History of the English People Volume Vii Part 2

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 amba.s.sador) 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 ma.s.sacre 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 a.s.suring 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 dest.i.tute 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 t.i.tle 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 ma.s.sed 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 ma.s.sacre 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 embarra.s.sments 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 pa.s.sing 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 const.i.tution 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 a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sembly of Parliament has become a matter of absolute necessity.

The greatest const.i.tutional 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.body. 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 Lat.i.tudinarians 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sing of a Toleration Act in 1689 practically established freedom of worship. Whatever the religious effect of this failure of the Lat.i.tudinarian 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 pa.s.sive 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 a.s.sertion 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 Lat.i.tudinarians 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 Lat.i.tudinarians 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 ma.s.s 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 t.i.tus 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sure 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sent 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 bra.s.s 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 pa.s.sage 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sed 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 ingrat.i.tude, 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 amba.s.sador 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 pa.s.sage, 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 anch.o.r.ed 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 pa.s.sed 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 const.i.tutional 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 const.i.tutional 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 const.i.tutional 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 dest.i.tute 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 h.o.m.ogeneous 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.