William the Third Part 2

History has done justice to these well-meaning efforts of William; but the political virtue which for the moment was its own reward, must, one imagines, have been felt by him as painfully unremunerative. He could not have expected to be personally popular, and he was not, though Macaulay, in his desire for strong pictorial effect, has surely exaggerated his unpopularity. But he, no doubt, counted upon wielding a greater civil influence at the outset of his career than he in fact discovered to be his, and must have learned, with some chagrin, that he had failed to realise the vehemence of those English party conflicts in which not even the ablest and best intentioned of mediators can interpose without disappointment until he has mastered all the secrets of their intensity. On the whole, one can easily understand the feeling of satisfaction with which he hailed the coming of the hour when he, with whom the instincts of the European statesman and soldier were always dominant over these of the domestic administrator, was once more summoned to activity in one of the two arts in which he shone. On the 19th of April the Commons presented an address to the Crown, in which, after reciting the various acts of hostility committed by Louis XIV.

against their country, "particularly the present invasion of Ireland,"

they a.s.sured William that when he "should think fit to enter into a war against the French king, they would give him such a.s.sistance in a parliamentary way as to enable him to support and go through with the same." To this invitation from his Parliament William returned an answer of ready acquiescence, while to those about him he exclaimed, with unwonted animation, "This is the first day of my reign."

FOOTNOTES:

[10] There are but two ways in which a sovereign can, while alive, and _compos mentis_, become divested of his regal attributes and authority--by abdication and by deposition; and it is impossible to define abdication satisfactorily by any form of words which does not involve the idea of a _voluntary_ act. Even if a voluntary abandonment or "desertion of the Government" amounted to abdication, it would not help the case. James's flight from England in 1688 was no more voluntary than the flight of his brother, then king _de jure_, after Worcester in 1651. Both flights were taken under what was or was conceived to be _force majeure_.

[11] This, however, it should be conceded, was really, of the two, a more respectable proportion; for the clergy had a sterner alternative before them than the bishops, peers, or members of the Lower House. The latter had only status at stake--the former, in most cases, their means of subsistence.

CHAPTER VII

1689-1690

Invasion of Ireland--Campaign of 1689--Parliamentary strife --The conduct of the war--The Oates Case--The Succession Bill --Attempts to pa.s.s an Indemnity Bill--Rancour of the Whigs-- Their factious opposition to William's Irish plans-- Dissolution of Parliament.

An address from Parliament praying the sovereign to declare war against a foreign state is far from a common incident in our history; and even in this instance the initiative then taken by the Commons was one of form rather than of fact. The descent of James upon Ireland, under the convoy of a French fleet of fifteen sail of the line, and accompanied by a force of 2500 French soldiers, amounted to an act of war on the part of France, if ever such an act was committed by one nation upon another; and it was not till more than a month after the perpetration of this outrage that the address referred to in the last chapter was presented to the King. James landed at Kinsale on the 12th of March; the address to the King is dated, as has been said, on the 19th of April. England, moreover, was not the first of the coalition of Powers which the patient diplomacy of William had formed against Louis to take action against the common enemy. The declaration of the German Diet had appeared in February, and that of the States-General in March.

On the 24th of March James entered Dublin, which, in common with all the other cities of the three southern provinces of Ireland, had declared for his cause; but after only three weeks' stay in the capital it was decided, against the advice of his chief French counsellor, d'Avaux, who with the Lord Deputy Tyrconnel, and the Irish Catholic party in general, were for keeping him among the Celtic population of the island, that he should go northward and take command of the royal army in Ulster. He accordingly set out on the 14th of April, and after some further hesitations caused by conflicting reports as to the results of a skirmish between the Protestants and a body of his own men at Strabane, arrived a few days later among his troops, who were quartered a few miles south of Londonderry, a city which, with Inniskillen, had formed the rallying point for the Protestant minority when the outbreak of the Revolution, awakening the hopes of the Catholic population, appeared to threaten the "English garrison" with a repet.i.tion of the horrors of 1641. Here it had been fully expected by James's more sanguine counsellors that he would be, if not loyally, at any rate submissively received. The appearance of their lawful sovereign before their walls would at any rate, it was thought, confirm the wavering allegiance of the military under the command of the Governor, Colonel Lundy. As a matter of fact, it only served to arouse a spirit of determined resistance in the townsmen, to unite the soldiery in the same cause, and to precipitate the flight of the Jacobite governor. James and his retinue, on approaching the gate, were fired on from the nearest bastion; a subsequent demand for surrender was contemptuously rejected, and after a few days' delay before the town its rejected sovereign set off in chagrin and disappointment to return to Dublin, leaving Londonderry to prepare for that heroic defence of three months against the combined forces of war, disease, and famine, which has made her name famous among the cities of the world. James's first act on his return to the capital was to summon a Parliament, and a Parliament, of a sort, responded to the summons. That is to say, out of a hundred temporal peers then in Ireland, fourteen, of whom ten were Catholics, obeyed the summons, while the fidelity at any rate of the faithful Commons was guaranteed by the fact that only six out of the total number of two hundred and fifty were Protestants. Having a.s.sembled, they promptly proceeded to attest this virtue by the wholesale confiscation of the lands of Protestants, and the proscription of their heads. Ulster, however, was still unreduced, and while that was so, denunciatory and spoliatory decrees might well turn out to be mere waste paper. The dashing Inniskilleners--the cavalry, so to speak, of that Protestant army in which Londonderry played the part of the immovable square of infantry--had actually meditated, though they never carried out, an attempt to relieve their beleaguered sister city, and at Newtown Butler they were able to render signal service to their cause by the defeat of General Macarthy and 6000 Irish. By the end of July Londonderry had been relieved; early in August Marshal Schomberg, then one of the most renowned of European generals, landed at Carrickfergus with 16,000 men, and it became evident even to the most hopeful of James's adherents that the northern province was lost to him irretrievably.

William meanwhile still remained in London busied with the task, at once delicate and laborious, of administering the government of a distrustful and almost unfriendly people through the agency of two bitterly divided factions. The parliamentary session had become more prolific of quarrels and more barren of counsel as it proceeded. The two Houses and the two parties had agreed with little difficulty to do justice to some of the admitted victims of the oppression practised under the last two sovereigns. The attainders of Sidney, Russell, and others were reversed without recorded dissent, but the case of Oates gave rise to acute conflict between the Lords and Commons--a conflict in which, though the conduct of the former a.s.sembly was undoubtedly arbitrary, the temper, or, at any rate, the motives of the latter appear by no means worthy of the unqualified praise bestowed upon them by the great Whig historian.

Undoubtedly the Peers were without justification in refusing to reverse a sentence which the judges had solemnly p.r.o.nounced illegal; but it is ridiculous to represent the Commons, as a body of judicially minded legislators, doing violence to their natural sentiments in their determination to obtain justice for Oates. Such a theory is at once refuted by the fact that, after his release under royal pardon, his personal adherents in the Commons proved numerous enough to disgrace their party and their country by procuring a pension of three hundred a year for perhaps the most infamous wretch who ever disgraced human nature. The dispute is of importance because it has been suggested that to the bitterness of feeling engendered by it was due the subsequent quarrel between the two Houses over the succession clauses in the Bill of Rights. At the end of this famous enactment--the statutory affirmation of the claims formulated by the Convention in the Declaration of Right--it had been proposed at William's suggestion that to the several enumerated reversions of the British Crown a further remainder should be added. In the Declaration, as will be remembered, the crown was settled, after the death of the King or Queen, upon the survivor, and after the death of such survivor upon the heirs of Mary, failing whom upon Anne and her heirs, failing whom upon the issue of William by any other wife than Mary. It appearing by no means improbable, having regard to the fact that the King and Queen were childless, and that Anne had repeatedly failed to rear the children to whom she had given birth, that there might be a failure of all the named reversioners, and that the otherwise legal right of some Catholic prince might thereupon come into conflict with the statutory exclusion of Catholic sovereigns, William proposed to entail the crown after the last mentioned limitation upon an undoubted Protestant, Sophia of Hanover, granddaughter of James I., and her issue, being Protestants. That the proposal was a well-conceived one is evidenced by the fact that it was actually adopted by Parliament in the succeeding reign; but though the Lords to whom it was submitted by Burnet accepted it unanimously, the Commons would have none of it. The irritation left by the Oates quarrel may in part have accounted for this, but Macaulay attributes too childish a temper to the Lower House in implying as he does that ill-humour is the sole explanation of their resistance. They in fact alleged several grounds of objection of unequal weight, but of which one at least has every appearance of _bona fides_, viz. that the mentioning of the House of Hanover would give an opportunity to foreigners of intermeddling too far in the affairs of the nation. But whatever the excuse, we can readily imagine that William regarded the action of the Commons as purely factious, and although the birth at this juncture of another son and heir to the Princess Anne deprived the succession dispute of its urgency, the cool-headed Dutchman can hardly but have been impressed with the keenness of that political strife which could keep the two branches of the legislature asunder when the cost of their dissension was the postponement of the greatest statutory a.s.sertion of their liberties since Magna Charta. For as a consequence of the irreconcilable dispute on the succession clause, the Bill of Rights had of course to be dropped; and between this date and the 20th of August, when Parliament was prorogued, the breach between William and the Whigs was still further widened by the rancour with which they pursued their political enemies, and resisted the attempts of the King to procure a statutory amnesty for past political offences. Impartiality was easier of course for him than them, but William's natural affinities of mind and politics cannot but have been rather with the Whigs than the Tories, and the steadiness of purpose with which he persisted in his patriotic though hopeless attempt at combining representatives of both political parties in his councils is, upon any view of the matter, highly honourable to him. It was the Whigs who from the first made the experiment hopeless, and who finally determined its failure. We owe them the English Const.i.tution, but we owe them also, at any rate in the rigid inflexible shape which it has since a.s.sumed, that _genius vultu mutabilis albus et ater_, the English party-system.

Parliament met again after a two months' recess on the 19th of October, and seemed at first disposed to act with somewhat more of unity in support of the Executive. They unanimously affirmed their determination to a.s.sist the King in the reconquest of Ireland, and in a vigorous prosecution of the war with France, for which purposes they voted an extraordinary supply of two millions, a portion of which it was at first proposed, on principles which the enactors of the Bill of Rights (pa.s.sed this session without William's suggested amendment) had inherited in a slightly modified form from the signatory of Magna Charta, to raise by a special tax upon Jews. Supplies voted, however, disunion recommenced.

The Whigs had come back from their short holiday more bloodthirsty than ever. Beginning with a legitimate cause of complaint against the administration in respect of the mismanagement of the war in Ireland, where the whole organisation of the commissariat seems to have been almost of a Crimean inefficiency, they easily converted this just grievance into a general protest against the presence of Tories in the Government. An attempt was made to induce William to say by whose advice he had employed Henry Shales, the knavish Commissary-General, to whom the scandal was mainly if not wholly due--the object of course being to found an accusation against some one or other of the Tory officials to whom Shales's retention in his post was a.s.sumed to be due. It would have been enough for William to reply that he found the man Commissary on his accession, and simply continued him in office. He refused to gratify the malicious curiosity of the address presented to him on the subject, though he a.s.sented very readily to another for the appointment of a commission to examine into the state of affairs in Ireland.

The Tories were next destined to cross the sorely-troubled king by the resistance which they offered to him on a delicate question connected with the provision for his sister-in-law. On the vote of the Civil List, and the question arising under it as to the establishment of the Princess Anne, it had been originally proposed by William that he himself should undertake this charge out of his own revenues; but through the instrumentality of the Churchills a strong party was formed among the Tories to insist upon Anne having a settlement independent of the Crown. Seventy thousand a year was the (for those days) extravagant sum which they demanded, and which proved too much even for an indulgent House of Commons to grant. The vote was reduced to 50,000, and though William's dislike to the idea of a parliamentary settlement upon his sister-in-law induced him to raise his own original offer of 30,000 to 50,000 Anne still held out, and a yearly income of the amount last mentioned was accordingly secured to her for life by Act of Parliament.

In none of the parts played by the various actors in this little political drama (the sequel to which was the permanent estrangement of the Queen and King from the Princess) is it easy to discern the promptings of any public principle, or indeed of any decorously avowable motive whatever. The Tories would seem to have been wholly swayed either by party and ecclesiastical prepossessions, or by personal interests of a lower kind--either by sentimental sympathy with a High Churchwoman, or by a practical eye to the Marlborough gold. As to William it was eminently natural that he should wish to retain at least _one_ string of this puppet of the Churchills in his own hands; as natural as that the Churchills themselves should wish to deprive him of it, and that the puppet herself should respond to the vigorous pulling of the strings which they already held. Neither of the two latter parties would probably have cared to allege any public motive for their behaviour in the transaction. It is to be presumed, however, that William would have done so if he could; and it is at least noteworthy that the only objection which he seems to have taken to Anne's parliamentary settlement affords no logical support to his own alternative proposal. That Anne should have her income settled on her for life, while his was only voted to him annually, was doubtless a just ground of complaint; but the proper redress of the anomaly would have been to subject his sister-in-law's income like his own to the annual revision of the House of Commons. The fact that the King was dependent upon Parliament could be no reason for making the Princess dependent not upon Parliament, but upon the King.

Meanwhile the session wore on, and William's cherished project of an Act of Indemnity was no nearer realisation. He had earnestly recommended it to Parliament in the Speech from the Throne, but nothing was further from the hearts of the dominant party in the Commons than the idea of amnesty. They seemed bent on a.s.suring themselves the tranquil exit of Marshal Narvaez, who died in peace with all mankind by dint of leaving himself no enemies to forgive. An Indemnity Bill was for form's sake brought in at the beginning of November, but no progress was made with it. Proscription took the place of purgation. Lords Salisbury and Peterborough, Sir Edward Hales, and others, were marked out for impeachment and summoned according to their status to the bar of one or the other House. The Lords appointed a committee to inquire into the judicial murders of Russell and Sidney, and Sir Dudley North and Lord Halifax were cited before this body to answer for their shares, real or alleged, in these dark transactions. John Hampden, a grandson of the greater John, was conspicuous for the violence of his hostility to the official Tories, and by his instrumentality a committee was appointed to prepare an address to the King to remove the authors of the late failures and to appoint "unsuspected persons" to the management of affairs. The address, however, presented by Hampden was sharply criticised for the violence of its language, and the House of Commons ultimately laid it aside. So plainly, indeed, was the Whig party now losing ground in that House, and so grave had become their apprehensions of declining popularity in the country, that with a view of at least recovering their position at the polling-booths they resolved upon one of the boldest and most unscrupulous strokes of party tactics which our history records. Into a Bill then before the House for restoring the charters to these corporations which had surrendered them to the Crown, they introduced a clause excluding from munic.i.p.al office all persons who had been implicated in the surrenders of such charters--or, in other words, all Tories, thus designing to fill the munic.i.p.alities with Whig office-bearers and to secure the control of the elections to the Whig party. Smuggled into the Bill in a House half depleted of its members by the approach of Christmas, it needed a vigorous whip of the Tories to procure the rejection of this clause by a narrow majority; and William's disgust at this manuvre was further intensified by the attachment to his much-desired Indemnity Bill of a bill of pains and penalties against political delinquents. So acute at this moment became his chagrin and disappointment at the condition of English politics that he was strongly tempted to wash his hands of the whole distasteful and thankless business, and he was with difficulty prevailed upon by his ministers to abandon his design of bidding adieu to the country which he had come to deliver and retiring to his native land. Dissuaded from this, he resolved that he would at least reduce Ireland to submission if he had failed to compose the quarrels of his Parliament; and he let it be known that he was about to quit the capital for the headquarters of his army in Ulster. But against this, too, the Whigs vehemently protested. An address deprecatory of the project was said to be preparing; and William, his patience exhausted by this last sally of faction, determined to appeal to the good sense and patriotism of the country.

Accordingly, on the 27th of January, after having in a speech from the throne announced his resolve to go to Ireland in person, "and with the blessing of G.o.d Almighty endeavour to reduce that kingdom, that it may no longer be a charge to this," the King, to the high satisfaction of the Tories and the proportional discomfiture of the Whigs, proceeded to prorogue Parliament with a view to its early dissolution.

CHAPTER VIII

1690-1691

Parliament of 1690--Tory majority--Settlement of the royal income--Case of the Princess Anne--The "Act of Grace"-- Detection of Preston's conspiracy--William's departure for Ireland--Battle of the Boyne--Battle of Beachy Head-- Marlborough's Irish campaign--Session of 1690.

The elections were contested with the utmost energy of party spirit.

Both Whigs and Tories strove their hardest for the victory, but the policy of the King's appeal to the country was justified by the success of the latter. A Tory majority was returned to the House of Commons, and William felt that there was now at last a fair prospect of his effectually mediating between factions. To have replaced a party to whom he owed everything by a party who owed everything to him was undoubtedly a great step towards the attainment of his ends. He had at least secured a majority who could affect no right to dictate his policy, and had reduced those who could and did advance this pretension to a minority.

His first act was to remodel his Ministry. Halifax resigned the Privy Seal, which was placed in commission; Danby, who had been raised at the distribution of honours accompanying the coronation to the Marquisate of Caermarthen, became Lord President; Sir John Lowther, First Lord of the Treasury--not then, as now, the chief office in the Administration.

Whigs and Tories were still mingled in the Government, but no longer in the old proportions.

On the 20th of March the new Parliament met, and the King addressed it in a speech in which he announced his intention of proceeding to Ireland as soon as might be, and recommended to the prompt attention of the two Houses the question of the settlement of the royal revenue and of the enactment of an amnesty. In the former of these matters their action was more conformable to sound const.i.tutional principle than agreeable to the King. In addition to the hereditary revenues which had pa.s.sed with the crown to William and Mary, the Commons would only agree to settle absolutely upon the King and Queen about one third of the fiscal revenues which had been a.s.sured to the last two sovereigns for the term of their lives. That portion of the excise, estimated at 300,000, which had been settled upon James II. for life, was now settled upon William and Mary for their joint and separate lives. But, on the other hand, the customs duties, amounting to 600,000, which had been settled for life on Charles and James successively, were granted to the Crown for a term of only four years. This restriction, in which Whigs and Tories concurred, was not unnaturally displeasing to a sovereign who justly valued himself on the ability, integrity, and thrift which made him, as he conceived, at once the most efficient and the most trustworthy steward of the national resources; but that he should have resented the action of Parliament in this matter not merely as a limitation upon the free play of his policy, but as a personal slight to himself, instructively ill.u.s.trates the very limited extent to which the principles of the British Const.i.tution, as we now know it, had established themselves in the joint recognition of the sovereign and the legislature. If there was one principle more inevitably implied in the Revolution that William had headed than another, it was that no personal claims of any individual sovereign could be allowed either to suspend or in any degree to qualify the general rule of parliamentary control. Had William contended, whether reasonably or unreasonably, that the restraint placed on him by Parliament was more severe than needed to be imposed upon _any_ sovereign, his position would have been a defensible one; but his complaint, as Burnet testifies, was that the Commons were showing an undue and ungenerous jealousy of their particular sovereign for the time being. His claim to enjoy the same amount of freedom as his predecessor had abused was founded simply on the fact that James was James and that he was William; and that was obviously one of these circ.u.mstances of which the administrators of a general rule, intended to apply to any number of future Jameses and Williams, could not possibly take into account. Had this general rule been recognised with anything approaching to its acceptance in these days, it is impossible to suppose that so clear and fair an intelligence as William's could have missed its application to himself.

No doubt it may have caused him some irritation to observe with what rapidity the coalition of Whigs and Tories, which had formed for the purpose of limiting his independence, dissolved again when that work was done. In a few weeks the two parties were as fiercely at odds as ever upon a Whig Abjuration Bill, the main object of which, though in one quite indefensible clause it went far beyond this, was to impose a test which the official Tories could not swallow, and so to drive them from office. It was not enough that a man should have sworn allegiance to King William; he must also expressly abjure allegiance to King James.

Who knew but that he might have taken the former oath in some non-natural sense or with some mental reservations? And though the answer seemed obvious that he might take the latter in the same sense and with the same reservations, the Bill was prosecuted to its rejection in the House of Commons by a majority of thirty-three. An Abjuration Bill of a somewhat less stringent kind was then introduced into the House of Lords, the debate upon which William personally attended. He had let it be known, however, that he was opposed to the former measure, and it is probable that he had no great liking for the latter. Anyhow, it underwent so much mutilation in committee that its authors did not care to persevere with it.

The Tory majority, however, was soon after employed to an even more useful purpose in the final accomplishment of William's policy of pacification. Resolved that on this occasion the measure of indemnity should not be defeated by delay, the King submitted it personally to the Upper House in the form of an Act of Grace for political offences--a proceeding which, according to const.i.tutional practice, abridged its deliberative stages in each House of Parliament to a single reading.

Introduced under such auspices, and a.s.sured of the support of a party always dominant in the Upper House, and now possessing a majority in the Lower, it pa.s.sed without any opposition into law, and is undoubtedly ent.i.tled to take its place among the most honourable and statesmanlike acts of William's career. Its value as a political precedent was scarcely capable of exaggeration even by Macaulay; and if he somewhat inordinately applauds the enlightened clemency which it was as easy for any brave and dispa.s.sionate foreigner to recommend as it was difficult for English parties embittered by the mutual wrongs of a generation of conflict to accept, it would be falling into the converse error to insist on any serious qualification of the historian's praises.

William's great qualities were his own; they must at least divide the credit of his high-minded and sagacious policy with the accident of his antecedents in his own country and of his position in ours; nor would it be gracious to attempt too nice an apportionment of the shares.

Impatience to proceed to Ireland had probably something to do with the expeditious form of procedure adopted by the King in the case of the Indemnity Act. On the 20th of May it became law. On the same day William informed the Houses that his departure for the seat of war could be delayed no longer; and after having given his a.s.sent to an Act empowering the Queen to administer the government during his absence, he prorogued Parliament until the 14th of July. Then, having appointed from the list of Privy Councillors a small interior Council of Nine to advise the Queen, and having delayed no longer than was necessary to place in their hands the threads of a newly-discovered conspiracy,[12] William took a tender farewell of his wife, and set forth on the strange errand of defeating the army, if not destroying the life, of his wife's father.

"G.o.d send," he exclaimed, "that no harm may come to him." His anxiety on this score for the Queen's sake was painful; but otherwise, though he belonged to that order of brave men whose spirits are fortified rather than exhilarated by danger, he was cheered by the approach of the hour of action. Ireland in the hands of a hostile army, the sh.o.r.es of England threatened by a hostile fleet, a dangerous conspiracy only detected on the eve of success, a formidable insurrection imminent in the country he was leaving behind him, he could still say to Burnet--"As for me, but for one thing I should enjoy the prospect of being on horseback and under canvas again. For I am sure that I am fitter to direct a campaign than to manage your Houses of Lords and Commons."

On the 14th of June he landed at Carrickfergus, and immediately set out for Belfast to take over the command from Schomberg. All Ulster rose with enthusiasm to receive him, and the soldiers, whom treachery and incompetency had been sacrificing by the hundred to the ravages of disease and privation, took heart once more. After ten days spent in concentrating his forces at Loughbrickland, William started southward at the head of 36,000 men. Two days after his nephew's landing James had left Dublin to lead his troops to Dundalk with the view either of giving battle at that point, or merely, as has been suggested, of eating up the country between the capital and the invading army, so as to impede its advance by difficulties of supply. But if the former were the original object of the movement it was soon abandoned. When William's army approached Dundalk James fell back upon Ardee; and the former still pressing southwards, the latter still continued his retreat, until the pursuer was brought to a halt on the morning of the 30th of June by the halt of the pursued, and the English and Irish armies at last looked each other in the face across the now historic waters of the Boyne.

Lauzun, who had succeeded De Rosen in the command of James's forces, was a courtier rather than a general, but the position he had here taken up, behind entrenchments and with a river in front, was strategically a strong one--so strong indeed that the veteran Schomberg doubted his master's wisdom in resolving upon an immediate attack. But William, as he had told the Ulster men, had not come to Ireland to "let the gra.s.s grow under his feet." He had the advantage in numbers; the advantage in generalship; above all, the advantage in the quality of his troops, who, if but few of them were as good as the trained French soldiers of his adversary, were none of them so bad as the rapparee Irish levies who formed the bulk of James's forces. The day pa.s.sed in an exchange of shots across the river, from one of which William had well-nigh lost his life. Having sat down to breakfast somewhat close to the brink of the Boyne, he attracted the attention of the Irish sentries on the opposite sh.o.r.e. Two field-pieces were planted opposite to him, and, on his rising and remounting his horse, were discharged at the group of which he was the centre. The first shot killed a man and two horses at some distance from him; the second, better aimed, struck the river bank and grazed the King's shoulder in its ricochet, inflicting a slight flesh wound. His staff thronged anxiously about him, but William, in his usual dry and stoical fashion, relieved their fears. He was unharmed, he told them, but "there was no need for any bullet to come nearer." His wound was dressed, and he remained in the saddle till nightfall. At nine o'clock he held a council of war, and, against the advice of Schomberg, declared his determination of effecting a pa.s.sage of the river on the following day. Unable to dissuade his master from the rash project, as he deemed it, the veteran general urged that at least a portion of the army should be sent up the stream at midnight to Slane Bridge, and crossing it at that point, should be in readiness either to a.s.sist them in the event of their attack being unsuccessful, by a diversion in the rear of James's army, or, in case the river should have been carried, to cut off the retreat of the Irish by the pa.s.s of Duleek. This plan, which, if adopted, would probably, as one of William's biographers points out, have ended the campaign at a stroke, was rejected: why, does not very clearly appear. The tactics were such as might have been thought likely to commend themselves to William, and he could apparently have well spared the men to execute them. It is said by the biographer above referred to that the plan was opposed "by the Dutch generals"; but it is not impossible that the objection may have really come from the King himself, and have been founded not on strategical but on political considerations. William, as we know, was especially solicitous about his father-in-law's life, and not perhaps suspecting how well it would be cared for by its owner, whom he must have remembered to have once been brave, he may have rejected Schomberg's scheme for its very completeness, and because he not unnaturally a.s.sumed that in cutting off the retreat of James's army he would be cutting off the retreat of James himself. The too complimentary a.s.sumption that the royal general would be last rather than first in the flight had yet to be reb.u.t.ted by events. But whatever the reason, the Marshal's plan was rejected; he retired, chagrined and hurt, from the council, and the last night of the old soldier's life was spent, it is melancholy to think, in displeasure with the master whom he had so long and faithfully served.

The morning of the 1st of July broke fair, and a little after sunrise the English army advanced in three divisions to the attack. The right under the younger Schomberg, a.s.sisted by the Earl of Portland and James Douglas, was detailed for the same operation which the Marshal would have had executed four hours earlier, and by a surprise. Having marched a few miles up the river to Slane Bridge, and finding there but one regiment of Irish dragoons, they easily beat them back, crossed the bridge, and made good their footing on the southern bank of the Boyne.

Lauzun, apprehensive for his command of the pa.s.s of Duleek, had detached the best of his troops--his own countrymen--to resist the further advance of the English right; and the centre and left of William's army were opposed at the lower fords by the Irish Catholics alone. Between them and the Dutch Guards, the French Huguenots, the men of Londonderry and Inniskillen, it was _impar congressus_ indeed.[13] Schomberg in command of the centre took the water at the ford of Old Bridge. William at the head of the left wing, consisting entirely of cavalry, made for a more difficult and dangerous crossing lower down. At one point only does the pa.s.sage of the river appear to have been for more than a moment doubtful. The Danes and Huguenots under Cambon and Caillemot were set upon in the act of landing by the Irish cavalry under Richard Hamilton; the former were driven back again into the water, and the latter, unarmed with pikes, began to give ground. The conflict raged hotly for a short s.p.a.ce at the southern exit of the ford; Caillemot fell mortally wounded; the whole brigade was wavering; when old Schomberg, who had been watching the action from the northern bank, dashed impetuously into the river. "_Allons, Messieurs!_" he cried to the Huguenots, as he pointed to the French Catholics in James's ranks, "_voila vos persecuteurs!_" As he uttered the words a small band of Irish hors.e.m.e.n came galloping in upon the main body, the Huguenots, mistaking them for friends, having allowed them to pa.s.s. In the confused melee which followed the Marshal was surrounded; he received two sabre cuts on his head, and a musket shot, said in one account to have been fired in a fatal mistake "by one of his own men," laid him dead upon the ground.

The arrival of William, who had with difficulty forced his way across through the strongly flowing tide, at once decided the doubtful struggle. "Men of Inniskillen, what will you do for me?" was his inspiriting question to the sorely pressed Protestants of Ulster; and drawing his sword with an arm yet stiff from the wound of the previous morning, he led his Dutch Guards and Inniskilleners against the still unbroken Irish centre. Ulstermen and Hollanders vied with each other in steadiness and valour; Schomberg's cavalry came opportunely to their support; De Ginkell's horse effected as timely a diversion on the enemy's left. Hamilton and his riders being thus driven back, the heart of the defence was broken, and after one more brief stand at Plottin Castle, where the Inniskilleners were temporarily checked and had again to be rallied, and where Hamilton was wounded and made prisoner, the defeat of the Irish army became a rout, and their retreat a flight.

James, who had watched the battle from the hill of Donore till it went against him, had already hurried through the pa.s.s of Duleek, and was making the best of his way to Dublin. His army, now a broken and confused ma.s.s of fugitives, struggled after him through the defile. The battle of the Boyne was won.

The victory, though not so immediately decisive as it might have been if Schomberg's plan had been adopted, was practically fatal to the Jacobite cause. Drogheda surrendered the next day. James, who had reached Dublin on the evening of the battle, quitted it the day after for ever. On the 3d of July he reached Waterford, whence he embarked on board a French frigate and sailed for Brest. Lauzun and Tyrconnel collected their straggling forces as best they could, and, evacuating the Irish capital immediately after James's flight, marched westward with the design of reorganising resistance at such still remaining strongholds of the deposed monarch as Limerick and Athlone.

William fixed his headquarters at Finglas, near Dublin, but enjoyed no long period of unmixed satisfaction with his victory. The day before the two armies closed upon the Boyne, the French fleet, under De Tourville, had encountered what should have been the combined fleets of England and the States off Beachy Head, but by the supineness or treachery of the English Admiral the Dutch had been left to bear the brunt of the battle alone. After hours of hard fighting they drew off with the worst of the encounter, and Admiral Herbert, destroying some of the Dutch ships, and taking the rest in tow, sailed up the Thames, leaving the enemy in undisputed possession of the Channel. The news of this defeat, and of the alarm for our unprotected coasts which it had occasioned in London, reached William on the 27th of July at Carrick-on-Suir, where he was encamped, after having reduced Waterford. He immediately hurried to Dublin with the intention of embarking to England; but, rea.s.sured by later advices informing him that the French attempt at a descent on the Devonshire coast had proved a failure, he returned to headquarters, and hastened to prosecute the campaign. The glory of the Boyne, however, was destined to be somewhat dimmed before many weeks were past. At Limerick the Celtic Irish showed, with the variability of their unstable race, that they could fight bravely when "i' th' humour." Sarsfield, left in command by the departure in disgust of Lauzun and Tyrconnel, approved himself a leader of vigour and resource. He intercepted and destroyed William's heavier battering-train before it could reach him. The besieged of Limerick, fighting with a desperate courage, which even their women imitated, beat back an a.s.sault of the English forces with much bloodshed, and on the 30th of August, fearing the ravages of disease with the approach of the autumnal rains, William raised the siege of the city and returned to England. The campaign thus left undecided was to be taken in hand by a greater commander than himself.

Landing in Ireland some three weeks later, the Earl of Marlborough gave promise of his future military prowess in the remarkable speed and success of his operations. In five weeks after leaving Portsmouth he had taken Cork and Kinsale, and had not his fast sickening army constrained his retirement, would probably have settled the whole Irish business out of hand. He returned to London to receive from William, who, besides being incapable of jealousy, was in the habit of underrating his own generalship, the graceful compliment that "no officer living who has seen so little service as my Lord Marlborough is so fit for great commands."

On the 2d of November the King once more met his Parliament, and under more favourable auspices than ever before during his reign. The imminent dangers to which the nation had been exposed had brought about a temporary truce between parties; the skill, energy, and valour with which the King had borne his part in averting them had, moreover, united them in a common sentiment of admiration and grat.i.tude. Thanks were voted both to William, and separately to Mary, who had indeed well merited them by the spirit and vigour which she had displayed during the critical days that followed the defeat of Beachy Head. Supplies of unusual magnitude were voted with unusual readiness, and the short session, marked only by an abortive bill for confiscating the property of Jacobites, pa.s.sed tranquilly away. On the 5th of January William thanked the Houses for their supplies, and a.s.suring them, in words on which later events were to place an awkward commentary, that he would not grant away any of the forfeited property in Ireland till they had had an opportunity of declaring their wishes in that matter, he adjourned Parliament, and on the following day he quitted London to return for the first time in two years to his native country.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] The conspiracy known as Preston's--a plan of inviting the French king to land troops in England, and offering to second his efforts by an insurrection, and, if possible, the treacherous surrender of the whole or a part of the British fleet. Clarendon and Dartmouth, with other more or less eminent personages, were implicated in it, including, at least as was suspected, the Quaker, William Penn. The conspirators were betrayed by an accomplice, and some of them sent to the Tower. Lord Preston, a Scotch peer, a ringleader of the conspiracy, was tried and convicted for high treason, but subsequently pardoned.

[13] James's ungenerous reproaches of his defeated troops, and the many French complaints quoted by Macaulay might not in themselves prove conclusively that the Irish showed greater _natural_ cowardice, as distinguished from mere military unsteadiness, than other undisciplined levies. But the mere fact that with all their advantages of position, commanding a river which their adversaries had to cross, they made, with the exception of Hamilton's horse, so miserable an exhibition of themselves, is a clear enough indication of personal deficiencies. It is only fair to remember, however, that the generalship of James's army was beneath contempt. To leave a bridge a few miles above their position unprotected by artillery, and indeed with only a single regiment of cavalry available for resisting its being crossed by a hostile army, is surely the last word of tactical inept.i.tude.

CHAPTER IX

1691-1692

Campaign of 1691 in the Netherlands--Fall of Mons--Disaffection of William's councillors--Conclusion of year's campaign-- Disgrace and dismissal of Marlborough--Ma.s.sacre of Glencoe.

The night of William's arrival off the coast of Holland was wild and stormy; but impatient to be ash.o.r.e, he quitted the ship which had carried him for an open boat, and after a night of extreme danger and hardship, which he pa.s.sed through with his usual fearlessness and stoicism, effected a landing. His welcome among his people was enthusiastic, and his reception by the a.s.sembled notables--electors, princes, dukes, and ministers-plenipotentiary then a.s.sembled in Congress--at the Hague was signally respectful. Those among them in whom the statesman was strongest were no doubt chiefly impressed by his successful elevation of himself to a powerful throne; while to the high aristocratic and monarchical party among them it was sufficient that he filled it by a t.i.tle at least good enough to relieve him of the reproach of mere high-handed usurpation. Each, after his manner, did homage to the qualities of character, or the accidents of birth, which are respectively implied in the two meanings of the word "succeed"; over both alike, however, the ascendency of William was now in all probability much more firmly established. As wielding the power of England he was in a material sense, though not perhaps in any very imposing degree, stronger than he had been; but the accession to his moral prestige from his remarkable achievements, in the field and in the council, of the two previous years was doubtless very great. The banded enemies of the French monarch looked undoubtedly with new feelings upon the head of their coalition.

William addressed the Congress at its opening in a stirring speech in which he impressed on them the necessity of union in counsel and prompt.i.tude in action; and with such effect that the Congress resolved to oppose Louis with an army of 220,000 men, to which William, acting as his own war minister--a function which he a.s.sumed as constantly as that of the conduct of foreign affairs--engaged to contribute a contingent of 20,000. While the Congress, however, were talking their enemy was acting. A heavy blow was dealt at the confederacy by the capture of Mons, which surrendered to the vigorous siege of the French, commanded by the King in person, within a few weeks of the separation of the Congress. On the news of its danger William collected a force with all speed for its relief, but he was too late to save it; and the short period of suspension of hostilities which followed upon this disaster he took advantage of to return to England. His presence there was really more needed than he at the time imagined, for it is probable that at no time during the early years of his reign had he so much reason to distrust the fidelity of so many of his most highly placed servants. To review the intrigues with the exiled monarch, in which men like Marlborough, Russell, G.o.dolphin, and Shrewsbury were at this moment either voluntarily engaged, or being successfully pressed to join, is altogether beyond the scope of this volume. But it may be worth while to interpose one observation here on what appears to me to be a common, and, in a certain sense, a mitigating feature of all these duplicities.

They differ no doubt to a certain extent in depth of moral turpitude one from another, just as the moral characters and motives of those who committed them so differed. The devouring ambition which actuated Marlborough, the disappointed Whiggism which was the dominant impulse with Russell, gave place in a man like G.o.dolphin to mere distrust of the future, and anxiety to provide against the incalculable. But it is only fair to recollect that this last, and for statesmen of that age, most venial motive of action, most probably played a considerable part in all their double-dealing. None of them considered William's position a.s.sured. All perceived that he had so far failed, and all doubted whether he would ever succeed, in winning the affection of the people.

Whether he would succeed in the experiment of governing by his factious and deeply-divided Parliament was, to say the least of it, a question of the gravest uncertainty; and they governed their conduct accordingly. It is not necessary to suppose that because an individual statesman in William's service maintained communication with James's agents with more or less vague promises of a.s.sistance he contemplated any downright betrayal of William's cause. In most cases his deceit was rather of that negative sort which seeks to make to itself friends betimes of the mammon of unrighteousness. The deceiver was anxious in the event of a counter-revolution to stand well with the restored monarch, and intended no further treachery to his existing master than is necessarily involved in the attempt to serve two masters at once.