No More Learning

Yet a less acute observer
than Swift might have been aware that there is a certain tact,
resembling an instinct, which is often wanting to great orators and
philosophers, and which is often found in persons who, if judged by
their conversation or by their writings, would be pronounced simpletons.
Indeed, when a man possesses this tact, it is in some sense an advantage
to him that he is destitute of those more showy talents which would
make him an object of admiration, of envy, and of fear. Sidney was a
remarkable instance of this truth. Incapable, ignorant, and dissipated
as he seemed to be, he understood, or rather felt, with whom it was
necessary to be reserved, and with whom he might safely venture to be
communicative. The consequence was that he did what Mordaunt, with
all his vivacity and invention, or Burnet, with all his multifarious
knowledge and fluent elocution never could have done. [415]

With the old Whigs there could be no difficulty. In their opinion there
had been scarcely a moment, during many years, at which the public
wrongs would not have justified resistance. Devonshire, who might
be regarded as their chief, had private as well as public wrongs to
revenge. He went into the scheme with his whole heart, and answered for
his party. [416]

Russell opened the design to Shrewsbury. Sidney sounded Halifax.
Shrewsbury took his part with a courage and decision which, at a later
period, seemed to be wanting to his character. He at once agreed to
set his estate, his honours, and his life, on the stake. But Halifax
received the first hint of the project in a way which showed that it
would be useless, and perhaps hazardous, to be explicit. He was indeed
not the man for such an enterprise. His intellect was inexhaustibly
fertile of distinctions and objections; his temper calm and
unadventurous. He was ready to oppose the court to the utmost in the
House of Lords and by means of anonymous writings: but he was little
disposed to exchange his lordly repose for the insecure and agitated
life of a conspirator, to be in the power of accomplices, to live in
constant dread of warrants and King's messengers, nay, perhaps, to end
his days on a scaffold, or to live on alms in some back street of the
Hague. He therefore let fall some words which plainly indicated that
he did not wish to be privy to the intentions of his more daring and
impetuous friends. Sidney understood him and said no more. [417]

The next application was made to Danby, and had far better success.
Indeed, for his bold and active spirit the danger and the excitement,
which were insupportable to the more delicately organized mind of
Halifax, had a strong fascination. The different characters of the two
statesmen were legible in their faces. The brow, the eye, and the mouth
of Halifax indicated a powerful intellect and an exquisite sense of the
ludicrous; but the expression was that of a sceptic, of a voluptuary,
of a man not likely to venture his all on a single hazard, or to be a
martyr in any cause. To those who are acquainted with his countenance
it will not seem wonderful that the writer in whom he most delighted
was Montaigne. [418] Danby was a skeleton; and his meagre and wrinkled,
though handsome and noble, face strongly expressed both the keenness
of his parts and the restlessness of his ambition. Already he had once
risen from obscurity to the height of power. He had then fallen headlong
from his elevation. His life had been in danger. He had passed years in
a prison. He was now free: but this did not content him: he wished to
be again great. Attached as he was to the Anglican Church, hostile as he
was to the French ascendency, he could not hope to be great in a court
swarming with Jesuits and obsequious to the House of Bourbon. But, if he
bore a chief part in a revolution which should confound all the schemes
of the Papists, which should put an end to the long vassalage of
England, and which should transfer the regal power to an illustrious
pair whom he had united, he might emerge from his eclipse with new
splendour. The Whigs, whose animosity had nine years before driven
him from office, would, on his auspicious reappearance, join their
acclamations to the acclamations of his old friends the Cavaliers.
Already there had been a complete reconciliation between him and one of
the most distinguished of those who had formerly been managers of his
impeachment, the Earl of Devonshire. The two noblemen had met at
a village in the Peak, and had exchanged assurances of good will.
Devonshire had frankly owned that the Whigs had been guilty of a great
injustice, and had declared that they were now convinced of their error.
Danby, on his side, had also recantations to make. He had once held,
or pretended to hold, the doctrine of passive obedience in the largest
sense. Under his administration and with his sanction, a law had
been proposed which, if it had been passed, would have excluded from
Parliament and office all who refused to declare on oath that
they thought resistance in every case unlawful. But his vigorous
understanding, now thoroughly awakened by anxiety for the public
interests and for his own, was no longer to be duped, if indeed it ever
had been duped, by such childish fallacies. He at once gave in his
own adhesion to the conspiracy. He then exerted himself to obtain the
concurrence of Compton, the suspended Bishop of London, and succeeded
without difficulty. No prelate had been so insolently and unjustly
treated by the government as Compton; nor had any prelate so much to
expect from a revolution: for he had directed the education of the
Princess of Orange, and was supposed to possess a large share of her
confidence. He had, like his brethren, strongly maintained, as long as
he was not oppressed, that it was a crime to resist oppression; but,
since he had stood before the High Commission, a new light had broken in
upon his mind. [419]

Both Danby and Compton were desirous to secure the assistance of
Nottingham. The whole plan was opened to him; and he approved of it.
But in a few days he began to be unquiet. His mind was not sufficiently
powerful to emancipate itself from the prejudices of education. He went
about from divine to divine proposing in general terms hypothetical
cases of tyranny, and inquiring whether in such cases resistance would
be lawful. The answers which he obtained increased his distress. He at
length told his accomplices that he could go no further with them. If
they thought him capable of betraying them, they might stab him; and he
should hardly blame them; for, by drawing back after going so far, he
had given them a kind of right over his life. They had, however, he
assured them, nothing to fear from him: he would keep their secret; he
could not help wishing them success; but his conscience would not suffer
him to take an active part in a rebellion. They heard his confession
with suspicion and disdain. Sidney, whose notions of a conscientious
scruple were extremely vague, informed the Prince that Nottingham had
taken fright. It is due to Nottingham, however, to say that the general
tenor of his life justifies us in believing his conduct on this occasion
to have been perfectly honest, though most unwise and irresolute. [420]

The agents of the Prince had more complete success with Lord Lumley,
who knew himself to be, in spite of the eminent service which he
had performed at the time of the Western insurrection, abhorred
at Whitehall, not only as a heretic but as a renegade, and who was
therefore more eager than most of those who had been born Protestants to
take arms in defence of Protestantism. [421]

During June the meetings of those who were in the secret were frequent.
At length, on the last day of the month, the day on which the Bishops
were pronounced not guilty, the decisive step was taken. A formal
invitation, transcribed by Sidney but drawn up by some person more
skilled than Sidney, in the art of composition, was despatched to the
Hague. In this paper William was assured that nineteen twentieths of the
English people were desirous of a change, and would willingly join
to effect it, if only they could obtain the help of such a force from
abroad as might secure those who should rise in arms from the danger of
being dispersed and slaughtered before they could form themselves into
anything like military order. If his Highness would appear in the
island at the head of some troops, tens of thousands would hasten to
his standard. He would soon find himself at the head of a force greatly
superior to the whole regular army of England. Nor could that army
be implicitly depended on by the government. The officers were
discontented; and the common soldiers shared that aversion to Popery
which was general in the class from which they were taken. In the navy
Protestant feeling was still stronger. It was important to take some
decisive step while things were in this state. The enterprise would
be far more arduous if it were deferred till the King, by remodelling
boroughs and regiments, had procured a Parliament and an army on which
he could rely. The conspirators, therefore, implored the Prince to come
among them with as little delay as possible. They pledged their honour
that they would join him; and they undertook to secure the cooperation
of as large a number of persons as could safely be trusted with so
momentous and perilous a secret. On one point they thought it their
duty to remonstrate with his Highness. He had not taken advantage of the
opinion which the great body of the English people had formed respecting
the late birth. He had, on the contrary, sent congratulations to
Whitehall, and had thus seemed to acknowledge that the child who was
called Prince of Wales was rightful heir of the throne. This was a grave
error, and had damped the zeal of many. Not one person in a thousand
doubted that the boy was supposititious; and the Prince would be wanting
to his own interests if the suspicious circumstances which had attended
the Queen's confinement were not put prominently forward among his
reasons for taking arms. [422]

This paper was signed in cipher by the seven chiefs of the conspiracy,
Shrewsbury, Devonshire, Danby, Lumley, Compton, Russell and Sidney.
Herbert undertook to be their messenger. His errand was one of no
ordinary peril. He assumed the garb of a common sailor, and in this
disguise reached the Dutch coast in safety, on the Friday after the
trial of the Bishops. He instantly hastened to the Prince. Bentinck and
Dykvelt were summoned, and several days were passed in deliberation. The
first result of this deliberation was that the prayer for the Prince of
Wales ceased to be read in the Princess's chapel. [423]

From his wife William had no opposition to apprehend. Her understanding
had been completely subjugated by his; and, what is more extraordinary,
he had won her entire affection. He was to her in the place of the
parents whom she had lost by death and by estrangement, of the children
who had been denied to her prayers, and of the country from which she
was banished. His empire over her heart was divided only with her God.
To her father she had probably never been attached: she had quitted him
young: many years had elapsed since she had seen him; and no part of
his conduct to her, since her marriage, had indicated tenderness on his
part, or had been calculated to call forth tenderness on hers. He
had done all in his power to disturb her domestic happiness, and had
established a system of spying, eavesdropping, and talebearing under her
roof. He had a far greater revenue than any of his predecessors had ever
possessed, and regularly allowed to her younger sister forty thousand
pounds a year: [424] but the heiress presumptive of his throne had never
received from him the smallest pecuniary assistance, and was scarcely
able to make that appearance which became her high rank among European
princesses. She had ventured to intercede with him on behalf of her
old friend and preceptor Compton, who, for refusing to commit an act of
flagitious injustice, had been suspended from his episcopal functions;
but she had been ungraciously repulsed. [425] From the day on which
it had become clear that she and her husband were determined not to be
parties to the subversion of the English constitution, one chief object
of the politics of James had been to injure them both. He had recalled
the British regiments from Holland. He had conspired with Tyrconnel
and with France against Mary's rights, and had made arrangements for
depriving her of one at least of the three crowns to which, at his
death, she would have been entitled. It was now believed by the great
body of his people, and by many persons high in rank and distinguished
by abilities, that he had introduced a supposititious Prince of
Wales into the royal family, in order to deprive her of a magnificent
inheritance; and there is no reason to doubt that she partook of the
prevailing suspicion. That she should love such a father was impossible.
Her religious principles, indeed, were so strict that she would probably
have tried to perform what she considered as her duty, even to a father
whom she did not love. On the present occasion, however, she judged
that the claim of James to her obedience ought to yield to a claim more
sacred. And indeed all divines and publicists agree in this, that,
when the daughter of a prince of one country is married to a prince of
another country, she is bound to forget her own people and her father's
house, and, in the event of a rupture between her husband and her
parents, to side with her husband. This is the undoubted rule even when
the husband is in the wrong; and to Mary the enterprise which William
meditated appeared not only just, but holy.

But, though she carefully abstained from doing or saying anything that
could add to his difficulties, those difficulties were serious indeed.
They were in truth but imperfectly understood even by some of those who
invited him over, and have been but imperfectly described by some of
those who have written the history of his expedition.

The obstacles which he might expect to encounter on English ground,
though the least formidable of the obstacles which stood in the way of
his design, were yet serious. He felt that it would be madness in him
to imitate the example of Monmouth, to cross the sea with a few British
adventurers, and to trust to a general rising of the population. It was
necessary, and it was pronounced necessary by all those who invited him
over, that he should carry an army with him. Yet who could answer for
the effect which the appearance of such an army might produce? The
government was indeed justly odious. But would the English people,
altogether unaccustomed to the interference of continental powers in
English disputes, be inclined to look with favour on a deliverer who
was surrounded by foreign soldiers? If any part of the royal forces
resolutely withstood the invaders, would not that part soon have on its
side the patriotic sympathy of millions? A defeat would be fatal to the
whole undertaking. A bloody victory gained in the heart of the island by
the mercenaries of the States General over the Coldstream Guards and the
Buffs would be almost as great a calamity as a defeat. Such a victory
would be the most cruel wound ever inflicted on the national pride of
one of the proudest of nations. The crown so won would never be worn
in peace or security: The hatred with which the High Commission and the
Jesuits were regarded would give place to the more intense hatred which
would be inspired by the alien conquerors; and many, who had hitherto
contemplated the power of France with dread and loathing, would say
that, if a foreign yoke must be borne, there was less ignominy in
submitting to France than in submitting to Holland.

These considerations might well have made William uneasy; even if all
the military means of the United Provinces had been at his absolute
disposal. But in truth it seemed very doubtful whether he would be able
to obtain the assistance of a single battalion. Of all the difficulties
with which he had to struggle, the greatest, though little noticed
by English historians, arose from the constitution of the Batavian
republic. No great society has ever existed during a long course of
years under a polity so inconvenient. The States General could not make
war or peace, could not conclude any alliance or levy any tax, without
the consent of the States of every province. The States of a province
could not give such consent without the consent of every municipality
which had a share in the representation. Every municipality was, in
some sense, a sovereign state, and, as such, claimed the right of
communicating directly with foreign ambassadors, and of concerting with
them the means of defeating schemes on which other municipalities
were intent. In some town councils the party which had, during several
generations, regarded the influence of the Stadtholders with jealousy
had great power. At the head of this party were the magistrates of the
noble city of Amsterdam, which was then at the height of prosperity.
They had, ever since the peace of Nimeguen, kept up a friendly
correspondence with Lewis through the instrumentality of his able and
active envoy the Count of Avaux. Propositions brought forward by the
Stadtholder as indispensable to the security of the commonwealth,
sanctioned by all the provinces except Holland, and sanctioned by
seventeen of the eighteen town councils of Holland, had repeatedly been
negatived by the single voice of Amsterdam. The only constitutional
remedy in such cases was that deputies from the cities which were agreed
should pay a visit to the city which dissented, for the purpose of
expostulation. The number of deputies was unlimited: they might continue
to expostulate as long as they thought fit; and meanwhile all their
expenses were defrayed by the obstinate community which refused to yield
to their arguments. This absurd mode of coercion had once been tried
with success on the little town of Gorkum, but was not likely to produce
much effect on the mighty and opulent Amsterdam, renowned throughout
the world for its haven bristling with innumerable masts, its canals
bordered by stately mansions, its gorgeous hall of state, walled,
roofed, and floored with polished marble, its warehouses filled with
the most costly productions of Ceylon and Surinam, and its Exchange
resounding with the endless hubbub of all the languages spoken by
civilised men. [426]

The disputes between the majority which supported the Stadtholder and
the minority headed by the magistrates of Amsterdam had repeatedly run
so high that bloodshed had seemed to be inevitable. On one occasion the
Prince had attempted to bring the refractory deputies to punishment as
traitors. On another occasion the gates of Amsterdam had been barred
against him, and troops had been raised to defend the privileges of the
municipal council. That the rulers of this great city would ever consent
to an expedition offensive in the highest degree to Lewis whom they
courted, and likely to aggrandise the House of Orange which they
abhorred, was not likely. Yet, without their consent, such an expedition
could not legally be undertaken. To quell their opposition by main force
was a course from which, in different circumstances, the resolute and
daring Stadtholder would not have shrunk. But at that moment it was
most important that he should carefully avoid every act which could
be represented as tyrannical. He could not venture to violate the
fundamental laws of Holland at the very moment at which he was drawing
the sword against his father in law for violating the fundamental laws
of England. The violent subversion of one free constitution would have
been a strange prelude to the violent restoration of another. [427]

There was yet another difficulty which has been too little noticed by
English writers, but which was never for a moment absent from William's
mind. In the expedition which he meditated he could succeed only by
appealing to the Protestant feeling of England, and by stimulating
that feeling till it became, for a time, the dominant and almost the
exclusive sentiment of the nation. This would indeed have been a
very simple course, had the end of all his politics been to effect
a revolution in our island and to reign there. But he had in view
an ulterior end which could be attained only by the help of princes
sincerely attached to the Church of Rome. He was desirous to unite the
Empire, the Catholic King, and the Holy See, with England and Holland,
in a league against the French ascendency. It was therefore necessary
that, while striking the greatest blow ever struck in defence of
Protestantism, he should yet contrive not to lose the goodwill of
governments which regarded Protestantism as a deadly heresy.

Such were the complicated difficulties of this great undertaking.
Continental statesmen saw a part of those difficulties; British
statesmen another part. One capacious and powerful mind alone took them
all in at one view, and determined to surmount them all. It was no
easy thing to subvert the English government by means of a foreign army
without galling the national pride of Englishmen. It was no easy
thing to obtain from that Batavian faction which regarded France with
partiality, and the House of Orange with aversion, a decision in favour
of an expedition which would confound all the schemes of France, and
raise the House of Orange to the height of greatness. It was no easy
thing to lead enthusiastic Protestants on a crusade against Popery
with the good wishes of almost all Popish governments and of the Pope
himself. Yet all these things William effected. All his objects, even
those which appeared most incompatible with each other, he attained
completely and at once. The whole history of ancient and of modern times
records no other such triumph of statesmanship.

The task would indeed have been too arduous even for such a statesman
as the Prince of Orange, had not his chief adversaries been at this
time smitten with an infatuation such as by many men not prone to
superstition was ascribed to the special judgment of God. Not only was
the King of England, as he had ever been, stupid and perverse: but even
the counsel of the politic King of France was turned into foolishness.
Whatever wisdom and energy could do William did. Those obstacles
which no wisdom or energy could have overcome his enemies themselves
studiously removed.

On the great day on which the Bishops were acquitted, and on which the
invitation was despatched to the Hague, James returned from Hounslow
to Westminster in a gloomy and agitated mood. He made an effort that
afternoon to appear cheerful: [428] but the bonfires, the rockets, and
above all the waxen Popes who were blazing in every quarter of London,
were not likely to soothe him. Those who saw him on the morrow could
easily read in his face and demeanour the violent emotions which
agitated his mind. [429] During some days he appeared so unwilling to
talk about the trial that even Barillon could not venture to introduce
the subject. [430]

Soon it began to be clear that defeat and mortification had only
hardened the King's heart. The first words which he uttered when he
learned that the objects of his revenge had escaped him were, "So much
the worse for them. " In a few days these words, which he, according
to his fashion, repeated many times, were fully explained. He blamed
himself; not for having prosecuted the Bishops, but for having
prosecuted them before a tribunal where questions of fact were decided
by juries, and where established principles of law could not be utterly
disregarded even by the most servile Judges. This error he determined to
repair. Not only the seven prelates who had signed the petition, but the
whole Anglican clergy, should have reason to curse the day on which they
had triumphed over their Sovereign. Within a fortnight after the
trial an order was made, enjoining all Chancellors of dioceses and all
Archdeacons to make a strict inquisition throughout their respective
jurisdictions, and to report to the High Commission, within five weeks,
the names of all such rectors, vicars, and curates as had omitted to
read the Declaration. [431] The King anticipated with delight the terror
with which the offenders would learn that they were to be cited before a
court which would give them no quarter. [432] The number of culprits was
little, if at all, short of ten thousand: and, after what had passed
at Magdalene College, every one of them might reasonably expect to be
interdicted from all his spiritual functions, ejected from his benefice,
declared incapable of holding any other preferment, and charged with the
costs of the proceedings which had reduced him to beggary.

Such was the persecution with which James, smarting from his great
defeat in Westminster Hall, resolved to harass the clergy. Meanwhile he
tried to show the lawyers, by a prompt and large distribution of rewards
and punishments, that strenuous and unblushing servility, even when
least successful, was a sure title to his favour, and that whoever,
after years of obsequiousness, ventured to deviate but for one moment
into courage and honesty was guilty of an unpardonable offence.
The violence and audacity which the apostate Williams had exhibited
throughout the trial of the Bishops had made him hateful to the whole
nation. [433] He was recompensed with a baronetcy. Holloway and Powell
had raised their character by declaring that, in their judgment, the
petition was no libel. They were dismissed from their situations. [434]
The fate of Wright seems to have been, during some time, in suspense.
He had indeed summed up against the Bishops: but he had suffered their
counsel to question the dispensing power. He had pronounced the petition
a libel: but he had carefully abstained from pronouncing the Declaration
legal; and, through the whole proceeding, his tone had been that of a
man who remembered that a day of reckoning might come. He had indeed
strong claims to indulgence: for it was hardly to be expected that any
human impudence would hold out without flagging through such a task in
the presence of such a bar and of such an auditory. The members of the
Jesuitical cabal, however, blamed his want of spirit; the Chancellor
pronounced him a beast; and it was generally believed that a new Chief
Justice would be appointed. [435] But no change was made. It would
indeed have been no easy matter to supply Wright's place. The many
lawyers who were far superior to him in parts and learning were, with
scarcely an exception, hostile to the designs of the government; and
the very few lawyers who surpassed him in turpitude and effrontery were,
with scarcely an exception, to be found only in the lowest ranks of
the profession, and would have been incompetent to conduct the ordinary
business of the Court of King's Bench. Williams, it is true, united all
the qualities which James required in a magistrate. But the services
of Williams were needed at the bar; and, had he been moved thence, the
crown would have been left without the help of any advocate even of the
third rate.

Nothing had amazed or mortified the King more than the enthusiasm which
the Dissenters had shown in the cause of the Bishops. Penn, who, though
he had himself sacrificed wealth and honours to his conscientious
scruples, seems to have imagined that nobody but himself had a
conscience, imputed the discontent of the Puritans to envy and
dissatisfied ambition. They had not had their share of the benefits
promised by the Declaration of Indulgence: none of them had been
admitted to any high and honourable post; and therefore it was not
strange that they were jealous of the Roman Catholics. Accordingly,
within a week after the great verdict had been pronounced in Westminster
Hall, Silas Titus, a noted Presbyterian, a vehement Exclusionist, and a
manager of Stafford's impeachment, was invited to occupy a seat in the
Privy Council. He was one of the persons on whom the opposition had most
confidently reckoned. But the honour now offered to him, and the hope
of obtaining a large sum due to him from the crown, overcame his virtue,
and, to the great disgust of all classes of Protestants, he was sworn
in. [436]

The vindictive designs of the King against the Church were not
accomplished. Almost all the Archdeacons and diocesan Chancellors
refused to furnish the information which was required. The day on which
it had been intended that the whole body of the priesthood should be
summoned to answer for the crime of disobedience arrived. The High
Commission met. It appeared that scarcely one ecclesiastical officer had
sent up a return. At the same time a paper of grave import was delivered
to the board. It came from Sprat, Bishop of Rochester. During two years,
supported by the hope of an Archbishopric, he had been content to bear
the reproach of persecuting that Church which he was bound by every
obligation of conscience and honour to defend. But his hope had been
disappointed. He saw that, unless he abjured his religion, he had
no chance of sitting on the metropolitan throne of York. He was too
goodnatured to find any pleasure in tyranny, and too discerning not
to see the signs of the coming retribution.
He therefore determined to
resign his odious functions; and he communicated his determination to
his colleagues in a letter written, like all his prose compositions,
with great propriety and dignity of style. It was impossible, he said,
that he could longer continue to be a member of the Commission. He had
himself, in obedience to the royal command, read the Declaration: but
he could not presume to condemn thousands of pious and loyal divines who
had taken a different view of their duty; and, since it was resolved to
punish them for acting according to their conscience, he must declare
that he would rather suffer with them than be accessary to their
sufferings.

The Commissioners read and stood aghast. The very faults of their
colleague, the known laxity of his principles, the known meanness of
his spirit, made his defection peculiarly alarming. A government must
be indeed in danger when men like Sprat address it in the language of
Hampden. The tribunal, lately so insolent, became on a sudden strangely
tame. The ecclesiastical functionaries who had defied its authority were
not even reprimanded. It was not thought safe to hint any suspicion that
their disobedience had been intentional. They were merely enjoined to
have their reports ready in four months. The Commission then broke up in
confusion. It had received a death blow. [437]

While the High Commission shrank from a conflict with the Church, the
Church, conscious of its strength, and animated by a new enthusiasm,
invited, by a series of defiances, the attack of the High Commission.
Soon after the acquittal of the Bishops, the venerable Ormond, the most
illustrious of the Cavaliers of the great civil war, sank under his
infirmities. The intelligence of his death was conveyed with speed to
Oxford. Instantly the University, of which he had long been Chancellor,
met to name a successor. One party was for the eloquent and accomplished
Halifax, another for the grave and orthodox Nottingham. Some mentioned
the Earl of Abingdon, who resided near them, and had recently been
turned out of the lieutenancy of the county for refusing to join with
the King against the established religion. But the majority, consisting
of a hundred and eighty graduates, voted for the young Duke of Ormond,
grandson of their late head, and son of the gallant Ossory. The speed
with which they came to this resolution was caused by their apprehension
that, if there were a delay even of a day, the King would attempt to
force on them some chief who would betray their rights. The apprehension
was reasonable: for, only two hours after they had separated, came a
mandate from Whitehall requiring them to choose Jeffreys. Happily the
election of young Ormond was already complete and irrevocable. [438] A
few weeks later the infamous Timothy Hall, who had distinguished himself
among the clergy of London by reading the Declaration, was rewarded with
the Bishopric of Oxford, which had been vacant since the death of the
not less infamous Parker. Hall came down to his see: but the Canons of
his Cathedral refused to attend his installation: the University refused
to create him a Doctor: not a single one of the academic youth applied
to him for holy orders: no cap was touched to him and, in his palace, he
found himself alone. [439]

Soon afterwards a living which was in the gift of Magdalene College,
Oxford, became vacant. Hough and his ejected brethren assembled and
presented a clerk; and the Bishop of Gloucester, in whose diocese the
living lay, instituted their presentee without hesitation. [440]

The gentry were not less refractory than the clergy. The assizes of
that summer wore all over the country an aspect never before known. The
Judges, before they set out on their circuits, had been summoned into
the King's presence, and had been directed by him to impress on the
grand jurors and magistrates, throughout the kingdom, the duty of
electing such members of Parliament as would support his policy. They
obeyed his commands, harangued vehemently against the clergy, reviled
the seven Bishops, called the memorable petition a factious libel,
criticized with great asperity Sancroft's style, which was indeed open
to criticism, and pronounced that his Grace ought to be whipped by
Doctor Busby for writing bad English. But the only effect of these
indecent declamations was to increase the public discontent. All the
marks of public respect which had usually been shown to the judicial
office and to the royal commission were withdrawn. The old custom
was that men of good birth and estate should ride in the train of the
Sheriff when he escorted the Judges to the county town: but such a
procession could now with difficulty be formed in any part of the
kingdom. The successors of Powell and Holloway, in particular, were
treated with marked indignity. The Oxford circuit had been allotted to
them; and they had expected to be greeted in every shire by a cavalcade
of the loyal gentry. But as they approached Wallingford, where they were
to open their commission for Berkshire, the Sheriff alone came forth to
meet them. As they approached Oxford, the eminently loyal capital of an
eminently loyal province, they were again welcomed by the Sheriff alone.
[441]

The army was scarcely less disaffected than the clergy or the gentry.
The garrison of the Tower had drunk the health of the imprisoned
Bishops. The footguards stationed at Lambeth had, with every mark of
reverence, welcomed the Primate back to his palace. Nowhere had the
news of the acquittal been received with more clamorous delight than at
Hounslow Heath. In truth, the great force which the King had assembled
for the purpose of overawing his mutinous capital had become more
mutinous than the capital itself; and was more dreaded by the court than
by the citizens. Early in August, therefore, the camp was broken up,
and the troops were sent to quarters in different parts of the country.
[442]

James flattered himself that it would be easier to deal with separate
battalions than with many thousands of men collected in one mass. The
first experiment was tried on Lord Lichfield's regiment of infantry,
now called the Twelfth of the Line. That regiment was probably selected
because it had been raised, at the time of the Western insurrection, in
Staffordshire, a province where the Roman Catholics were more numerous
and powerful than in almost any other part of England. The men were
drawn up in the King's presence. Their major informed them that His
Majesty wished them to subscribe an engagement, binding them to assist
in carrying into effect his intentions concerning the test, and that all
who did not choose to comply must quit the service on the spot. To the
King's great astonishment, whole ranks instantly laid down their pikes
and muskets. Only two officers and a few privates, all Roman Catholics,
obeyed his command. He remained silent for a short time. Then he bade
the men take up their arms. "Another time," he said, with a gloomy look,
"I shall not do you the honour to consult you. " [443]

It was plain that, if he determined to persist in his designs, he must
remodel his army. Yet materials for that purpose he could not find in
our island. The members of his Church, even in the districts where
they were most numerous, were a small minority of the people. Hatred of
Popery had spread through all classes of his Protestant subjects, and
had become the ruling passion even of ploughmen and artisans. But there
was another part of his dominions where a very different spirit animated
the great body of the population. There was no limit to the number of
Roman Catholic soldiers whom the good pay and quarters of England would
attract across St. George's Channel. Tyrconnel had been, during some
time, employed in forming out of the peasantry of his country a military
force on which his master might depend. Already Papists, of Celtic
blood and speech, composed almost the whole army of Ireland. Barillon
earnestly and repeatedly advised James to bring over that army for the
purpose of coercing the English. [444]

James wavered. He wished to be surrounded by troops on whom he could
rely: but he dreaded the explosion of national feeling which the
appearance of a great Irish force on English ground must produce.
At last, as usually happens when a weak man tries to avoid opposite
inconveniences, he took a course which united them all. He brought over
Irishmen, not indeed enough to hold down the single city of London, or
the single county of York, but more than enough to excite the alarm and
rage of the whole kingdom, from Northumberland to Cornwall. Battalion
after battalion, raised and trained by Tyrconnel, landed on the western
coast and moved towards the capital; and Irish recruits were imported
in considerable numbers, to fill up vacancies in the English regiments.
[445]

Of the many errors which James committed, none was more fatal than this.
Already he had alienated the hearts of his people by violating their
laws, confiscating their estates, and persecuting their religion. Of
those who had once been most zealous for monarchy, he had already made
many rebels in heart. Yet he might still, with some chance of success,
have appealed to the patriotic spirit of his subjects against
an invader. For they were a race insular in temper as well as in
geographical position. Their national antipathies were, indeed, in
that age, unreasonably and unamiably strong. Never had the English
been accustomed to the control of interference of any stranger. The
appearance of a foreign army on their soil might impel them to rally
even round a King whom they had no reason to love. William might perhaps
have been unable to overcome this difficulty; but James removed it. Not
even the arrival of a brigade of Lewis's musketeers would have excited
such resentment and shame as our ancestors felt when they saw armed
columns of Papists, just arrived from Dublin, moving in military
pomp along the high roads. No man of English blood then regarded the
aboriginal Irish as his countrymen. They did not belong to our branch of
the great human family. They were distinguished from us by more than one
moral and intellectual peculiarity, which the difference of situation
and of education, great as that difference was, did not seem altogether
to explain. They had an aspect of their own, a mother tongue of their
own. When they talked English their pronunciation was ludicrous; their
phraseology was grotesque, as is always the phraseology of those who
think in one language and express their thoughts in another. They were
therefore foreigners; and of all foreigners they were the most hated and
despised: the most hated, for they had, during five centuries, always
been our enemies; the most despised, for they were our vanquished,
enslaved, and despoiled enemies. The Englishman compared with pride his
own fields with the desolate bogs whence the Rapparees issued forth to
rob and murder, and his own dwelling with the hovels where the peasants
and the hogs of the Shannon wallowed in filth together. He was a member
of a society far inferior, indeed, in wealth and civilisation, to the
society in which we live, but still one of the wealthiest and most
highly civilised societies that the world had then seen: the Irish were
almost as rude as the savages of Labrador. He was a freeman: the Irish
were the hereditary serfs of his race. He worshipped God after a pure
and rational fashion: the Irish were sunk in idolatry and superstition.
He knew that great numbers of Irish had repeatedly fled before a small
English force, and that the whole Irish population had been held down
by a small English colony; and he very complacently inferred that he was
naturally a being of a higher order than the Irishman: for it is thus
that a dominant race always explains its ascendency and excuses its
tyranny. That in vivacity, humour, and eloquence, the Irish stand high
among the nations of the world is now universally acknowledged. That,
when well disciplined, they are excellent soldiers has been proved on a
hundred fields of battle. Yet it is certain that, a century and a half
ago, they were generally despised in our island as both a stupid and a
cowardly people. And these were the men who were to hold England down
by main force while her civil and ecclesiastical constitution was
destroyed. The blood of the whole nation boiled at the thought. To be
conquered by Frenchmen or by Spaniards would have seemed comparatively
a tolerable fate. With Frenchmen and Spaniards we had been accustomed
to treat on equal terms. We had sometimes envied their prosperity,
sometimes dreaded their power, sometimes congratulated ourselves on
their friendship. In spite of our unsocial pride, we admitted that they
were great nations, and that they could boast of men eminent in the
arts of war and peace. But to be subjugated by an inferior caste was a
degradation beyond all other degradation. The English felt as the white
inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans would feel if those towns were
occupied by negro garrisons. The real facts would have been sufficient
to excite uneasiness and indignation: but the real facts were lost
amidst a crowd of wild rumours which flew without ceasing from
coffeehouse to coffeehouse and from alebench to alebench, and became
more wonderful and terrible at every stage of the progress. The number
of the Irish troops who had landed on our shores might justly excite
serious apprehensions as to the King's ulterior designs; but it was
magnified tenfold by the public apprehensions. It may well be supposed
that the rude kerne of Connaught, placed, with arms in his hands, among
a foreign people whom he hated, and by whom he was hated in turn, was
guilty of some excesses. These excesses were exaggerated by report; and,
in addition to the outrages which the stranger had really committed, all
the offences of his English comrades were set down to his account. From
every corner of the kingdom a cry arose against the foreign barbarians
who forced themselves into private houses, seized horses and waggons,
extorted money and insulted women. These men, it was said, were the sons
of those who, forty-seven years before, had massacred Protestants by
tens of thousands. The history of the rebellion of 1641, a history
which, even when soberly related, might well move pity and horror,
and which had been frightfully distorted by national and religious
antipathies, was now the favourite topic of conversation. Hideous
stories of houses burned with all the inmates, of women and young
children butchered, of near relations compelled by torture to be the
murderers of each other, of corpses outraged and mutilated, were told
and heard with full belief and intense interest. Then it was added that
the dastardly savages who had by surprise committed all these cruelties
on an unsuspecting and defenceless colony had, as soon as Oliver came
among them on his great mission of vengeance, flung down their arms
in panic terror, and had sunk, without trying the chances of a single
pitched field, into that slavery which was their fit portion. Many
signs indicated that another great spoliation and slaughter of the Saxon
settlers was meditated by the Lord Lieutenant. Already thousands
of Protestant colonists, flying from the injustice and insolence
of Tyrconnel, had raised the indignation of the mother country by
describing all that they had suffered, and all that they had, with too
much reason, feared. How much the public mind had been excited by the
complaints of these fugitives had recently been shown in a manner not
to be mistaken. Tyrconnel had transmitted for the royal approbation the
heads of a bill repealing the law by which half the soil of Ireland was
held, and he had sent to Westminster, as his agents, two of his Roman
Catholic countrymen who had lately been raised to high judicial
office; Nugent, Chief Justice of the Irish Court of King's Bench, a
personification of all the vices and weaknesses which the English then
imagined to be characteristic of the Popish Celt, and Rice, a Baron of
the Irish Exchequer, who, in abilities and attainments, was perhaps the
foremost man of his race and religion. The object of the mission was
well known; and the two Judges could not venture to show themselves in
the streets. If ever they were recognised, the rabble shouted, "Room for
the Irish Ambassadors;" and their coach was escorted with mock solemnity
by a train of ushers and harbingers bearing sticks with potatoes stuck
on the points. [446]

So strong and general, indeed, was at that time the aversion of the
English to the Irish that the most distinguished Roman Catholics
partook of it. Powis and Bellasyse expressed, in coarse and acrimonious
language, even at the Council board, their antipathy to the aliens.
[447] Among English Protestants that antipathy was still stronger and
perhaps it was strongest in the army. Neither officers nor soldiers were
disposed to bear patiently the preference shown by their master to a
foreign and a subject race. The Duke of Berwick, who was Colonel of the
Eighth Regiment of the Line, then quartered at Portsmouth, gave orders
that thirty men just arrived from Ireland should be enlisted. The
English soldiers declared that they would not serve with these
intruders. John Beaumont, the Lieutenant Colonel, in his own name and in
the name of five of the Captains, protested to the Duke's face against
this insult to the English army and nation. "We raised the regiment,"
he said, "at our own charges to defend His Majesty's crown in a time
of danger. We had then no difficulty in procuring hundreds of English
recruits. We can easily keep every company up to its full complement
without admitting Irishmen. We therefore do not think it consistent with
our honour to have these strangers forced on us; and we beg that we may
either be permitted to command men of our own nation or to lay down our
commissions. " Berwick sent to Windsor for directions. The King, greatly
exasperated, instantly despatched a troop of horse to Portsmouth with
orders to bring the six refractory officers before him. A council of
war sate on them. They refused to make any submission; and they were
sentenced to be cashiered, the highest punishment which a court martial
was then competent to inflict. The whole nation applauded the disgraced
officers; and the prevailing sentiment was stimulated by an unfounded
rumour that, while under arrest, they had been treated with cruelty.
[448]

Public feeling did not then manifest itself by those signs with which we
are familiar, by large meetings, and by vehement harangues. Nevertheless
it found a vent. Thomas Wharton, who, in the last Parliament, had
represented Buckinghamshire, and who was already conspicuous both as
a libertine and as a Whig, had written a satirical ballad on
the administration of Tyrconnel. In this little poem an Irishman
congratulates a brother Irishman, in a barbarous jargon, on the
approaching triumph of Popery and of the Milesian race. The Protestant
heir will be excluded. The Protestant officers will be broken. The Great
Charter and the praters who appeal to it will be hanged in one rope. The
good Talbot will shower commissions on his countrymen, and will cut the
throats of the English. These verses, which were in no respect above the
ordinary standard of street poetry, had for burden some gibberish which
was said to have been used as a watchword by the insurgents of Ulster in
1641. The verses and the tune caught the fancy of the nation. From one
end of England to the other all classes were constantly singing this
idle rhyme. It was especially the delight of the English army. More
than seventy years after the Revolution, a great writer delineated, with
exquisite skill, a veteran who had fought at the Boyne and at Namur. One
of the characteristics of the good old soldier is his trick of whistling
Lillibullero. [449]

Wharton afterwards boasted that he had sung a King out of three
kingdoms. But in truth the success of Lillibullero was the effect, and
not the cause, of that excited state of public feeling which produced
the Revolution.

While James was thus raising against himself all those national feelings
which, but for his own folly, might have saved his throne, Lewis was
in another way exerting himself not less effectually to facilitate the
enterprise which William meditated.

The party in Holland which was favourable to France was a minority, but
a minority strong enough, according to the constitution of the Batavian
federation, to prevent the Stadtholder from striking any great blow.
To keep that minority steady was an object to which, if the Court of
Versailles had been wise, every other object would at that conjuncture
have been postponed. Lewis however had, during some time, laboured,
as if of set purpose, to estrange his Dutch friends; and he at length,
though not without difficulty, succeeded in forcing them to become
his enemies at the precise moment at which their help would have been
invaluable to him.

There were two subjects on which the people of the United Provinces were
peculiarly sensitive, religion and trade; and both their religion and
their trade the French King assailed. The persecution of the Huguenots,
and the revocation of the edict of Nantes, had everywhere moved the
grief and indignation of Protestants. But in Holland these feelings were
stronger than in any other country; for many persons of Dutch birth,
confiding in the repeated and solemn declarations of Lewis that the
toleration granted by his grandfather should be maintained, had, for
commercial purposes, settled in France, and a large proportion of the
settlers had been naturalised there. Every post now brought to Holland
the tidings that these persons were treated with extreme rigour on
account of their religion. Dragoons, it was reported, were quartered on
one. Another had been held naked before a fire till he was half roasted.
All were forbidden, under the severest penalties, to celebrate the rites
of their religion, or to quit the country into which they had, under
false pretences, been decoyed. The partisans of the House of Orange
exclaimed against the cruelty and perfidy of the tyrant. The opposition
was abashed and dispirited. Even the town council of Amsterdam, though
strongly attached to the French interest and to the Arminian theology,
and though little inclined to find fault with Lewis or to sympathize
with the Calvinists whom he persecuted, could not venture to oppose
itself to the general sentiment; for in that great city there was
scarcely one wealthy merchant who had not some kinsman or friend
among the sufferers. Petitions numerously and respectably signed
were presented to the Burgomasters, imploring them to make strong
representations to Avaux. There were even suppliants who made their way
into the Stadthouse, flung themselves on their knees, described with
tears and sobs the lamentable condition of those whom they most loved,
and besought the intercession of the magistrates. The pulpits resounded
with invectives and lamentations. The press poured forth heartrending
narratives and stirring exhortations. Avaux saw the whole danger. He
reported to his court that even the well intentioned--for so he always
called the enemies of the House of Orange--either partook of the public
feeling or were overawed by it; and he suggested the policy of making
some concession to their wishes. The answers which he received from
Versailles were cold and acrimonious. Some Dutch families, indeed, which
had not been naturalised in France, were permitted to return to their
country. But to those natives of Holland who had obtained letters of
naturalisation Lewis refused all indulgence. No power on earth, he said,
should interfere between him and his subjects. These people had chosen
to become his subjects; and how he treated them was a matter with which
no neighbouring state had anything to do. The magistrates of Amsterdam
naturally resented the scornful ingratitude of the potentate whom they
had strenuously and unscrupulously served against the general sense of
their own countrymen. Soon followed another provocation which they felt
even more keenly. Lewis began to make war on their trade. He first
put forth an edict prohibiting the importation of herrings into his
dominions, Avaux hastened to inform his court that this step had excited
great alarm and indignation, that sixty thousand persons in the United
Provinces subsisted by the herring fishery, and that some strong measure
of retaliation would probably be adopted by the States. The answer which
he received was that the King was determined, not only to persist, but
also to increase the duties on many of those articles in which Holland
carried on a lucrative trade with France. The consequence of these
errors, errors committed in defiance of repeated warnings, and, as it
should seem, in the mere wantonness of selfwill, was that now, when the
voice of a single powerful member of the Batavian federation might have
averted an event fatal to all the politics of Lewis, no such voice was
raised. The Envoy, with all his skill, vainly endeavoured to rally
the party by the help of which he had, during several years, held
the Stadtholder in check. The arrogance and obstinacy of the master
counteracted all the efforts of the servant. At length Avaux was
compelled to send to Versailles the alarming tidings that no reliance
could be placed on Amsterdam, so long devoted to the French cause, that
some of the well intentioned were alarmed for their religion, and that
the few whose inclinations were unchanged could not venture to utter
what they thought. The fervid eloquence of preachers who declaimed
against the horrors of the French persecution, and the lamentations of
bankrupts who ascribed their ruin to the French decrees, had wrought
up the people to such a temper, that no citizen could declare himself
favourable to France without imminent risk of being flung into the
nearest canal. Men remembered that, only fifteen years before, the most
illustrious chief of the party adverse to the House of Orange had been
torn to pieces by an infuriated mob in the very precinct of the palace
of the States General. A similar fate might not improbably befall those
who should, at this crisis, be accused of serving the purposes of France
against their native land, and against the reformed religion. [450]

While Lewis was thus forcing his friends in Holland to become, or to
pretend to become, his enemies, he was labouring with not less success
to remove all the scruples which might have prevented the Roman Catholic
princes of the Continent from countenancing William's designs. A new
quarrel had arisen between the Court of Versailles and the Vatican, a
quarrel in which the injustice and insolence of the French King were
perhaps more offensively displayed than in any other transaction of his
reign.

It had long been the rule at Rome that no officer of justice or finance
could enter the dwelling inhabited by the minister who represented a
Catholic state. In process of time not only the dwelling, but a large
precinct round it, was held inviolable. It was a point of honour with
every Ambassador to extend as widely as possible the limits of the
region which was under his protection. At length half the city consisted
of privileged districts, within which the Papal government had no more
power than within the Louvre or the Escurial. Every asylum was thronged
with contraband traders, fraudulent bankrupts, thieves and assassins. In
every asylum were collected magazines of stolen or smuggled goods. From
every asylum ruffians sallied forth nightly to plunder and stab. In no
town of Christendom, consequently, was law so impotent and wickedness
so audacious as in the ancient capital of religion and civilisation. On
this subject Innocent felt as became a priest and a prince. He
declared that he would receive no Ambassador who insisted on a right so
destructive of order and morality. There was at first much murmuring;
but his resolution was so evidently just that all governments but
one speedily acquiesced. The Emperor, highest in rank among Christian
monarchs, the Spanish court, distinguished among all courts by
sensitiveness and pertinacity on points of etiquette, renounced the
odious privilege. Lewis alone was impracticable. What other sovereigns
might choose to do, he said, was nothing to him. He therefore sent a
mission to Rome, escorted by a great force of cavalry and infantry.