H. D. Traill

“ Ireland in the hands of a hostile army, the shores 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." ”

“ The young Prince had too much to gain in reputation not to be eager to provoke a battle, and the old soldier too much to lose to be willing to accept one if it could be avoided; but William succeeded in his object. Condé was at first victorious in an encounter between a portion of the two armies, but he imprudently brought on a general battle, which, after raging furiously for a whole day, left both parties to claim the victory—"the allies because they were last upon the field, and the French on the strength of the great number of prisoners and standards they had carried off." ”

“ William's part in the Revolution—Convention declared a Parliament—Oath of Allegiance—Settlement of Civil List—Appropriation Clause—Toleration and Comprehension—Address of the Commons inviting the King to declare war.
Thus prudently and calmly was effected our great English Revolution. Both as an event and as an achievement we have equal cause to review its history with pleasure; for if in some aspects it testifies to the good fortune of our nation, it reflects credit in others on the good qualities of our people. ”

“ Even that exaggerated dread of a standing army, which, no doubt, had more to do with the decision of the parliamentary majority than any theory, good, bad, or indifferent, of the probable course of European affairs, would not deserve to be severely judged. But it is difficult to attribute the refusal of the House of Commons to sanction William's retention of his body-guard to any worthier motive than mere jealousy of the foreigner. ”

“ The principles of which William was in part the voluntary and in part the unchoosing champion have triumphed so completely that they find nowadays no avowed opponent, and scarcely even any secret enemy; but it was William's destiny to have been identified in the promotion and defence of them with an English political party whose many excellent qualities as statesmen and citizens have been always associated with a moral and intellectual temper which, for a century and a half, has offered a standing provocation to men of every other political school. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We shall not really add to that honour by seeking any more showy motives than those which lie on the face of his conduct. The mere masculine repugnance of the man of action to lower the spear before the distaff would in any case probably have induced him to reject the proposal of the Tory lords. But apart from this, his shrewd knowledge of men and clear insight into politics assured him that he had only to refuse the false position in order to compel the offer of the true one. He might have been all else that he was—the devoted son of Holland; the true, if unimpassioned, friend of England ”

“ It was eminently probable that the convocation of a Parliament would not save his throne, but it was quite certain that nothing else would. Nor had James the excuse of pride for rejecting the Peers' advice; he was to show in a very short time that no such account of his conduct could be sustained. Some monarchs might have preferred to lose a crown rather than be forced into political concession under coercion of an invading army. James was quite willing to pay that or any other price to save his crown, only he was impenetrable to the proof that it was necessary at that moment. ”

“ A royal martyr is a much more impressive object than a royal levanter. It is better to "ascend to Heaven" as "the son of St. Louis" than to take ship for Dover as "Mr. Smith." The last three weeks of James's reign are weeks of painful ignominy. His plan of spiriting away the infant Prince of Wales was defeated by Dartmouth, the admiral on whom he had relied to execute it, but who steadfastly refused to lend a hand to the project. William's army advanced from Exeter to Salisbury, and from Salisbury to Hungerford, where it had been arranged that the royal commissioners should meet the Prince. ”

“ But William, as he had told the Ulster men, had not come to Ireland to "let the grass 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. ”

“ But such eulogy does not, for it could not, materially exaggerate his great features as a man—his patience of delay and disappointment, his fortitude under disaster, his imperturbable composure in moments of crisis, his lofty magnanimity, which from its high place seemed literally to overlook rather than to forgive injuries, his haughty courage, which thought it equal shame to glance aside at the lurking assassin and to turn away from the open foe. ”

“ Indeed, since the English crown devolved according to the ordinary English laws of succession, it was impossible that anybody should succeed to it by mere operation of law during its former wearer's life-time. If it was a principle of constitutional law that at any given moment there must be some lawful king or queen of England in existence, it was no less a principle [Pg 46] of the common law that nemo est hæres viventis. James, therefore, had according to the Whig theory ceased to be sovereign, and no one else had become sovereign in his stead: the throne was vacant. ”

“ In our day, when the lands of the Crown are formally vested in commissioners by the sovereign in consideration of his Civil List at the commencement of each reign, the quasi-national character of this property is fixed and emphasised. But no sovereign before William's time had regarded it in this light, or recognised any implied restraint upon alienation; and William, with Charles II.'s grants to his numerous mistresses before his eyes, may well be excused for thinking his gift to Lady Orkney not only justifiable but laudably moderate. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 titles, 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To William, whose Ministers had held out hopes to him that a force of at least 10,000 men would be sanctioned by Parliament, and who personally held that anything less than double that number would be insufficient, a resolution which would not only have inexcusably weakened, in his opinion, the defences of England, but have deprived him even of the services of those Dutch Guards who had fought with such signal bravery for the liberties of that country, caused natural and bitter chagrin. ”

“ 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 assist his efforts for a country which he loved far better than England was virtually assured of his favour ”

“ It is the highest praise of his high qualities to say that our impression of them easily survives the reaction from idolatry, and that after we have thrown aside the magnifying-glass of Whiggism the objects which it was used to exaggerate still fill the eye. If William had not all the virtues which belong to the patriot and philosopher, he had all that go to the making of the hero. ”

“ Even Macaulay, who has over painted both his king-craft and his statesmanship, has not laid on the colours of his heroism with too bold a hand. Sagacious as he undoubtedly was in counsel, dexterous as he was in the management of men, keen as was his outlook on European politics, and resourceful as he was in meeting its exigencies, it is possible to contend that his Whig eulogist has credited him with far more than the keenness and sagacity, the dexterity and resource, which he possessed. ”

“ 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 assertion of their liberties since Magna Charta. ”

“ It is surely not unjust to a man of William's antecedents to believe that from the hour that he learned the strength of his party in England, down to the hour when he was presented with the crown in the banqueting chamber at Whitehall, he had eyes for little else than the great European future which would open before him as King of England ”

“ Both parties concurred so readily in that opinion that they applied it without either of them pausing to consider its scope as a precedent, and that, quite apart from all controversies as to regency, demise of the crown, vacancy of the throne, or what not, the first instance in which a people pronounced any king impossible—such king being of sound mind, and still asserting his sovereignty—let in the whole modern democratic theory. ”

“ 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. ”

“ His succession, or rather his wife's succession, was safe enough if Mary of Modena bore no male issue to James. But she might and did bear such issue, in a child whose claims could only be set aside by a revolution; and even had no heir apparent been born to the throne, the position of William accepting the English crown conjointly with his wife in his capacity as liberator of the English people would be something very different from that of a king-consort, which was all he could otherwise have hoped to be. ”

“ The Comprehension Bill had a troubled time of it even in the House of Lords, where it was first introduced, and after some debate in the House of Commons it was shelved. As vainly did William attempt to compose the feud between the Whig and Tory Churchman and Nonconformist by offering, so to speak, a bribe to each of them to tolerate the other. The new oath of allegiance, framed by Parliament for itself, required to be extended to all those classes of persons who had been compelled to take one. ”