William the Third Part 3

In May 1691 William returned to Flanders taking Marlborough with him.

The day of that great soldier had not yet come, but though invested with no military command, it should seem that he attended councils of war where his great abilities as a general attracted the notice and admiration of experts. In June the business of campaigning was recommenced in the leisurely and ceremonious manner peculiar to the age, and with that strict attention to the limits of the "season" which in our own day is only bestowed upon the gaieties of London and the sports of the country. From early in June until the arrival of what may be called the "close-time," towards the end of September, the armies of France and of the allies continued to perform their stately military minuet to the high satisfaction of their commanders, but without suffering or inflicting on one another any serious blows.

On the 19th of October William arrived in England, and three days later he opened Parliament. The circ.u.mstances under which he met the Houses were on the whole favourable, and the mood of the Sovereign and Legislature was one of mutual good humour. It is true that the campaign in the Netherlands had been ineffectual, but its failure was more than balanced by successes nearer home. Ireland had been subdued and pacified, the navy of England had recovered its ascendency in the Channel. The King's speech to the two Houses elicited a warm reply, and the large supplies which he had still to demand for the prosecution of continental warfare was granted to him without demur. Nor was the session in other respects one of much difficulty for the King. The House of Commons indeed renewed its complaints of the magnitude of official salaries and fees, but, showing little or no capacity to discriminate between legitimate remuneration for public services and mere corrupt abuses, they naturally failed to agree upon any measure of reform. The Bill for regulating trials for high treason--a measure destined to be a subject of long contention between the two Houses--was introduced for the first time this session, and, pa.s.sing the Commons, underwent in the House of Lords an amendment to which the Lower House refused to a.s.sent.

On the merits of the case it ought undoubtedly to have been adopted, but it happened to touch the royal prerogative, and the Commons made this the excuse for gratifying their not unreasonable jealousy of the exclusive privileges in the matter of justiciability which were possessed by the Peers. They showed no hesitation a little later on in making a distinct encroachment on the royal rights by imposing the salaries of the judges as a permanent charge upon the hereditary revenues of the Crown without the sovereign's consent. On this Bill William exercised for the first time his right of veto. That such first employment of it should have been on a matter touching his own interests, and at the same time affecting the independence of the judicial bench, was unfortunate; but it is impossible to complain of his exerting his const.i.tutional authority in this case to arrest a measure of such a kind as would not, even in our more advanced days, be introduced without the express a.s.sent of the Crown. The "event" of the year 1691 was undoubtedly the political intrigue, the discovery of which led to the dismissal and disgrace of Marlborough. That indefatigable plotter, who was still holding active communication with St. Germains, undertook to move an address in the House of Lords requesting that all foreigners might be dismissed from the service of the Crown. It was said and believed that his object in doing this was to inflame the national and professional jealousies of the country and the army against the Dutch officers in William's service, so that in the event of William declining to act upon the advice of his Parliament, he would find both the people and the soldiery prepared to support him in an ulterior design of deposing the King and placing Anne upon the throne, with himself as mayor of the palace. The plot, however, if plot there was, fell through; and a.s.suming it to have been really conceived, the natural resentment with which it inspired William would of course sufficiently account for the disgrace and dismissal of Marlborough which followed immediately afterwards.[14] The attempt of the half-lunatic, half-villain Fuller to repeat the exploits of Oates, with a trumped-up and promptly disproved charge of conspiracy against many prominent personages, inspired doubts in the public mind as to whether there had ever been any Scotch plot at all.

Here, too,--that is, among the record of the events of the winter of 1691 and the spring of 1692,--seems the most fitting place to take notice of a strange and terrible incident, which, though of little importance from the historical point of view, could on no account be omitted from a biography of William III. On the 13th of February 1692, at five o'clock in the morning, was perpetrated, under circ.u.mstances of signal perfidy and barbarity, the crime known as the Ma.s.sacre of Glencoe--the surprise and slaughter of the chief and thirty-eight men of the Macdonalds by two companies of soldiers, who had been quartered upon the clan for the preconcerted purpose of their extirpation, under the command of Captain Campbell of Glenlyon. It is not necessary, and would here be impossible, to give more than a highly condensed account of the intrigues, amounting almost to conspiracy, among various enemies of the ill-fated clan, which preceded the ma.s.sacre. Suffice it to say that private revenge combined with public policy to suggest the act. It was the joint work of the Earls of Breadalbane and Argyle--hereditary foes of the Macdonalds--and of the Secretary of State for Scotland, Sir John Dalrymple, Master of Stair; but the order upon which this official a.s.sumed to act was signed and countersigned by the King himself. It was in these words: "As for MacIan of Glencoe and that tribe, if they can be distinguished from the other Highlanders, it will be proper for the vindication of public justice to extirpate that set of thieves." The "other Highlanders" from whom they were to be distinguished had, in accordance with a proclamation issued in the autumn of the previous year, made formal submission to the Government and taken the oath of allegiance to the sovereign before the 1st of January 1692. This, by an accident, MacIan had failed to do. He had presented himself on the 31st of December 1691 to the officer in command at Fort William; but, being informed by him that he had no power to administer the oaths, the old chief was obliged to betake himself to Inverary, to be there sworn by the Sheriff of Argyleshire, Sir Colin Campbell of Ardkingla.s.s, who, although the submitted Highlander did not arrive there till the 6th of January, consented, after some demur, to administer to him the oaths. A certificate setting forth the circ.u.mstances was transmitted to the Council at Edinburgh, but was there cancelled for irregularity; and the fact of MacIan's tardy submission does not appear to have been--indeed, we may affirm with confidence that it never was--brought to the knowledge of the King. Acting, however, on the pretended authority of the royal order, the Master of Stair gave directions to the military authorities that "the thieving tribe of Glencoe be rooted out to purpose"; adding in a later despatch to the commander of Fort William: "Pray, when the thing concerning Glencoe is resolved let it be secret and sudden; better not meddle with them than not to purpose;" and again, in a still later communication: "I hope the soldiers will not trouble the Government with prisoners." Acting on these sinister injunctions, Captain Campbell of Glenlyon marched his men to Glencoe, and, pretending that he came as a friend and not as an enemy, quartered them upon the Macdonalds, by whom they were cordially received and hospitably entertained. After a twelve days' sojourn among the clan, Glenlyon received orders from his superior officer to proceed to his b.l.o.o.d.y work, and at five in the morning of the 13th of February the soldiers fell upon their unsuspecting hosts in their sleep. The ma.s.sacre, however, was less skilfully executed than it had been cunningly planned. The greater portion of the Macdonalds, including the sons of the chief, effected their escape; but MacIan himself, with his wife and thirty-eight of his clansmen, including some women and children, were ruthlessly murdered.

As many more, in all probability, fell victims to the rigours of a Highland winter in their attempted flight. In those days of slow communication it was long before the story of the savage deed became known, or at least before it was recognised as possessing a more trustworthy character than the ordinary Jacobite fables of the day; and it was eagerly caught up, of course, by the political enemies of the King and the Government. History has acquitted William of all complicity with the crime in the precise form in which it was committed, as indeed it would only be reasonable to acquit any ruler possessing, we will not say common humanity, but the common instincts of the soldier. But Burnet's attempt to exonerate his master on the plea of having signed the order of "extirpation" through inadvertence, and Macaulay's half-suggestion that it was his general incuriousness in Scotch affairs which made him Stair's unquestioning instrument in the matter, must be alike dismissed. It was not William's practice to affix his signature to public doc.u.ments of which he knew not the purport; and the mere fact that the Macdonalds of Glencoe were excepted by name from the submitted clans, and with the careful proviso that the proposed measure should only be taken against them "if they could well be separated from the rest," seems to afford sufficient proof that to this particular matter of Scotch administration, at any rate, his attention was specially called.

There is, in short, no good reason to doubt that when William signed the order for the "extirpation" of the Macdonalds he meant them to be extirpated. He treated his act as equivalent to the issue of one of those "letters of fire and sword" which in those wild days of Highland history formed a recognised instrument of police. He would undoubtedly have been quite prepared to hear that a regiment had been marched into the valley of Glencoe, had put the contumacious clansmen (as he believed them to be) to the sword, and left their village a heap of smoking ruins. As undoubtedly he was _not_ prepared to hear that a body of soldiers had quartered themselves on the clan under pretence of amity, and had treacherously slaughtered them at unawares. But though it is likely enough that when he did hear of this he was disgusted with the unsoldierly cowardice of the proceeding, we should mistake both the man and the time in supposing that he viewed it with the horror and detestation which in our own days it excites. He regarded it, so far as one can judge, as a mere blundering excess of duty and nothing more.

Four years later, when an inquiry was inst.i.tuted into the matter by the Scotch Parliament, he showed no disposition to press it forward;[15] and later on, when a commission reported that the affair of Glencoe was a murder for which the Master of Stair was primarily responsible, he steadily declined to inflict any further penalty on the chief culprit than he had already suffered in his dismissal from office. Burnet's excuse for William that he was alarmed at finding how many men it would be necessary for him to punish for the ma.s.sacre is, as Macaulay rightly says, no justification for his screening the one criminal whose case was so easily distinguishable from the others, and whose guilt was so much more heinous than theirs. It is idle, in short, to deny that in the matter of the Glencoe Ma.s.sacre William incurred something of the responsibility of an accessory after the fact.

FOOTNOTES:

[14] The whole affair is still surrounded with obscurity. At least half a dozen conflicting explanations of Marlborough's fall are in existence, and from the same hand--that of Burnet. It cannot be said that the conspiracy theory, which Macaulay of course adopts, is in itself at all improbable.

[15] Macaulay, in that injudicious spirit of special pleading which is often so damaging to his hero, says that the King, "who knew little and cared little" about Scotland, "_forgot_ to urge the commissioners." As if a king would be likely to "forget" an inquiry as to whether one of his secretaries of state had or had not been guilty of murder.

CHAPTER X

1692-1693

Gloomy European prospects--Campaign of 1692 in the Netherlands--Defeat of Steinkirk--Attempt of Grandval --Session of 1692--Place Bill and Triennial Bill-- Campaign of 1693--William outwitted by Luxembourg-- Defeat of Landen--Session of 1693-94--Louis's overtures of peace.

Never perhaps in the whole course of his unresting life were the energies of William more severely taxed, and never did his great moral and intellectual qualities shine forth with a brighter l.u.s.tre, than in the years 1692-93. The great victory of La Hogue and the destruction of the flower of the French fleet did, it is true, relieve England of any immediate dread either of insurrection or invasion, and so far the prospect before him acquired a slight improvement towards the summer of 1692. But this was the only gleam of light in the horizon; elsewhere the darkness gathered more thickly than ever as the months rolled on. The years 1692 and 1693 were years of diplomatic difficulties and military reverses--the one encountered with unerring sagacity and untiring patience, the other sustained with a n.o.ble fort.i.tude. The great coalition of Powers which he had succeeded in forming to resist the ambition of Louis was never nearer dissolution than in the spring of 1692. The Scandinavian states, who had held aloof from it from the first, were now rapidly changing the benevolence of their neutrality into something not easily distinguishable from its reverse. The new Pope Innocent XII. showed himself far less amicably disposed towards William than his two predecessors. The decrepitude of Spain and the arrogant self-will of Austria were displaying themselves more conspicuously than ever. Savoy was ruled by a duke who was more than half suspected of being a traitor. Out of materials so rotten and so ill-a.s.sorted as these had the one statesman of the whole group to build up and maintain the barrier which he was bent on erecting against the inroads of France. By what incessant toil and unfailing tact, with what insistences here and concessions there, with what appeals to the vanity of this potentate, the bigotry of that, the cupidity of the third, and the apprehensions of all, he succeeded in keeping them side by side and with their faces to the common enemy it would be impossible to describe, in a manner at all worthy of the subject, within the s.p.a.ce at my command. Suffice it to say that William did succeed in saving the league from dissolution, and in getting their armies once more into the field. But not, unfortunately, to any purpose. The campaign of the present year was destined to repeat the errors of the last, and these errors were to be paid for at a heavier cost. Mons had fallen in 1691, through the delays and mismanagement of the allied armies; and in 1692 a greater fortress than Mons was to share its fate. The French king was bent upon the capture of the great stronghold of Namur, and the enemy, as in the case of Mons, were too slow in their movements and too ineffective in their dispositions to prevent it. Marching to the a.s.sault of the doomed city, with a magnificence of courtly pageantry which had never before been witnessed in warfare, Louis sat down before Namur, and in eight days its faint-hearted governor, the nominee of the Spanish viceroy of the Netherlands, surrendered at discretion. Having accomplished, or rather having graciously condescended to witness the accomplishment of this feat of arms, Louis returned to Versailles, leaving his army under the command of Luxembourg. The fall of Namur was a severe blow to the hopes of William, but yet worse disasters were in store for him. He was now pitted against one who enjoyed the reputation of the greatest general of the age, and William, a fair but by no means brilliant strategist, was unequal to the contest with his accomplished adversary. Luxembourg lay at Steinkirk, and William approaching him from a place named Lambeque, opened his attack upon him by a well-conceived surprise which promised at first to throw the French army into complete disorder. Luxembourg's resource and energy, however, were equal to the emergency. He rallied and steadied his troops with astonishing speed, and the nature of the ground preventing the allies from advancing as rapidly as they had expected, they found the enemy in a posture to receive them. The British forces were in the front, commanded by Count Solmes, the division of Mackay, a name now honourable for many generations in the annals of continental, no less than of Scottish warfare, leading the way. These heroes, for so, though as yet untried soldiers, they approved themselves, were to have been supported by Count Solmes with a strong body of cavalry and infantry, but at the critical moment he failed them miserably, and his failure decided the fortunes of the day. After a desperate struggle, in which they long sustained the attack of the French household troops, the flower of Louis's army, Mackay's division began to give way. But no effective help arrived from Solmes. His cavalry could not act from the nature of the ground, and he refused to devote his infantry to what he declared was useless slaughter. The division was practically annihilated. Its five regiments, "Cutts's, Mackay's, Angus's, Graham's, and Leven's, all," as Corporal Trim relates pathetically, "cut to pieces, and so had the English Life-guards been too, had it not been for some regiments on the right, who marched up boldly to their relief, and received the enemy's fire in their faces, before any one of their own platoons discharged a musket." Bitter was the resentment in the English army at the desertion of these gallant troops by Count de Solmes, and William gave vent to one of his rare outbursts of anger at the sight. We have it indeed on the authority above quoted--unimpeachable as first-hand tradition, for Sterne had heard the story of these wars at the knees of an eye-witness of and actor in them--that the King "would not suffer the Count to come into his presence for many months after." The destruction of Mackay's division had indeed decided the issue of the struggle. Luxembourg's army was being rapidly strengthened by reinforcements from that of Boufflers, and there was nothing for it but retreat. The loss on both sides had been great, but the moral effect of the victory was still greater.

William's reputation for generalship, perhaps unduly raised by his recent exploits in Ireland, underwent a serious decline. The French were exultant at the demonstration of his inferiority to Luxembourg, and the victory of Steinkirk inflamed the national pride to an overweening degree.

William's popularity with his own army and people, however, was at this time about to receive one of those friendly "lifts" which his more unscrupulous enemies were continually giving it throughout his life.

Grandval, a French officer, undertook, at the instigation it is said of Barbesieux, the French Minister, and with the connivance of James II., to a.s.sa.s.sinate him, and set out with that purpose, accompanied by two accomplices, for the camp of the allies. Both of these men, however, appear, with an originality and independence of initiative not often found among traitors, to have played him false simultaneously, yet without any collusion with each other. Grandval had not been long in the Netherlands before he was arrested, brought to trial before a court-martial, and, on his own confession, sentenced to death. His statement, attested by the officers const.i.tuting the court-martial, was published immediately after his execution, and the world then learnt that the dying man's meditated crime was, according to his solemn a.s.severation, suggested to him by a minister then, and after the exposure still retained, in the service of Louis XIV.; and that James had signified to him at an interview at St. Germains that he had been informed of the "business" on which he was setting out, and that if Grandval and his companions rendered him that service "they should never want." Neither the French king nor his Minister ever made any reply to Grandval's confession; but James, though he put forth no public disclaimer, denied on this as on other occasions that he had ever partic.i.p.ated in any of the schemes for killing William. Probably the projectors of such schemes were careful never to mention the ugly word a.s.sa.s.sination in the royal ears, so that it might always be possible for his ex-Majesty to a.s.sume that nothing was contemplated but William's "taking-off" in a less serious than the Shakspearean sense. Plots to kidnap the "usurper" were almost as commonly broached as plots to a.s.sa.s.sinate him; and it was convenient that exalted personages should be able to persuade others, if not themselves, that they were thinking only of seizing William's person when their humbler instruments were in reality bent upon taking his life.

Towards the end of October William arrived in England, and was received with an amount of popular acclamation to which the crime of Grandval had contributed more than his own military prowess. In a few days Parliament met, and the King addressed the two Houses in a judicious speech, in which he congratulated them on their great naval victory, condoled with them on their military reverses, referred with concern to the distress occasioned by the failure of the last harvest, and informed them in effect that yet more money would be required for the effective prosecution of the war. The address in reply was amiable enough, but the Parliament, as the event soon proved, was in no very manageable mood.

The confusion of parties caused by William's perseverance in his well-meant attempt at mixed government was now at its height, and the state of things created was undoubtedly not favourable either to executive or legislative efficiency. An a.s.sembly divided as was the then House of Commons by two intersecting lines of cleavage, with its Whig and Tory demarcation, traversed by a cross division into "court party"

and "country party," was obviously not a body likely to display much unity and vigour. Jealousy of officialism forbade ministers to reckon on the consentaneous support even of members of their own way of political thinking, while on the other hand party differences prevented the formation of a strong opposition.

The session of 1692 was, however, fruitful both in legislative achievement and in successful legislative effort. In this year was made that valuation for the land-tax, which subsisted until the tax itself was made perpetual and redeemable more than a century afterwards in 1798; and the first loan of one million sterling, contracted by the Government in the name of a National Debt, which has now increased to almost a thousand times that amount. But the measures with which the biographer of William is more directly concerned were the Place Bill and the Triennial Bill. Of both of these legislative projects I shall have more to say hereafter. Here let it be enough to note that the former was lost in the House of Lords by a majority of three votes; and that the latter after pa.s.sing both Houses was held in suspense by William until just the eve of the prorogation, and then vetoed. The occasion is one of special interest to English literature, as it was in reference to this Bill that the King consulted Sir William Temple, whose strong advice to his master to a.s.sent to the Bill was conveyed through the medium of his young secretary Jonathan Swift. After making several ministerial changes, including as the most important the elevation of Lord Somers to the Chancellorship, William prorogued Parliament, and once more, in the perpetual succession of the toils of war to the labours of Government, betook himself to the Netherlands. The outlook of the continental struggle had not improved; and the task before him, both diplomatic and military, was as formidable as ever. He had as usual petty quarrels to compose among the allied Powers, and wounded vanities to soothe, to animate the energies of the lagging, and to keep an eye on the movements of the false. The effort in which he was the least successful was the last mentioned but one; he was unable with all his efforts to collect a force equal to that of Luxembourg. He managed, however, to take the field in greater strength than he had mustered on some previous years, and as Louis had now again put himself, with the usual elaboration of gorgeous ceremony, at the head of his army, William promised himself the satisfaction of looking his lifelong enemy once more in the face upon a battlefield. Louis, however, whether from personal cowardice or from having really contracted under the influence of perpetual adulation a sort of religious reverence for his own life, had none of William's military ardour. He liked directing sieges, but had no taste for commanding in pitched battles. In other words, he preferred those operations of war in which the most adventurous of generals must necessarily remain in the rear to those in which the most cautious of generals may find himself imperatively called upon to go to the front.

He had hoped that the more agreeable form of warfare would be provided for him, and that he would have an opportunity of taking Liege or Brussels as he had taken Ghent. When, however, he found William posted in his path with a considerable if numerically inferior army, his martial ardour underwent a rapid reduction of temperature, and he at once signified his intention of returning to Versailles. The disappointment of Luxembourg, who had a.s.sured him of certain victory over William, was aggravated by the fact that the King insisted on detaching Boufflers with a portion of the army of the Netherlands to reinforce the troops in the Palatinate; which movement having been effected, he went home to Madame de Maintenon.

Luxembourg, however, though reduced in strength, had still the advantage over William in point of numbers, and he succeeded in further increasing the disparity by a feint in the direction of Liege, which deceived William into despatching more than twenty thousand men of his army to protect that city from attack. He was thus left with only fifty thousand men to oppose a force exceeding his own by more than half. His position, however, on the bank of the Gette was a naturally strong one, and by extraordinary efforts with the spade he succeeded in adding most formidably to its strength. On the morning of the 19th of July the men of Luxembourg's army found themselves confronted by a powerful line of earthworks manned by a brave and steady foe. Relying, however, upon a numerical superiority which he rightly regarded as more than counterbalancing William's advantages of position, Luxembourg at an early hour of the morning gave orders for the attack, and the two armies closed in a struggle more b.l.o.o.d.y and obstinate than that of Steinkirk.

For eight hours the battle raged fiercely along the whole line, but most fiercely round the village of Neerwinden on the English right. This, the position of most strategic importance on the field, was disputed with extraordinary fury. Twice did the French troops succeed in making themselves masters of it, and twice were they driven out by the allies, leaving their dead in heaps behind them. At last the household troops, who had done such service at Steinkirk, were sent against this village; it was captured a third time, and this time it was held. William weakened his centre and left in desperate attempts to retake it, but in vain; and at last, as the day was wearing towards the evening, the line of the allies gave way. The French troops poured into and over the entrenchments; the position was captured; nothing remained for the commander of the beaten army but to arrest disorganisation and save retreat from becoming flight. To the moral appeal of the situation William's great nature might be trusted to respond, and it seems to have equally stimulated his strategic capacities. The praise of his famous opponent is sufficient testimony to his skilful conduct of the military operation; the memory of his fiery valour was perpetuated in the traditions of the English army. No doubt it was from some old messmate of Roger Sterne's that the future author of _Tristram Shandy_ gathered the materials of that vivid picture of the retreat across the bridge of Neerspeeken which he has put into the mouth of My Uncle Toby. "The King," Trim reminds his master, "was pressed hard, as your honour knows, on every side of him." "Gallant mortal," cried my Uncle Toby, caught up with enthusiasm, "this moment, now that all is lost, I see him galloping across me, corporal, to the left, to bring up the remains of the English horse along with him to support the right and tear the laurel from Luxembourg's brows if yet 'tis possible. I see him with the knot of his scarf just shot off, infusing fresh spirits into poor Galway's regiment, riding along the line, then wheeling about and charging Conti at the head of it. Brave! brave! by heaven! He deserves a crown!"

With Galway's regiments, we learn from the same tradition, were those of "Wyndham and Lumley." Talmash "brought off the foot with great prudence; but the number of wounded was prodigious, and no one had time to think of anything but his own safety." It is indeed pretty evident that only William's cool heroism saved his army from annihilation. Solmes, the _faineant_ of Steinkirk, was left dead on the field. Galway himself, the refugee Ravigny, was taken prisoner; Sarsfield on the other side received a mortal wound. It was by far the deadliest battle of the whole war, and it is difficult to understand why a blow so crushing should have been so slackly followed up. One cannot help thinking what a French army and a French general would have made of such a defeat inflicted upon the troops of a continental coalition on such a battlefield some hundred years later. But the terrible rapidity of those movements with which, as with hammerstrokes, Napoleon was wont to drive home the nail of victory was then unknown to warfare. Town upon town would probably have fallen after Landen had the fruits of the victory been seized, as they would have been at a later day. But, either through the indolence of Luxembourg or the comparative immobility of a seventeenth-century army, William obtained a priceless respite. He was rejoined by the troops whom the enemy had so fatally decoyed to Liege; and three weeks after his defeat he was once more at the head of an army stronger than he had commanded at Landen. The danger to the allied cause was past.

Luxembourg besieged and took Charleroi for sole trophy of his great victory, and the campaign closed for the year.

On the 31st of October William landed in England, and prepared for a meeting with his Parliament, to which he could hardly have looked forward with much pleasure. He had a bad account to give and receive.

Over the whole Continent, in Spain, Germany, and Italy, as well as Flanders, the allies had met with adverse fortune; at sea the vast "Smyrna fleet" of merchantmen, four hundred strong, had, through the incapacity of our naval commanders, been surprised in the Bay of Lagos by the combined Brest and Toulouse fleets of France, and, its imprudently reduced convoy of twenty English and Dutch sail having been easily mastered, nearly three-fourths of it suffered capture or destruction. His Parliament, however, met him as a matter of fact in a commendably patriotic mood. William made no attempt to ignore the serious losses which the nation had incurred by land and sea, though of the former he said (not perhaps with perfect impartiality towards his own tactical errors) that "they were only occasioned by the great numbers of our enemies, which exceeded ours in all places"; while the latter he described as "having brought great disgrace upon the nation."

And, admitting that the charges of the war had already been very great, "I am yet persuaded," he added, "that the experience of the summer is sufficient to convince us all that to arrive at a good end of it there will be a necessity of increasing our forces both by sea and land." The reply of the Commons was cordial, and manifested no hesitation as to granting the increased supplies; and their patriotic spirit encouraged William to hold his ground on a question in which the minds of the allies were just now about to be exercised. Louis XIV., insatiable in war as he had hitherto been, was beginning to feel that he, and still more that France, had had enough of the struggle. Five years of hostilities carried on in half a dozen quarters of Europe, with a failure of the French harvest and the vintage, had almost prostrated the country. Distress was rife in the provinces; even that most patient of people showed signs of disaffection. Louis made private overtures to the States-General with the intention, of course, of his proposals being brought to the ear of William. Through the neutral King of Denmark he signified his willingness to restore all the conquests he had made during the present war, to renounce his pretensions to the Low Countries, and to agree that the Elector of Bavaria should have the Spanish Netherlands in case of the death of the King of Spain, and that the commercial arrangements of Europe should be put on their old footing. The great _crux_ of the negotiations, and of all negotiations with a similar object, was, and was known to be, the question of the recognition or non-recognition of the _de facto_ King and Queen of England. On this question, so far as we can now judge, the mouth-pieces of Louis gave forth an uncertain sound. The King of Denmark told the allies that he was making efforts to induce the King of France to waive the demand for the restoration of James; the French Amba.s.sador hinted at a compromise. This, it has been suggested, was that "James should waive his rights, and that the Prince of Wales should be sent to England, be bred a Protestant, and, being adopted by William and Mary, be declared his heir." To such an arrangement Macaulay thinks that William would probably have had no objection, but that he "neither would nor could have made it a condition of peace with France, since the question who should reign in England was to be decided by England alone." Undoubtedly William "could" not have independently a.s.sented to a condition which, to acquire the least validity, would have necessitated the statutory revision of the succession settlement, as effected by the Convention and ratified by the Convention Parliament; but there does not seem to be much evidence that he would have a.s.sented to the condition if he could.

There is no trace of any endeavour on his part to sound the chiefs of his parliamentary parties on the subject, and I cannot but think it far more likely that neither in this nor in any other matter of foreign policy was William at all disposed to share any of his discretionary powers in his capacity of virtual Foreign Minister with his Parliament, so long as he could obtain what he wanted from that body without admitting it any more fully to his confidence. His rejection of Louis's overtures, including this offer of compromise, if it was made, was probably not dictated by any high const.i.tutional considerations at all.

He thought, and rightly, that pacific advances made by so haughty an enemy indicated greater exhaustion than had been suspected, and reckoning justly that another year or two of fighting would get him better terms still, he decided that another year or two of fighting there should be. The supplies had been cheerfully voted him, and that was enough. That the Parliament which had voted them had any paramount right to decide whether they would go on voting money or accept Louis's terms almost certainly never entered his mind. To suppose that it did is to attribute to him a theory of the const.i.tution anachronistic by fully fifty years. That such a theory is more or less designedly attributed to him in the above-quoted pa.s.sage from Macaulay appears unquestionable; and the Whig historian's antic.i.p.ation of history in this respect is of a piece with his exaggeration of the permanent significance of the const.i.tutional changes which fall to be treated of in the next chapter.

CHAPTER XI

1693-1694

Formation of the first party Ministry--Reintroduction of the Triennial Bill and its defeat--Of the Place Bill and its veto--Causes of the disallowance--Macaulay's account examined--Campaign of 1694--Death of Mary.

I am now to speak of one of the most important, as it is sometimes regarded, of all the steps made under William's auspices in the development of our parliamentary polity--a step represented as even more influential in fixing and determining that system of strict party government under which the nation is thriving or declining at the present era than even the Revolution itself--the formation of the first Ministry of the modern type. "No writer," says Macaulay in speaking of it, "has yet attempted to trace the progress of this inst.i.tution--an inst.i.tution indispensable to the harmonious working of our other inst.i.tutions. The first Ministry was the work partly of chance and partly of wisdom--not however of that highest wisdom that is conversant with great principles of political philosophy, but of that lower wisdom which meets daily exigencies by daily expedients. Neither William nor the most enlightened of his advisers fully understood the nature and importance of that noiseless revolution--for it was no less--which began about the close of 1693, and was completed about the close of 1696. But everybody could perceive that at the close of 1693 the chief offices in the Government were distributed not unequally between the two great parties, that the men who held these offices were perpetually caballing against each other, haranguing against each other, moving votes of censure on each other, exhibiting articles of impeachment against each other, and that the temper of the House of Commons was wild, ungovernable and uncertain. Everybody could perceive that at the close of 1696 all the princ.i.p.al servants of the Crown were Whigs, closely bound together by public and private ties, and prompt to defend one another against every attack, and that the majority of the House of Commons was arrayed in good order under these leaders, and had learned to move like one man at the word of command."

There are perhaps not many pa.s.sages of the famous history in which its author's love of dramatic ant.i.thesis has displayed itself in a statement more likely to mislead the student. Because the change which took place in the relation of Ministers of the Crown between 1693 and 1696 was a striking one Macaulay cannot resist the temptation of describing it as though it were a final one. In 1693 Ministers in disagreement with each other, in 1696 Ministers in accord with each other--the suggestion of course being that they "lived happily ever afterwards." Certainly no one previously unacquainted with the facts would suppose from this account of them that the first politically h.o.m.ogeneous Ministry was a purely experimental one, and that the experiment was not repeated by William, and never even attempted by his successor, under whom the old system prevailed, though with gradual modification, throughout her reign; that on many later occasions in our history the men in the chief offices of the Government were to be found "caballing" and sometimes even "haranguing" against each other; and, in short, that it was not till far on in the next century that the idea of Ministers being men of like political opinions "bound together by public and private ties," and supported by a majority "arrayed in good order under them, and moving like one man at the word of command," became uniformly and permanently a.s.sociated with the const.i.tution. Yet this is in fact the case. The "lower political wisdom meeting daily exigencies by daily expedients"

did not devise an arrangement calculated to endure for all time; and no one ought to have been more surprised than Macaulay if it had. It met a particular exigency by a particular expedient, and as that particular exigency did not uniformly recur, the particular expedient naturally did not at once stereotype itself in our parliamentary polity. The pure Whig Government of 1696 attained the object of its formation, namely, to carry out his war policy, and pa.s.sed away. William's later ministries were of a mixed character; the ministries of Anne were partly Whig and partly Tory; and the political unity which prevailed in the Walpole Administration was succeeded by a return to the old practice under Pulteney. It was not, as has been said, until well on in the century that it became an admitted political axiom that Cabinets should be constructed upon some bases of political union agreed upon by the members composing the same when they accept office together.

But though it is delusive to represent a mere political experiment as the consummation of a great const.i.tutional change, yet an experiment by which such change was foreshadowed cannot of course be otherwise than deeply interesting. And such undoubtedly is the character of the ministerial reconstruction which took place in 1693. The particular exigency which the expedient was designed to meet is almost patent on the face of the European situation, as it must have presented itself to a statesman of William's views and with William's policy at heart. The one fact that the Whigs were in favour of a vigorous prosecution of the war with Louis on its continental theatre, while the Tories favoured the husbanding of English military resources and the maintenance of a defensive att.i.tude behind our "silver streak," and under the protection of our navy, would undoubtedly have sufficed of itself to determine William's choice of the former party. In all other respects he probably regarded both English parties at this as at all other times of his life with equal indifference--if indeed one should not say with equal aversion. He could have no love for men who, like the Whigs, regarded him as a king of their own making, or who, like the Tories, considered him no king, in the full sense of the word, at all. Whichever of the two English parties were more willing to a.s.sist his efforts for a country which he loved far better than England was virtually a.s.sured of his favour; and though no doubt he believed honestly enough that the interests not only of continental Europe, but of insular England, were identified with those of the United Provinces--though no doubt he honestly regarded Holland as only the vanguard of European and English liberties, menaced by the insatiable ambition of Louis--yet it is impossible to credit him, or any other mortal man in the same situation, with the capacity of impartial judgment on any point at which the interests of England and those of Holland might have diverged. Nor is it, I think, unjust to add that even when the balance of English advantage might have appeared to William himself to incline somewhat against any contemplated course of conduct, he would perhaps have held himself justified in proceeding from contemplation to action. He was in all probability firmly, and one cannot say unreasonably, possessed with the idea that England was largely his debtor and the debtor of his country; and that she should, at least within reason, make sacrifices for the protection of that nation, who and whose Prince had rendered such services to her. Whichever English party showed most disposition, or rather least reluctance, to make common cause with the United Provinces in the defence of Dutch (and therefore of English and European) liberties, became thereby the party of William's choice. No doubt his gradual construction of a pure Whig Ministry was in part dictated by a desire to secure greater stability of counsel and unity of action in the House of Commons. No doubt his laudable experiment of governing by means of both parties had had results with which he could hardly have been satisfied. But he had borne for five years with the parliamentary factiousness which that experiment had undoubtedly tended to aggravate, and there is no visible reason, save that which I have indicated, for his putting an end to the experiment at this particular moment and in this particular way. He had made shift to do without a h.o.m.ogeneous Ministry ever since his accession. If now he needed a Ministry which should be not only h.o.m.ogeneous, but h.o.m.ogeneously Whig, we must look to the exigencies of his continental policy for the cause.

The process, however, of replacing the Tories of the Administration by Whigs was a very gradual one, and it was not of course until it was complete that the Whig party in the House of Commons could be trusted to support the Administration, "right or wrong," as, without much suspicion of satire, we may say to have now become the accepted const.i.tutional practice. Nottingham and the Tory Naval administrators were the first to go, their retirement having been in the one case consequentially, and in the other directly necessitated by the narrow escape of the latter from parliamentary censure in respect of the late naval miscarriages. Russell became First Lord of the Admiralty, and with him Nottingham, who, as Secretary of State, was then responsible for the military service, was of course unable to serve. His place, however, was not immediately filled up, nor was it till the end of the session that any further ministerial changes were made. And this session itself was one of peculiar const.i.tutional interest on other grounds. In the first place the Triennial Bill, vetoed by William in the previous session, was reintroduced, and met with a most unexpected fate. It was brought in this time in the House of Commons, and pa.s.sed through all its stages up to the final one without a division. But the motion that "the Bill do now pa.s.s" was rejected by a majority of ten. The whole affair is involved in much obscurity, and the cause or causes of the unlooked-for rejection of the measure must always remain matter of conjecture.

Macaulay declares its defeat to have been brought about by the instrumentality of the expert parliamentary intriguer Seymour; and as no House of Commons that ever lived is likely to have relished the idea of putting a term to its own existence, it is not difficult to guess the kind of sentiment to which Seymour might have appealed. But one point not unworthy of notice in the matter is that the numbers voting in the division, 146 Noes and 136 Ayes, did not together compose a very full House. They fell short by thirty-two of the numbers who voted in the division by which the second edition of the Triennial Bill, introduced in, and pa.s.sed through, the House of Lords, and sent down to the House of Commons, was rejected a fortnight afterwards. In this case, of course, the adverse majority of 197 were able to allege that they were not opposing the limitation of Parliament, but merely resisting a usurpation of const.i.tutional jurisdiction on the part of the Peers. But it should be observed that this argument does not appear to have produced many defections from the party of the Ayes. They number 127, or only nine short of their original strength; and a.s.suming that these nine votes were transferred to the Noes, it will still leave some forty new votes to be accounted for. It looks rather as if these were the votes of members who would have divided against the Bill if they had dared (and as they did so soon as they got a plausible pretext for doing so), but not daring, consented to a.s.sist in compa.s.sing its rejection by absenting themselves from the division.

The Place Bill, another abortive measure of this session, had a quite different history. It was introduced in much the same shape as in the previous year, and pa.s.sed the Lower House substantially unchanged. In the Lords, however, it underwent a material amendment. As originally drawn it provided that no member of the House of Commons elected after the 1st of January 1694 should accept any place of profit under the Crown on pain of forfeiting his seat, and of being incapable of sitting again in the same Parliament. The Lords, while maintaining the provision for the forfeiture of the seat, introduced words qualifying the acceptor of office to sit in the same Parliament if again chosen as a representative. This amendment the Commons adopted, and the Bill thus modified, having pa.s.sed both Houses, was, somewhat to the surprise of everybody and to the disgust of many people, vetoed by the King. This exercise of the prerogative was received with far less patience than on the two former occasions, and for a few days a serious conflict between the Legislature and the Crown appeared to be imminent. An address of remonstrance was presented to William, who replied in conciliatory language, but without holding out any hopes that his veto would be withdrawn. Another debate of a somewhat excited character followed, but calmer counsels than had at first found favour with the House of Commons ultimately prevailed. A motion to prepare a new representation or remonstrance was rejected by a very large majority, and the Place Bill dropped. The great Whig historian's account of the matter is that the amendment "deprived the Bill of all efficacy both for good and evil"; but that the Commons "so little understood what they were about that, after framing a law, in one view most mischievous"--namely, in respect of its tending to keep the chief Ministers of the Crown out of the House of Commons, "and in another view most beneficial"--namely, as tending to keep subordinate officials out of the House of Commons, they were perfectly willing that it should be "transformed into a law quite harmless and almost useless"; and that William went out of the way to veto this quite harmless and almost useless law, because he "understood the question as little as the Commons themselves."

This is not a very plausible theory; nor does one well see why Macaulay should describe that proviso of a right to re-election--which was afterwards adopted, and which is an essential feature of our still subsisting Act of Anne--as depriving the Bill of nine-tenths of its power both for good and for evil. Surely both King and Parliament might have been credited with knowing their own business a little better than that. It seems reasonable rather to ask ourselves whether the amendment was such as to militate in any serious degree against the legislative object of the Commons, or in any similar degree to disarm the objections which William entertained to the measure. If it did neither of these things, there was nothing paradoxical either in the Commons accepting or the King p.r.o.nouncing his veto upon the Place Bill; and it seems to me to be clear that the amendment did neither of these things in fact. No doubt it was desirable, from the point of view of the majority, that office-holders should cease to sit in Parliament and become incapacitated for re-election; and this on the abstract and general ground that such persons were not sufficiently independent to be able to discharge the functions of legislators with advantage to the country.

So far, then, as the general principle relating to office-holders was concerned, the amendment was opposed to the real wishes of the Commons, and had no reason therefore to provoke the hostility of the King. But there was a specific ground on which the House had cause to dislike office-holders, and a specific cla.s.s of appointments to which this ground applied; and the Bill, even as modified by the Lords' proviso, would have limited the royal influence in respect of these appointments to an extent quite sufficient to account both for the Commons adopting the amendment of the Upper House, and for the King refusing his a.s.sent to the Bill. It would obviously have dealt a heavy, though not, of course, a final, blow to the employment of the patronage of the Crown for the purpose of "managing" the Legislature. It would have made it a far more difficult thing for the Court or the Government to maintain their majority in the House of Commons by what would now be called a corrupt use of its patronage, but what was then regarded, or getting to be regarded--at any rate by the party in power,--as one of the legitimate arts of rule. For whenever the Sovereign or his Ministers endeavoured to convert a hostile into a friendly vote by the bestowal of office upon its possessor, he or they would always have to reckon with the possibility that the const.i.tuents of the bought member might not care to have their interests sold along with their parliamentary representative. They might, and on a question which strongly moved them they very probably would, have expressed their disapproval of his conduct by refusing to re-elect him; in which case the Government would, of course, have found themselves at the end of the transaction with one piece of patronage the less, but not with one vote the more. In a word, the Place Bill, as amended by the Lords, though it would have left untouched the power of the Crown to bring office-holders into Parliament, would materially have impaired its power of turning members of Parliament into office-holders; and apparently it was only because Macaulay viewed the Bill too exclusively in its relation to the former power, and took no account of its bearing on the latter, that he could have regarded it as a measure in which William had no real concern, and which he only vetoed through some vague dislike of it as affecting his prerogative he hardly knew how. So far from this, it seems to me that his objection may well have been a very definite one, and that he perfectly understood, and was not at all disposed to undervalue, the particular exercise of his prerogative which it threatened. For whatever may have been his original or even his persistent repugnance to the acts of parliamentary management by means of parliamentary corruption, he had probably come by this time to regard it as among the inevitable if disagreeable necessities of royal and ministerial policy under the English system of party government.

The close of this session witnessed the virtual completion of the work of ministerial reconstruction on a purely Whig basis. Shrewsbury, who had been offered the Secretaryship of State left vacant by the retirement of Nottingham, after some months of hesitation accepted the office. Trenchard, the other Secretary of State, was also a member of the Whig party. The rising Whig financier, Charles Montague, who had during this session devised and carried out the legislative measure for the establishment of the Bank of England, was for this service elevated to the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Keeper of the Seal was the Whig Somers. The Whig Russell was First Lord of the Admiralty. All the important offices of the State were now in fact in the hands of the Whig party, and William, now fairly embarked upon the experiment recommended by Sunderland, made one last concession to his old policy of balancing one party against the other by a liberal distribution of honours among the displaced Tories.

The military and naval operations of 1694 were marked by none of these successes which catch the public eye, but the year was really one of more moment to the history of the struggle with Louis than at first sight appears. Mismanagement and treachery brought disaster on the expedition against Brest, and the disgrace was certainly not redeemed by the subsequent bombardment and destruction of Dieppe and Havre. But the despatch of Russell's fleet to the Mediterranean yielded solid gains which more than compensated for our losses in the Channel. Russell relieved Barcelona, blockaded Toulon, brought the hostile Italian States to reason, and compelled them, for the first time, to acknowledge William's t.i.tles, reanimated the Duke of Savoy, who had begun to think of a separate peace with France, and, indeed, practically brought the Mediterranean under English maritime control. As a consequence, our commerce, which had been declining ever since the Revolution, began rapidly to revive.

The land campaign, though equally undistinguished by any striking triumph, was no less fruitful in matter for solid satisfaction. An attempt of William to carry the war into the enemy's country was foiled, it is true, by the skill of Luxembourg, who repulsed the advance of the Elector of Bavaria upon French Flanders, and this check was, of course, more important on one side than William's capture of the inconsiderable fortress of Huy was on the other. But in Spain, where Russell's appearance before Barcelona had compelled De Noailles to retreat; on the Rhine, where the Prince of Baden drove back Delorges, and established himself for the summer in Alsace; and in Piedmont, where, in spite of the vacillations of the Duke of Savoy, the French gained no material advantage--the course of events, particularly as contrasted with those of the three previous years, gave ample justification for the words with which William met his Parliament on the 9th of November. "With respect,"

he said, "to the war by land, I think I may say that this year has put a stop to the progress of the French arms." Loyal addresses were returned, and supplies to the amount of five millions were readily voted; but, along with the Supply Bill, the Triennial Bill was again introduced. It was probably intimated to Parliament, through some of the private channels of communication with the Court, that William was not prepared to veto it a second time. The Bill was brought in on the first day of the session, and, together with a Bill settling the Customs on the Crown, received the royal a.s.sent on the 22d of December. November of 1696 was fixed as the limit of the life of the existing Parliament. The Place Bill, vetoed by the King in the previous session, was again introduced, and with exactly the same results as had followed the second attempt to pa.s.s the Triennial Bill. This measure, it will be remembered, after failing to obtain the royal a.s.sent in the session of 1692-3, was defeated in the Commons in 1693-4, and so also it happened with the Place Bill. The inference which I think suggests itself in both cases is that the exercise of the royal veto, though unpopular with the country, was not by any means equally so with the House of Commons; that there were many Tories who were not particularly keen on purging Parliament of office-holders, and not a few Whigs whose zeal for the limitation of its const.i.tutional life was somewhat lukewarm; and that both Whigs and Tories of this order were not sorry to be able to evade their party obligations to vote for these measures by pleading their unwillingness to force the King's hand, and perhaps provoke a const.i.tutional crisis.

The day on which William gave his a.s.sent to the Triennial Bill was to him a day of grave anxiety; and a year fairly prosperous abroad and peaceful at home was to bring him ere its close the heaviest calamity of his life. The illness of the Queen, who had been for two or three days confined to her bed, was on the evening of the 21st of December recognised by her physician as smallpox. A week afterwards, at one in the morning of the 28th of December, she died. William's grief at her loss was uncontrollable, and to all but those, and they were few, who had penetrated the stoicism beneath which he was accustomed to conceal deep feelings, it must have been a strange and moving sight. He remained for days at her bedside scarcely taking food or sleep. He broke out in the presence of Burnet into pa.s.sionate outcries upon his agony at the thought of losing her, and into fervent praises of her love and virtues. "He cried out," says the Bishop, "that there was no hope, and that from being the happiest he was now going to be the miserablest creature on earth. He said that during the whole course of their marriage he had never known one single fault in her; there was a worth in her which n.o.body knew besides himself.... The King's affection was greater than those who knew him best thought his temper capable of; he went beyond all bounds in it; during her sickness he was in an agony that amazed us all, fainting often and breaking out into most violent lamentations; when she died his spirits sank so low that there was great reason to apprehend that he was following her; for some weeks after he was so little master of himself that he was not capable of minding business or of seeing company."

The depth of this affection, moreover, was not disproportioned, as is sometimes the case in examples of conjugal devotion, to the worthiness of the object. Even Evelyn, who was shocked as a Tory and legitimate king's-man by the levity of Mary's behaviour (for which, however, an explanation has been suggested) on her arrival at Whitehall after James's flight, affirms of her that "she was such an admirable woman, abating for taking the crown without a due apology, as does, if possible, outdo the renowned Queen Elizabeth." The comparison, extravagant as it may appear at first sight, is not without some justification in the spirited behaviour of Mary on the great national crisis which occurred during her husband's absence in the Irish campaign. It would be absurd of course to credit Mary with Elizabeth's gifts of statecraft, or with her intellectual capacity in general, but in courage and composure in the presence of danger she was no unworthy successor of that great queen. In William's pa.s.sionate declarations of his debt to her there was no extravagance at all. To him she had been the most affectionate, dutiful, and forbearing of wives, and if her influence over him fell short of retaining his marital constancy, she endeared herself more closely to him on the side of the purer emotions by her magnanimous forgiveness of his errors. It cannot but soften the harsher outlines of our conception of William, and help to supply that human and homely element which is too much wanting in his character, to know that he was capable both of inspiring and reciprocating so true an affection as this.

CHAPTER XII

1695-1697

Campaign of 1695--Capture of Namur by the allies--Dissolution of Parliament--William's "progress"--The elections--New Parliament--Grants to Portland--The a.s.sa.s.sination Plot-- Campaign of 1696--Fenwick's conspiracy--Negotiations with France--Peace of Ryswick.