a borough, was required to
be a Catholic and an Irishman. The Irish army, raised to the number of
fifty thousand men and purged of its Protestant soldiers, was entrusted
to Catholic officers. In a few months the English ascendency was
overthrown, and the life and fortune of the English settlers were at the
mercy of the natives on whom they had trampled since Cromwell's day. The
king's flight and the agitation among the native Irish at the news
spread panic therefore through the island. Another massacre was believed
to be at hand; and fifteen hundred Protestant families, chiefly from the
south, fled in terror over sea. The Protestants of the north on the
other hand drew together at Enniskillen and Londonderry, and prepared
for self-defence. The outbreak however was still delayed, and for two
months Tyrconnell intrigued with William's Government. But his aim was
simply to gain time. He was at this very moment indeed inviting James to
return to Ireland, and assuring him of his fidelity. To James this call
promised the aid of an army which would enable him to help the Scotch
rising and to effect a landing in England, while Lewis saw in it the
means of diverting William from giving effectual aid to the Grand
Alliance. A staff of French officers with arms, ammunition, and a supply
of money was placed therefore at the service of the exiled king, and the
news of his coming no sooner reached Dublin at the opening of 1689 than
Tyrconnell threw off the mask. A flag was hoisted over Dublin Castle
with the words embroidered on its folds "Now or Never." The signal
called every Catholic to arms. The maddened Irishmen flung themselves on
the plunder which their masters had left and in a few weeks havoc was
done, the French envoy told Lewis, which it would take years to repair.

[Sidenote: Siege of Londonderry.]

It was in this condition that James found Ireland when he landed at
Kinsale. The rising of the natives had already baffled his plans. To him
as to Lewis Ireland was simply a basis of operations against William,
and whatever were their hopes of a future restoration of the soil to its
older possessors both kings were equally anxious that no strife of races
should at this moment interrupt their plans of an invasion of England
with the fifty thousand soldiers that Tyrconnell was said to have at his
disposal. But long ere James landed the war of races had already begun.
To Tyrconnell indeed and the Irish leaders the king's plans were utterly
distasteful. They had no wish for an invasion and conquest of England
which would replace Ireland again in its position of dependence. Their
policy was simply that of Ireland for the Irish, and the first step in
such a policy was to drive out the Englishmen who still stood at bay in
Ulster. Half of Tyrconnell's army therefore had already been sent
against Londonderry, where the bulk of the fugitives found shelter
behind a weak wall, manned by a few old guns and destitute even of a
ditch. But the seven thousand desperate Englishmen behind the wall made
up for its weakness. They rejected with firmness the offers of James,
who was still anxious to free his hands from a strife which broke his
plans. They kept up their fire even when the neighbouring Protestants
with their women and children were brutally driven under their walls and
placed in the way of their guns. So fierce were their sallies, so
crushing the repulse of his attack, that the king's general, Hamilton,
at last turned the siege into a blockade. The Protestants died of hunger
in the streets and of the fever which comes of hunger, but the cry of
the town was still "No Surrender." The siege had lasted a hundred and
five days, and only two days' food remained in Londonderry when on the
28th of July an English ship broke the boom across the river, and the
besiegers sullenly withdrew.

[Sidenote: James and Ireland.]

Their defeat was turned into a rout by the men of Enniskillen who
struggled through a bog to charge an Irish force of double their number
at Newtown Butler, and drove horse and foot before them in a panic which
soon spread through Hamilton's whole army. The routed soldiers fell back
on Dublin where James lay helpless in the hands of the frenzied
Parliament which he had summoned. Every member returned was an Irishman
and a Catholic, and their one aim was to undo the successive
confiscations which had given the soil to English settlers and to get
back Ireland for the Irish. The Act of Settlement, on which all title to
property rested, was at once repealed in spite of the king's reluctance.
He was told indeed bluntly that if he did not do Ireland justice not an
Irishman would fight for him. It was to strengthen this work by ensuring
the legal forfeiture of their lands that three thousand Protestants of
name and fortune were massed together in the hugest Bill of Attainder
which the world has seen. To the bitter memory of past wrongs was added
the fury of religious bigotry. In spite of the king's promise of
religious freedom the Protestant clergy were everywhere driven from
their parsonages, Fellows and scholars were turned out of Trinity
College, and the French envoy, the Count of Avaux, dared even to propose
that if any Protestant rising took place on the English descent, as was
expected, it should be met by a general massacre of the Protestants who
still lingered in the districts which had submitted to James. To his
credit the king shrank horror-struck from the proposal. "I cannot be so
cruel," he said, "as to cut their throats while they live peaceably
under my government." "Mercy to Protestants," was the cold reply, "is
cruelty to Catholics."

[Sidenote: The Revolution and the Monarchy.]

The long agony of Londonderry was invaluable to England: it foiled the
king's hopes of an invasion which would have roused a fresh civil war,
and gave the new Government time to breathe. Time was indeed sorely
needed. Through the proscription and bloodshed of the new Irish rule
William was forced to look helplessly on. The best troops in the army
which had been mustered at Hounslow had been sent with Marlborough to
the Sambre, and the political embarrassments which grew up around the
new Government made it impossible to spare a man of those who remained
at home. The great ends of the Revolution were indeed secured, even
amidst the confusion and intrigue which we shall have to describe, by
the common consent of all. On the great questions of civil liberty Whig
and Tory were now at one. The Declaration of Rights was turned into the
Bill of Rights by the Convention which had now become a Parliament, and
the passing of this measure in 1689 restored to the monarchy the
character which it had lost under the Tudors and the Stuarts. The right
of the people through its representatives to depose the king, to change
the order of succession, and to set on the throne whom they would, was
now established. All claim of Divine Right or hereditary right
independent of the law was formally put an end to by the election of
William and Mary. Since their day no English sovereign has been able to
advance any claim to the crown save a claim which rested on a particular
clause in a particular Act of Parliament. William, Mary, and Anne, were
sovereigns simply by virtue of the Bill of Rights. George the First and
his successors have been sovereigns solely by virtue of the Act of
Settlement. An English monarch is now as much the creature of an Act of
Parliament as the pettiest tax-gatherer in his realm.

[Sidenote: Taxation and the Army.]

Nor was the older character of the kingship alone restored. The older
constitution returned with it. Bitter experience had taught England the
need of restoring to the Parliament its absolute power over taxation.
The grant of revenue for life to the last two kings had been the secret
of their anti-national policy, and the first act of the new legislature
was to restrict the grant of the royal revenue to a term of four years.
William was bitterly galled by the provision. "The gentlemen of England
trusted King James," he said, "who was an enemy of their religion and
their laws, and they will not trust me, by whom their religion and their
laws have been preserved." But the only change brought about in the
Parliament by this burst of royal anger was a resolve henceforth to make
the vote of supplies an annual one, a resolve which, in spite of the
slight changes introduced by the next Tory Parliament, soon became an
invariable rule. A change of almost as great importance established the
control of Parliament over the army. The hatred to a standing army which
had begun under Cromwell had only deepened under James; but with the
Continental war the existence of an army was a necessity. As yet however
it was a force which had no legal existence. The soldier was simply an
ordinary subject; there were no legal means of punishing strictly
military offences or of providing for military discipline: and the
assumed power of billeting soldiers in private houses had been taken
away by the law. The difficulty both of Parliament and the army was met
by a Mutiny Act. The powers requisite for discipline in the army were
conferred by Parliament on its officers, and provision was made for the
pay of the force, but both pay and disciplinary powers were granted only
for a single year.

[Sidenote: Parliament and the Revolution.]

The Mutiny Act, like the grant of supplies, has remained annual ever
since the Revolution; and as it is impossible for the State to exist
without supplies or for the army to exist without discipline and pay the
annual assembly of Parliament has become a matter of absolute necessity.
The greatest constitutional change which our history has witnessed was
thus brought about in an indirect but perfectly efficient way. The
dangers which experience had lately shown lay in the Parliament itself
were met with far less skill. Under Charles the Second England had seen
a Parliament, which had been returned in a moment of reaction,
maintained without fresh election for eighteen years. A Triennial Bill
which limited the duration of a Parliament to three was passed with
little opposition, but fell before the dislike and veto of William. To
counteract the influence which a king might obtain by crowding the
Commons with officials proved a yet harder task. A Place Bill, which
excluded all persons in the employment of the State from a seat in
Parliament, was defeated, and wisely defeated, in the Lords. The modern
course of providing against a pressure from the Court or the
administration by excluding all minor officials, but of preserving the
hold of Parliament over the great officers of State by admitting them
into its body, seems as yet to have occurred to nobody. It is equally
strange that while vindicating its right of Parliamentary control over
the public revenue and the army the Bill of Rights should have left by
its silence the control of trade to the Crown. It was only a few years
later, in the discussions on the charter granted to the East India
Company, that the Houses silently claimed and obtained the right of
regulating English commerce.

[Sidenote: The Toleration Act.]

The religious results of the Revolution were hardly less weighty than
the political. In the common struggle against Catholicism Churchman and
Nonconformist had found themselves, as we have seen, strangely at one;
and schemes of Comprehension became suddenly popular. But with the fall
of James the union of the two bodies abruptly ceased; and the
establishment of a Presbyterian Church in Scotland, together with the
"rabbling" of the Episcopalian clergy in its western shires, revived the
old bitterness of the clergy towards the dissidents. The Convocation
rejected the scheme of the Latitudinarians for such modifications of the
Prayer-Book as would render possible a return of the Nonconformists, and
a Comprehension Bill, which was introduced into Parliament, failed to
pass in spite of the king's strenuous support. William's attempt to
partially admit Dissenters to civil equality by a repeal of the
Corporation Act proved equally fruitless. Active persecution however
had now become distasteful to all; the pledge of religious liberty given
to the Nonconformists to ensure their aid in the Revolution had to be
redeemed; and the passing of a Toleration Act in 1689 practically
established freedom of worship. Whatever the religious effect of this
failure of the Latitudinarian schemes may have been its political effect
has been of the highest value. At no time had the Church been so strong
or so popular as at the Revolution, and the reconciliation of the
Nonconformists would have doubled its strength. It is doubtful whether
the disinclination to all political change which has characterised it
during the last two hundred years would have been affected by such a
change; but it is certain that the power of opposition which it has
wielded would have been enormously increased. As it was, the Toleration
Act established a group of religious bodies whose religious opposition
to the Church forced them to support the measures of progress which the
Church opposed. With religious forces on the one side and on the other
England has escaped the great stumbling-block in the way of nations
where the cause of religion has become identified with that of political
reaction.

[Sidenote: The Revolution and the Church.]

A secession from within its own ranks weakened the Church still more.
The doctrine of Divine Right had a strong hold on the body of the clergy
though they had been driven from their other favourite doctrine of
passive obedience, and the requirement of an oath of allegiance to the
new sovereigns from all persons exercising public functions was resented
as an intolerable wrong by almost every parson. The whole bench of
bishops resolved, though to no purpose, that Parliament had no right to
impose such an oath on the clergy. Sancroft, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, with a few prelates and a large number of the higher clergy
absolutely refused the oath when it was imposed, treated all who took it
as schismatics, and on their deprivation by Act of Parliament regarded
themselves and their adherents, who were known as Nonjurors, as the only
members of the true Church of England. The bulk of the clergy bowed to
necessity, but their bitterness against the new Government was fanned
into a flame by the religious policy announced in this assertion of the
supremacy of Parliament over the Church, and the deposition of bishops
by an act of the legislature. It was fanned into yet fiercer flame by
the choice of successors to the nonjuring prelates. The new bishops were
men of learning and piety, but they were for the most part
Latitudinarians and some of them Whigs. Tillotson, the new Archbishop of
Canterbury, was the foremost theologian of the school of Chillingworth
and Hales. Burnet, the new bishop of Salisbury, was as liberal as
Tillotson in religion and more liberal in politics. It was indeed only
among Whigs and Latitudinarians that William and William's successors
could find friends in the ranks of the clergy; and it was to these that
they were driven with a few breaks here and there to entrust all the
higher offices of the Church. The result was a severance between the
higher dignitaries and the mass of the clergy which broke the strength
of the Church. From the time of William to the time of George the Third
its fiercest strife was waged within its own ranks. But the resentment
at the measure which brought this strife about already added to the
difficulties which William had to encounter.

[Sidenote: William and the Parliament.]

Yet greater difficulties arose from the temper of his Parliament. In the
Commons, chosen as they had been in the first moment of revolutionary
enthusiasm, the bulk of the members were Whigs, and their first aim was
to redress the wrongs which the Whig party had suffered during the last
two reigns. The attainder of Lord Russell was reversed. The judgments
against Sidney, Cornish, and Alice Lisle were annulled. In spite of the
opinion of the judges that the sentence on Titus Oates had been against
law the Lords refused to reverse it, but even Oates received a pardon
and a pension. The Whigs however wanted not merely the redress of wrongs
but the punishment of the wrong-doers. Whig and Tory had been united
indeed by the tyranny of James; both parties had shared in the
Revolution, and William had striven to prolong their union by joining
the leaders of both in his first Ministry. He named the Tory Earl of
Danby Lord President, made the Whig Earl of Shrewsbury Secretary of
State, and gave the Privy Seal to Lord Halifax, a trimmer between the
one party and the other. But save in a moment of common oppression or
common danger union was impossible. The Whigs clamoured for the
punishment of Tories who had joined in the illegal acts of Charles and
of James, and refused to pass the Bill of General Indemnity which
William laid before them. William on the other hand was resolved that no
bloodshed or proscription should follow the revolution which had placed
him on the throne. His temper was averse from persecution; he had no
great love for either of the battling parties; and above all he saw that
internal strife would be fatal to the effective prosecution of the war.

[Sidenote: The Jacobites.]

While the cares of his new throne were chaining him to England the
confederacy of which he was the guiding spirit was proving too slow and
too loosely compacted to cope with the swift and resolute movements of
France. The armies of Lewis had fallen back within their own borders,
but only to turn fiercely at bay. Even the junction of the English and
Dutch fleets failed to assure them the mastery of the seas. The English
navy was paralysed by the corruption which prevailed in the public
service, as well as by the sloth and incapacity of its commander. The
services of Admiral Herbert at the Revolution had been rewarded with the
earldom of Torrington and the command of the fleet; but his indolence
suffered the seas to be swept by French privateers, and his want of
seamanship was shown in an indecisive engagement with a French squadron
in Bantry Bay. Meanwhile Lewis was straining every nerve to win the
command of the Channel; the French dockyards were turning out ship after
ship, and the galleys of the Mediterranean fleet were brought round to
reinforce the fleet at Brest. A French victory off the English coast
would have brought serious political danger; for the reaction of popular
feeling which had begun in favour of James had been increased by the
pressure of the war, by the taxation, by the expulsion of the Nonjurors
and the discontent of the clergy, by the panic of the Tories at the
spirit of vengeance which broke out among the triumphant Whigs, and
above all by the presence of James in Ireland. A new party, that of the
Jacobites or adherents of King James, was forming around the Nonjurors;
and it was feared that a Jacobite rising would follow the appearance of
a French fleet on the coast.

[Sidenote: Schomberg in Ireland.]

In such a state of affairs William judged rightly that to yield to the
Whig thirst for vengeance would have been to ruin his cause. He
dissolved the Parliament, which had refused to pass a Bill of Indemnity
for all political offences, and called a new one to meet in March. The
result of the elections proved that William had only expressed the
general temper of the nation. In the new Parliament the bulk of the
members proved Tories. The boroughs had been alienated from the Whigs by
their refusal to pass the Indemnity, and their desire to secure the
Corporations for their own party by driving from them all who had taken
part in the Tory misgovernment under Charles or James. In the counties
the discontent of the clergy told as heavily against the Whigs; and
parson after parson led his flock in a body to the poll. The change of
temper in the Parliament necessarily brought about a change among the
king's advisers. William accepted the resignation of the more violent
Whigs among his counsellors and placed Danby at the head of affairs; and
in May the Houses gave their assent to the Act of Grace. The king's aim
in his sudden change of front was not only to meet the change in the
national spirit, but to secure a momentary lull in English faction which
would suffer him to strike at the rebellion in Ireland. While James was
king in Dublin the attempt to crush treason at home was a hopeless one;
and so urgent was the danger, so precious every moment in the present
juncture of affairs, that William could trust no one to bring the work
as sharply to an end as was needful save himself. In the autumn of the
year 1689 the Duke of Schomberg, an exiled Huguenot who had followed
William in his expedition to England and was held to be one of the most
skilful captains of the time, had been sent with a small force to Ulster
to take advantage of the panic which had followed the relief of
Londonderry. James indeed was already talking of flight, and looked upon
the game as hopeless. But the spirit of the Irish people rose quickly
from their despair, and the duke's landing roused the whole nation to a
fresh enthusiasm. The ranks of the Irish army were filled up at once,
and James was able to face the duke at Drogheda with a force double that
of his opponent. Schomberg, whose men were all raw recruits whom it was
hardly possible to trust at such odds in the field, did all that was
possible when he entrenched himself at Dundalk and held his ground in a
camp where pestilence swept off half his numbers.

[Sidenote: Battle of the Boyne.]

Winter at last parted the two armies, and during the next six months
James, whose treasury was utterly exhausted, strove to fill it by a
coinage of brass money while his soldiers subsisted by sheer plunder.
William meanwhile was toiling hard on the other side of the Channel to
bring the Irish war to an end. Schomberg was strengthened during the
winter with men and stores, and when the spring came his force reached
thirty thousand men. Lewis too felt the importance of the coming
struggle. Seven thousand picked Frenchmen under the Count of Lauzun were
despatched to reinforce the army of James, but they had hardly arrived
when William himself landed at Carrickfergus and pushed rapidly with his
whole army to the south. His columns soon caught sight of the Irish
forces, hardly exceeding twenty thousand men in number but posted
strongly behind the Boyne. Lauzun had hoped by falling back on Dublin to
prolong a defensive war, but retreat was now impossible. "I am glad to
see you, gentlemen," William cried with a burst of delight; "and if you
escape me now the fault will be mine." Early next morning, the first of
July 1690, the whole English army plunged into the river. The Irish
foot, who at first fought well, broke in a sudden panic as soon as the
passage of the river was effected, but the horse made so gallant a stand
that Schomberg fell in repulsing its charge and for a time the English
centre was held in check. With the arrival of William however at the
head of his left wing all was over. James, who had throughout been
striving to secure the withdrawal of his troops to the nearest defile
rather than frankly to meet William's onset, abandoned his troops as
they fell back in retreat upon Dublin, and took ship at Kinsale for
France.

[Sidenote: Irish War.]

But though James had fled in despair, and though the beaten army was
forced by William's pursuit to abandon the capital, it was still
resolute to fight. The incapacity of the Stuart sovereign moved the
scorn even of his followers. "Change kings with us," an Irish officer
replied to an Englishman who taunted him with the panic of the Boyne,
"change kings with us and we will fight you again." They did better in
fighting without a king. The French indeed withdrew scornfully from the
routed army as it turned at bay beneath the walls of Limerick. "Do you
call these ramparts?" sneered Lauzun: "the English will need no cannon;
they may batter them down with roasted apples." But twenty thousand
Irish soldiers remained with Sarsfield, a brave and skilful officer who
had seen service in England and abroad; and his daring surprise of the
English ammunition train, his repulse of a desperate attempt to storm
the town, and the approach of winter forced William to raise the siege.
The course of the war abroad recalled him to England, but he was hardly
gone when a new turn was given to the struggle by one who was quietly
proving himself a master in the art of war. Churchill, rewarded for his
opportune desertion of James with the earldom of Marlborough, had been
recalled from Flanders to command a division which landed in the south
of Ireland. Only a few days remained before the operations were
interrupted by the coming of winter, but the few days were turned to
good account. The two ports by which alone Ireland could receive
supplies from France fell into English hands. Cork, with five thousand
men behind its walls, was taken in forty-eight hours. Kinsale a few days
later shared the fate of Cork. Winter indeed left Connaught and the
greater part of Munster in Irish hands, the French force remained
untouched, and the coming of a new French general, St. Ruth, with arms
and supplies encouraged the insurgents. But the summer of 1691 had
hardly begun when Ginkell, the new English general, by his seizure of
Athlone forced on a battle with the combined French and Irish forces at
Aughrim, in which St. Ruth fell on the field and his army was utterly
broken.

[Sidenote: Ireland conquered.]

The defeat at Aughrim left Limerick alone in its revolt, and in October
Sarsfield bowed to the necessity of surrender. Two treaties were drawn
up between the Irish and English generals. By the first it was
stipulated that the Catholics of Ireland should enjoy such privileges in
the exercise of their religion as were consistent with law, or as they
had enjoyed in the reign of Charles the Second. The Crown pledged itself
also to summon a Parliament as soon as possible, and to endeavour to
procure to the good Roman Catholics such further security in that
particular as "may preserve them from any disturbance upon the account
of the said religion." By the military treaty those of Sarsfield's
soldiers who would were suffered to follow him to France; and ten
thousand men, the whole of his force, chose exile rather than life in a
land where all hope of national freedom was lost. When the wild cry of
the women who stood watching their departure was hushed the silence of
death settled down upon Ireland. For a hundred years the country
remained at peace. But the peace was a peace of despair. No Englishman
who loves what is noble in the English temper can tell without sorrow
and shame the story of that time of guilt. The work of oppression, it is
true, was done not directly by England but by the English settlers in
Ireland; and the cruelty of their rule sprang in great measure from the
sense of danger and the atmosphere of panic in which the Protestants
lived. But if thoughts such as these relieve the guilt of those who
oppressed they leave the fact of oppression as dark as before. The most
terrible legal tyranny under which a nation has ever groaned avenged the
rising under Tyrconnell. The conquered people, in Swift's bitter words
of contempt, became "hewers of wood and drawers of water" to their
conquerors. Such as the work was, however, it was thoroughly done.
Though local risings of these serfs perpetually spread terror among the
English settlers in Ireland, all dream of a national revolt passed away.
Till the very eve of the French Revolution Ireland ceased to be a source
of political danger and anxiety to England.

[Sidenote: French Descent on England.]

Short as the struggle of Ireland had been it had served Lewis well, for
while William was busy at the Boyne a series of brilliant successes was
restoring the fortunes of France. In Flanders the Duke of Luxembourg won
the victory of Fleurus. In Italy Marshal Catinat defeated the Duke of
Savoy. A success of even greater moment, the last victory which France
was fated to win at sea, placed for an instant the very throne of
William in peril. William never showed a cooler courage than in quitting
England to fight James in Ireland at a moment when the Jacobites were
only looking for the appearance of a French fleet on the coast to rise
in revolt. The French minister in fact hurried the fleet to sea in the
hope of detaining William in England by a danger at home; and he had
hardly set out for Ireland when Tourville, the French admiral, appeared
in the Channel with strict orders to fight. Orders as strict had been
sent to the allied fleets to engage even at the risk of defeat; and when
Tourville was met on the 30th of June 1690 by the English and Dutch
fleet at Beachy Head the Dutch division at once engaged. Though utterly
outnumbered it fought stubbornly in hope of Herbert's aid; but Herbert,
whether from cowardice or treason, looked idly on while his allies were
crushed, and withdrew with the English ships at nightfall to seek
shelter in the Thames. The danger was as great as the shame, for
Tourville's victory left him master of the Channel and his presence off
the coast of Devon invited the Jacobites to revolt. But whatever the
discontent of Tories and Nonjurors against William might be all signs of
it vanished with the landing of the French. The burning of Teignmouth by
Tourville's sailors called the whole coast to arms; and the news of the
Boyne put an end to all dreams of a rising in favour of James.

[Sidenote: Intrigues in England.]

The natural reaction against a cause which looked for foreign aid gave a
new strength for the moment to William in England; but ill luck still
hung around the Grand Alliance. So urgent was the need for his presence
abroad that William left as we have seen his work in Ireland undone, and
crossed in the spring of 1691 to Flanders. It was the first time since
the days of Henry the Eighth that an English king had appeared on the
Continent at the head of an English army. But the slowness of the allies
again baffled William's hopes. He was forced to look on with a small
army while a hundred thousand Frenchmen closed suddenly around Mons, the
strongest fortress of the Netherlands, and made themselves masters of it
in the presence of Lewis. The humiliation was great, and for the moment
all trust in William's fortune faded away. In England the blow was felt
more heavily than elsewhere. The Jacobite hopes which had been crushed
by the indignation at Tourville's descent woke up to a fresh life.
Leading Tories, such as Lord Clarendon and Lord Dartmouth, opened
communications with James; and some of the leading Whigs with the Earl
of Shrewsbury at their head, angered at what they regarded as William's
ingratitude, followed them in their course. In Lord Marlborough's mind
the state of affairs raised hopes of a double treason. His design was to
bring about a revolt which would drive William from the throne without
replacing James on it, a revolt which would in fact give the crown to
his daughter Anne whose affection for Marlborough's wife would place the
real government of England in Churchill's hands. A yet greater danger
lay in the treason of Admiral Russell who had succeeded Torrington in
command of the fleet.

[Sidenote: Battle of La Hogue.]

Russell's defection would have removed the one obstacle to a new attempt
which James was resolved to make for the recovery of his throne and
which Lewis had been brought to support. James had never wavered from
his design of returning to England at the head of a foreign force. He
abandoned Ireland as soon as his hopes of finding such a force there
vanished at the Boyne; and from that moment he had sought a base of
invasion in France. Lewis was the more willing to make the trial that
the pressure of the war had left few troops in England. So certain was
he of success that the future ambassador to the court of James was
already nominated, and a treaty of commerce sketched between France and
England. In the beginning of 1692 an army of thirty thousand troops was
quartered in Normandy in readiness for a descent on the English coast.
Nearly a half of this force was composed of the Irish regiments who had
followed Sarsfield into exile after the surrender of Limerick.
Transports were provided for their passage, and Tourville was ordered to
cover it with the French fleet at Brest. Though Russell had twice as
many ships as his opponent the belief in his purpose of betraying
William's cause was so strong that Lewis ordered Tourville to engage the
allied fleets at any disadvantage. But whatever Russell's intrigues may
have meant he was no Herbert. All he would promise was to keep his fleet
out of the way of hindering a landing. But should Tourville engage, he
would promise nothing. "Do not think I will let the French triumph over
us in our own seas," he warned his Jacobite correspondents. "If I meet
them I will fight them, even though King James were on board." When the
allied fleet, which had been ordered to the Norman coast, met the French
off the heights of Barfleur his fierce attack proved Russell true to his
word. Tourville's fifty vessels were no match for the ninety ships of
the allies, and after five hours of a brave struggle the French were
forced to fly along the rocky coast of the Cotentin. Twenty-two of their
vessels reached St. Malo; thirteen anchored with Tourville in the bays
of Cherbourg and La Hogue; but their pursuers were soon upon them, and
in a bold attack the English boats burned ship after ship under the eyes
of the French army.

[Sidenote: The turn of the War.]

All dread of the invasion was at once at an end; and the throne of
William was secured by the detection and suppression of the Jacobite
conspiracy at home which the invasion was intended to support. The
battle of La Hogue was a death-blow to the project of a Stuart
restoration by help of foreign arms. Henceforth English Jacobitism would
have to battle unaided against the throne of the Revolution. But the
overthrow of the Jacobite hopes was the least result of the victory.
France ceased from that moment to exist as a great naval power; for
though her fleet was soon recruited to its former strength the
confidence of her sailors was lost, and not even Tourville ventured
again to tempt in battle the fortune of the seas. A new hope too dawned
on the Grand Alliance. The spell of French triumph was broken. On land
indeed the French still held their old mastery. Namur, one of the
strongest fortresses in Europe, surrendered to Lewis a few days after
the battle of La Hogue. An inroad into Dauphine failed to rouse the
Huguenots to revolt, and the Duke of Luxembourg maintained the glory of
the French arms by a victory over William at Steinkirk. But the battle
was a useless butchery in which the conquerors lost as many men as the
conquered. From that moment France felt herself disheartened and
exhausted by the vastness of her efforts. The public misery was extreme.
"The country," Fenelon wrote frankly to Lewis, "is a vast hospital." The
tide too of the war began to turn. In 1693 the campaign of Lewis in the
Netherlands proved a fruitless one, and Luxembourg was hardly able to
beat off the fierce attack of William at Neerwinden. For the first time
in his long career of prosperity therefore Lewis bent his pride to seek
peace at the sacrifice of his conquests, and though the effort was a
vain one it told that the daring hopes of French ambition were at an end
and that the work of the Grand Alliance was practically done.

[Sidenote: The Sovereignty of the Commons.]

Its final triumph however was in great measure brought about by a change
which now passed over the face of English politics. In outer seeming the
Revolution of 1688 had only transferred the sovereignty over England
from James to William and Mary. In actual fact it had given a powerful
and decisive impulse to the great constitutional progress which was
transferring the sovereignty from the king to the House of Commons. From
the moment when its sole right to tax the nation was established by the
Bill of Rights, and when its own resolve settled the practice of
granting none but annual supplies to the Crown, the House of Commons
became the supreme power in the State. It was impossible permanently to
suspend its sittings or in the long run to oppose its will when either
course must end in leaving the Government penniless, in breaking up the
army and navy, and in suspending the public service. But though the
constitutional change was complete the machinery of government was far
from having adapted itself to the new conditions of political life which
such a change brought about. However powerful the will of the House of
Commons might be it had no means of bringing its will directly to bear
upon the conduct of public affairs. The Ministers who had charge of them
were not its servants, but the servants of the Crown; it was from the
king that they looked for direction, and to the king that they held
themselves responsible. By impeachment or more indirect means the
Commons could force a king to remove a Minister who contradicted their
will; but they had no constitutional power to replace the fallen
statesman by a Minister who would carry out their will.

[Sidenote: Lord Sunderland.]

The result was the growth of a temper in the Lower House which drove
William and his Ministers to despair. It became as corrupt, as jealous
of power, as fickle in its resolves and factious in spirit as bodies
always become whose consciousness of the possession of power is
untempered by a corresponding consciousness of the practical
difficulties or the moral responsibilities of the power which they
possess. It grumbled at the ill-success of the war, at the suffering of
the merchants, at the discontent of the Churchmen; and it blamed the
Crown and its Ministers for all at which it grumbled. But it was hard to
find out what policy or measures it would have preferred. Its mood
changed, as William bitterly complained, with every hour. His own hold
over it grew less day by day. It was only through great pressure that he
succeeded in defeating by a majority of two a Place Bill which would
have rendered all his servants and Ministers incapable of sitting in the
Commons. He was obliged to use his veto to defeat a Triennial Bill
which, as he believed, would have destroyed what little stability of
purpose there was in the present Parliament. The Houses were in fact
without the guidance of recognized leaders, without adequate
information, and destitute of that organization out of which alone a
definite policy can come. Nothing better proves the inborn political
capacity of the English mind than that it should at once have found a
simple and effective solution of such a difficulty as this. The credit
of the solution belongs to a man whose political character was of the
lowest type. Robert, Earl of Sunderland, had been a Minister in the
later days of Charles the Second; and he had remained Minister through
almost all the reign of James. He had held office at last only by
compliance with the worst tyranny of his master and by a feigned
conversion to the Roman Catholic faith; but the ruin of James was no
sooner certain than he had secured pardon and protection from William by
the betrayal of the master to whom he had sacrificed his conscience and
his honour. Since the Revolution Sunderland had striven only to escape
public observation in a country retirement, but at this crisis he came
secretly forward to bring his unequalled sagacity to the aid of the
king. His counsel was to recognize practically the new power of the
Commons by choosing the Ministers of the Crown exclusively from among
the members of the party which was strongest in the Lower House.

[Sidenote: The New Ministerial System.]

As yet no Ministry in the modern sense of the term had existed. Each
great officer of State, Treasurer or Secretary or Lord Privy Seal, had
in theory been independent of his fellow-officers; each was the "King's
servant" and responsible for the discharge of his special duties to the
king alone. From time to time one Minister, like Clarendon, might tower
above the rest and give a general direction to the whole course of
government, but the predominance was merely personal and never
permanent; and even in such a case there were colleagues who were ready
to oppose or even impeach the statesman who overshadowed them. It was
common for a king to choose or dismiss a single Minister without any
communication with the rest; and so far was even William from aiming at
ministerial unity that he had striven to reproduce in the Cabinet itself
the balance of parties which prevailed outside it. Sunderland's plan
aimed at replacing these independent Ministers by a homogeneous
Ministry, chosen from the same party, representing the same sentiments,
and bound together for common action by a sense of responsibility and
loyalty to the party to which it belonged. Not only was such a plan
likely to secure a unity of administration which had been unknown till
then, but it gave an organization to the House of Commons which it had
never had before. The Ministers who were representatives of the majority
of its members became the natural leaders of the House. Small factions
were drawn together into the two great parties which supported or
opposed the Ministry of the Crown. Above all it brought about in the
simplest possible way the solution of the problem which had so long
vexed both Kings and Commons. The new Ministers ceased in all but name
to be the king's servants. They became simply an Executive Committee
representing the will of the majority of the House of Commons, and
capable of being easily set aside by it and replaced by a similar
Committee whenever the balance of power shifted from one side of the
House to the other.

[Sidenote: The Junto.]

Such was the origin of that system of representative government which
has gone on from Sunderland's day to our own. But though William showed
his own political genius in understanding and adopting Sunderland's
plan, it was only slowly and tentatively that he ventured to carry it
out in practice. In spite of the temporary reaction Sunderland believed
that the balance of political power was really on the side of the Whigs.
Not only were they the natural representatives of the principles of the
Revolution, and the supporters of the war, but they stood far above
their opponents in parliamentary and administrative talent. At their
head stood a group of statesmen whose close union in thought and action
gained them the name of the Junto. Russell, as yet the most prominent of
these, was the victor of La Hogue; John Somers was an advocate who had
sprung into fame by his defence of the Seven Bishops; Lord Wharton was
known as the most dexterous and unscrupulous of party managers; and
Montague was fast making a reputation as the ablest of English
financiers. In spite of such considerations however it is doubtful
whether William would have thrown himself into the hands of a purely
Whig Ministry but for the attitude which the Tories took towards the
war. Exhausted as France was the war still languished and the allies
still failed to win a single victory. Meanwhile English trade was all
but ruined by the French privateers and the nation stood aghast at the
growth of taxation. The Tories, always cold in their support of the
Grand Alliance, now became eager for peace. The Whigs on the other hand
remained resolute in their support of the war.

[Sidenote: Bank of England.]

William, in whose mind the contest with France was the first object, was
thus driven slowly to follow Sunderland's advice. Already in 1694 indeed
Montague established his political position and weakened that of the
Tory Ministers by his success in a great financial measure which at once
relieved the pressure of taxation and added strength to the new
monarchy. The war could be kept up only by loans: and loans were still
raised in England by personal appeal to a few London goldsmiths in whose
hands men placed money for investment. But the bankruptcies which
followed the closing of the Exchequer by the Cabal had shaken public
confidence in the goldsmiths, while the dread of a restoration of James
made these capitalists appear shy of the Ministers' appeals for aid.
Money therefore could only be raised in scanty quantities and at a heavy
loss. In this emergency Montague came forward with a plan which had been
previously suggested by a Scotchman, William Paterson, for the creation
of a National Bank such as already existed in Holland and in Genoa.
While serving as an ordinary bank for the supply of capital to
commercial enterprises the Bank of England, as the new institution was
called, was in reality an instrument for procuring loans from the
people at large by the formal pledge of the State to repay the money
advanced on the demand of the lender. For this purpose a loan of
L1,200,000 was thrown open to public subscription; and the subscribers
to it were formed into a chartered company in whose hands the
negotiation of all after loans was placed. The plan turned out a perfect
success. In ten days the list of subscribers was full. A new source of
power revealed itself in this discovery of the resources afforded by the
national credit and the national wealth; and the rapid growth of the
National Debt, as the mass of these loans to the State came to be
called, gave a new security against the return of the Stuarts whose
first work would have been the repudiation of the claims of the lenders
or as they were termed the "fundholders."

[Sidenote: The Whig Ministry.]

The evidence of the public credit gave strength to William abroad as at
home. In 1694 indeed the army of 90,000 men which he commanded in the
Netherlands did no more than hold the French successfully at bay; but
the English fleet rode triumphant in the Channel, ravaged and alarmed
the coast of France, and foiled by its pressure the attack of a French
army on Barcelona. The brighter aspect of affairs abroad coincided with
a new unity of action at home. The change which Sunderland counselled
was quietly carried out. One by one the Tory Ministers had been replaced
by members of the Junto. Russell went to the Admiralty; Somers was
named Lord Keeper; Shrewsbury, Secretary of State; Montague, Chancellor
of the Exchequer. Even before this change was completed its effect was
felt. The House of Commons took a new tone. The Whig majority of its
members, united and disciplined, moved quietly under the direction of
their natural leaders, the Whig Ministers of the Crown. It was this
which enabled William to face the shock which was given to his position
by the death of Queen Mary at the end of 1694. It had been provided
indeed that on the death of either sovereign the survivor should retain
the throne; but the renewed attacks of the Tories under Nottingham and
Halifax on the war and the Bank showed what fresh hopes had been raised
by William's lonely position. The Parliament however, whom the king had
just conciliated by assenting at last to the Triennial Bill, went
steadily with the Ministry; and its fidelity was rewarded by triumph
abroad. In September 1695 the Alliance succeeded for the first time in
winning a great triumph over France in the capture of Namur. The king
skilfully took advantage of his victory to call a new Parliament, and
its members at once showed their temper by a vigorous support of the
measures necessary for the prosecution of the war. The Houses indeed
were no mere tools in William's hands. They forced him to resume the
prodigal grants of lands which he had made to his Dutch favourites, and
to remove his Ministers in Scotland who had aided in a wild project for
a Scotch colony on the Isthmus of Darien. They claimed a right to name
members of the new Board of Trade which was established in 1696 for the
regulation of commercial matters. They rejected a proposal, never
henceforth to be revived, for a censorship of the Press. But there was
no factious opposition. So strong was the Ministry that Montague was
enabled to face the general distress which was caused for the moment by
a reform of the currency, which had been reduced by clipping to far less
than its nominal value, and although the financial embarrassments
created by the currency reform hindered any vigorous measures abroad
William was able to hold the French at bay.

[Sidenote: The Spanish Succession.]

But the war was fast drawing to a close. The Catholic powers in the
Grand Alliance were already in revolt against William's supremacy as
they had been in revolt against that of Lewis. In 1696 the Pope
succeeded in detaching Savoy from the league and Lewis was enabled to
transfer his Italian army to the Low Countries. But France was now
simply fighting to secure more favourable terms, and William, though he
held that "the only way of treating with France is with our swords in
our hands," was almost as eager as Lewis for a peace. The defection of
Savoy made it impossible to carry out the original aim of the Alliance,
that of forcing France back to its position at the Treaty of Westphalia,
and a new question was drawing every day nearer, the question of the
succession to the Spanish throne. The death of the King of Spain,
Charles the Second, was now known to be at hand. With him ended the male
line of the Austrian princes who for two hundred years had occupied the
Spanish throne. How strangely Spain had fallen from its high estate in
Europe the wars of Lewis had abundantly shown, but so vast was the
extent of its empire, so enormous the resources which still remained to
it, that under a vigorous ruler men believed its old power would at once
return. Its sovereign was still master of some of the noblest provinces
of the Old World and the New, of Spain itself, of the Milanese, of
Naples and Sicily, of the Netherlands, of Southern America, of the noble
islands of the Spanish Main. To add such a dominion as this to the
dominion either of Lewis or of the Emperor would be to undo at a blow
the work of European independence which William had wrought; and it was
with a view to prevent either of these results that William resolved to
free his hands by a conclusion of the war.

[Sidenote: Peace of Ryswick.]

In May negotiations were opened at Ryswick; the obstacles thrown in the
way of an accommodation by Spain and the Empire were set aside in a
private negotiation between William and Lewis; and peace was finally
signed in October 1697. In spite of failure and defeat in the field
William's policy had won. The victories of France remained barren in the
face of a united Europe; and her exhaustion forced her for the first
time since Richelieu's day to consent to a disadvantageous peace. On the
side of the Empire France withdrew from every annexation save that of
Strassburg which she had made since the Treaty of Nimeguen, and
Strassburg would have been restored but for the unhappy delays of the
German negotiators. To Spain Lewis restored Luxemburg and all the
conquests he had made during the war in the Netherlands. The Duke of
Lorraine was replaced in his dominions. A far more important provision
of the peace pledged Lewis to an abandonment of the Stuart cause and a
recognition of William as King of England. For Europe in general the
peace of Ryswick was little more than a truce. But for England it was
the close of a long and obstinate struggle and the opening of a new aera
of political history. It was the final and decisive defeat of the
conspiracy which had gone on between Lewis and the Stuarts ever since
the Treaty of Dover, the conspiracy to turn England into a Roman
Catholic country and into a dependency of France. But it was even more
than this. It was the definite establishment of England as the centre of
European resistance against all attempts to overthrow the balance of
power.

[Sidenote: William's aims.]

In leaving England face to face with France the Treaty of Ryswick gave a
new turn to the policy of William. Hitherto he had aimed at saving the
balance of European power by the joint action of England and the rest of
the European states against France. He now saw a means of securing what
that action had saved by the co-operation of France and the two great
naval powers. In his new course we see the first indication of that
triple alliance of France, England, and Holland, which formed the base
of Walpole's foreign policy, as well as of that common action of England
and France which since the fall of Holland has so constantly recurred to
the dreams of English statesmen. Peace therefore was no sooner signed
than William by stately embassies and a series of secret negotiations
drew nearer to France. It was in direct negotiation and co-operation
with Lewis that he aimed at bringing about a peaceful settlement of the
question which threatened Europe with war. At this moment the claimants
of the Spanish succession were three: the French Dauphin, a son of the
Spanish king's elder sister; the Electoral Prince of Bavaria, a grandson
of his younger sister; and the Emperor, who was a son of Charles's aunt.
In strict law--if there had been any law really applicable to the
matter--the claim of the last was the strongest of the three; for the
claim of the Dauphin was barred by an express renunciation of all right
to the succession at his mother's marriage with Lewis XIV., a
renunciation which had been ratified at the Treaty of the Pyrenees; and
a similar renunciation barred the claim of the Bavarian candidate. The
claim of the Emperor was more remote in blood, but it was barred by no
renunciation at all. William however was as resolute in the interests of
Europe to repulse the claim of the Emperor as to repulse that of Lewis;
and it was the consciousness that the Austrian succession was inevitable
if the war continued and Spain remained a member of the Grand Alliance,
in arms against France and leagued with the Emperor, which made him
suddenly conclude the Peace of Ryswick.

[Sidenote: The first Partition Treaty.]

Had England and Holland shared William's temper he would have insisted
on the succession of the Electoral Prince to the whole Spanish
dominions. But both were weary of war, and of the financial distress
which war had brought with it. In England the peace of Ryswick was at
once followed by the reduction of the army at the demand of the House of
Commons to ten thousand men; and a clamour had already begun for the
disbanding even of these. It was necessary therefore to bribe the two
rival claimants to a waiver of their claims; and Lewis after some
hesitation yielded to the counsels of his Ministers, and consented to
waive his son's claims for such a bribe. The secret treaty between the
three powers, which was concluded in the summer of 1698, thus became
necessarily a Partition Treaty. The succession of the Electoral Prince
of Bavaria was recognized on condition of the cession by Spain of its
Italian possessions to his two rivals. The Milanese was to pass to the
Emperor; the Two Sicilies, with the border province of Guipuzcoa, to
France. But the arrangement was hardly concluded when the death of the
Bavarian prince in February 1699 made the Treaty waste paper. Austria
and France were left face to face; and a terrible struggle, in which the
success of either would be equally fatal to the independence of Europe,
seemed unavoidable. The peril was the greater that the temper of both
England and Holland left William without the means of backing his policy
by arms. The suffering which the war had caused to the merchant class
and the pressure of the debt and taxation it entailed were waking every
day a more bitter resentment in the people of both countries. While the
struggle lasted the value of English exports had fallen from four
millions a year to less than three, and the losses of ships and goods at
sea had been enormous. Nor had the stress been less felt within the
realm. The revenue from the post-office, a fair index to the general
wealth of the country, had fallen from seventy-six thousand to
fifty-eight. With the restoration of peace indeed the energies of the
country had quickly recovered from the shock. In the five years after
the Peace of Ryswick the exports doubled themselves; the
merchant-shipping was quadrupled; and the revenue of the post-office
rose to eighty-two thousand pounds. But such a recovery only produced a
greater disinclination to face again the sufferings of a renewed state
of war.

[Sidenote: The second Partition Treaty.]

The general discontent at the course of the war, the general anxiety to
preserve the new gains of the peace, told alike on William and on the
party which had backed his policy. In England almost every one was set
on two objects, the reduction of taxes and the disbanding of the
standing army. The war had raised the taxes from two millions a year to
four. It had bequeathed twenty millions of debt and a fresh six millions
of deficit. The standing army was still held to be the enemy of liberty,
as it had been held under the Stuarts; and hardly any one realized the
new conditions of political life which had robbed its existence of
danger to the State. The king however resisted desperately the proposals
for its disbanding; for the maintenance of the army was all-important
for the success of the negotiations he was carrying on. But his stubborn
opposition only told against himself. Personally indeed the king still
remained an object of national gratitude; but his natural partiality to
his Dutch favourites, the confidence he gave to Sunderland, his cold and
sullen demeanour, above all his endeavours to maintain the standing
army, robbed him of popularity and of the strength which comes from
popularity. The negotiations too which he was carrying on were a secret
he could not reveal; and his prayers failed to turn the Parliament from
its purpose. The army and navy were ruthlessly cut down. How much
William's hands were weakened by this reduction of forces and by the
peace-temper of England was shown by the Second Partition Treaty which
was concluded in 1700 between the two maritime powers and France. The
demand of Lewis that the Netherlands should be given to the Elector of
Bavaria, whose political position would always leave him a puppet in the
French king's hands, was indeed successfully resisted. Spain, the
Netherlands, and the Indies were assigned to the second son of the
Emperor, the Archduke Charles of Austria. But the whole of the Spanish
territories in Italy were now granted to France; and it was provided
that Milan should be exchanged for Lorraine, whose Duke was to be
summarily transferred to the new Duchy. If the Emperor persisted in his
refusal to come into the Treaty the share of his son was to pass to
another unnamed prince, who was probably the Duke of Savoy.

[Sidenote: Fall of the Junto.]

The Emperor, indifferent to the Archduke's personal interest, and
anxious only to gain a new dominion in Italy for the House of Austria,
stubbornly protested against this arrangement; but his protest was of
little moment so long as Lewis and the two maritime powers held firmly
together. The new Western Alliance indeed showed how wide its power was
from the first. The mediation of England and Holland, no longer
counteracted by France, secured peace between the Emperor and the Turks
in the Treaty of Carlowitz. The common action of the three powers
stifled a strife between Holstein and Denmark which would have set North
Germany on fire. William's European position indeed was more commanding
than ever. But his difficulties at home were increasing every day. In
spite of the defection of their supporters on the question of a standing
army the Whig Ministry for some time retained fairly its hold on the
Houses. But the elections for a new Parliament at the close of 1698
showed the growth of a new temper in the nation. A Tory majority,
pledged to peace as to a reduction of taxation and indifferent to
foreign affairs, was returned to the House of Commons. The fourteen
thousand men still retained in the army were at once cut down to seven.
It was voted that William's Dutch guards should return to Holland. It
was in vain that William begged for their retention as a personal
favour, that he threatened to leave England with them, and that the ill
effect of this strife on his negotiations threw him into a fever. Even
before the elections he had warned the Dutch Pensionary that in any
fresh struggle England could be relied on only for naval aid. He was
forced to give way; and, as he expected, this open display of the
peace-temper of England told fatally on the resistance he had attempted
to the pretensions of France. He strove indeed to appease the Parliament
by calling for the resignation of Russell and Montague, the two
ministers most hated by the Tories. But all seemed in vain. The Houses
no sooner met in 1699 than the Tory majority attacked the Crown, passed
a Bill for resuming estates granted to the Dutch favourites, and
condemned the Ministers as responsible for these grants. Again
Sunderland had to intervene, and to press William to carry out the
policy which had produced the Whig Ministry by its entire dismissal.
Somers and his friends withdrew, and a new administration composed of
moderate Tories, with Lords Rochester and Godolphin as its leading
members, took their place.

[Sidenote: Accession of the Duke of Anjou.]

The moment indeed was one in which the king needed at any price the
co-operation of the Parliament. Spain had been stirred to bitter
resentment as news of the Partition Treaty crept abroad. The Spaniards
cared little whether a French or an Austrian prince sat on the throne of
Charles the Second, but their pride revolted against the dismemberment
of the monarchy by the loss of its Italian dependencies. The nobles too
dreaded the loss of their vast estates in Italy and of the lucrative
posts they held as governors of these dependencies. Even the dying king
shared the anger of his subjects. He hesitated only whether to leave his
dominions to the House of Austria or the House of Bourbon; but in
either case he was resolved to leave the whole. A will wrested from him
by the factions which wrangled over his deathbed bequeathed at last the
whole monarchy of Spain to a grandson of Lewis, the Duke of Anjou, the
second son of the Dauphin. It was doubtful indeed whether Lewis would
suffer his grandson to receive the crown. He was still a member of that
Triple Alliance on which for the last three years the peace of Europe
had depended. The Treaty of Partition was so recent and the risk of
accepting this bequest so great that Lewis would have hardly resolved on
it but for his belief that the temper of England must necessarily render
William's opposition a fruitless one. Never in fact had England been so
averse from war. So strong was the antipathy to William's policy that
men openly approved the French king's course. Hardly any one in England
dreaded the succession of a boy who, French as he was, would as they
believed soon be turned into a Spaniard by the natural course of events.
The succession of the Duke of Anjou was generally looked upon as far
better than the increase of power which France would have derived from
the cessions of the last treaty of Partition. The cession of the
Sicilies would have turned the Mediterranean, it was said, into a French
lake, and have ruined the English trade with the Levant, while the
cession of Guipuzcoa and the annexation of the west coast of Spain,
which was looked on as certain to follow, would have imperilled the
American trade and again raised France into a formidable power at sea.
Backing all these considerations was the dread of losing by a contest
with Spain and its new king the lucrative trade with the Spanish
colonies. "It grieves me to the heart," William wrote bitterly, "that
almost every one rejoices that France has preferred the Will to the
Treaty." Astonished and angered as he was at his rival's breach of
faith, he had no means of punishing it. In the opening of 1701 the Duke
of Anjou entered Madrid, and Lewis proudly boasted that henceforth there
were no Pyrenees.

[Sidenote: Seizure of the Dutch Barrier.]

The life-work of William seemed undone. He knew himself to be dying. His
cough was incessant, his eyes sunk and dead, his frame so weak that he
could hardly get into his coach. But never had he shown himself so
great. His courage rose with every difficulty. His temper, which had
been heated by the personal affronts lavished on him through English
faction, was hushed by a supreme effort of his will. His large and
clear-sighted intellect looked through the temporary embarrassments of
French diplomacy and English party strife to the great interests which
he knew must in the end determine the course of European politics.
Abroad and at home all seemed to go against him. For the moment he had
no ally save Holland, for Spain was now united with Lewis, while the
attitude of Bavaria divided Germany and held the House of Austria in
check. The Bavarian Elector indeed, who had charge of the Spanish
Netherlands and on whom William had counted, openly joined the French
side from the first and proclaimed the Duke of Anjou as king in
Brussels. In England a new Parliament, which had been called by way of
testing public opinion, was crowded with Tories who were resolute
against war. The Tory Ministry pressed him to acknowledge the new king
of Spain; and as even Holland did this, William was forced to submit. He
could only count on the greed of Lewis to help him, and he did not count
in vain. The general approval of the French king's action had sprung
from a belief that he intended honestly to leave Spain to the Spaniards
under their new boy-king. Bitter too as the strife of Whig and Tory
might be in England, there were two things on which Whig and Tory were
agreed. Neither would suffer France to occupy the Spanish Netherlands.
Neither would endure a French attack on the Protestant succession which
the Revolution of 1688 had established. But the arrogance of Lewis
blinded him to the need of moderation in his hour of good-luck. The
wretched defence made by the strong places of the Netherlands in the
former war had brought about an agreement between Spain and Holland at
its close, by which seven fortresses, including Luxemburg, Mons, and
Charleroi, were garrisoned with Dutch in the place of Spanish troops.
The seven were named the Dutch barrier, and the first anxiety both of
Holland and of William was to maintain this arrangement under the new
state of things. William laid down the maintenance of the barrier in his
negotiations at Madrid as a matter of peace or war. But Lewis was too
eager to wait even for the refusal of William's demand which the pride
of the Spanish Court prompted. In February 1701 his troops appeared at
the gates of the seven fortresses; and a secret convention with the
Elector, who remained in charge of the Netherlands, delivered them into
his hands to hold in trust for his grandson. Other French garrisons took
possession at the same time of Ostend and the coast towns of Flanders.

[Sidenote: The Act of Settlement.]

The Parliament of 1701, a Parliament mainly of Tories, and in which the
leader of the moderate Tories, Robert Harley, came for the first time to
the front, met amidst the general panic and suspension of trade which
followed this seizure of the barrier fortresses. Peace-Parliament as it
was and bitterly as it condemned the Partition Treaties, it at once
supported William in his demand for a withdrawal of the French troops,
and authorized him to conclude a defensive alliance with Holland, which
would give that State courage to join in the demand. The disclosure of a
new Jacobite plot strengthened William's position. The hopes of the
Jacobites had been raised in the preceding year by the death of the
young Duke of Gloucester, the only living child of the Princess Anne,
and who as William was childless ranked, after his mother, as
heir-presumptive of the throne. William was dying, the health of Anne
herself was known to be precarious; and to the partisans of James it
seemed as if the succession of his son, the boy who was known in later
life as the Old Pretender, was all but secure. But Tory as the
Parliament was, it had no mind to undo the work of the Revolution. When
a new Act of Succession was laid before the Houses in 1701 not a voice
was raised for James or his son. By the ordinary rules of heritage the
descendants of the daughter of Charles the First, Henrietta of Orleans,
whose only child had married the Duke of Savoy, would come next as
claimants; but the house of Savoy was Catholic and its pretensions were
passed over in the same silence. No other descendants of Charles the
First remained, and the Parliament fell back on his father's line.
Elizabeth, the daughter of James the First, had married the Elector
Palatine; but of her twelve children all had died save one. This was
Sophia, the wife of the late and the mother of the present Elector of
Hanover. It was in Sophia and the heirs of her body, being Protestants,
that the Act of Settlement vested the Crown. But the jealousy of a
foreign ruler accompanied this settlement with remarkable provisions.
It was enacted that every English sovereign must be in communion with
the Church of England as by law established. All future kings were
forbidden to leave England without consent of Parliament, and foreigners
were excluded from all public posts, military or civil. The independence
of justice, which had been inadequately secured by the Bill of Rights,
was now established by a clause which provided that no judge should be
removed from office save on an address from Parliament to the Crown. The
two principles that the king acts only through his ministers and that
these ministers are responsible to Parliament were asserted by a
requirement that all public business should be formally done in the
Privy Council and all its decisions signed by its members. These two
last provisions went far to complete the parliamentary Constitution
which had been drawn by the Bill of Rights.

[Sidenote: The Country and the War.]

But, firm as it was in its loyalty to the Revolution, and in its resolve
to maintain the independence of the Netherlands, the Parliament had
still no purpose of war. It assented indeed to the alliance with Holland
in the belief that the pressure of the two powers would bring Lewis to a
peaceful settlement of the question. Its aim was still to avoid a
standing army and to reduce taxation; and its bitterness against the
Partition Treaties sprang from a belief that William had entailed on
England by their means a contest which must bring back again the army
and the debt. The king was bitterly blamed, while the late ministers,
Somers, Russell, and Montague (now become peers), were impeached for
their share in the treaties; and the Commons prayed the king to exclude
the three from his counsels for ever. But a counter-prayer from the
Lords gave the first sign of a reaction of opinion. Outside the House of
Commons indeed the tide of national feeling rose as the designs of Lewis
grew clearer. He refused to allow the Dutch barrier to be
re-established; and a great French fleet gathered in the Channel to
support, it was believed, a fresh Jacobite descent which was proposed by
the ministers of James in a letter intercepted and laid before
Parliament. Even the House of Commons took fire at this, and the fleet
was raised to thirty thousand men, the army to ten thousand. But the
country moved faster than the Parliament. Kent sent up a remonstrance
against the factious measures by which the Tories still struggled
against the king's policy, with a prayer "that addresses might be turned
into Bills of Supply"; and William was encouraged by these signs of a
change of temper to despatch an English force to Holland, and to
conclude a secret treaty with the United Provinces for the recovery of
the Netherlands from Lewis and for their transfer with the Milanese to
the house of Austria as a means of counterbalancing the new power added
to France.

[Sidenote: The Grand Alliance.]

England however still clung desperately to a hope of peace; and even in
the Treaty with the Emperor, which followed on the French refusal to
negotiate on a basis of compensation, William was far from disputing the
right of Philip of Anjou to the Spanish throne. Hostilities had indeed
already broken out in Italy between the French and Austrian armies; but
the king had not abandoned the dream of a peaceful settlement when
France by a sudden act forced him into war. Lewis had acknowledged
William as king in the Peace of Ryswick and pledged himself to oppose
all attacks on his throne; but in September 1701 he entered the
bedchamber at St. Germain where James the Second was breathing his last,
and promised to acknowledge his son at his death as king of England,
Scotland, and Ireland. The promise which was thus made was in fact a
declaration of war, and in a moment all England was at one in accepting
the challenge. The issue Lewis had raised was no longer a matter of
European politics, but a question whether the work of the Revolution
should be undone, and whether Catholicism and despotism should be
replaced on the throne of England by the arms of France. On such a
question as this there was no difference between Tory and Whig. Every
Englishman backed William in his open resentment of the insult and in
the recall of his ambassador. The national union showed itself in the
warm welcome given to the king on his return from the Hague, where the
conclusion of a new Grand Alliance in September between the Empire,
Holland, and the United Provinces had rewarded William's patience and
skill. The Alliance was soon joined by Denmark, Sweden, the Palatinate,
and the bulk of the German States. William seized the moment of
enthusiasm to dissolve the Houses whose action had hitherto embarrassed
him; and though the new Parliament which met in 1702 was still Tory in
the main, its Tory members were now as much for war as the Whigs, and
the House of Commons replied to the king's stirring appeal by voting
forty thousand soldiers and as many sailors for the coming struggle. As
a telling reply to the recognition of the young James by Lewis, a Bill
of Attainder was passed against the new Pretender, and correspondence
with him or maintenance of his title was made treason. At the same time
all members of either House and all public officials were sworn to
uphold the succession of the House of Hanover as established by law.

[Sidenote: Marlborough.]

The king's weakness was already too great to allow of his taking the
field; and he was forced to entrust the war in the Netherlands to the
one Englishman who had shown himself capable of a great command. John
Churchill, Earl of Marlborough, was born in 1650, the son of a
Devonshire Cavalier, whose daughter became at the Restoration mistress
of the Duke of York. The shame of Arabella did more perhaps than her
father's loyalty to win for her brother a commission in the royal
Guards; and after five years' service abroad under Turenne the young
captain became colonel of an English regiment which was retained in the
service of France. He had already shown some of the qualities of a great
soldier, an unruffled courage, a temper naturally bold and venturesome
but held in check by a cool and serene judgement, a vigilance and
capacity for enduring fatigue which never forsook him. In later years he
was known to spend a whole day in reconnoitring, and at Blenheim he
remained on horseback for fifteen hours. But courage and skill in arms
did less for Churchill on his return to the English court than his
personal beauty. In the French camp he had been known as "the handsome
Englishman"; and his manners were as winning as his person. Even in age
his address was almost irresistible; "he engrossed the graces," says
Chesterfield; and his air never lost the careless sweetness which won
the favour of Lady Castlemaine. A present of L5000 from the king's
mistress laid the foundation of a fortune which grew rapidly to
greatness, as the prudent forethought of the handsome young soldier
hardened into the avarice of age.

[Sidenote: Churchill and James.]

But it was to the Duke of York that Churchill looked mainly for
advancement, and he earned it by the fidelity with which as a member of
his household he clung to the Duke's fortunes during the dark days of
the Popish Plot. He followed James to Edinburgh and the Hague, and on
his master's return he was rewarded with a peerage and the colonelcy of
the Life Guards. The service he rendered James after his accession by
saving the royal army from a surprise at Sedgemoor would have been yet
more splendidly acknowledged but for the king's bigotry. In spite of his
master's personal solicitations Churchill remained true to
Protestantism. But he knew James too well to count on further favour
after a formal refusal to abandon his faith. Luckily for him he had now
found a new groundwork for his fortunes in the growing influence of his
wife over the king's second daughter, Anne; and at the crisis of the
Revolution the adhesion of Anne to the cause of Protestantism was of the
highest value. No sentiment of gratitude to his older patron hindered
Churchill from corresponding with the Prince of Orange, from promising
Anne's sympathy to William's effort, or from deserting the ranks of the
king's army when it faced William in the field. His desertion proved
fatal to the royal cause; but great as this service was it was eclipsed
by a second. It was by his wife's persuasion that Anne was induced to
forsake her father and take refuge in Danby's camp. Unscrupulous as his
conduct had been, the services which Churchill thus rendered to William
were too great to miss their reward. On the new king's accession he
became Earl of Marlborough; he was put at the head of a force during the
Irish war where his rapid successes at once won William's regard; and he
was given high command in the army of Flanders.

[Sidenote: Churchill and William.]

But the sense of his power over Anne soon turned Marlborough from
plotting treason against James to plot treason against William. Great as
was his greed of gold, he had married Sarah Jennings, a penniless beauty
of Charles's court, in whom a violent and malignant temper was strangely
combined with a power of winning and retaining love. Churchill's
affection for her ran like a thread of gold through the dark web of his
career. In the midst of his marches and from the very battle-field he
writes to his wife with the same passionate tenderness. The composure
which no danger or hatred could ruffle broke down into almost womanish
depression at the thought of her coldness or at any burst of her violent
humour. To the last he never left her without a pang. "I did for a great
while with a perspective glass look upon the cliffs," he once wrote to
her after setting out on a campaign, "in hopes that I might have had one
sight of you." It was no wonder that the woman who inspired Marlborough
with a love like this bound to her the weak and feeble nature of the
Princess Anne. The two friends threw off the restraints of state, and
addressed each other as "Mrs. Freeman" and "Mrs. Morley." It was on his
wife's influence over her friend that the Earl's ambition counted in its
designs against William. His subtle policy aimed at availing itself both
of William's unpopularity and of the dread of a Jacobite restoration.
His plan was to drive the king from the throne by backing the Tories in
their opposition to the war, as well as by stirring to frenzy the
English hatred of foreigners, and then to use the Whig dread of James's
return to seat Anne in William's place. The discovery of these designs
roused the king to a burst of unusual resentment. "Were I and my Lord
Marlborough private persons," William exclaimed, "the sword would have
to settle between us." As it was, he could only strip the Earl of his
offices and command and drive his wife from St. James's. Anne followed
her favourite, and the court of the Princess became the centre of the
Tory opposition: while Marlborough opened a correspondence with James.
So notorious was his treason that on the eve of the French invasion
which was foiled by the victory of La Hogue the Earl was one of the
first among the suspected persons who were sent to the Tower.

[Sidenote: Death of William.]

The death of Mary however forced William to recall the Princess, who
became by this event his successor; and with Anne the Marlboroughs
returned to court. Now indeed that Anne's succession was brought near by
the rapid decay of William's health their loyalty to the throne might
be counted on; and though William could not bend himself to trust the
Earl again, he saw in him as death drew near the one man whose splendid
talents fitted him in spite of the perfidy and treason of his life to
rule England and direct the Grand Alliance in his stead. He employed
Marlborough therefore to negotiate the treaty of alliance with the
Emperor, and put him at the head of the army in Flanders. But the Earl
had only just taken the command when a fall from his horse on the
twenty-first of February 1702 proved fatal to the broken frame of
William of Orange. "There was a time when I should have been glad to
have been delivered out of my troubles," the dying man whispered to
Portland, "but I own I see another scene, and could wish to live a
little longer." He knew however that the wish was vain; and he died on
the morning of the 8th of March, commending Marlborough to Anne as the
fittest person to lead her armies and guide her counsels. Anne's zeal in
her friend's cause needed no quickening. Three days after her accession
the Earl was named Captain-General of the English forces at home and
abroad, and entrusted with the entire direction of the war. His
supremacy over home affairs was secured by the expulsion of the few
remaining Whigs among the ministers, and the construction of a purely
Tory administration with Lord Godolphin, a close friend of
Marlborough's, as Lord Treasurer at its head. The Queen's affection for
his wife ensured him the support of the Crown at a moment when Anne's
personal popularity gave the Crown a new weight with the nation. In
England indeed party feeling for the moment died away. The Parliament
called on the new accession was strongly Tory; but all save the extreme
Tories were won over to the war now that it was waged on behalf of a
Tory queen by a Tory general, while the most extreme of the Whigs were
ready to back even a Tory general in waging a Whig war.

[Sidenote: Marlborough and the Allies.]

Abroad however William's death shook the Alliance to its base; and even
Holland wavered in dread of being deserted by England in the coming
struggle. But the decision of Marlborough soon did away with this
distrust. Anne was made to declare from the throne her resolve to pursue
with energy the policy of her predecessor. The Parliament was brought to
sanction vigorous measures for the prosecution of the war. The new
general hastened to the Hague, received the command of the Dutch as well
as of the English forces, and drew the German powers into the
Confederacy with a skill and adroitness which even William might have
envied. Never indeed was greatness more quickly recognised than in the
case of Marlborough. In a few months he was regarded by all as the
guiding spirit of the Alliance, and princes whose jealousy had worn out
the patience of the king yielded without a struggle to the counsels of
his successor. His temper fitted him in an especial way to be the head
of a great confederacy. Like William, he owed little of his power to any
early training. The trace of his neglected education was seen to the
last in his reluctance to write. "Of all things," he said to his wife,
"I do not love writing." To pen a despatch indeed was a far greater
trouble to Marlborough than to plan a campaign. But nature had given him
qualities which in other men spring specially from culture. His capacity
for business was immense. During the next ten years he assumed the
general direction of the war in Flanders and in Spain. He managed every
negotiation with the courts of the allies. He watched over the shifting
phases of English politics. He crossed the Channel to win over Anne to a
change in the cabinet, or hurried to Berlin to secure the due contingent
of Electoral troops from Brandenburg. At one and the same moment men saw
him reconciling the Emperor with the Protestants of Hungary, stirring
the Calvinists of the Cevennes into revolt, arranging the affairs of
Portugal, and providing for the protection of the Duke of Savoy.

[Sidenote: His temper.]

But his air showed no trace of fatigue or haste or vexation. He retained
to the last the indolent grace of his youth. His natural dignity was
never ruffled by an outbreak of temper. Amidst the storm of battle his
soldiers saw their leader "without fear of danger or in the least hurry
giving his orders with all the calmness imaginable." In the cabinet he
was as cool as on the battle-field. He met with the same equable
serenity the pettiness of the German princes, the phlegm of the Dutch,
the ignorant opposition of his officers, the libels of his political
opponents. There was a touch of irony in the simple expedients by which
he sometimes solved problems which had baffled cabinets. The touchy
pride of the king of Prussia in his new royal dignity, when he rose from
being a simple Elector of Brandenburg to a throne, made him one of the
most vexatious among the allies; but all difficulty with him ceased when
Marlborough rose at a state banquet and glutted his vanity by handing
him a napkin. Churchill's composure rested partly on a pride which could
not stoop to bare the real self within to the eyes of meaner men. In the
bitter moments before his fall he bade Godolphin burn some querulous
letters which the persecution of his opponents had wrung from him; "My
desire," he wrote, "is that the world may continue in their error of
thinking me a happy man, for I think it better to be envied than
pitied." But in great measure it sprang from the purely intellectual
temper of his mind. His passion for his wife was the one sentiment which
tinged the colourless light in which his understanding moved. In all
else he was without affection or resentment, he knew neither doubt nor
regret. In private life he was a humane and compassionate man; but if
his position required it he could betray Englishmen to death or lead his
army to a butchery such as that of Malplaquet. Of honour or the finer
sentiments of mankind he knew nothing; and he turned without a shock
from guiding Europe and winning great victories to heap up a matchless
fortune by peculation and greed. He is perhaps the only instance of a
man of real greatness who loved money for money's sake. No life indeed,
no temper ever stood more aloof from the common life and temper of
mankind. The passions which stirred the men around him, whether noble or
ignoble, were to Marlborough simply elements in an intellectual problem
which had to be solved by patience. "Patience will overcome all things,"
he writes again and again. "As I think most things are governed by
destiny, having done all things we should submit with patience."

[Sidenote: Opening of the War.]

As a statesman the high qualities of Marlborough were owned by his
bitterest foes. "Over the Confederacy," says Lord Bolingbroke, "he, a
new, a private man, acquired by merit and management a more decided
influence than high birth, confirmed authority, and even the crown of
Great Britain had given to King William." But great as he was in the
council, he was even greater in the field. He stands alone amongst the
masters of the art of war as a captain whose victories began at an age
when the work of most men is done. Though he served as a young officer
under Turenne, and for a few months in Ireland and the Netherlands,
Marlborough had held no great command till he took the field in Flanders
at the age of fifty-two. He stands alone too in his unbroken good
fortune. Voltaire notes that he never besieged a fortress which he did
not take, or fought a battle which he did not win. His difficulties
indeed came not so much from the enemy as from the ignorance and
timidity of his own allies. He was never defeated in the field, but
victory after victory was snatched from him by the incapacity of his
officers or the stubbornness of the Dutch. What startled the cautious
strategists of his day was the vigour and audacity of his plans. Old as
he was, Marlborough's designs had from the first all the dash and
boldness of youth. On taking the field in 1702 he at once resolved to
force a battle in the heart of Brabant. The plan was foiled by the
timidity and resistance of the Dutch deputies. But his resolute advance
across the Meuse drew the French forces from that river and enabled him
to reduce fortress after fortress in a series of sieges, till the
surrender of Liege closed a campaign which cut off the French from the
Lower Rhine and freed Holland from all danger of invasion.

[Sidenote: The French in Germany.]

The successes of Marlborough had been brought into bolder relief by the
fortunes of the war in other quarters. Though the Imperialist general,
Prince Eugene of Savoy, showed his powers by a surprise of the French
army at Cremona, no real successes had been won in Italy. An English
descent on the Spanish coast ended in failure. In Germany, where the
Bavarians joined the French, their united armies defeated the army of
the Empire and opened the line of the Danube to a French advance. It was
in this quarter that Lewis resolved to push his fortunes in the coming
year. In the spring of 1703 a French army under Marshal Villars again
relieved the Bavarian Elector from the pressure of the Austrian forces,
and only a strife which arose between the two commanders hindered their
joint armies from marching on Vienna. Meanwhile the timidity of the
Dutch deputies served Lewis well in the Low Countries. The hopes of
Marlborough, who had been raised to a dukedom for his services in the
previous year, were again foiled by the deputies of the States-General.
Serene as his temper was, it broke down before their refusal to
co-operate in an attack on Antwerp and French Flanders; and the prayers
of Godolphin and of the Pensionary Heinsius alone induced him to
withdraw his offer of resignation. In spite of his victories on the
Danube, indeed, of the blunders of his adversaries on the Rhine, and the
sudden aid of an insurrection against the Court of Vienna which broke
out in Hungary, the difficulties of Lewis were hourly increasing. The
accession of Savoy to the Grand Alliance threatened his armies in Italy
with destruction. That of Portugal gave the allies a base of operations
against Spain. The French king's energy however rose with the pressure;
and while the Duke of Berwick, a natural son of James the Second, was
despatched against Portugal, and three small armies closed round Savoy,
the flower of the French troops joined the army of Bavaria on the
Danube, for the bold plan of Lewis was to decide the fortunes of the war
by a victory which would wrest peace from the Empire under the walls of
Vienna.

[Sidenote: Marlborough in Germany.]

The master-stroke of Lewis roused Marlborough at the opening of 1704 to
a master-stroke in return; but the secrecy and boldness of the Duke's
plans deceived both his enemies and his allies. The French army in
Flanders saw in his march from the Netherlands upon Maintz only a design
to transfer the war into Elsass. The Dutch on the other hand were lured
into suffering their troops to be drawn as far from Flanders as Coblentz
by the Duke's proposals for an imaginary campaign on the Moselle. It was
only when Marlborough crossed the Neckar and struck through the centre
of Germany for the Danube that the true aim of his operations was
revealed to both. After struggling through the hill country of
Wurtemberg he joined the Imperial army under the Prince of Baden,
stormed the heights of Donauwerth, crossed the Danube and the Lech, and
penetrated into the heart of Bavaria. The crisis drew two other armies
which were facing one another on the Upper Rhine to the scene. The
arrival of Marshal Tallard with thirty thousand French troops saved the
Elector of Bavaria for the moment from the need of submission; but the
junction of his opponent, Prince Eugene, with Marlborough raised the
contending forces again to an equality. After a few marches the armies
met on the north bank of the Danube near the small town of Hochstaedt and
the village of Blindheim or Blenheim, which have given their names to
one of the most memorable battles in the history of the world.

[Sidenote: Battle of Blenheim.]

In one respect the struggle which followed stands almost unrivalled, for
the whole of the Teutonic race was represented in the strange medley of
Englishmen, Dutchmen, Hanoverians, Danes, Wurtembergers and Austrians
who followed Marlborough and Eugene. The French and Bavarians, who
numbered like their opponents some fifty thousand men, lay behind a
little stream which ran through swampy ground to the Danube. Their
position was a strong one, for its front was covered by the swamp, its
right by the Danube, its left by the hill-country in which the stream
rose; and Tallard had not only entrenched himself but was far superior
to his rival in artillery. But for once Marlborough's hands were free.
"I have great reason," he wrote calmly home, "to hope that everything
will go well, for I have the pleasure to find all the officers willing
to obey without knowing any other reason than that it is my desire,
which is very different from what it was in Flanders, where I was
obliged to have the consent of a council of war for everything I
undertook." So formidable were the obstacles, however, that though the
allies were in motion at sunrise on the 13th of August it was not till
midday that Eugene, who commanded on the right, succeeded in crossing
the stream. The English foot at once forded it on the left, and attacked
the village of Blindheim in which the bulk of the French infantry were
entrenched; but after a furious struggle the attack was repulsed, while
as gallant a resistance at the other end of the line held Eugene in
check. It was the centre however, where the French believed themselves
to be unassailable, and which this belief had led them to weaken by
drawing troops to their wings, that had been chosen by Marlborough from
the first for the chief point of attack. By making an artificial road
across the morass which covered it, he was at last enabled to throw his
eight thousand horsemen on the mass of the French cavalry, which
occupied this position; and two desperate charges which the Duke headed
in person decided the day. The French centre was flung back on the
Danube and forced to surrender. Their left fell back in confusion on
Hochstaedt: while their right, cooped up in Blindheim and cut off from
retreat, became prisoners of war. Of the defeated army only twenty
thousand men escaped. Twelve thousand were slain, fourteen thousand were
captured. Vienna was saved, Germany finally freed from the French, and
Marlborough, who followed the wreck of the French host in its flight to
Elsass, soon made himself master of the Lower Moselle.

[Sidenote: Occasional conformity.]

But the loss of France could not be measured by men or fortresses. A
hundred victories since Rocroi had taught the world to regard the armies
of Lewis as all but invincible, when Blenheim and the surrender of the
flower of the French soldiery broke the spell. From that moment the
terror of victory passed to the side of the allies, and "Malbrook"
became a name of fear to every child in France. In England itself the
victory of Blenheim aided to bring about a great change in the political
aspect of affairs. The Tories were already pressing hard on the defeated
Whigs. If they were willing to support the war abroad, they were
resolved to use the accession of a Stuart to the throne to secure their
own power at home. They resolved therefore to make a fresh attempt to
create a permanent Tory majority in the Commons by excluding
Nonconformists from the municipal corporations, which returned the bulk
of the borough members, and whose political tendencies were for the
most part Whig. The test of receiving the sacrament according to the
ritual of the Church of England, effective as it was against Catholics,
was useless against Protestant Dissenters. While adhering to their
separate congregations, in which they were now protected by the
Toleration Act, they "qualified for office," as it was called, by the
"occasional conformity" of receiving the sacrament at church once in the
year. It was against "occasional conformity" that the Tories introduced
a test which by excluding the Nonconformists would have given them the
command of the boroughs; and this test at first received Marlborough's
support. But it was rejected by the Lords as often as it was sent up to
them, and it was soon guessed that the resistance of the Lords was
secretly backed by both Marlborough and Godolphin. Tory as he was, in
fact, Marlborough had no mind for an unchecked Tory rule, or for a
measure which would be fatal to the war by again reviving religious
strife. But it was in vain that he strove to propitiate his party by
inducing the Queen to set aside the tenths and first-fruits hitherto
paid by the clergy to the Crown as a fund for the augmentation of small
benefices, a fund which still bears the name of Queen Anne's Bounty. The
Commons showed their resentment against Marlborough by refusing to add a
grant of money to the grant of a dukedom after his first campaign; and
the higher Tories, with Lord Nottingham at their head, began to throw
every obstacle they could in the way of the continuance of the war.

[Sidenote: The Coalition Ministry.]

Nottingham and his followers at last quitted office in 1704, and
Marlborough replaced them by Tories of a more moderate stamp who were
still in favour of the war; by Robert Harley, who became Secretary of
State, and by Henry St. John, a young man of splendid talents, who was
named Secretary at War. Small as the change seemed, its significance was
clear to both parties; and the Duke's march into Germany gave his
enemies an opportunity of embittering the political strife. The original
aim of the Tories had been to limit English efforts to what seemed
purely English objects, the defence of the Netherlands and of English
commerce; and the bulk of them shrank even now from any further
entanglement in the struggle. But the Duke's march seemed at once to
pledge England to a strife in the very heart of the Continent, and above
all to a strife on behalf of the House of Austria, whose designs upon
Spain were regarded with almost as much suspicion as those of Lewis. It
was an act indeed of even greater political than military daring. The
High Tories and Jacobites threatened if Marlborough failed to bring his
head to the block; and only the victory of Blenheim saved him from
political ruin. Slowly and against his will the Duke drifted from his
own party to the party which really backed his policy. He availed
himself of the national triumph over Blenheim to dissolve Parliament;
and when the election of 1705, as he hoped, returned a majority in
favour of the war, his efforts brought about a coalition between the
moderate Tories who still clung to him and the Whig Junto, whose support
was purchased by making a Whig, William Cowper, Lord Keeper, and by
sending Lord Sunderland as envoy to Vienna.

[Sidenote: Ramillies.]

The bitter attacks of the peace party were entirely foiled by this
union, and Marlborough at last felt secure at home. But he had to bear
disappointment abroad. His plan of attack along the line of the Moselle
was defeated by the refusal of the Imperial army to join him. When he
transferred the war again to the Netherlands and entered the French
lines across the Dyle, the Dutch generals withdrew their troops; and his
proposal to attack the Duke of Villeroy in the field of Waterloo was
rejected in full council of war by the deputies of the States with cries
of "murder" and "massacre." Even Marlborough's composure broke into
bitterness at this last blow. "Had I the same power I had last year," he
wrote home, "I could have won a greater victory than that of Blenheim."
On his complaint indeed the States recalled their commissaries, but the
year was lost; nor had greater results been brought about in Italy or on
the Rhine. The spirits of the allies were only sustained by the
romantic exploits of Lord Peterborough in Spain. Profligate,
unprincipled, flighty as he was, Peterborough had a genius for war, and
his seizure of Barcelona with a handful of men, a step followed by his
recognition of the old liberties of Aragon, roused that province to
support the cause of the second son of the Emperor, who had been
acknowledged as King of Spain by the allies under the title of Charles
the Third. Catalonia and Valencia soon joined Aragon in declaring for
Charles: while Marlborough spent the winter of 1705 in negotiations at
Vienna, Berlin, Hanover, and the Hague, and in preparations for the
coming campaign. Eager for freedom of action and sick of the Imperial
generals as of the Dutch, he planned a march over the Alps and a
campaign in Italy; and though these designs were defeated by the
opposition of the allies, he found himself unfettered when he again
appeared in Flanders in 1706. Marshal Villeroy, the new French general,
was as eager as Marlborough for an engagement; and the two armies met on
the 23rd of May at the village of Ramillies on an undulating plain which
forms the highest ground in Brabant. The French were drawn up in a wide
curve with morasses covering their front. After a feint on their left,
Marlborough flung himself on their right wing at Ramillies, crushed it
in a brilliant charge that he led in person, and swept along their whole
line till it broke in a rout which only ended beneath the walls of
Louvain. In an hour and a half the French had lost fifteen thousand men,
their baggage, and their guns; and the line of the Scheldt, Brussels,
Antwerp and Bruges became the prize of the victors. It only needed four
successful sieges which followed the battle of Ramillies to complete the
deliverance of Flanders.

[Sidenote: The Union with Scotland.]

The year which witnessed the victory of Ramillies remains yet more
memorable as the year which witnessed the final Union of England with
Scotland. As the undoing of the earlier union had been the first work of
the Government of the Restoration, its revival was one of the first aims
of the Government which followed the Revolution. But the project was
long held in check by religious and commercial jealousies. Scotland
refused to bear any part of the English debt. England would not yield
any share in her monopoly of trade with the colonies. The English
Churchmen longed for a restoration of Episcopacy north of the Border,
while the Scotch Presbyterians would not hear even of the legal
toleration of Episcopalians. In 1703 however an Act of Settlement which
passed through the Scotch Parliament at last brought home to English
statesmen the dangers of further delay. In dealing with this measure the
Scotch Whigs, who cared only for the independence of their country,
joined hand in hand with the Scotch Jacobites, who looked only to the
interests of the Pretender. The Jacobites excluded from the Act the
name of the Princess Sophia; the Whigs introduced a provision that no
sovereign of England should be recognized as sovereign of Scotland save
upon security given to the religion, freedom, and trade of the Scottish
people. The danger arising from such a measure was undoubtedly great,
for it pointed to a recognition of the Pretender in Scotland on the
Queen's death, and such a recognition meant war between Scotland and
England. The need of a union became at once apparent to every statesman,
but it was only after three years' delay that the wisdom and resolution
of Lord Somers brought the question to an issue. The Scotch proposals of
a federative rather than a legislative union were set aside by his
firmness; the commercial jealousies of the English traders were put by;
and the Act of Union as it was completed in 1706, though not finally
passed till the following year, provided that the two kingdoms should be
united into one under the name of Great Britain, and that the succession
to the crown of this United Kingdom should be ruled by the provisions of
the English Act of Settlement. The Scotch Church and the Scotch law were
left untouched: but all rights of trade were thrown open to both
nations, a common system of taxation was established, and a uniform
system of coinage adopted. A single Parliament was henceforth to
represent the United Kingdom; and for this purpose forty-five Scotch
members, a number taken to represent the proportion of Scotch property
and population relatively to England, were added to the five hundred and
thirteen English members of the House of Commons, and sixteen
representative peers to the one hundred and eight who formed the English
House of Lords.

[Sidenote: Its results.]

In Scotland the opposition to this measure was bitter and almost
universal. The terror of the Presbyterians indeed was met by an Act of
Security which became part of the Treaty of Union, and which required an
oath to support the Presbyterian Church from every sovereign on his
accession. But no securities could satisfy the enthusiastic patriots or
the fanatical Cameronians. The Jacobites sought troops from France and
plotted a Stuart restoration. The nationalists talked of seceding from
the Houses which voted for the Union and of establishing a rival
Parliament. In the end however good sense and the loyalty of the trading
classes to the cause of the Protestant succession won their way. The
measure was adopted by the Scotch Parliament, and the Treaty of Union
became a legislative Act to which Anne in 1707 gave her assent in noble
words. "I desire," said the Queen, "and expect from my subjects of both
nations that from henceforth they act with all possible respect and
kindness to one another, that so it may appear to all the world they
have hearts disposed to become one people." Time has more than answered
these hopes. The two nations whom the Union brought together have ever
since remained one. England gained in the removal of a constant danger
of treason and war. To Scotland the Union opened up new avenues of
wealth which the energy of its people turned to wonderful account. The
farms of Lothian have become models of agricultural skill. A fishing
town on the Clyde has grown into the rich and populous Glasgow. Peace
and culture have changed the wild clansmen of the Highlands into
herdsmen and farmers. Nor was the change followed by any loss of
national spirit. The world has hardly seen a mightier and more rapid
developement of national energy than that of Scotland after the Union.
All that passed away was the jealousy which had parted since the days of
Edward the First two peoples whom a common blood and common speech
proclaimed to be one. The Union between Scotland and England has been
real and stable simply because it was the legislative acknowledgement
and enforcement of a national fact.

[Sidenote: Marlborough's difficulties.]

With the defeat of Ramillies and the conclusion of the Union the
greatness of Marlborough reached its height. In five years he had
rescued Holland, saved Germany, and thrown France back on a purely
defensive position. He exercised an undisputed supremacy over an
alliance which embraced the greatest European powers. At home he was
practically first minister, commander-in-chief, and absolute master
through his wife of the Queen herself. He was looked upon as the most
powerful as he was the wealthiest subject in the world. And while
Marlborough's fortunes mounted to their height those of France sank to
their lowest ebb. Eugene in his greatest victory broke the siege of
Turin, and Lewis saw the loss of Flanders followed by the loss of Italy.
Not only did Peterborough hold his ground in Spain, but Charles the
Third, with an army of English and Portuguese, entered Madrid. But it
was in fact only these triumphs abroad that enabled Marlborough to face
the difficulties which were opening on him at home. His command of the
Parliament rested now on a coalition of the Whigs with the moderate
Tories who still adhered to him after his break with the more violent
members of his old party. Ramillies gave him strength enough to force
Anne in spite of her hatred of the Whigs to fulfil the compact with them
from which this coalition had sprung, by admitting Lord Sunderland, the
bitterest leader of their party, to office as Secretary of State at the
close of 1706. But with the entry of Sunderland into office the system
of political balance which the Duke had maintained till now began at
once to break down. Constitutionally, Marlborough's was the last attempt
to govern England on other terms than those of party government, and the
union of parties to which he had clung ever since his severance from
the extreme Tories became every day more impossible as the growing
opposition of the Tories to the war threw the Duke more and more on the
support of the Whigs.

[Sidenote: Triumph of the Whigs.]

The Whigs sold their support dearly. Sunderland's violent and imperious
temper differed widely from the supple and unscrupulous nature which had
carried his father, the Lord Sunderland of the Restoration, unhurt
through the violent changes of his day. But he had inherited his
father's conceptions of party government. He was resolved to restore a
strict party administration on a purely Whig basis, and to drive the
moderate Tories from office in spite of Marlborough's desire to retain
them. The Duke wrote hotly home at the news of the pressure which the
Whigs were putting on him. "England," he said, "will not be ruined
because a few men are not pleased." Nor was Marlborough alone in his
resentment. Harley foresaw the danger of his expulsion from office, and
even as early as 1706 began to intrigue at court, through Mrs. Masham, a
bedchamber woman of the Queen, who was supplanting the Duchess in Anne's
favour, against the Whigs and against Marlborough, whom he looked upon
as in the hands of the Whigs. St. John, though bound by ties of
gratitude to the Duke, to whose favour he owed his early promotion to
office, was driven by the same fear to share Harley's schemes.
Marlborough strove to win both of them back, but the growing opposition
of the Tories to the war left him helpless in the hands of the only
party that steadily supported it. A factious union of the Whigs with
their opponents, though it roused the Duke to a burst of unusual passion
in Parliament, effected its end by convincing him of the impossibility
of further resistance. The resistance of the Queen indeed was stubborn
and bitter. Anne was at heart a Tory, and her old trust in Marlborough
died with his submission to the Whig demands. It was only by the threat
of resignation that he had forced her to admit Sunderland to office; and
the violent outbreak of temper with which the Duchess enforced her
husband's will changed the Queen's friendship for her into a bitter
resentment. Marlborough was forced to increase this resentment by fresh
compliances with the conditions which the Whigs imposed on him, by
removing Peterborough from his command as a Tory general, and by
wresting from Anne her consent in 1708 to the dismissal from office of
Harley and St. John with the whole of the moderate Tories whom they
headed. Their removal was followed by the complete triumph of the Whigs
in the admission of Lords Somers and Wharton into the ministry. Somers
became President of the Council, Wharton Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland,
while lower posts were occupied by younger men of the same party, who
were destined to play a great part in our later history, such as the
young Duke of Newcastle and Robert Walpole.

[Sidenote: Oudenarde.]

Meanwhile, the great struggle abroad went steadily against France,
though its progress was varied with striking alternations of success.
France rose indeed with singular rapidity from the crushing blow of
Ramillies. Spain was recovered for Philip in 1707 by a victory of
Marshal Berwick at Almanza. Marshal Villars won fresh triumphs on the
Rhine; while Eugene, who had penetrated into Provence, was driven back
into Italy. In Flanders Marlborough's designs for taking advantage of
his great victory were foiled by the strategy of the Duke of Vendome and
by the reluctance of the Dutch, who were now wavering towards peace. In
the campaign of 1708 however Vendome, in spite of his superiority in
force, was attacked and defeated at Oudenarde; and though Marlborough
was hindered from striking at the heart of France by the timidity of the
English and Dutch statesmen, he reduced Lille, the strongest of its
frontier fortresses, in the face of an army of relief which numbered a
hundred thousand men. The blow proved an effective one. The pride of
Lewis was at last broken by defeat and by the terrible sufferings of
France. He offered terms of peace which yielded all that the allies had
fought for. He consented to withdraw his aid from Philip of Spain, to
give up ten Flemish fortresses as a barrier for the Dutch, and to
surrender to the Empire all that France had gained since the Treaty of
Westphalia. He offered to acknowledge Anne, to banish the Pretender from
his dominions, and to demolish the fortifications of Dunkirk, a port
hateful to England as the home of the French privateers.

[Sidenote: Peace rejected.]

To Marlborough these terms seemed sufficient, and for the moment he
regarded peace as secure. Peace was indeed now the general wish of the
nation, and the longing for it was nowhere stronger than with the Queen.
Dull and sluggish as was Anne's temper, she had the pride and
stubbornness of her race, and both revolted against the submission to
which she was forced. If she bowed to the spirit of the Revolution by
yielding implicitly to the decision of her Parliament, she held firmly
to the ceremonial traditions of the monarchy of her ancestors. She dined
in royal state, she touched for the evil in her progresses, she presided
at every meeting of council or cabinet, she insisted on every measure
proposed by her ministers being previously laid before her. She shrank
from party government as an enslavement of the Crown; and claimed the
right to call on men from either side to aid in the administration of
the State. But if England was to be governed by a party, she was
resolved that it should be her own party. She had been bred a Tory. Her
youth had fallen among the storms of the Exclusion Bill, and she looked
on Whigs as disguised republicans. Above all her pride was outraged by
the concessions which were forced from her. She had prayed Godolphin to
help her in excluding Sunderland as a thing on which the peace of her
life depended. She trembled every day before the violent temper of the
Duchess of Marlborough, and before the threat of resignation by which
the Duke himself crushed her first faint efforts at revolt. She longed
for a peace which would free her from both Marlborough and the Whigs, as
the Whigs on the other hand were resolute for a war which kept them in
power. It was on this ground that they set aside the Duke's counsels and
answered the French proposals of peace by terms which made peace
impossible. They insisted on the transfer of the whole Spanish monarchy
to the Austrian prince. When even this seemed likely to be conceded they
demanded that Lewis should with his own troops compel his grandson to
give up the crown of Spain.

[Sidenote: Sacheverell.]

"If I must wage war," replied the French king, "I had rather wage it
with my enemies than with my children." In a bitter despair he appealed
to France; and, exhausted as the country was by the struggle, the
campaign of 1709 proved how nobly France answered his appeal. The
terrible slaughter which bears the name of the battle of Malplaquet
showed a new temper in the French soldiers. Starving as they were, they
flung away their rations in their eagerness for the fight, and fell
back at its close in serried masses that no efforts of Marlborough could
break. They had lost twelve thousand men, but the forcing their lines of
entrenchment had cost the allies a loss of double that number. Horror at
such a "deluge of blood" increased the general distaste for the war; and
the rejection of fresh French offers in 1710, a rejection unjustly
attributed to Marlborough's desire for the lengthening out of a contest
which brought him profit and power, fired at last the smouldering
discontent into flame. A storm of popular passion burst suddenly on the
Whigs. Its occasion was a dull and silly sermon in which a High Church
divine, Dr. Sacheverell, maintained the doctrine of non-resistance at
St. Paul's. His boldness challenged prosecution; but in spite of the
warning of Marlborough and of Somers the Whig Ministers resolved on his
impeachment before the Lords, and the trial at once widened into a great
party struggle. An outburst of popular enthusiasm in Sacheverell's
favour showed what a storm of hatred had gathered against the Whigs and
the war. The most eminent of the Tory Churchmen stood by his side at the
bar, crowds escorted him to the court and back again, while the streets
rang with cries of "The Church and Dr. Sacheverell." A small majority of
the peers found the preacher guilty, but the light sentence they
inflicted was in effect an acquittal, and bonfires and illuminations
over the whole country welcomed it as a Tory triumph.

[Sidenote: Dismissal of the Whigs.]

The turn of popular feeling at once roused to new life the party whom
the Whigs had striven to crush. The expulsion of Harley and St. John
from the Ministry had given the Tories leaders of a more subtle and
vigorous stamp than the High Churchmen who had quitted office in the
first years of the war; and St. John brought into play a new engine of
political attack whose powers soon made themselves felt. In the
_Examiner_, and in a crowd of pamphlets and periodicals which followed
in its train, the humour of the poet Prior, the bitter irony of Swift,
an Irish writer who was now forcing his way into fame, as well as St.
John's own brilliant sophistry, spent themselves on the abuse of the war
and of its general. "Six millions of supplies and almost fifty millions
of debt!" Swift wrote bitterly; "the High Allies have been the ruin of
us!" Marlborough was ridiculed and reviled, even his courage was called
in question; he was charged with insolence, with cruelty and ambition,
with corruption and greed. The virulence of the abuse would have
defeated its aim had not the general sense of the people condemned the
maintenance of the war, and encouraged Anne to free herself from the
yoke beneath which she had bent so long. At the close of Sacheverell's
trial she broke with the Duchess. Marlborough looked for support to the
Whigs; but the subtle intrigue of Harley was as busy in undermining the
Ministry as St. John was in openly attacking it. The Whigs, who knew
that the Duke's league with them had simply been forced on him by th

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