After a
struggle
he was secured.
Macaulay
[445] This was exactly what Luxemburg
had expected and desired. His feint had served its purpose. He turned
his back on the fortress which had hitherto seemed to be his object, and
hastened towards the Gette. William, who had detached more than twenty
thousand men, and who had but fifty thousand left in his camp, was
alarmed by learning from his scouts, on the eighteenth of July, that the
French General, with near eighty thousand, was close at hand.
It was still in the King's power, by a hasty retreat, to put the narrow,
but deep, waters of the Gette, which had lately been swollen by rains,
between his army and the enemy. But the site which he occupied was
strong; and it could easily be made still stronger. He set all his
troops to work. Ditches were dug, mounds thrown up, palisades fixed in
the earth. In a few hours the ground wore a new aspect; and the King
trusted that he should be able to repel the attack even of a force
greatly outnumbering his own. Nor was it without much appearance of
reason that he felt this confidence. When the morning of the nineteenth
of July broke, the bravest men of Lewis's army looked gravely and
anxiously on the fortress which had suddenly sprung up to arrest their
progress. The allies were protected by a breastwork. Here and there
along the entrenchments were formed little redoubts and half moons. A
hundred pieces of cannon were disposed along the ramparts. On the left
flank, the village of Romsdorff rose close to the little stream of
Landen, from which the English have named the disastrous day. On the
right was the village of Neerwinden. Both villages were, after the
fashion of the Low Countries, surrounded by moats and fences; and,
within these enclosures, the little plots of ground occupied by
different families were separated by mud walls five feet in height and
a foot in thickness. All these barricades William had repaired and
strengthened. Saint Simon, who, after the battle, surveyed the ground,
could hardly, he tells us, believe that defences so extensive and so
formidable could have been created with such rapidity.
Luxemburg, however, was determined to try whether even this position
could be maintained against the superior numbers and the impetuous
valour of his soldiers. Soon after sunrise the roar of cannon began
to be heard. William's batteries did much execution before the French
artillery could be so placed as to return the fire. It was eight o'clock
before the close fighting began. The village of Neerwinden was regarded
by both commanders as the point on which every thing depended. There an
attack was made by the French left wing commanded by Montchevreuil, a
veteran officer of high reputation, and by Berwick, who, though young,
was fast rising to a high place among the captains of his time. Berwick
led the onset, and forced his way into the village, but was soon driven
out again with a terrible carnage. His followers fled or perished; he,
while trying to rally them, and cursing them for not doing their duty
better, was surrounded by foes. He concealed his white cockade, and
hoped to be able, by the help of his native tongue, to pass himself off
as an officer of the English army. But his face was recognised by one
of his mother's brothers, George Churchill, who held on that day the
command of a brigade. A hurried embrace was exchanged between the
kinsmen; and the uncle conducted the nephew to William, who, as long as
every thing seemed to be going well, remained in the rear. The meeting
of the King and the captive, united by such close domestic ties, and
divided by such inexpiable injuries, was a strange sight. Both behaved
as became them. William uncovered, and addressed to his prisoner a few
words of courteous greeting. Berwick's only reply was a solemn bow. The
King put on his hat; the Duke put on his hat; and the cousins parted for
ever.
By this time the French, who had been driven in confusion out of
Neerwinden, had been reinforced by a division under the command of the
Duke of Bourbon, and came gallantly back to the attack. William, well
aware of the importance of this post, gave orders that troops should
move thither from other parts of his line. This second conflict was long
and bloody. The assailants again forced an entrance into the village.
They were again driven out with immense slaughter, and showed little
inclination to return to the charge.
Meanwhile the battle had been raging all along the entrenchments of
the allied army. Again and again Luxemburg brought up his troops within
pistolshot of the breastwork; but he could bring them no nearer. Again
and again they recoiled from the heavy fire which was poured on their
front and on their flanks. It seemed that all was over. Luxemburg
retired to a spot which was out of gunshot, and summoned a few of his
chief officers to a consultation. They talked together during some time;
and their animated gestures were observed with deep interest by all who
were within sight.
At length Luxemburg formed his decision. A last attempt must be made to
carry Neerwinden; and the invincible household troops, the conquerors of
Steinkirk, must lead the way.
The household troops came on in a manner worthy of their long and
terrible renown. A third time Neerwinden was taken. A third time William
tried to retake it. At the head of some English regiments he charged the
guards of Lewis with such fury that, for the first time in the memory of
the oldest warrior, that far famed band gave way. [446] It was only by
the strenuous exertions of Luxemburg, of the Duke of Chartres, and of
the Duke of Bourbon, that the broken ranks were rallied. But by this
time the centre and left of the allied army had been so much thinned
for the purpose of supporting the conflict at Neerwinden that the
entrenchments could no longer be defended on other points. A little
after four in the afternoon the whole line gave way. All was havoc and
confusion. Solmes had received a mortal wound, and fell, still alive,
into the hands of the enemy. The English soldiers, to whom his name was
hateful, accused him of having in his sufferings shown pusillanimity
unworthy of a soldier. The Duke of Ormond was struck down in the press;
and in another moment he would have been a corpse, had not a rich
diamond on his finger caught the eye of one of the French guards,
who justly thought that the owner of such a jewel would be a valuable
prisoner. The Duke's life was saved; and he was speedily exchanged for
Berwick. Ruvigny, animated by the true refugee hatred of the country
which had cast him out, was taken fighting in the thickest of the
battle. Those into whose hands he had fallen knew him well, and knew
that, if they carried him to their camp, his head would pay for that
treason to which persecution had driven him. With admirable generosity
they pretended not to recognise him, and suffered him to make his escape
in the tumult.
It was only on such occasions as this that the whole greatness of
William's character appeared. Amidst the rout and uproar, while arms and
standards were flung away, while multitudes of fugitives were choking up
the bridges and fords of the Gette or perishing in its waters, the King,
having directed Talmash to superintend the retreat, put himself at the
head of a few brave regiments, and by desperate efforts arrested the
progress of the enemy. His risk was greater than that which others ran.
For he could not be persuaded either to encumber his feeble frame with
a cuirass, or to hide the ensigns of the garter. He thought his star a
good rallying point for his own troops, and only smiled when he was told
that it was a good mark for the enemy. Many fell on his right hand and
on his left. Two led horses, which in the field always closely followed
his person, were struck dead by cannon shots. One musket ball passed
through the curls of his wig, another through his coat; a third
bruised his side and tore his blue riband to tatters. Many years later
greyhaired old pensioners who crept about the arcades and alleys of
Chelsea Hospital used to relate how he charged at the head of Galway's
horse, how he dismounted four times to put heart into the infantry, how
he rallied one corps which seemed to be shrinking; "That is not the way
to fight, gentlemen. You must stand close up to them. Thus, gentlemen,
thus. " "You might have seen him," an eyewitness wrote, only four days
after the battle, "with his sword in his hand, throwing himself upon the
enemy. It is certain that one time, among the rest, he was seen at the
head of two English regiments, and that he fought seven with these two
in sight of the whole army, driving them before him above a quarter of
an hour. Thanks be to God that preserved him. " The enemy pressed on him
so close that it was with difficulty that he at length made his way over
the Gette. A small body of brave men, who shared his peril to the last,
could hardly keep off the pursuers as he crossed the bridge. [447]
Never, perhaps, was the change which the progress of civilisation has
produced in the art of war more strikingly illustrated than on that day.
Ajax beating down the Trojan leader with a rock which two ordinary men
could scarcely lift, Horatius defending the bridge against an army,
Richard the Lionhearted spurring along the whole Saracen line without
finding an enemy to stand his assault, Robert Bruce crushing with one
blow the helmet and head of Sir Henry Bohun in sight of the whole array
of England and Scotland, such are the heroes of a dark age. In such an
age bodily vigour is the most indispensable qualification of a warrior.
At Landen two poor sickly beings, who, in a rude state of society, would
have been regarded as too puny to bear any part in combats, were the
souls of two great armies. In some heathen countries they would have
been exposed while infants. In Christendom they would, six hundred years
earlier, have been sent to some quiet cloister. But their lot had fallen
on a time when men had discovered that the strength of the muscles is
far inferior in value to the strength of the mind. It is probable that,
among the hundred and twenty thousand soldiers who were marshalled round
Neerwinden under all the standards of Western Europe, the two feeblest
in body were the hunchbacked dwarf who urged forward the fiery onset
of France, and the asthmatic skeleton who covered the slow retreat of
England.
The French were victorious; but they had bought their victory dear. More
than ten thousand of the best troops of Lewis had fallen. Neerwinden was
a spectacle at which the oldest soldiers stood aghast. The streets were
piled breast high with corpses. Among the slain were some great lords
and some renowned warriors. Montchevreuil was there, and the mutilated
trunk of the Duke of Uzes, first in order of precedence among the
whole aristocracy of France. Thence too Sarsfield was borne desperately
wounded to a pallet from which he never rose again. The Court of Saint
Germains had conferred on him the empty title of Earl of Lucan;
but history knows him by the name which is still dear to the most
unfortunate of nations. The region, renowned in history as the battle
field, during many ages, of the most warlike nations of Europe, has
seen only two more terrible days, the day of Malplaquet and the day of
Waterloo. During many months the ground was strewn with skulls and bones
of men and horses, and with fragments of hats and shoes, saddles and
holsters. The next summer the soil, fertilised by twenty thousand
corpses, broke forth into millions of poppies. The traveller who, on the
road from Saint Tron to Tirlemont, saw that vast sheet of rich scarlet
spreading from Landen to Neerwinden, could hardly help fancying that the
figurative prediction of the Hebrew prophet was literally accomplished,
that the earth was disclosing her blood, and refusing to cover the
slain. [448]
There was no pursuit, though the sun was still high in the heaven when
William crossed the Gette. The conquerors were so much exhausted by
marching and fighting that they could scarcely move; and the horses were
in even worse condition than the men. Their general thought it necessary
to allow some time for rest and refreshment. The French nobles unloaded
their sumpter horses, supped gaily, and pledged one another in champagne
amidst the heaps of dead; and, when night fell, whole brigades gladly
lay down to sleep in their ranks on the field of battle. The inactivity
of Luxemburg did not escape censure. None could deny that he had in the
action shown great skill and energy. But some complained that he wanted
patience and perseverance. Others whispered that he had no wish to bring
to an end a war which made him necessary to a Court where he had never,
in time of peace, found favour or even justice. [449] Lewis, who on this
occasion was perhaps not altogether free from some emotions of jealousy,
contrived, it was reported, to mingle with the praise which he bestowed
on his lieutenant blame which, though delicately expressed, was
perfectly intelligible. "In the battle," he said, "the Duke of Luxemburg
behaved like Conde; and since the battle the Prince of Orange has
behaved like Turenne. "
In truth the ability and vigour with which William repaired his terrible
defeat might well excite admiration. "In one respect," said the Admiral
Coligni, "I may claim superiority over Alexander, over Scipio, over
Caesar. They won great battles, it is true. I have lost four great
battles; and yet I show to the enemy a more formidable front than ever. "
The blood of Coligni ran in the veins of William; and with the blood had
descended the unconquerable spirit which could derive from failure as
much glory as happier commanders owed to success. The defeat of Landen
was indeed a heavy blow. The King had a few days of cruel anxiety.
If Luxemburg pushed on, all was lost. Louvain must fall, and Mechlin,
Nieuport, and Ostend. The Batavian frontier would be in danger. The cry
for peace throughout Holland might be such as neither States General nor
Stadtholder would be able to resist. [450] But there was delay; and a
very short delay was enough for William. From the field of battle he
made his way through the multitude of fugitives to the neighbourhood of
Louvain, and there began to collect his scattered forces. His character
is not lowered by the anxiety which, at that moment, the most disastrous
of his life, he felt for the two persons who were dearest to him. As
soon as he was safe, he wrote to assure his wife of his safety. [451] In
the confusion of the flight he had lost sight of Portland, who was then
in very feeble health, and had therefore run more than the ordinary
risks of war. A short note which the King sent to his friend a few hours
later is still extant. [452] "Though I hope to see you this evening, I
cannot help writing to tell you how rejoiced I am that you got off so
well. God grant that your health may soon be quite restored. These are
great trials, which he has been pleased to send me in quick succession.
I must try to submit to his pleasure without murmuring, and to deserve
his anger less. "
His forces rallied fast. Large bodies of troops which he had, perhaps
imprudently, detached from his army while he supposed that Liege was the
object of the enemy, rejoined him by forced marches. Three weeks after
his defeat he held a review a few miles from Brussels. The number of men
under arms was greater than on the morning of the bloody day of Landen;
their appearance was soldierlike; and their spirit seemed unbroken.
William now wrote to Heinsius that the worst was over. "The crisis," he
said, "has been a terrible one. Thank God that it has ended thus. " He
did not, however, think it prudent to try at that time the event of
another pitched field. He therefore suffered the French to besiege and
take Charleroy; and this was the only advantage which they derived
from the most sanguinary battle fought in Europe during the seventeenth
century.
The melancholy tidings of the defeat of Landen found England agitated by
tidings not less melancholy from a different quarter. During many
months the trade with the Mediterranean Sea had been almost entirely
interrupted by the war. There was no chance that a merchantman from
London or from Amsterdam would, if unprotected, reach the Pillars of
Hercules without being boarded by a French privateer; and the protection
of armed vessels was not easily to be obtained. During the year 1691,
great fleets, richly laden for Spanish, Italian and Turkish markets, had
been gathering in the Thames and the Texel. In February 1693, near
four hundred ships were ready to start. The value of the cargoes was
estimated at several millions sterling. Those galleons which had long
been the wonder and envy of the world had never conveyed so precious
a freight from the West Indies to Seville. The English government
undertook, in concert with the Dutch government, to escort the vessels
which were laden with this great mass of wealth. The French government
was bent on intercepting them.
The plan of the allies was that seventy ships of the line and about
thirty frigates and brigantines should assemble in the Channel under
the command of Killegrew and Delaval, the two new Lords of the English
Admiralty, and should convoy the Smyrna fleet, as it was popularly
called, beyond the limits within which any danger could be apprehended
from the Brest squadron. The greater part of the armament might then
return to guard the Channel, while Rooke, with twenty sail, might
accompany the trading vessels and might protect them against the
squadron which lay at Toulon. The plan of the French government was that
the Brest squadron under Tourville and the Toulon squadron under Estrees
should meet in the neighbourhood of the Straits of Gibraltar, and should
there lie in wait for the booty.
Which plan was the better conceived may be doubted. Which was the better
executed is a question which admits of no doubt. The whole French navy,
whether in the Atlantic or in the Mediterranean, was moved by one will.
The navy of England and the navy of the United Provinces were subject to
different authorities; and, both in England and in the United Provinces,
the power was divided and subdivided to such an extent that no single
person was pressed by a heavy responsibility. The spring came. The
merchants loudly complained that they had already lost more by delay
than they could hope to gain by the most successful voyage; and still
the ships of war were not half manned or half provisioned. The Amsterdam
squadron did not arrive on our coast till late in April; the Zealand
squadron not till the middle of May. [453] It was June before the
immense fleet, near five hundred sail, lost sight of the cliffs of
England.
Tourville was already on the sea, and was steering southward. But
Killegrew and Delaval were so negligent or so unfortunate that they had
no intelligence of his movements. They at first took it for granted that
he was still lying in the port of Brest. Then they heard a rumour that
some shipping had been seen to the northward; and they supposed that
he was taking advantage of their absence to threaten the coast of
Devonshire. It never seems to have occurred to them as possible that he
might have effected a junction with the Toulon squadron, and might be
impatiently waiting for his prey in the neighbourhood of Gibraltar. They
therefore, on the sixth of June, having convoyed the Smyrna fleet about
two hundred miles beyond Ushant, announced their intention to part
company with Rooke. Rooke expostulated, but to no purpose. It was
necessary for him to submit, and to proceed with his twenty men of
war to the Mediterranean, while his superiors, with the rest of the
armament, returned to the Channel.
It was by this time known in England that Tourville had stolen out of
Brest, and was hastening to join Estrees. The return of Killegrew
and Delaval therefore excited great alarm. A swift sailing vessel was
instantly despatched to warn Rooke of his danger; but the warning never
reached him. He ran before a fair wind to Cape Saint Vincent; and there
he learned that some French ships were lying in the neighbouring Bay of
Lagos. The first information which he received led him to believe that
they were few in number; and so dexterously did they conceal their
strength that, till they were within half an hour's sail, he had no
suspicion that he was opposed to the whole maritime strength of a great
kingdom. To contend against fourfold odds would have been madness. It
was much that he was able to save his squadron from titter destruction.
He exerted all his skill. Two or three Dutch men of war, which were in
the rear, courageously sacrificed themselves to save the fleet. With
the rest of the armament, and with about sixty merchant ships, Rooke got
safe to Madeira and thence to Cork. But more than three hundred of
the vessels which he had convoyed were scattered over the ocean. Some
escaped to Ireland; some to Corunna; some to Lisbon; some to Cadiz; some
were captured, and more destroyed. A few, which had taken shelter under
the rock of Gibraltar, and were pursued thither by the enemy, were sunk
when it was found that they could not be defended. Others perished in
the same manner under the batteries of Malaga. The gain to the French
seems not to have been great; but the loss to England and Holland was
immense. [454]
Never within the memory of man had there been in the City a day of more
gloom and agitation than that on which the news of the encounter in the
Bay of Lagos arrived. Many merchants, an eyewitness said, went away from
the Royal Exchange, as pale as if they had received sentence of death.
A deputation from the merchants who had been sufferers by this great
disaster went up to the Queen with an address representing their
grievances. They were admitted to the Council Chamber, where she was
seated at the head of the Board. She directed Somers to reply to them
in her name; and he addressed to them a speech well calculated to soothe
their irritation. Her Majesty, he said, felt for them from her heart;
and she had already appointed a Committee of the Privy Council to
inquire into the cause of the late misfortune, and to consider of the
best means of preventing similar misfortunes in time to come. [455] This
answer gave so much satisfaction that the Lord Mayor soon came to the
palace to thank the Queen for her goodness, to assure her that, through
all vicissitudes, London would be true to her and her consort, and to
inform her that, severely as the late calamity had been felt by many
great commercial houses, the Common Council had unanimously resolved to
advance whatever might be necessary for the support of the government.
[456]
The ill humour which the public calamities naturally produced was
inflamed by every factious artifice. Never had the Jacobite pamphleteers
been so savagely scurrilous as during this unfortunate summer. The
police was consequently more active than ever in seeking for the dens
from which so much treason proceeded. With great difficulty and after
long search the most important of all the unlicensed presses was
discovered. This press belonged to a Jacobite named William Anderton,
whose intrepidity and fanaticism marked him out as fit to be employed
on services from which prudent men and scrupulous men shrink. During two
years he had been watched by the agents of the government; but where
he exercised his craft was an impenetrable mystery. At length he was
tracked to a house near Saint James's Street, where he was known by a
feigned name, and where he passed for a working jeweller. A messenger
of the press went thither with several assistants, and found Anderton's
wife and mother posted as sentinels at the door. The women knew the
messenger, rushed on him, tore his hair, and cried out "Thieves"
and "Murder. " The alarm was thus given to Anderton. He concealed the
instruments of his calling, came forth with an assured air, and bade
defiance to the messenger, the Censor, the Secretary, and Little
Hooknose himself.
After a struggle he was secured. His room was
searched; and at first sight no evidence of his guilt appeared. But
behind the bed was soon found a door which opened into a dark closet.
The closet contained a press, types and heaps of newly printed papers.
One of these papers, entitled Remarks on the Present Confederacy and the
Late Revolution, is perhaps the most frantic of all the Jacobite libels.
In this tract the Prince of Orange is gravely accused of having ordered
fifty of his wounded English soldiers to be burned alive. The governing
principle of his whole conduct, it is said, is not vainglory, or
ambition, or avarice, but a deadly hatred of Englishmen and a desire
to make them miserable. The nation is vehemently adjured, on peril of
incurring the severest judgments, to rise up and free itself from this
plague, this curse, this tyrant, whose depravity makes it difficult to
believe that he can have been procreated by a human pair. Many copies
were also found of another paper, somewhat less ferocious but perhaps
more dangerous, entitled A French Conquest neither desirable nor
practicable. In this tract also the people are exhorted to rise in
insurrection. They are assured that a great part of the army is with
them. The forces of the Prince of Orange will melt away; he will be glad
to make his escape; and a charitable hope is sneeringly expressed that
it may not be necessary to do him any harm beyond sending him back to
Loo, where he may live surrounded by luxuries for which the English have
paid dear.
The government, provoked and alarmed by the virulence of the Jacobite
pamphleteers, determined to make Anderton an example. He was indicted
for high treason, and brought to the bar of the Old Bailey. Treby,
now Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and Powell, who had honourably
distinguished himself on the day of the trial of the bishops, were on
the Bench. It is unfortunate that no detailed report of the evidence has
come down to us, and that we are forced to content ourselves with such
fragments of information as can be collected from the contradictory
narratives of writers evidently partial, intemperate and dishonest. The
indictment, however, is extant; and the overt acts which it imputes to
the prisoner undoubtedly amount to high treason. [457] To exhort the
subjects of the realm to rise up and depose the King by force, and to
add to that exhortation the expression, evidently ironical, of a hope
that it may not be necessary to inflict on him any evil worse than
banishment, is surely an offence which the least courtly lawyer will
admit to be within the scope of the statute of Edward the Third. On this
point indeed there seems to have been no dispute, either at the trial or
subsequently.
The prisoner denied that he had printed the libels. On this point it
seems reasonable that, since the evidence has not come down to us,
we should give credit to the judges and the jury who heard what the
witnesses had to say.
One argument with which Anderton had been furnished by his advisers,
and which, in the Jacobite pasquinades of that time, is represented as
unanswerable, was that, as the art of printing had been unknown in the
reign of Edward the Third, printing could not be an overt act of treason
under a statute of that reign. The judges treated this argument very
lightly; and they were surely justified in so treating it. For it is
an argument which would lead to the conclusion that it could not be an
overt act of treason to behead a King with a guillotine or to shoot him
with a Minie rifle.
It was also urged in Anderton's favour,--and this was undoubtedly an
argument well entitled to consideration,--that a distinction ought to
be made between the author of a treasonable paper and the man who merely
printed it. The former could not pretend that he had not understood the
meaning of the words which he had himself selected. But to the latter
those words might convey no idea whatever. The metaphors, the allusions,
the sarcasms, might be far beyond his comprehension; and, while his
hands were busy among the types, his thoughts might be wandering to
things altogether unconnected with the manuscript which was before him.
It is undoubtedly true that it may be no crime to print what it would be
a great crime to write. But this is evidently a matter concerning
which no general rule can be laid down. Whether Anderton had, as a mere
mechanic, contributed to spread a work the tendency of which he did
not suspect, or had knowingly lent his help to raise a rebellion, was
a question for the jury; and the jury might reasonably infer from his
change of his name, from the secret manner in which he worked, from the
strict watch kept by his wife and mother, and from the fury with which,
even in the grasp of the messengers, he railed at the government,
that he was not the unconscious tool, but the intelligent and zealous
accomplice of traitors. The twelve, after passing a considerable time
in deliberation, informed the Court that one of them entertained doubts.
Those doubts were removed by the arguments of Treby and Powell; and a
verdict of Guilty was found.
The fate of the prisoner remained during sometime in suspense. The
Ministers hoped that he might be induced to save his own neck at the
expense of the necks of the pamphleteers who had employed him. But his
natural courage was kept up by spiritual stimulants which the nonjuring
divines well understood how to administer. He suffered death with
fortitude, and continued to revile the government to the last. The
Jacobites clamoured loudly against the cruelty of the judges who had
tried him and of the Queen who had left him for execution, and, not very
consistently, represented him at once as a poor ignorant artisan who was
not aware of the nature and tendency of the act for which he suffered,
and as a martyr who had heroically laid down his life for the banished
King and the persecuted Church. [458]
The Ministers were much mistaken if they flattered themselves that the
fate of Anderton would deter others from imitating his example. His
execution produced several pamphlets scarcely less virulent than those
for which he had suffered. Collier, in what he called Remarks on the
London Gazette, exulted with cruel joy over the carnage of Landen, and
the vast destruction of English property on the coast of Spain. [459]
Other writers did their best to raise riots among the labouring people.
For the doctrine of the Jacobites was that disorder, in whatever place
or in whatever way it might begin, was likely to end in a Restoration.
A phrase which, without a commentary, may seem to be mere nonsense,
but which was really full of meaning, was often in their mouths at
this time, and was indeed a password by which the members of the party
recognised each other: "Box it about; it will come to my father. " The
hidden sense of this gibberish was, "Throw the country into confusion;
it will be necessary at last to have recourse to King James. " [460]
Trade was not prosperous; and many industrious men were out of work.
Accordingly songs addressed to the distressed classes were composed by
the malecontent street poets. Numerous copies of a ballad exhorting the
weavers to rise against the government were discovered in the house of
that Quaker who had printed James's Declaration. [461] Every art was
used for the purpose of exciting discontent in a much more formidable
body of men, the sailors; and unhappily the vices of the naval
administration furnished the enemies of the State with but too good a
choice of inflammatory topics. Some seamen deserted; some mutinied; then
came executions; and then came more ballads and broadsides representing
those executions as barbarous murders. Reports that the government
had determined to defraud its defenders of their hard earned pay were
circulated with so much effect that a great crowd of women from Wapping
and Rotherhithe besieged Whitehall, clamouring for what was due to their
husbands. Mary had the good sense and good nature to order four of
those importunate petitioners to be admitted into the room where she was
holding a Council. She heard their complaints, and herself assured them
that the rumour which had alarmed them was unfounded. [462] By this
time Saint Bartholomew's day drew near; and the great annual fair, the
delight of idle apprentices and the horror of Puritanical Aldermen,
was opened in Smithfield with the usual display of dwarfs, giants, and
dancing dogs, the man that ate fire, and the elephant that loaded and
fired a musket. But of all the shows none proved so attractive as a
dramatic performance which, in conception, though doubtless not in
execution, seems to have borne much resemblance to those immortal
masterpieces of humour in which Aristophanes held up Cleon and Lamachus
to derision. Two strollers personated Killegrew and Delaval. The
Admirals were represented as flying with their whole fleet before a few
French privateers, and taking shelter under the grins of the Tower.
The office of Chorus was performed by a Jackpudding who expressed very
freely his opinion of the naval administration. Immense crowds flocked
to see this strange farce. The applauses were loud; the receipts were
great; and the mountebanks, who had at first ventured to attack only the
unlucky and unpopular Board of Admiralty, now, emboldened by impunity
and success, and probably prompted and rewarded by persons of much
higher station than their own, began to cast reflections on other
departments of the government. This attempt to revive the license of the
Attic Stage was soon brought to a close by the appearance of a strong
body of constables who carried off the actors to prison. [463] Meanwhile
the streets of London were every night strewn with seditious handbills.
At all the taverns the zealots of hereditary right were limping about
with glasses of wine and punch at their lips. This fashion had just come
in; and the uninitiated wondered much that so great a number of jolly
gentlemen should have suddenly become lame. But, those who were in the
secret knew that the word Limp was a consecrated word, that every one
of the four letters which composed it was the initial of an august name,
and that the loyal subject who limped while he drank was taking off his
bumper to Lewis, James, Mary, and the Prince. [464]
It was not only in the capital that the Jacobites, at this time, made a
great display of their wit. They mustered strong at Bath, where the Lord
President Caermarthen was trying to recruit his feeble health. Every
evening they met, as they phrased it, to serenade the Marquess. In other
words they assembled under the sick man's window, and there sang doggrel
lampoons on him. [465]
It is remarkable that the Lord President, at the very time at which
he was insulted as a Williamite at Bath, was considered as a stanch
Jacobite at Saint Germains. How he came to be so considered is a
most perplexing question. Some writers are of opinion that he, like
Shrewsbury, Russell, Godolphin and Marlborough, entered into engagements
with one king while eating the bread of the other. But this opinion
does not rest on sufficient proofs. About the treasons of Shrewsbury,
of Russell, of Godolphin and of Marlborough, we have a great mass of
evidence, derived from various sources, and extending over several
years. But all the information which we possess about Caermarthen's
dealings with James is contained in a single short paper written by
Melfort on the sixteenth of October 1693. From that paper it is quite
clear that some intelligence had reached the banished King and his
Ministers which led them to regard Caermarthen as a friend. But there is
no proof that they ever so regarded him, either before that day or after
that day. [466] On the whole, the most probable explanation of this
mystery seems to be that Caermarthen had been sounded by some Jacobite
emissary much less artful than himself, and had, for the purpose of
getting at the bottom of the new scheme of policy devised by Middleton,
pretended to be well disposed to the cause of the banished King, that an
exaggerated account of what had passed had been sent to Saint Germains,
and that there had been much rejoicing there at a conversion which soon
proved to have been feigned. It seems strange that such a conversion
should even for a moment have been thought sincere. It was plainly
Caermarthen's interest to stand by the sovereigns in possession. He
was their chief minister. He could not hope to be the chief minister of
James. It can indeed hardly be supposed that the political conduct of a
cunning old man, insatiably ambitious and covetous, was much influenced
by personal partiality. But, if there were any person to whom
Caermarthen was partial, that person was undoubtedly Mary. That he had
seriously engaged in a plot to depose her, at the risk of his head if he
failed, and with the certainty of losing immense power and wealth if he
succeeded, was a story too absurd for any credulity but the credulity of
exiles.
Caermarthen had indeed at that moment peculiarly strong reasons for
being satisfied with the place which he held in the counsels of William
and Mary. There is but too strong reason to believe that he was then
accumulating unlawful gain with a rapidity unexampled even in his
experience.
The contest between the two East India Companies was, during the autumn
of 1693, fiercer than ever. The House of Commons, finding the Old
Company obstinately averse to all compromise, had, a little before the
close of the late session, requested the King to give the three years'
warning prescribed by the Charter. Child and his fellows now began to
be seriously alarmed. They expected every day to receive the dreaded
notice. Nay, they were not sure that their exclusive privilege might not
be taken away without any notice at all; for they found that they had,
by inadvertently omitting to pay the tax lately imposed on their stock
at the precise time fixed by law, forfeited their Charter; and, though
it would, in ordinary circumstances, have been thought cruel in the
government to take advantage of such a slip, the public was not inclined
to allow the Old Company any thing more than the strict letter of the
bond. Every thing was lost if the Charter were not renewed before the
meeting of Parliament. There can be little doubt that the proceedings
of the corporation were still really directed by Child. But he had, it
should seem, perceived that his unpopularity had injuriously affected
the interests which were under his care, and therefore did not obtrude
himself on the public notice. His place was ostensibly filled by his
near kinsman Sir Thomas Cook, one of the greatest merchants of London,
and Member of Parliament for the borough of Colchester. The Directors
placed at Cook's absolute disposal all the immense wealth which lay in
their treasury; and in a short time near a hundred thousand pounds were
expended in corruption on a gigantic scale. In what proportions this
enormous sum was distributed among the great men at Whitehall, and how
much of it was embezzled by intermediate agents, is still a mystery. We
know with certainty however that thousands went to Seymour and thousands
to Caermarthen.
The effect of these bribes was that the Attorney General received orders
to draw up a charter regranting the old privileges to the old Company.
No minister, however, could, after what had passed in Parliament,
venture to advise the Crown to renew the monopoly without conditions.
The Directors were sensible that they had no choice, and reluctantly
consented to accept the new Charter on terms substantially the same with
those which the House of Commons had sanctioned.
It is probable that, two years earlier, such a compromise would have
quieted the feud which distracted the City. But a long conflict, in
which satire and calumny had not been spared, had heated the minds of
men. The cry of Dowgate against Leadenhall Street was louder than ever.
Caveats were entered; petitions were signed; and in those petitions a
doctrine which had hitherto been studiously kept in the background
was boldly affirmed. While it was doubtful on which side the royal
prerogative would be used, that prerogative had not been questioned.
But as soon as it appeared that the Old Company was likely to obtain a
regrant of the monopoly under the Great Seal, the New Company began to
assert with vehemence that no monopoly could be created except by Act
of Parliament. The Privy Council, over which Caermarthen presided, after
hearing the matter fully argued by counsel on both sides, decided in
favour of the Old Company, and ordered the Charter to be sealed. [467]
The autumn was by this time far advanced, and the armies in the
Netherlands had gone into quarters for the winter. On the last day of
October William landed in England. The Parliament was about to meet; and
he had every reason to expect a session even more stormy than the last.
The people were discontented, and not without cause. The year had been
every where disastrous to the allies, not only on the sea and in the Low
Countries, but also in Servia, in Spain, in Italy, and in Germany. The
Turks had compelled the generals of the Empire to raise the siege of
Belgrade. A newly created Marshal of France, the Duke of Noailles, had
invaded Catalonia and taken the fortress of Rosas. Another newly created
Marshal, the skilful and valiant Catinat, had descended from the Alps
on Piedmont, and had, at Marsiglia, gained a complete victory over the
forces of the Duke of Savoy. This battle is memorable as the first of
a long series of battles in which the Irish troops retrieved the honour
lost by misfortunes and misconduct in domestic war. Some of the exiles
of Limerick showed, on that day, under the standard of France, a valour
which distinguished them among many thousands of brave men. It is
remarkable that on the same day a battalion of the persecuted and
expatriated Huguenots stood firm amidst the general disorder round the
standard of Savoy, and fell fighting desperately to the last.
The Duke of Lorges had marched into the Palatinate, already twice
devastated, and had found that Turenne and Duras had left him something
to destroy. Heidelberg, just beginning to rise again from its ruins,
was again sacked, the peaceable citizens butchered, their wives and
daughters foully outraged. The very choirs of the churches were stained
with blood; the pyxes and crucifixes were torn from the altars; the
tombs of the ancient Electors were broken open; the corpses, stripped
of their cerecloths and ornaments, were dragged about the streets. The
skull of the father of the Duchess of Orleans was beaten to fragments
by the soldiers of a prince among the ladies of whose splendid Court she
held the foremost place.
And yet a discerning eye might have perceived that, unfortunate as the
confederates seemed to have been, the advantage had really been on their
side. The contest was quite as much a financial as a military contest.
The French King had, some months before, said that the last piece of
gold would carry the day; and he now began painfully to feel the truth
of the saying. England was undoubtedly hard pressed by public burdens;
but still she stood up erect. France meanwhile was fast sinking. Her
recent efforts had been too much for her strength, and had left her
spent and unnerved. Never had her rulers shown more ingenuity in
devising taxes or more severity in exacting them; but by no ingenuity,
by no severity, was it possible to raise the sums necessary for another
such campaign as that of 1693. In England the harvest had been abundant.
In France the corn and the wine had again failed. The people, as usual,
railed at the government. The government, with shameful ignorance or
more shameful dishonesty, tried to direct the public indignation
against the dealers in grain. Decrees appeared which seemed to have been
elaborately framed for the purpose of turning dearth into famine. The
nation was assured that there was no reason for uneasiness, that there
was more than a sufficient supply of food, and that the scarcity had
been produced by the villanous arts of misers, who locked up their
stores in the hope of making enormous gains. Commissioners were
appointed to inspect the granaries, and were empowered to send to
market all the corn that was not necessary for the consumption of the
proprietors. Such interference of course increased the suffering which
it was meant to relieve. But in the midst of the general distress there
was an artificial plenty in one favoured spot. The most arbitrary
prince must always stand in some awe of an immense mass of human beings
collected in the neighbourhood of his own palace. Apprehensions similar
to those which had induced the Caesars to extort from Africa and Egypt
the means of pampering the rabble of Rome induced Lewis to aggravate the
misery of twenty provinces for the purpose of keeping one huge city in
good humour. He ordered bread to be distributed in all the parishes of
the capital at less than half the market price. The English Jacobites
were stupid enough to extol the wisdom and humanity of this arrangement.
The harvest, they said, had been good in England and bad in France; and
yet the loaf was cheaper at Paris than in London; and the explanation
was simple. The French had a sovereign whose heart was French, and
who watched over his people with the solicitude of a father, while the
English were cursed with a Dutch tyrant, who sent their corn to Holland.
The truth was that a week of such fatherly government as that of Lewis
would have raised all England in arms from Northumberland to Cornwall.
That there might be abundance at Paris, the people of Normandy and Anjou
were stuffing themselves with nettles. That there might be tranquillity
at Paris, the peasantry were fighting with the bargemen and the troops
all along the Loire and the Seine. Multitudes fled from those rural
districts where bread cost five sous a pound to the happy place where
bread was to be had for two sous a pound. It was necessary to drive the
famished crowds back by force from the barriers, and to denounce the
most terrible punishments against all who should not go home and starve
quietly. [468]
Lewis was sensible that the strength of France had been overstrained by
the exertions of the last campaign. Even if her harvest and her vintage
had been abundant, she would not have been able to do in 1694 what she
had done in 1693; and it was utterly impossible that, in a season of
extreme distress, she should again send into the field armies superior
in number on every point to the armies of the coalition. New conquests
were not to be expected. It would be much if the harassed and exhausted
land, beset on all sides by enemies, should be able to sustain a
defensive war without any disaster. So able a politician as the French
King could not but feel that it would be for his advantage to treat with
the allies while they were still awed by the remembrance of the gigantic
efforts which his kingdom had just made, and before the collapse which
had followed those efforts should become visible.
He had long been communicating through various channels with some
members of the confederacy, and trying to induce them to separate
themselves from the rest. But he had as yet made no overture tending
to a general pacification. For he knew that there could be no general
pacification unless he was prepared to abandon the cause of James, and
to acknowledge the Prince and Princess of Orange as King and Queen of
England. This was in truth the point on which every thing turned. What
should be done with those great fortresses which Lewis had unjustly
seized and annexed to his empire in time of peace, Luxemburg which
overawed the Moselle, and Strasburg which domineered over the Upper
Rhine; what should be done with the places which he had recently won in
open war, Philipsburg, Mons and Namur, Huy and Charleroy; what barrier
should be given to the States General; on what terms Lorraine should be
restored to its hereditary Dukes; these were assuredly not unimportant
questions. But the all important question was whether England was to
be, as she had been under James, a dependency of France, or, as she
was under William and Mary, a power of the first rank. If Lewis really
wished for peace, he must bring himself to recognise the Sovereigns
whom he had so often designated as usurpers. Could he bring himself to
recognise them? His superstition, his pride, his regard for the unhappy
exiles who were pining at Saint Germains, his personal dislike of
the indefatigable and unconquerable adversary who had been constantly
crossing his path during twenty years, were on one side; his interests
and those of his people were on the other. He must have been sensible
that it was not in his power to subjugate the English, that he must at
last leave them to choose their government for themselves, and that what
he must do at last it would be best to do soon. Yet he could not at once
make up his mind to what was so disagreeable to him. He however opened
a negotiation with the States General through the intervention of Sweden
and Denmark, and sent a confidential emissary to confer in secret at
Brussels with Dykvelt, who possessed the entire confidence of William.
There was much discussion about matters of secondary importance; but
the great question remained unsettled. The French agent used, in private
conversation, expressions plainly implying that the government which he
represented was prepared to recognise William and Mary; but no formal
assurance could be obtained from him. Just at the same time the King
of Denmark informed the allies that he was endeavouring to prevail on
France not to insist on the restoration of James as an indispensable
condition of peace, but did not say that his endeavours had as yet
been successful. Meanwhile Avaux, who was now Ambassador at Stockholm,
informed the King of Sweden, that, as the dignity of all crowned heads
had been outraged in the person of James, the Most Christian King felt
assured that not only neutral powers, but even the Emperor, would try to
find some expedient which might remove so grave a cause of quarrel. The
expedient at which Avaux hinted doubtless was that James should waive
his rights, and that the Prince of Wales should be sent to England, bred
a Protestant, adopted by William and Mary, and declared their heir.
To such an arrangement William would probably have had no personal
objection. But we may be assured that he never would have consented to
make it a condition of peace with France. Who should reign in England
was a question to be decided by England alone. [469]
It might well be suspected that a negotiation conducted in this manner
was merely meant to divide the confederates. William understood the
whole importance of the conjuncture. He had not, it may be, the eye of a
great captain for all the turns of a battle. But he had, in the highest
perfection, the eye of a great statesman for all the turns of a war.
That France had at length made overtures to him was a sufficient proof
that she felt herself spent and sinking. That those overtures were made
with extreme reluctance and hesitation proved that she had not yet come
to a temper in which it was possible to have peace with her on fair
terms. He saw that the enemy was beginning to give ground, and that this
was the time to assume the offensive, to push forward, to bring up every
reserve. But whether the opportunity should be seized or lost it did not
belong to him to decide. The King of France might levy troops and exact
taxes without any limit save that which the laws of nature impose on
despotism. But the King of England could do nothing without the support
of the House of Commons; and the House of Commons, though it had
hitherto supported him zealously and liberally, was not a body on
which he could rely. It had indeed got into a state which perplexed
and alarmed all the most sagacious politicians of that age. There
was something appalling in the union of such boundless power and such
boundless caprice. The fate of the whole civilised world depended on
the votes of the representatives of the English people; and there was
no public man who could venture to say with confidence what those
representatives might not be induced to vote within twenty-four hours.
[470] William painfully felt that it was scarcely possible for a prince
dependent on an assembly so violent at one time, so languid at another,
to effect any thing great. Indeed, though no sovereign did so much to
secure and to extend the power of the House of Commons, no sovereign
loved the House of Commons less. Nor is this strange; for he saw that
House at the very worst. He saw it when it had just acquired the power
and had not yet acquired the gravity of a senate. In his letters to
Heinsius he perpetually complains of the endless talking, the factious
squabbling, the inconstancy, the dilatoriness, of the body which
his situation made it necessary for him to treat with deference. His
complaints were by no means unfounded; but he had not discovered either
the cause or the cure of the evil.
The truth was that the change which the Revolution had made in the
situation of the House of Commons had made another change necessary;
and that other change had not yet taken place. There was parliamentary
government; but there was no Ministry; and, without a Ministry, the
working of a parliamentary government, such as ours, must always be
unsteady and unsafe.
It is essential to our liberties that the House of Commons should
exercise a control over all the departments of the executive
administration. And yet it is evident that a crowd of five or six
hundred people, even if they were intellectually much above the average
of the members of the best Parliament, even if every one of them were
a Burleigh, or a Sully, would be unfit for executive functions. It has
been truly said that every large collection of human beings, however
well educated, has a strong tendency to become a mob; and a country of
which the Supreme Executive Council is a mob is surely in a perilous
situation.
Happily a way has been found out in which the House of Commons can
exercise a paramount influence over the executive government, without
assuming functions such as can never be well discharged by a body so
numerous and so variously composed.
had expected and desired. His feint had served its purpose. He turned
his back on the fortress which had hitherto seemed to be his object, and
hastened towards the Gette. William, who had detached more than twenty
thousand men, and who had but fifty thousand left in his camp, was
alarmed by learning from his scouts, on the eighteenth of July, that the
French General, with near eighty thousand, was close at hand.
It was still in the King's power, by a hasty retreat, to put the narrow,
but deep, waters of the Gette, which had lately been swollen by rains,
between his army and the enemy. But the site which he occupied was
strong; and it could easily be made still stronger. He set all his
troops to work. Ditches were dug, mounds thrown up, palisades fixed in
the earth. In a few hours the ground wore a new aspect; and the King
trusted that he should be able to repel the attack even of a force
greatly outnumbering his own. Nor was it without much appearance of
reason that he felt this confidence. When the morning of the nineteenth
of July broke, the bravest men of Lewis's army looked gravely and
anxiously on the fortress which had suddenly sprung up to arrest their
progress. The allies were protected by a breastwork. Here and there
along the entrenchments were formed little redoubts and half moons. A
hundred pieces of cannon were disposed along the ramparts. On the left
flank, the village of Romsdorff rose close to the little stream of
Landen, from which the English have named the disastrous day. On the
right was the village of Neerwinden. Both villages were, after the
fashion of the Low Countries, surrounded by moats and fences; and,
within these enclosures, the little plots of ground occupied by
different families were separated by mud walls five feet in height and
a foot in thickness. All these barricades William had repaired and
strengthened. Saint Simon, who, after the battle, surveyed the ground,
could hardly, he tells us, believe that defences so extensive and so
formidable could have been created with such rapidity.
Luxemburg, however, was determined to try whether even this position
could be maintained against the superior numbers and the impetuous
valour of his soldiers. Soon after sunrise the roar of cannon began
to be heard. William's batteries did much execution before the French
artillery could be so placed as to return the fire. It was eight o'clock
before the close fighting began. The village of Neerwinden was regarded
by both commanders as the point on which every thing depended. There an
attack was made by the French left wing commanded by Montchevreuil, a
veteran officer of high reputation, and by Berwick, who, though young,
was fast rising to a high place among the captains of his time. Berwick
led the onset, and forced his way into the village, but was soon driven
out again with a terrible carnage. His followers fled or perished; he,
while trying to rally them, and cursing them for not doing their duty
better, was surrounded by foes. He concealed his white cockade, and
hoped to be able, by the help of his native tongue, to pass himself off
as an officer of the English army. But his face was recognised by one
of his mother's brothers, George Churchill, who held on that day the
command of a brigade. A hurried embrace was exchanged between the
kinsmen; and the uncle conducted the nephew to William, who, as long as
every thing seemed to be going well, remained in the rear. The meeting
of the King and the captive, united by such close domestic ties, and
divided by such inexpiable injuries, was a strange sight. Both behaved
as became them. William uncovered, and addressed to his prisoner a few
words of courteous greeting. Berwick's only reply was a solemn bow. The
King put on his hat; the Duke put on his hat; and the cousins parted for
ever.
By this time the French, who had been driven in confusion out of
Neerwinden, had been reinforced by a division under the command of the
Duke of Bourbon, and came gallantly back to the attack. William, well
aware of the importance of this post, gave orders that troops should
move thither from other parts of his line. This second conflict was long
and bloody. The assailants again forced an entrance into the village.
They were again driven out with immense slaughter, and showed little
inclination to return to the charge.
Meanwhile the battle had been raging all along the entrenchments of
the allied army. Again and again Luxemburg brought up his troops within
pistolshot of the breastwork; but he could bring them no nearer. Again
and again they recoiled from the heavy fire which was poured on their
front and on their flanks. It seemed that all was over. Luxemburg
retired to a spot which was out of gunshot, and summoned a few of his
chief officers to a consultation. They talked together during some time;
and their animated gestures were observed with deep interest by all who
were within sight.
At length Luxemburg formed his decision. A last attempt must be made to
carry Neerwinden; and the invincible household troops, the conquerors of
Steinkirk, must lead the way.
The household troops came on in a manner worthy of their long and
terrible renown. A third time Neerwinden was taken. A third time William
tried to retake it. At the head of some English regiments he charged the
guards of Lewis with such fury that, for the first time in the memory of
the oldest warrior, that far famed band gave way. [446] It was only by
the strenuous exertions of Luxemburg, of the Duke of Chartres, and of
the Duke of Bourbon, that the broken ranks were rallied. But by this
time the centre and left of the allied army had been so much thinned
for the purpose of supporting the conflict at Neerwinden that the
entrenchments could no longer be defended on other points. A little
after four in the afternoon the whole line gave way. All was havoc and
confusion. Solmes had received a mortal wound, and fell, still alive,
into the hands of the enemy. The English soldiers, to whom his name was
hateful, accused him of having in his sufferings shown pusillanimity
unworthy of a soldier. The Duke of Ormond was struck down in the press;
and in another moment he would have been a corpse, had not a rich
diamond on his finger caught the eye of one of the French guards,
who justly thought that the owner of such a jewel would be a valuable
prisoner. The Duke's life was saved; and he was speedily exchanged for
Berwick. Ruvigny, animated by the true refugee hatred of the country
which had cast him out, was taken fighting in the thickest of the
battle. Those into whose hands he had fallen knew him well, and knew
that, if they carried him to their camp, his head would pay for that
treason to which persecution had driven him. With admirable generosity
they pretended not to recognise him, and suffered him to make his escape
in the tumult.
It was only on such occasions as this that the whole greatness of
William's character appeared. Amidst the rout and uproar, while arms and
standards were flung away, while multitudes of fugitives were choking up
the bridges and fords of the Gette or perishing in its waters, the King,
having directed Talmash to superintend the retreat, put himself at the
head of a few brave regiments, and by desperate efforts arrested the
progress of the enemy. His risk was greater than that which others ran.
For he could not be persuaded either to encumber his feeble frame with
a cuirass, or to hide the ensigns of the garter. He thought his star a
good rallying point for his own troops, and only smiled when he was told
that it was a good mark for the enemy. Many fell on his right hand and
on his left. Two led horses, which in the field always closely followed
his person, were struck dead by cannon shots. One musket ball passed
through the curls of his wig, another through his coat; a third
bruised his side and tore his blue riband to tatters. Many years later
greyhaired old pensioners who crept about the arcades and alleys of
Chelsea Hospital used to relate how he charged at the head of Galway's
horse, how he dismounted four times to put heart into the infantry, how
he rallied one corps which seemed to be shrinking; "That is not the way
to fight, gentlemen. You must stand close up to them. Thus, gentlemen,
thus. " "You might have seen him," an eyewitness wrote, only four days
after the battle, "with his sword in his hand, throwing himself upon the
enemy. It is certain that one time, among the rest, he was seen at the
head of two English regiments, and that he fought seven with these two
in sight of the whole army, driving them before him above a quarter of
an hour. Thanks be to God that preserved him. " The enemy pressed on him
so close that it was with difficulty that he at length made his way over
the Gette. A small body of brave men, who shared his peril to the last,
could hardly keep off the pursuers as he crossed the bridge. [447]
Never, perhaps, was the change which the progress of civilisation has
produced in the art of war more strikingly illustrated than on that day.
Ajax beating down the Trojan leader with a rock which two ordinary men
could scarcely lift, Horatius defending the bridge against an army,
Richard the Lionhearted spurring along the whole Saracen line without
finding an enemy to stand his assault, Robert Bruce crushing with one
blow the helmet and head of Sir Henry Bohun in sight of the whole array
of England and Scotland, such are the heroes of a dark age. In such an
age bodily vigour is the most indispensable qualification of a warrior.
At Landen two poor sickly beings, who, in a rude state of society, would
have been regarded as too puny to bear any part in combats, were the
souls of two great armies. In some heathen countries they would have
been exposed while infants. In Christendom they would, six hundred years
earlier, have been sent to some quiet cloister. But their lot had fallen
on a time when men had discovered that the strength of the muscles is
far inferior in value to the strength of the mind. It is probable that,
among the hundred and twenty thousand soldiers who were marshalled round
Neerwinden under all the standards of Western Europe, the two feeblest
in body were the hunchbacked dwarf who urged forward the fiery onset
of France, and the asthmatic skeleton who covered the slow retreat of
England.
The French were victorious; but they had bought their victory dear. More
than ten thousand of the best troops of Lewis had fallen. Neerwinden was
a spectacle at which the oldest soldiers stood aghast. The streets were
piled breast high with corpses. Among the slain were some great lords
and some renowned warriors. Montchevreuil was there, and the mutilated
trunk of the Duke of Uzes, first in order of precedence among the
whole aristocracy of France. Thence too Sarsfield was borne desperately
wounded to a pallet from which he never rose again. The Court of Saint
Germains had conferred on him the empty title of Earl of Lucan;
but history knows him by the name which is still dear to the most
unfortunate of nations. The region, renowned in history as the battle
field, during many ages, of the most warlike nations of Europe, has
seen only two more terrible days, the day of Malplaquet and the day of
Waterloo. During many months the ground was strewn with skulls and bones
of men and horses, and with fragments of hats and shoes, saddles and
holsters. The next summer the soil, fertilised by twenty thousand
corpses, broke forth into millions of poppies. The traveller who, on the
road from Saint Tron to Tirlemont, saw that vast sheet of rich scarlet
spreading from Landen to Neerwinden, could hardly help fancying that the
figurative prediction of the Hebrew prophet was literally accomplished,
that the earth was disclosing her blood, and refusing to cover the
slain. [448]
There was no pursuit, though the sun was still high in the heaven when
William crossed the Gette. The conquerors were so much exhausted by
marching and fighting that they could scarcely move; and the horses were
in even worse condition than the men. Their general thought it necessary
to allow some time for rest and refreshment. The French nobles unloaded
their sumpter horses, supped gaily, and pledged one another in champagne
amidst the heaps of dead; and, when night fell, whole brigades gladly
lay down to sleep in their ranks on the field of battle. The inactivity
of Luxemburg did not escape censure. None could deny that he had in the
action shown great skill and energy. But some complained that he wanted
patience and perseverance. Others whispered that he had no wish to bring
to an end a war which made him necessary to a Court where he had never,
in time of peace, found favour or even justice. [449] Lewis, who on this
occasion was perhaps not altogether free from some emotions of jealousy,
contrived, it was reported, to mingle with the praise which he bestowed
on his lieutenant blame which, though delicately expressed, was
perfectly intelligible. "In the battle," he said, "the Duke of Luxemburg
behaved like Conde; and since the battle the Prince of Orange has
behaved like Turenne. "
In truth the ability and vigour with which William repaired his terrible
defeat might well excite admiration. "In one respect," said the Admiral
Coligni, "I may claim superiority over Alexander, over Scipio, over
Caesar. They won great battles, it is true. I have lost four great
battles; and yet I show to the enemy a more formidable front than ever. "
The blood of Coligni ran in the veins of William; and with the blood had
descended the unconquerable spirit which could derive from failure as
much glory as happier commanders owed to success. The defeat of Landen
was indeed a heavy blow. The King had a few days of cruel anxiety.
If Luxemburg pushed on, all was lost. Louvain must fall, and Mechlin,
Nieuport, and Ostend. The Batavian frontier would be in danger. The cry
for peace throughout Holland might be such as neither States General nor
Stadtholder would be able to resist. [450] But there was delay; and a
very short delay was enough for William. From the field of battle he
made his way through the multitude of fugitives to the neighbourhood of
Louvain, and there began to collect his scattered forces. His character
is not lowered by the anxiety which, at that moment, the most disastrous
of his life, he felt for the two persons who were dearest to him. As
soon as he was safe, he wrote to assure his wife of his safety. [451] In
the confusion of the flight he had lost sight of Portland, who was then
in very feeble health, and had therefore run more than the ordinary
risks of war. A short note which the King sent to his friend a few hours
later is still extant. [452] "Though I hope to see you this evening, I
cannot help writing to tell you how rejoiced I am that you got off so
well. God grant that your health may soon be quite restored. These are
great trials, which he has been pleased to send me in quick succession.
I must try to submit to his pleasure without murmuring, and to deserve
his anger less. "
His forces rallied fast. Large bodies of troops which he had, perhaps
imprudently, detached from his army while he supposed that Liege was the
object of the enemy, rejoined him by forced marches. Three weeks after
his defeat he held a review a few miles from Brussels. The number of men
under arms was greater than on the morning of the bloody day of Landen;
their appearance was soldierlike; and their spirit seemed unbroken.
William now wrote to Heinsius that the worst was over. "The crisis," he
said, "has been a terrible one. Thank God that it has ended thus. " He
did not, however, think it prudent to try at that time the event of
another pitched field. He therefore suffered the French to besiege and
take Charleroy; and this was the only advantage which they derived
from the most sanguinary battle fought in Europe during the seventeenth
century.
The melancholy tidings of the defeat of Landen found England agitated by
tidings not less melancholy from a different quarter. During many
months the trade with the Mediterranean Sea had been almost entirely
interrupted by the war. There was no chance that a merchantman from
London or from Amsterdam would, if unprotected, reach the Pillars of
Hercules without being boarded by a French privateer; and the protection
of armed vessels was not easily to be obtained. During the year 1691,
great fleets, richly laden for Spanish, Italian and Turkish markets, had
been gathering in the Thames and the Texel. In February 1693, near
four hundred ships were ready to start. The value of the cargoes was
estimated at several millions sterling. Those galleons which had long
been the wonder and envy of the world had never conveyed so precious
a freight from the West Indies to Seville. The English government
undertook, in concert with the Dutch government, to escort the vessels
which were laden with this great mass of wealth. The French government
was bent on intercepting them.
The plan of the allies was that seventy ships of the line and about
thirty frigates and brigantines should assemble in the Channel under
the command of Killegrew and Delaval, the two new Lords of the English
Admiralty, and should convoy the Smyrna fleet, as it was popularly
called, beyond the limits within which any danger could be apprehended
from the Brest squadron. The greater part of the armament might then
return to guard the Channel, while Rooke, with twenty sail, might
accompany the trading vessels and might protect them against the
squadron which lay at Toulon. The plan of the French government was that
the Brest squadron under Tourville and the Toulon squadron under Estrees
should meet in the neighbourhood of the Straits of Gibraltar, and should
there lie in wait for the booty.
Which plan was the better conceived may be doubted. Which was the better
executed is a question which admits of no doubt. The whole French navy,
whether in the Atlantic or in the Mediterranean, was moved by one will.
The navy of England and the navy of the United Provinces were subject to
different authorities; and, both in England and in the United Provinces,
the power was divided and subdivided to such an extent that no single
person was pressed by a heavy responsibility. The spring came. The
merchants loudly complained that they had already lost more by delay
than they could hope to gain by the most successful voyage; and still
the ships of war were not half manned or half provisioned. The Amsterdam
squadron did not arrive on our coast till late in April; the Zealand
squadron not till the middle of May. [453] It was June before the
immense fleet, near five hundred sail, lost sight of the cliffs of
England.
Tourville was already on the sea, and was steering southward. But
Killegrew and Delaval were so negligent or so unfortunate that they had
no intelligence of his movements. They at first took it for granted that
he was still lying in the port of Brest. Then they heard a rumour that
some shipping had been seen to the northward; and they supposed that
he was taking advantage of their absence to threaten the coast of
Devonshire. It never seems to have occurred to them as possible that he
might have effected a junction with the Toulon squadron, and might be
impatiently waiting for his prey in the neighbourhood of Gibraltar. They
therefore, on the sixth of June, having convoyed the Smyrna fleet about
two hundred miles beyond Ushant, announced their intention to part
company with Rooke. Rooke expostulated, but to no purpose. It was
necessary for him to submit, and to proceed with his twenty men of
war to the Mediterranean, while his superiors, with the rest of the
armament, returned to the Channel.
It was by this time known in England that Tourville had stolen out of
Brest, and was hastening to join Estrees. The return of Killegrew
and Delaval therefore excited great alarm. A swift sailing vessel was
instantly despatched to warn Rooke of his danger; but the warning never
reached him. He ran before a fair wind to Cape Saint Vincent; and there
he learned that some French ships were lying in the neighbouring Bay of
Lagos. The first information which he received led him to believe that
they were few in number; and so dexterously did they conceal their
strength that, till they were within half an hour's sail, he had no
suspicion that he was opposed to the whole maritime strength of a great
kingdom. To contend against fourfold odds would have been madness. It
was much that he was able to save his squadron from titter destruction.
He exerted all his skill. Two or three Dutch men of war, which were in
the rear, courageously sacrificed themselves to save the fleet. With
the rest of the armament, and with about sixty merchant ships, Rooke got
safe to Madeira and thence to Cork. But more than three hundred of
the vessels which he had convoyed were scattered over the ocean. Some
escaped to Ireland; some to Corunna; some to Lisbon; some to Cadiz; some
were captured, and more destroyed. A few, which had taken shelter under
the rock of Gibraltar, and were pursued thither by the enemy, were sunk
when it was found that they could not be defended. Others perished in
the same manner under the batteries of Malaga. The gain to the French
seems not to have been great; but the loss to England and Holland was
immense. [454]
Never within the memory of man had there been in the City a day of more
gloom and agitation than that on which the news of the encounter in the
Bay of Lagos arrived. Many merchants, an eyewitness said, went away from
the Royal Exchange, as pale as if they had received sentence of death.
A deputation from the merchants who had been sufferers by this great
disaster went up to the Queen with an address representing their
grievances. They were admitted to the Council Chamber, where she was
seated at the head of the Board. She directed Somers to reply to them
in her name; and he addressed to them a speech well calculated to soothe
their irritation. Her Majesty, he said, felt for them from her heart;
and she had already appointed a Committee of the Privy Council to
inquire into the cause of the late misfortune, and to consider of the
best means of preventing similar misfortunes in time to come. [455] This
answer gave so much satisfaction that the Lord Mayor soon came to the
palace to thank the Queen for her goodness, to assure her that, through
all vicissitudes, London would be true to her and her consort, and to
inform her that, severely as the late calamity had been felt by many
great commercial houses, the Common Council had unanimously resolved to
advance whatever might be necessary for the support of the government.
[456]
The ill humour which the public calamities naturally produced was
inflamed by every factious artifice. Never had the Jacobite pamphleteers
been so savagely scurrilous as during this unfortunate summer. The
police was consequently more active than ever in seeking for the dens
from which so much treason proceeded. With great difficulty and after
long search the most important of all the unlicensed presses was
discovered. This press belonged to a Jacobite named William Anderton,
whose intrepidity and fanaticism marked him out as fit to be employed
on services from which prudent men and scrupulous men shrink. During two
years he had been watched by the agents of the government; but where
he exercised his craft was an impenetrable mystery. At length he was
tracked to a house near Saint James's Street, where he was known by a
feigned name, and where he passed for a working jeweller. A messenger
of the press went thither with several assistants, and found Anderton's
wife and mother posted as sentinels at the door. The women knew the
messenger, rushed on him, tore his hair, and cried out "Thieves"
and "Murder. " The alarm was thus given to Anderton. He concealed the
instruments of his calling, came forth with an assured air, and bade
defiance to the messenger, the Censor, the Secretary, and Little
Hooknose himself.
After a struggle he was secured. His room was
searched; and at first sight no evidence of his guilt appeared. But
behind the bed was soon found a door which opened into a dark closet.
The closet contained a press, types and heaps of newly printed papers.
One of these papers, entitled Remarks on the Present Confederacy and the
Late Revolution, is perhaps the most frantic of all the Jacobite libels.
In this tract the Prince of Orange is gravely accused of having ordered
fifty of his wounded English soldiers to be burned alive. The governing
principle of his whole conduct, it is said, is not vainglory, or
ambition, or avarice, but a deadly hatred of Englishmen and a desire
to make them miserable. The nation is vehemently adjured, on peril of
incurring the severest judgments, to rise up and free itself from this
plague, this curse, this tyrant, whose depravity makes it difficult to
believe that he can have been procreated by a human pair. Many copies
were also found of another paper, somewhat less ferocious but perhaps
more dangerous, entitled A French Conquest neither desirable nor
practicable. In this tract also the people are exhorted to rise in
insurrection. They are assured that a great part of the army is with
them. The forces of the Prince of Orange will melt away; he will be glad
to make his escape; and a charitable hope is sneeringly expressed that
it may not be necessary to do him any harm beyond sending him back to
Loo, where he may live surrounded by luxuries for which the English have
paid dear.
The government, provoked and alarmed by the virulence of the Jacobite
pamphleteers, determined to make Anderton an example. He was indicted
for high treason, and brought to the bar of the Old Bailey. Treby,
now Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and Powell, who had honourably
distinguished himself on the day of the trial of the bishops, were on
the Bench. It is unfortunate that no detailed report of the evidence has
come down to us, and that we are forced to content ourselves with such
fragments of information as can be collected from the contradictory
narratives of writers evidently partial, intemperate and dishonest. The
indictment, however, is extant; and the overt acts which it imputes to
the prisoner undoubtedly amount to high treason. [457] To exhort the
subjects of the realm to rise up and depose the King by force, and to
add to that exhortation the expression, evidently ironical, of a hope
that it may not be necessary to inflict on him any evil worse than
banishment, is surely an offence which the least courtly lawyer will
admit to be within the scope of the statute of Edward the Third. On this
point indeed there seems to have been no dispute, either at the trial or
subsequently.
The prisoner denied that he had printed the libels. On this point it
seems reasonable that, since the evidence has not come down to us,
we should give credit to the judges and the jury who heard what the
witnesses had to say.
One argument with which Anderton had been furnished by his advisers,
and which, in the Jacobite pasquinades of that time, is represented as
unanswerable, was that, as the art of printing had been unknown in the
reign of Edward the Third, printing could not be an overt act of treason
under a statute of that reign. The judges treated this argument very
lightly; and they were surely justified in so treating it. For it is
an argument which would lead to the conclusion that it could not be an
overt act of treason to behead a King with a guillotine or to shoot him
with a Minie rifle.
It was also urged in Anderton's favour,--and this was undoubtedly an
argument well entitled to consideration,--that a distinction ought to
be made between the author of a treasonable paper and the man who merely
printed it. The former could not pretend that he had not understood the
meaning of the words which he had himself selected. But to the latter
those words might convey no idea whatever. The metaphors, the allusions,
the sarcasms, might be far beyond his comprehension; and, while his
hands were busy among the types, his thoughts might be wandering to
things altogether unconnected with the manuscript which was before him.
It is undoubtedly true that it may be no crime to print what it would be
a great crime to write. But this is evidently a matter concerning
which no general rule can be laid down. Whether Anderton had, as a mere
mechanic, contributed to spread a work the tendency of which he did
not suspect, or had knowingly lent his help to raise a rebellion, was
a question for the jury; and the jury might reasonably infer from his
change of his name, from the secret manner in which he worked, from the
strict watch kept by his wife and mother, and from the fury with which,
even in the grasp of the messengers, he railed at the government,
that he was not the unconscious tool, but the intelligent and zealous
accomplice of traitors. The twelve, after passing a considerable time
in deliberation, informed the Court that one of them entertained doubts.
Those doubts were removed by the arguments of Treby and Powell; and a
verdict of Guilty was found.
The fate of the prisoner remained during sometime in suspense. The
Ministers hoped that he might be induced to save his own neck at the
expense of the necks of the pamphleteers who had employed him. But his
natural courage was kept up by spiritual stimulants which the nonjuring
divines well understood how to administer. He suffered death with
fortitude, and continued to revile the government to the last. The
Jacobites clamoured loudly against the cruelty of the judges who had
tried him and of the Queen who had left him for execution, and, not very
consistently, represented him at once as a poor ignorant artisan who was
not aware of the nature and tendency of the act for which he suffered,
and as a martyr who had heroically laid down his life for the banished
King and the persecuted Church. [458]
The Ministers were much mistaken if they flattered themselves that the
fate of Anderton would deter others from imitating his example. His
execution produced several pamphlets scarcely less virulent than those
for which he had suffered. Collier, in what he called Remarks on the
London Gazette, exulted with cruel joy over the carnage of Landen, and
the vast destruction of English property on the coast of Spain. [459]
Other writers did their best to raise riots among the labouring people.
For the doctrine of the Jacobites was that disorder, in whatever place
or in whatever way it might begin, was likely to end in a Restoration.
A phrase which, without a commentary, may seem to be mere nonsense,
but which was really full of meaning, was often in their mouths at
this time, and was indeed a password by which the members of the party
recognised each other: "Box it about; it will come to my father. " The
hidden sense of this gibberish was, "Throw the country into confusion;
it will be necessary at last to have recourse to King James. " [460]
Trade was not prosperous; and many industrious men were out of work.
Accordingly songs addressed to the distressed classes were composed by
the malecontent street poets. Numerous copies of a ballad exhorting the
weavers to rise against the government were discovered in the house of
that Quaker who had printed James's Declaration. [461] Every art was
used for the purpose of exciting discontent in a much more formidable
body of men, the sailors; and unhappily the vices of the naval
administration furnished the enemies of the State with but too good a
choice of inflammatory topics. Some seamen deserted; some mutinied; then
came executions; and then came more ballads and broadsides representing
those executions as barbarous murders. Reports that the government
had determined to defraud its defenders of their hard earned pay were
circulated with so much effect that a great crowd of women from Wapping
and Rotherhithe besieged Whitehall, clamouring for what was due to their
husbands. Mary had the good sense and good nature to order four of
those importunate petitioners to be admitted into the room where she was
holding a Council. She heard their complaints, and herself assured them
that the rumour which had alarmed them was unfounded. [462] By this
time Saint Bartholomew's day drew near; and the great annual fair, the
delight of idle apprentices and the horror of Puritanical Aldermen,
was opened in Smithfield with the usual display of dwarfs, giants, and
dancing dogs, the man that ate fire, and the elephant that loaded and
fired a musket. But of all the shows none proved so attractive as a
dramatic performance which, in conception, though doubtless not in
execution, seems to have borne much resemblance to those immortal
masterpieces of humour in which Aristophanes held up Cleon and Lamachus
to derision. Two strollers personated Killegrew and Delaval. The
Admirals were represented as flying with their whole fleet before a few
French privateers, and taking shelter under the grins of the Tower.
The office of Chorus was performed by a Jackpudding who expressed very
freely his opinion of the naval administration. Immense crowds flocked
to see this strange farce. The applauses were loud; the receipts were
great; and the mountebanks, who had at first ventured to attack only the
unlucky and unpopular Board of Admiralty, now, emboldened by impunity
and success, and probably prompted and rewarded by persons of much
higher station than their own, began to cast reflections on other
departments of the government. This attempt to revive the license of the
Attic Stage was soon brought to a close by the appearance of a strong
body of constables who carried off the actors to prison. [463] Meanwhile
the streets of London were every night strewn with seditious handbills.
At all the taverns the zealots of hereditary right were limping about
with glasses of wine and punch at their lips. This fashion had just come
in; and the uninitiated wondered much that so great a number of jolly
gentlemen should have suddenly become lame. But, those who were in the
secret knew that the word Limp was a consecrated word, that every one
of the four letters which composed it was the initial of an august name,
and that the loyal subject who limped while he drank was taking off his
bumper to Lewis, James, Mary, and the Prince. [464]
It was not only in the capital that the Jacobites, at this time, made a
great display of their wit. They mustered strong at Bath, where the Lord
President Caermarthen was trying to recruit his feeble health. Every
evening they met, as they phrased it, to serenade the Marquess. In other
words they assembled under the sick man's window, and there sang doggrel
lampoons on him. [465]
It is remarkable that the Lord President, at the very time at which
he was insulted as a Williamite at Bath, was considered as a stanch
Jacobite at Saint Germains. How he came to be so considered is a
most perplexing question. Some writers are of opinion that he, like
Shrewsbury, Russell, Godolphin and Marlborough, entered into engagements
with one king while eating the bread of the other. But this opinion
does not rest on sufficient proofs. About the treasons of Shrewsbury,
of Russell, of Godolphin and of Marlborough, we have a great mass of
evidence, derived from various sources, and extending over several
years. But all the information which we possess about Caermarthen's
dealings with James is contained in a single short paper written by
Melfort on the sixteenth of October 1693. From that paper it is quite
clear that some intelligence had reached the banished King and his
Ministers which led them to regard Caermarthen as a friend. But there is
no proof that they ever so regarded him, either before that day or after
that day. [466] On the whole, the most probable explanation of this
mystery seems to be that Caermarthen had been sounded by some Jacobite
emissary much less artful than himself, and had, for the purpose of
getting at the bottom of the new scheme of policy devised by Middleton,
pretended to be well disposed to the cause of the banished King, that an
exaggerated account of what had passed had been sent to Saint Germains,
and that there had been much rejoicing there at a conversion which soon
proved to have been feigned. It seems strange that such a conversion
should even for a moment have been thought sincere. It was plainly
Caermarthen's interest to stand by the sovereigns in possession. He
was their chief minister. He could not hope to be the chief minister of
James. It can indeed hardly be supposed that the political conduct of a
cunning old man, insatiably ambitious and covetous, was much influenced
by personal partiality. But, if there were any person to whom
Caermarthen was partial, that person was undoubtedly Mary. That he had
seriously engaged in a plot to depose her, at the risk of his head if he
failed, and with the certainty of losing immense power and wealth if he
succeeded, was a story too absurd for any credulity but the credulity of
exiles.
Caermarthen had indeed at that moment peculiarly strong reasons for
being satisfied with the place which he held in the counsels of William
and Mary. There is but too strong reason to believe that he was then
accumulating unlawful gain with a rapidity unexampled even in his
experience.
The contest between the two East India Companies was, during the autumn
of 1693, fiercer than ever. The House of Commons, finding the Old
Company obstinately averse to all compromise, had, a little before the
close of the late session, requested the King to give the three years'
warning prescribed by the Charter. Child and his fellows now began to
be seriously alarmed. They expected every day to receive the dreaded
notice. Nay, they were not sure that their exclusive privilege might not
be taken away without any notice at all; for they found that they had,
by inadvertently omitting to pay the tax lately imposed on their stock
at the precise time fixed by law, forfeited their Charter; and, though
it would, in ordinary circumstances, have been thought cruel in the
government to take advantage of such a slip, the public was not inclined
to allow the Old Company any thing more than the strict letter of the
bond. Every thing was lost if the Charter were not renewed before the
meeting of Parliament. There can be little doubt that the proceedings
of the corporation were still really directed by Child. But he had, it
should seem, perceived that his unpopularity had injuriously affected
the interests which were under his care, and therefore did not obtrude
himself on the public notice. His place was ostensibly filled by his
near kinsman Sir Thomas Cook, one of the greatest merchants of London,
and Member of Parliament for the borough of Colchester. The Directors
placed at Cook's absolute disposal all the immense wealth which lay in
their treasury; and in a short time near a hundred thousand pounds were
expended in corruption on a gigantic scale. In what proportions this
enormous sum was distributed among the great men at Whitehall, and how
much of it was embezzled by intermediate agents, is still a mystery. We
know with certainty however that thousands went to Seymour and thousands
to Caermarthen.
The effect of these bribes was that the Attorney General received orders
to draw up a charter regranting the old privileges to the old Company.
No minister, however, could, after what had passed in Parliament,
venture to advise the Crown to renew the monopoly without conditions.
The Directors were sensible that they had no choice, and reluctantly
consented to accept the new Charter on terms substantially the same with
those which the House of Commons had sanctioned.
It is probable that, two years earlier, such a compromise would have
quieted the feud which distracted the City. But a long conflict, in
which satire and calumny had not been spared, had heated the minds of
men. The cry of Dowgate against Leadenhall Street was louder than ever.
Caveats were entered; petitions were signed; and in those petitions a
doctrine which had hitherto been studiously kept in the background
was boldly affirmed. While it was doubtful on which side the royal
prerogative would be used, that prerogative had not been questioned.
But as soon as it appeared that the Old Company was likely to obtain a
regrant of the monopoly under the Great Seal, the New Company began to
assert with vehemence that no monopoly could be created except by Act
of Parliament. The Privy Council, over which Caermarthen presided, after
hearing the matter fully argued by counsel on both sides, decided in
favour of the Old Company, and ordered the Charter to be sealed. [467]
The autumn was by this time far advanced, and the armies in the
Netherlands had gone into quarters for the winter. On the last day of
October William landed in England. The Parliament was about to meet; and
he had every reason to expect a session even more stormy than the last.
The people were discontented, and not without cause. The year had been
every where disastrous to the allies, not only on the sea and in the Low
Countries, but also in Servia, in Spain, in Italy, and in Germany. The
Turks had compelled the generals of the Empire to raise the siege of
Belgrade. A newly created Marshal of France, the Duke of Noailles, had
invaded Catalonia and taken the fortress of Rosas. Another newly created
Marshal, the skilful and valiant Catinat, had descended from the Alps
on Piedmont, and had, at Marsiglia, gained a complete victory over the
forces of the Duke of Savoy. This battle is memorable as the first of
a long series of battles in which the Irish troops retrieved the honour
lost by misfortunes and misconduct in domestic war. Some of the exiles
of Limerick showed, on that day, under the standard of France, a valour
which distinguished them among many thousands of brave men. It is
remarkable that on the same day a battalion of the persecuted and
expatriated Huguenots stood firm amidst the general disorder round the
standard of Savoy, and fell fighting desperately to the last.
The Duke of Lorges had marched into the Palatinate, already twice
devastated, and had found that Turenne and Duras had left him something
to destroy. Heidelberg, just beginning to rise again from its ruins,
was again sacked, the peaceable citizens butchered, their wives and
daughters foully outraged. The very choirs of the churches were stained
with blood; the pyxes and crucifixes were torn from the altars; the
tombs of the ancient Electors were broken open; the corpses, stripped
of their cerecloths and ornaments, were dragged about the streets. The
skull of the father of the Duchess of Orleans was beaten to fragments
by the soldiers of a prince among the ladies of whose splendid Court she
held the foremost place.
And yet a discerning eye might have perceived that, unfortunate as the
confederates seemed to have been, the advantage had really been on their
side. The contest was quite as much a financial as a military contest.
The French King had, some months before, said that the last piece of
gold would carry the day; and he now began painfully to feel the truth
of the saying. England was undoubtedly hard pressed by public burdens;
but still she stood up erect. France meanwhile was fast sinking. Her
recent efforts had been too much for her strength, and had left her
spent and unnerved. Never had her rulers shown more ingenuity in
devising taxes or more severity in exacting them; but by no ingenuity,
by no severity, was it possible to raise the sums necessary for another
such campaign as that of 1693. In England the harvest had been abundant.
In France the corn and the wine had again failed. The people, as usual,
railed at the government. The government, with shameful ignorance or
more shameful dishonesty, tried to direct the public indignation
against the dealers in grain. Decrees appeared which seemed to have been
elaborately framed for the purpose of turning dearth into famine. The
nation was assured that there was no reason for uneasiness, that there
was more than a sufficient supply of food, and that the scarcity had
been produced by the villanous arts of misers, who locked up their
stores in the hope of making enormous gains. Commissioners were
appointed to inspect the granaries, and were empowered to send to
market all the corn that was not necessary for the consumption of the
proprietors. Such interference of course increased the suffering which
it was meant to relieve. But in the midst of the general distress there
was an artificial plenty in one favoured spot. The most arbitrary
prince must always stand in some awe of an immense mass of human beings
collected in the neighbourhood of his own palace. Apprehensions similar
to those which had induced the Caesars to extort from Africa and Egypt
the means of pampering the rabble of Rome induced Lewis to aggravate the
misery of twenty provinces for the purpose of keeping one huge city in
good humour. He ordered bread to be distributed in all the parishes of
the capital at less than half the market price. The English Jacobites
were stupid enough to extol the wisdom and humanity of this arrangement.
The harvest, they said, had been good in England and bad in France; and
yet the loaf was cheaper at Paris than in London; and the explanation
was simple. The French had a sovereign whose heart was French, and
who watched over his people with the solicitude of a father, while the
English were cursed with a Dutch tyrant, who sent their corn to Holland.
The truth was that a week of such fatherly government as that of Lewis
would have raised all England in arms from Northumberland to Cornwall.
That there might be abundance at Paris, the people of Normandy and Anjou
were stuffing themselves with nettles. That there might be tranquillity
at Paris, the peasantry were fighting with the bargemen and the troops
all along the Loire and the Seine. Multitudes fled from those rural
districts where bread cost five sous a pound to the happy place where
bread was to be had for two sous a pound. It was necessary to drive the
famished crowds back by force from the barriers, and to denounce the
most terrible punishments against all who should not go home and starve
quietly. [468]
Lewis was sensible that the strength of France had been overstrained by
the exertions of the last campaign. Even if her harvest and her vintage
had been abundant, she would not have been able to do in 1694 what she
had done in 1693; and it was utterly impossible that, in a season of
extreme distress, she should again send into the field armies superior
in number on every point to the armies of the coalition. New conquests
were not to be expected. It would be much if the harassed and exhausted
land, beset on all sides by enemies, should be able to sustain a
defensive war without any disaster. So able a politician as the French
King could not but feel that it would be for his advantage to treat with
the allies while they were still awed by the remembrance of the gigantic
efforts which his kingdom had just made, and before the collapse which
had followed those efforts should become visible.
He had long been communicating through various channels with some
members of the confederacy, and trying to induce them to separate
themselves from the rest. But he had as yet made no overture tending
to a general pacification. For he knew that there could be no general
pacification unless he was prepared to abandon the cause of James, and
to acknowledge the Prince and Princess of Orange as King and Queen of
England. This was in truth the point on which every thing turned. What
should be done with those great fortresses which Lewis had unjustly
seized and annexed to his empire in time of peace, Luxemburg which
overawed the Moselle, and Strasburg which domineered over the Upper
Rhine; what should be done with the places which he had recently won in
open war, Philipsburg, Mons and Namur, Huy and Charleroy; what barrier
should be given to the States General; on what terms Lorraine should be
restored to its hereditary Dukes; these were assuredly not unimportant
questions. But the all important question was whether England was to
be, as she had been under James, a dependency of France, or, as she
was under William and Mary, a power of the first rank. If Lewis really
wished for peace, he must bring himself to recognise the Sovereigns
whom he had so often designated as usurpers. Could he bring himself to
recognise them? His superstition, his pride, his regard for the unhappy
exiles who were pining at Saint Germains, his personal dislike of
the indefatigable and unconquerable adversary who had been constantly
crossing his path during twenty years, were on one side; his interests
and those of his people were on the other. He must have been sensible
that it was not in his power to subjugate the English, that he must at
last leave them to choose their government for themselves, and that what
he must do at last it would be best to do soon. Yet he could not at once
make up his mind to what was so disagreeable to him. He however opened
a negotiation with the States General through the intervention of Sweden
and Denmark, and sent a confidential emissary to confer in secret at
Brussels with Dykvelt, who possessed the entire confidence of William.
There was much discussion about matters of secondary importance; but
the great question remained unsettled. The French agent used, in private
conversation, expressions plainly implying that the government which he
represented was prepared to recognise William and Mary; but no formal
assurance could be obtained from him. Just at the same time the King
of Denmark informed the allies that he was endeavouring to prevail on
France not to insist on the restoration of James as an indispensable
condition of peace, but did not say that his endeavours had as yet
been successful. Meanwhile Avaux, who was now Ambassador at Stockholm,
informed the King of Sweden, that, as the dignity of all crowned heads
had been outraged in the person of James, the Most Christian King felt
assured that not only neutral powers, but even the Emperor, would try to
find some expedient which might remove so grave a cause of quarrel. The
expedient at which Avaux hinted doubtless was that James should waive
his rights, and that the Prince of Wales should be sent to England, bred
a Protestant, adopted by William and Mary, and declared their heir.
To such an arrangement William would probably have had no personal
objection. But we may be assured that he never would have consented to
make it a condition of peace with France. Who should reign in England
was a question to be decided by England alone. [469]
It might well be suspected that a negotiation conducted in this manner
was merely meant to divide the confederates. William understood the
whole importance of the conjuncture. He had not, it may be, the eye of a
great captain for all the turns of a battle. But he had, in the highest
perfection, the eye of a great statesman for all the turns of a war.
That France had at length made overtures to him was a sufficient proof
that she felt herself spent and sinking. That those overtures were made
with extreme reluctance and hesitation proved that she had not yet come
to a temper in which it was possible to have peace with her on fair
terms. He saw that the enemy was beginning to give ground, and that this
was the time to assume the offensive, to push forward, to bring up every
reserve. But whether the opportunity should be seized or lost it did not
belong to him to decide. The King of France might levy troops and exact
taxes without any limit save that which the laws of nature impose on
despotism. But the King of England could do nothing without the support
of the House of Commons; and the House of Commons, though it had
hitherto supported him zealously and liberally, was not a body on
which he could rely. It had indeed got into a state which perplexed
and alarmed all the most sagacious politicians of that age. There
was something appalling in the union of such boundless power and such
boundless caprice. The fate of the whole civilised world depended on
the votes of the representatives of the English people; and there was
no public man who could venture to say with confidence what those
representatives might not be induced to vote within twenty-four hours.
[470] William painfully felt that it was scarcely possible for a prince
dependent on an assembly so violent at one time, so languid at another,
to effect any thing great. Indeed, though no sovereign did so much to
secure and to extend the power of the House of Commons, no sovereign
loved the House of Commons less. Nor is this strange; for he saw that
House at the very worst. He saw it when it had just acquired the power
and had not yet acquired the gravity of a senate. In his letters to
Heinsius he perpetually complains of the endless talking, the factious
squabbling, the inconstancy, the dilatoriness, of the body which
his situation made it necessary for him to treat with deference. His
complaints were by no means unfounded; but he had not discovered either
the cause or the cure of the evil.
The truth was that the change which the Revolution had made in the
situation of the House of Commons had made another change necessary;
and that other change had not yet taken place. There was parliamentary
government; but there was no Ministry; and, without a Ministry, the
working of a parliamentary government, such as ours, must always be
unsteady and unsafe.
It is essential to our liberties that the House of Commons should
exercise a control over all the departments of the executive
administration. And yet it is evident that a crowd of five or six
hundred people, even if they were intellectually much above the average
of the members of the best Parliament, even if every one of them were
a Burleigh, or a Sully, would be unfit for executive functions. It has
been truly said that every large collection of human beings, however
well educated, has a strong tendency to become a mob; and a country of
which the Supreme Executive Council is a mob is surely in a perilous
situation.
Happily a way has been found out in which the House of Commons can
exercise a paramount influence over the executive government, without
assuming functions such as can never be well discharged by a body so
numerous and so variously composed.
