Anonymous

REIGN OF JAMES II.

James's Speech to the Council—Rochester supersedes Halifax—Other Changes in the Ministry—James Collects the Customs without Parliament—French Pension continued—Scottish Parliament—Oates and Dangerfield—Meeting of Parliament—It grants Revenue for Life—Monmouth and Argyll—Argyll's Expedition—His Capture and Execution—Monmouth's Expedition—He enters Taunton—Failure of his Hopes—Battle of Sedgemoor—Execution of Monmouth—Cruelties of Kirke and Jeffreys—The Bloody Assize—The Case of Lady Alice Lisle—Decline of James's Power—He Breaks the Test Act—Revocation of the Edict of Nantes—Prorogation of Parliament—Acquittal of Delamere—Alienation of the Church—Parties at Court—The Dispensing Power Asserted—Livings granted to Catholics—Court of High Commission Revived—Army on Hounslow Heath—Trial of "Julian" Johnson—James's Lawlessness in Scotland and Ireland—Declaration of Indulgence—The Party of the Prince of Orange and the Princess Mary—Expulsion of the Fellows of Magdalen College—New Declaration of Indulgence—Protest of the Seven Bishops—Birth of the Prince of Wales—Trial and Acquittal of the Bishops—Invitation to William of Orange—Folly of James—William's Preparations—Blindness of James and Treachery of his Ministers—William's Declaration—James convinced, makes Concessions—William lands at Torbay—His Advance to Exeter—Churchill's Treason—Flight of the Princess Anne and her Husband—James sends Commissioners to Treat with William—Flight of James—Riots in London—Return of James—His Final Flight to France—The Convention—The Succession Question—Declaration of Rights—William and Mary joint Sovereigns.

To the reign of merry cruelty now succeeded the reign of gloomy, ascetic, undisguised ferocity. Charles could laugh and sport with his ladies, whilst his subjects were imprisoned and tortured. James, who never laughed, pursued his cruel bent with a settled butcher-like mood, and would have extirpated nations, were it in his power, to restore Catholicism, and establish the political absolutism adored by the Stuarts. Yet he began the reign of the Inquisition with the hypocrisy of the Jesuit. When the breath had left the body of Charles, James retired for a quarter of an hour to his chamber, and then met the Privy Council with a speech which promised everything that he was most resolved not to perform. He began by eulogising the deceased "as a good and gracious king." If he really thought his late merry, debauched, and despotic brother good and gracious, it was an evil omen for the nation, whose ruler had such conceptions of what was good and gracious. He then added, "I have been reported to be a man fond of arbitrary power; but that is not the only falsehood which has been reported of me; and I shall make it my endeavour to preserve this Government, both in Church and State, as it is by law now established. I know the principles of the Church of England are favourable to monarchy, and the members of it have shown themselves good and loyal subjects; therefore I shall take care to defend and support it. I know, too, that the laws of England are sufficient to make the king as great a monarch as I can wish; and as I shall never depart from the just rights and prerogatives of the Crown, so I shall never invade any man's property. I have often before ventured my life in defence of this nation, and shall go as far as any man in preserving it in all its just rights and liberties."

The first thing which scandalised the people was the miserable economy of the late king's funeral. It was said to be scarcely befitting a private gentleman, and the Scottish Covenanters asserted that the dead tyrant had been treated, as the Scriptures declared tyrants should be, to the "burial of an ass." The first thing which James set about was the rearrangement of the Cabinet. There was but one man in the Cabinet of the late king who had his entire confidence—this was Rochester, the second son of the late Lord Clarendon. To him he gave the office of Lord High Treasurer, thus constituting him Prime Minister; to Godolphin, who had held this office, he gave that of Chamberlain to the Queen. Halifax was deprived of the Privy Seal, and was made President of the Council, a post both less lucrative and less influential, a circumstance which highly delighted Rochester, who now saw the wit who said he had been kicked upstairs, served in precisely the same way. Sunderland, the late Secretary of State, was suffered to retain his office. He had intrigued and acted against James; both he and Godolphin had supported the Exclusion Bill, but Sunderland now with his usual supple artifice, represented that he could have no hope of the king's favour but from the merit of his future services; and as he possessed some dangerous secrets, he was permitted to keep his place. He did not, however, content himself with this, but cherished the ambition of superseding Rochester as Lord Treasurer, and therefore represented himself to the Catholics as their staunch friend, whilst they knew that Rochester was the champion of the Church of England. For the present, nevertheless, from having been at high feud with both Rochester and Clarendon, he cultivated a strong friendship with them to make his position firm with the king. Halifax had opposed the Exclusion Bill, but he had become too well known as a decided enemy of Popery and of the French ascendency. James, therefore, tolerated him for the present, and whilst he assured him that all the past was forgotten, except the service he had rendered by his opposition to the Exclusion Bill, he told Barillon, the French ambassador, that he knew him too well to trust him, and only gave him the post of President of the Council to show how little influence he had.

The Great Seal was retained also by Lord Guildford, who, though he was by no means a friend of liberty, was too much a stickler for the law to be a useful tool of arbitrary power. James secretly hated him, and determined to associate a more unscrupulous man with him in the functions of his office. This was his most obedient and most unflinching creature, the Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys, of whose unexampled villainies we shall soon hear too much. Guildford was by the overbearing Jeffreys at once thrust back into the mere routine of a judge in equity, and all his State functions and patronage were usurped by this daring man. At the Council board Jeffreys treated him with the most marked contempt, and even insult, and poor Guildford soon saw all influence and profit of the Chancellorship, as well as the Chief Justiceship, in the hands of Jeffreys, and himself reduced to a cipher.

But the most ungenerous proceeding was that of depriving the old and faithful Lord Ormond of the Lord-Lieutenancy of Ireland. Ormond had not only stood firmly by Charles I., but had suffered unrepiningly the evil fortunes of Charles II. He had shared his exile, and had done all in his power for his restoration. He had opposed all the endeavours by the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Bill to get rid of James, and was highly respected in his office in Ireland. He had lately lost his eldest son, Lord Ossory, and, though aged, was still vigorous and zealous in discharge of his duties. But he had the unpardonable faults of being a firm Protestant and as firm an advocate for the constitutional restrictions of the Crown. James recalled him from his Lord-Lieutenancy on the plea that he was wanted at Court in his other office of Lord Steward of the Household. But the ancient chief felt the ungrateful act, and, at a farewell dinner at Dublin to the officers of the garrison, in toasting the health of the king, he filled a cup of wine to the brim, and, holding it aloft without spilling a drop, declared that whatever the courtiers might say, neither hand, heart, nor reason yet failed him—that he knew no approach of dotage.

Having made these changes in the ministry, James lost no time in letting his subjects see that he meant to enjoy his religion without the restraints to which he had been accustomed. He had been used to attend Mass with the queen in her oratory, with the doors carefully closed; but the second Sunday after his accession he ordered the chapel doors to be thrown wide open, and went thither in procession. The Duke of Somerset, who bore the sword of State, stopped at the threshold. James bade him advance, saying, "Your father would have gone farther." But Somerset replied, "Your Majesty's father would not have gone so far." At the moment of the elevation of the Host, the courtiers were thrown into a strange agitation. The Catholics fell on their knees, and the Protestants hurried away. On Easter Sunday Mass was attended with still greater ceremony. Somerset stopped at the door, according to custom, but the Dukes of Norfolk, Northumberland, Grafton, Richmond, and many other noblemen, accompanied the king as far as the gallery. Godolphin and Sunderland also complied, but Rochester absolutely refused to attend. Not satisfied with proclaiming his Catholicism, James produced two papers, which he said he had found in the strong box of the late king, wherein Charles was made to avow his persuasion that there could be no true Church but the Roman, and that all who dissented from that Church, whether communities or individuals, became heretic. James declared the arguments to be perfectly unanswerable, and challenged Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, to attempt it. This was not very consistent with his speech as regarded the Church of England, and his next step was as great a violation of his assurance that he would not invade any man's property. Funds for carrying on the Government were necessary, and James declared that as the customs and part of the excise had only been granted to Charles for his life, they had now lapsed, and that it would produce great inconvenience to wait for the meeting of Parliament for their re-enactment. Nothing prevented him from calling Parliament at once, but James undoubtedly had a fancy for trying his father's favourite measure of levying taxes without Parliament. It was contended that as no law for customs or excise now existed, all goods newly imported would come in duty free, and ruin the merchants who had to sell goods which had paid the duty. North, Lord Guildford, recommended that the duties should be levied as usual, but the proceeds kept in the Exchequer till Parliament met and authorised their appropriation; but Jeffreys was a councillor much more after the king's heart. He recommended that an edict should at once be issued, ordering the duties to be paid as usual to his Majesty, and this advice was carried, every one being afraid of being declared disloyal, or a trimmer, who voted against it. The proclamation was issued, but, to render it more palatable, it announced that a Parliament would be very soon called, and as many addresses as possible from public bodies, sanctioning the measure, were procured. The barristers and students of the Middle Temple, in their address, thanked the king for preserving the customs, and both they and the two universities expressed the most boundless obedience to the king's sovereign and unlimited power. But the public at large looked on with silent foreboding. "The compliments of these bodies," says Dalrymple, "only served to remind the nation that the laws had been broken."

Before venturing to assemble Parliament James endeavoured to render Louis of France acquiescent in this step. He knew from the history of the late reign how averse Louis was from English Parliaments, which were hostile to his designs against the Continental nations. He therefore had a private interview with Barillon, in which he apologised most humbly for the necessity of calling a Parliament. He begged him to assure his master of his grateful attachment, and that he was determined to do nothing without his consent. If the Parliament attempted to meddle in any foreign affairs, he would send them about their business. Again he begged him to explain this, and that he desired to consult his brother of France in everything, but then he must have money by some means. This hint of money was followed up the next day by Rochester, and Barillon hastened to convey the royal wishes. But Louis had lost no time in applying the effectual remedy for a Parliament, the moment the assembling of one became menaced. He sent over five hundred thousand crowns, which Barillon carried in triumph to Whitehall, and James wept tears of joy and gratitude over the accursed bribe. But he and his ministers soon hinted that the money, though most acceptable, would not render him independent of Parliament, and Barillon pressed his sovereign to send more with an urgency which rather offended Louis, and rendered it possible that the ambassador had a pretty good commission out of what he obtained. James sent over to Versailles Captain Churchill, already become Lord Churchill, and in time to become known to us and all the world as the Duke of Marlborough. He was to express James's gratitude and his assurances of keeping in view the interests of France, and so well did the proceedings of Churchill in Paris and of Barillon in England, prosper, that successive remittances, amounting to two millions of livres, were sent over. But of this, except four hundred and seventy thousand livres, the arrears of the late king's pension, and about thirty thousand pounds for the corruption of the House of Commons, Louis strictly forbade Barillon paying over more at present to James without his orders. In fact, he was no more assured of the good faith of James than he had been of that of Charles; and he had ample reason for his distrust, for at the very same time James was negotiating a fresh treaty with his son-in-law, the Prince of Orange.

It is impossible to comprehend the full turpitude of this conduct of James without keeping steadily in view the aims of both James and Louis. James's, like that of all the Stuarts, was simply to destroy the British constitution and reign absolutely. To do this the money of France was needed to render them independent of Parliaments, and a prospect of French troops should the English at length rebel against these attempts at their enslavement. The object of Louis was to keep England from affording any aid to any power on the Continent, whilst he was endeavouring to overrun it with his armies.

On the day of the coronation in England (April 23rd), St. George's Day, the Parliament in Scotland met. James called on the Scots to set a good example to the approaching Parliament of England in a liberal provision for the Crown; and the Scottish Estates, as if complimented by this appeal, not only responded to it by annexing the excise to the Crown for ever, and offering him besides two hundred and sixty thousand pounds a year for his own life, but declared their abhorrence of "all principles derogatory to the king's sacred, supreme, sovereign, and absolute power and authority." They did more, they passed an Act making it death for any one to preach in a conventicle, whether under a roof or in the open air. In England the elections were going on most favourably, and therefore James seized on the opportunity, whilst all appeared smiling and secure, to indulge his appetite for a little vengeance.

On the 7th of May, Titus Oates, the enemy of James and of Popery, the arch-instrument of the Whig agitators, was brought up to the bar of the King's Bench, before the terrible Jeffreys. When he was now brought up, the Court was crowded with people, a large proportion of them being Catholics, glad to see the punishment of their ruthless enemy. But if they expected to see him depressed or humbled, they were much disappointed. He came up bold and impudent as ever. Jeffreys flung his fiercest Billingsgate at him, but Oates returned him word for word unabashed. On his last trial he had sworn he had attended a council of Jesuits on the 24th of April, 1671, in London, but it was now proved beyond doubt that on that very day Oates was at St. Omer. He had sworn also to being present at the commission of treasonable acts by Ireland, the Jesuit, in London, on the 8th and 12th of August, and on the 2nd of September of the same year. It was now also clearly proved that Ireland left London that year on the 2nd of August, and did not return till the 14th of September. Oates was convicted of perjury on both indictments, and was sentenced to pay a thousand marks on each indictment; to be stripped of his clerical habit; to be pilloried in Palace Yard, and led round Westminster Hall, with an inscription over his head describing his crime. He was again to be pilloried in front of the Royal Exchange, and after that to be whipped from Aldgate to Newgate, and after two days' interval whipped again from Newgate to Tyburn. If he survived this, which was not expected, he was to be confined for life, but five times every year he was to stand again in the pillory.

If the crimes of this wretch were monstrous, his punishment was equally so. He had the assurance on his trial to call many persons of distinction, including members of Parliament, to give evidence in his favour, but he was answered only by bitter reproaches, for having led them into the spilling of much innocent blood. The lash was applied the first day so unmercifully, that though he endured it for some time, it compelled him to utter the most horrible yells. Several times he fainted, but the flagellations never stopped, and when the flogging ceased, it was doubted whether he was alive. The most earnest entreaties were made to the king and queen to have the second flogging omitted, but they were both inexorable. Yet the guilty wretch survived through all, though he was said to have received seventeen hundred stripes the second day on his already lacerated body. So long as James reigned, he was subjected to the pillory five times a year, but he lived to be pardoned at the Revolution, and receive a pension of five pounds a week in lieu of that granted him by Charles II. He died in 1705.

Dangerfield, who had not only succeeded in destroying so many innocent victims, but had displayed villainy and ingratitude of the blackest dye, was also convicted, and sentenced to pay five hundred pounds, and to be pilloried twice and whipped twice over the same ground as Oates. He was extremely insolent on his trial, but on hearing his sentence he was struck with horror, flew into the wildest exclamations, declared himself a dead man, and chose a text for his funeral sermon. Singularly enough, his end was really at hand. On returning from his whipping a gentleman named Robert Francis, of Gray's Inn, stepped up to the coach and asked him how his back was. Dangerfield replied by a curse, and Francis thrusting at him with his cane, wounded him in the eye; the wound was declared to occasion his death, though the unmerciful flogging was probably the real cause, and Francis was tried for the murder, and hanged.

JAMES II.

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The meeting of Parliament on the 19th of May drew the public attention from these barbarities. Every means had been exerted to influence the elections. In the counties the reaction of Toryism, and the effects of the Rye House Plot in defeating and intimidating the Whigs, gave the Court every advantage. In the corporations the deprivation of their ancient charters made them the slaves of Government. But even with these advantages James was not satisfied. Wherever there appeared likely to be any independent spirit shown, agents were sent down to overawe the people, and to force a choice of the Government candidate. On the 22nd of May James went to the House of Lords in great state to open Parliament. He took his seat on the throne with the crown on his head, and his queen, and Anne, his daughter, Princess of Denmark, standing on the right hand of the throne. The Spanish and other Catholic ambassadors were present, and heard the Pope, the Mass, the worship of the Virgin Mary, and the saints all renounced, as the Lords took their oaths. James then produced a written speech and read it. He repeated in it what he had before declared to the Council, that he would maintain the Constitution and the Church as by law established, and added that, "Having given this assurance concerning their religion and property, they might rely on his word." Although it had been the custom to listen to the royal speech in respectful silence, at this declaration the members of both Houses broke into loud acclamations. He then informed them that he expected a revenue for life, such as they had voted his late brother. Again the expression of accord was loud and satisfactory, but what followed was not so palatable. "The inclination men have for frequent Parliaments, some may think, would be the best secured by feeding me from time to time by such proportions as they shall think convenient, and this argument, it being the first time I speak to you from the throne, I will answer once for all, that this would be a very improper method to take with me; and that the best way to engage me to meet you often is always to use me well. I expect, therefore, that you will comply with me in what I have desired, and that you will do it speedily." This agreeable assurance he followed up by announcing a rebellion to have broken out in Scotland under Argyll and other refugees from Holland.

When the Commons returned to their own House, Lord Preston entered into a high eulogium of the king, telling the House that his name spread terror over all Europe, and that the reputation of England was already beginning to rise under his rule; they had only to have full confidence in him as a prince who had never broken his word, and thus enable him to assert the dignity of England. The House went into a Committee of Supply, and voted his Majesty the same revenue that Charles had enjoyed, namely, one million two hundred thousand pounds a year for life. But when several petitions against some of the late elections were presented, a serious opposition asserted itself in a most unexpected quarter. This was from Sir Edward Seymour, of Berry Pomeroy Castle, the member for Exeter. Seymour was both a Tory and a High Churchman, proud of his descent from the Lord Protector Seymour, and who had great influence in the western counties. He was a man of indifferent moral character, but able and accomplished, and a forcible debater. He was now irritated by the Government proceedings in the elections which had interfered with his interests, and made a fierce attack on the Government pressure on the electors; denounced the removal of the charters and the conduct of the returning officers; declared that there was a design to repeal the Test and Habeas Corpus Acts, and moved that no one whose right to sit was disputed should vote till that right had been ascertained by a searching inquiry. There was no seconder to the motion, and it fell to the ground; for the whole House, including the Whigs, sat, as it were, thunderstruck. But the effect was deep and lasting, and in time did not fail of its end.

For the present, however, things went smoothly enough. The king informed the House—through Sir Dudley North, the brother of the Lord Keeper Guildford, and the person who had been elected Sheriff of London by the influence of Charles for his ready and ingenious modes of serving the royal will—that his late brother had left considerable debts, and that the naval and ordnance stores were getting low. The House promptly agreed to lay on new taxes and North induced them to tax sugar and tobacco, so that the king now had a revenue of one million nine hundred thousand pounds from England, besides his pension from France, and was strong in revenue.

The Lords were employed in doing an act of justice in calling before them Lord Danby, and rescinding the impeachment still hanging over his head, and also summoning to their bar Lords Powis, Arundel, and Bellasis, the victims of the Popish plot, and fully discharging them as well as the Earl of Tyrone. They also introduced a Bill reversing the attainder of Lord Stafford, who had been executed for treason and concern in the Popish plot, now admitting that he had been unjustly sacrificed through the perjury of Oates. The Commons were proceeding to the third reading of this Bill, when the rebellion of Monmouth was announced, and the question remained unsettled till the trial of Warren Hastings more than a century afterwards, when men of all parties declared that Oates's Popish plot was a fiction, and the attainder of Stafford was then formally reversed.

The political refugees who had fled to Holland and sought protection from Prince William were numerous, and some of them of considerable distinction. Monmouth and the Earl of Argyll were severally looked up to as the heads of the English and Scottish exiles. The furious persecution against the Covenanters in Scotland and the Whigs in England had not only swelled these bands of refugees, but rendered them at once ardent for revenge and restoration. Amongst them Ford; Lord Grey of Wark; Ferguson, who had been conspicuous among the Whig plotters; Wildman and Danvers, of the same party; Ayloffe and Wade, Whig lawyers and plotters; Goodenough, formerly Sheriff of London, who gave evidence against the Papists; Rumbold, the Rye House maltster, and others, were incessantly endeavouring to excite Monmouth to avail himself of his popularity, and the hatred of Popery which existed, to rebel against his uncle and strike for the crown. Monmouth, however, for some time betrayed no desire for so hazardous an undertaking. On the death of Charles he had returned from the Hague, to avoid giving cause of jealousy to James, and led the life of an English gentleman at Brussels. William of Orange strongly advised him to take a command in the war of Austria against the Turks, where he might win honour and a rank worthy of his birth; but Monmouth would not listen to it. He had left his wife, the great heiress of Buccleuch, to whom he had been married almost as a boy from royal policy, and had attached himself to Lady Henrietta Wentworth, Baroness Wentworth of Nettlestede. The attachment, though illicit, appeared to be mutual and ardent. Monmouth confessed that Lady Henrietta, who was beautiful, amiable, and accomplished, had weaned him from a vicious life, and had their connection been lawful, nothing could have been more fortunate for Monmouth. In her society he seemed to have grown indifferent to ambition and the life of courts. But he was beset by both Grey and Ferguson, and, unfortunately for him, they won over Lady Wentworth to their views. She encouraged Monmouth, and offered him her income and her jewels to furnish him with immediate funds. With such an advocate, Grey and Ferguson at length succeeded. Grey was a man of blemished character. He had run off with his wife's sister, a daughter of the Earl of Berkeley, and was a poor and desperate adventurer, notoriously cowardly on the field of battle. Ferguson was a fiery demagogue and zealot of insurrection. He had been a preacher and schoolmaster amongst the Dissenters, then a clergyman of the Church, and finally had become a most untiring intriguer, and was deep in the Rye House Plot. Under all this fire of rebellion, however, there was more than a suspected foul smoke of espionage. He was shrewdly believed, though not by his dupes, to be in the pay of Government, and employed to betray its enemies to ruin.

Monmouth having consented to take the lead in an invasion, though with much reluctance and many misgivings, a communication was opened with Argyll and the Scottish malcontents. We have seen that Argyll, after his father had been inveigled from his mountains and beheaded, had himself nearly suffered the same fate from James when in Scotland. He had been imprisoned and condemned to death on the most arbitrary grounds, and had only managed to escape in disguise. He had purchased an estate at Leeuwarden, in Friesland, where the great Mac Cailean More, as he was called by the Highlanders, lived in much seclusion. He was now drawn from it once more to revisit his native country at the head of an invading force. But the views of the refugees were so different, and their means so small, that it was some time before they could agree upon a common plan of action. It was at length arranged that a descent should be made simultaneously on Scotland and England—the Scottish expedition headed by Argyll, that on England by Monmouth. But to maintain a correspondence and a sort of unison, two Englishmen, Ayloffe and Rumbold the maltster, were to accompany the Scots, and two Scotsmen, Fletcher of Saltoun and Ferguson, the English force. Monmouth was sworn not to claim any rank or reward on the success of the enterprise, except such as should be awarded him by a free Parliament; and Argyll was compelled, although he had the nominal command of the army, to submit to hold it only as one of a committee of twelve, of whom Sir Patrick Hume of Polwarth was to be president.

In fact, Argyll at the outset displayed a fatal want of knowledge of human nature or firmness of resolution, in consenting to accept a command on so impossible a basis. To expect success as a military leader when hampered with the conflicting opinions of a dozen men of ultra views in religion and politics, and of domineering wills, was the height of folly. Hume, who took the lead in the committee, was a man of enormous conceit, a great talker, and a very dilatory actor. Next to him was Sir John Cochrane, the second son of Lord Dundonald, who was almost equally self-willed and jealous of the power of Argyll. With their Republican notions, they endeavoured to impose such restrictions on the power of the earl as were certain to insure the ruin of the attempt, in which everything must depend on the independent action of a single mind.

We have already noticed the character of Ferguson, one of the twain selected to accompany Monmouth. Fletcher of Saltoun, the other, was a far different man—a man of high talent, fine taste, and finished education. At the head of a popular senate he would have shone as an orator and statesman; but he had those qualities of lofty pride and headstrong will which made him by no means a desirable officer in an army of adventurers, although his military skill was undoubted. What was worse, from the very first he foreboded no good result from the expedition, and accompanied it only because he would not seem to desert his more sanguine countrymen. When Wildman and Danvers sent from London flaming accounts of the ripeness of England for revolt, and said that just two hundred years before the Earl of Richmond landed in England with a mere handful of men, and wrested the Crown from Richard, Fletcher coolly replied that there was all the difference between the fifteenth century and the seventeenth.

These men, Wildman and Danvers, represented the country as so prepared to receive Monmouth, that he had only to show his standard for whole counties to flock to it. They promised also six thousand pounds in aid of the preparations. But the fact was that little or no money came, and James and his ministers were duly informed of the measures of the insurgents, and were at once using every means with the Dutch Government to prevent the sailing of the armaments, and taking steps for the defence of the Scottish and English coasts. We may first follow the fortunes of Argyll and his associates, who sailed first. He put out from the coast of Holland on the 2nd of May, and after a prosperous voyage, sighted Kirkwall, in Orkney, on the 6th. There he very unwisely anchored, and suffered two followers to go on shore to collect intelligence. The object of his armament then became known, and was sure to reach the English Government in a little time. The Bishop of Orkney boldly ordered the two insurgents to be secured, and refused to give them up. After three days lost in endeavouring to obtain their release, they seized some gentlemen living on the coast, and offered them in exchange. The bishop paid no regard to their proposal or their menaces, and they were compelled to pursue their voyage.

The consequence of this ill-advised measure was that news of the armament was sent to Edinburgh with all speed, and whilst the invading force was beating round the northern capes and headlands, active preparations were made for defence. The whole of the militia, amounting to twenty thousand men, were called out; a third of these, accompanied by three thousand regulars, were marched into the western counties. At Dunstaffnage, Argyll sent his son Charles ashore to summon the Campbells to arms, but he returned with the report that many of the chiefs had fled or were in prison, and the rest afraid to move. At Campbelltown, in Kintyre, Argyll published a proclamation, setting forth that he came to suppress Popery, prelacy, and Erastianism, and to take the crown from James, whom he accused of persecution of the Covenanters, and the poisoning of his brother. He sent across the hills the fiery cross to summon all true men to his standard, and appointed Tarbert as the place of rendezvous. About eighteen hundred men mustered at the call, but any advantage to be derived from this handful of men was far more than counterbalanced by the pertinacious interference of Cochrane and Hume. They insisted on arranging everything, even the appointment of the officers over Argyll's own clan. They insisted also that the attack should be directed against the Lowlands, though Argyll wisely saw that they had no chance whatever in the open country with their present force. He contended that having first cleared the Western Highlands of the national soldiery, they should soon have five or six thousand Highlanders at their command, and might then descend on the Lowlands with effect. Rumbold advocated this prudential course, but all reasoning was lost on Hume and Cochrane, who insolently accused Argyll of wanting only to secure his own territories, and sailed away with part of the troops to the Lowlands. They found the coast, however, well guarded by the English ships, and escaped up the Clyde to Greenock. There they again quarrelled between themselves, and finding the people not at all disposed to join them, they returned to Argyll. But they had learned no wisdom: the earl again proposed to endeavour to secure Inverary—they as firmly opposed it. They, therefore, fixed on the castle of Ealan Ghierig as their present headquarters, landed their arms and stores, and made an officer named Elphinstone commander of the fort. Argyll and Rumbold now drove back the troops of Athol, and prepared to march on Inverary; but from this they were diverted by a call from Hume and Cochrane at the ships, who were about to be attacked by the English fleet. Argyll hastened to them, and proposed to give fight to the English, but was again prevented by these infatuated men. The earl, therefore, in utter despair, passed into Dumbartonshire, and was the very next day followed by the news of the capture of all his ships, and the flight of Elphinstone from Ealan Ghierig, without striking a blow. As a last desperate attempt, Argyll proposed to make a rush on Glasgow and secure a strong footing there; but the very men who had so strongly urged the attempt on the Lowlands now deserted him in numbers, and on the march nothing but disasters from the insubordination of the little army ensued. They were attacked on all sides by the militia, and when the earl and Ayloffe advised a bold attack on the enemy, Hume and his partisans protested against it. The end of all was that, becoming involved amongst morasses, the army was seized with panic, and rapidly melted away. The wrong-headed Hume escaped, and reached the Continent; Cochrane was taken, and soon after Rumbold, Major Fullerton, and Argyll himself were seized.

THE LAST SLEEP OF ARGYLL. (See p. 297.)

(From the Fresco by E. M. Ward, R.A., in the House of Commons.)

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The conduct of Argyll after his capture was distinguished by a calm dignity which showed how superior he was to the factious, pugnacious men who had baffled all his plans. With his arms pinioned behind him, he was led bareheaded through the streets of Edinburgh, from Holyrood to the castle. The Royalists thus revelled in revenging on the son the act of his father thirty-five years before, when he caused Montrose to be conducted over the very same ground. The headsman marched before him with his axe, and on reaching his cell in the castle Argyll was put into irons, and informed that his execution would quickly follow. This was the 20th of June; his execution did not take place till the 30th. During the ten days the orders of James were that he should be tried all ways to compel him to confess the full particulars of the invasion, its originators, supporters, and participators. It was understood that James meant that his favourite application of the boots and thumbscrews should be used, but this was not attempted. Argyll was menaced, but his firm refusal to reveal anything that would incriminate others, convinced his enemies that it was useless, and could only cover them with odium. The last day of his life he lay down to rest, ere the hour of his execution should arrive. During his sleep, a renegade Privy Councillor insisted on entering his cell. The door was gently opened, and there lay the great Argyll in heavy chains and sleeping the happy sleep of infancy. The beholder turned and fled, sick at heart. His former sentence of death was deemed sufficient to supersede any fresh trial, and being brought out to the scaffold, and saying that he died in peace with all men, one of the Episcopalian clergymen stepped to the edge of the scaffold and exclaimed to the people, "My lord dies a Protestant." "Yes," said the earl, also going forward, "a Protestant, and cordial hater of Popery, prelacy, and all superstition." His head was fixed on the top of the Tolbooth, where that of Montrose had formerly stood.

On the 30th of May, nearly a month after the sailing of Argyll, Monmouth left the Texel. His squadron consisted of a frigate of thirty-two guns, called the Helderenbergh, and three small tenders, a fourth tender having been refused by the Dutch. He was attended by about eighty officers, and a hundred and fifty men of different degrees, fugitives from England and Scotland. With such a force he proposed to conquer the crown of England! All the fine promises of money by Wildman and Danvers had ended in smoke, and he had only been able, chiefly through the revenues of Lady Henrietta Wentworth, to supply himself with arms and stores for a small body of cavalry and infantry. The voyage was long and tedious, the weather was stormy, and the Channel abounded with the royal cruisers. On the morning of the 11th of June his little fleet appeared off the port of Lyme, in Dorsetshire.

Monmouth was extremely popular with the people, and on discovering that it was their favourite hero come to put down the Popish tyrant, he was received with loud acclamations. "Monmouth and the Protestant religion!" was the cry. There was a rush to enlist beneath his banners, and within four-and-twenty hours he was at the head of fifteen hundred men. Dare, one of the adventurers, had been put ashore as they came along the coast to ride across the country and rouse the people of Taunton, and he now came in at the head of about forty horsemen, with the news that the people of Somersetshire were in favour of his cause. But with this arrival came the tidings that the Dorsetshire and Somersetshire folk were mustering at Bridport to attack them, and Monmouth ordered Lord Grey, who was the commander of the cavalry, to march there at once, and disperse them before they had collected in strength. But here an incident occurred which showed the unruly materials that he had to work with. Dare had mounted himself on a fine horse in his expedition to Taunton, and Fletcher of Saltoun, who was second in command of the cavalry under Grey, without asking leave of Dare, as superior officer, and being himself badly mounted, took possession of his horse. Dare refused to let him have it, they came to high words, Dare shook his whip at Fletcher, and the proud Scot drew his pistol and shot Dare dead on the spot. This summary proceeding, which might have passed in the ruder country of Scotland, created a violent outburst amongst the soldiers of Monmouth. They demanded of the duke instant execution of the murderer, and it was only by getting on board the Helderenbergh that Fletcher escaped with his life. He returned to Holland, and thus was lost to the expedition almost its only man of any talent and experience.

The next morning Grey, accompanied by Wade, led forth his untrained cavalry to attack the militia at Bridport. There was a smart brush with the militia, in which Monmouth's raw soldiers fought bravely, and would have driven the enemy from the place, but Grey, who was an arrant coward in the field, turned his horse and fled, never drawing bit till he reached Lyme. The men were indignant, and Monmouth was confounded with this conduct of his chief officer; but nevertheless he had not moral firmness to put some more trusty officer in his place. Four days after his landing, the 15th of June, Monmouth marched forward to Axminster, where he encountered Christopher Monk, Duke of Albemarle, the son of the first General Monk, at the head of four thousand men of the trained bands. Though daunted at first, Monmouth accepted the situation, and disposed his men admirably for a fight. He drew up the main body in battle array on advantageous ground, sent out his skirmishers to the front, and, as a last precaution, lined the hedges of a narrow lane, through which Albemarle must pass to come at him, with musketeers. Monk, however, was too cautious to risk a pitched battle on these terms—the more especially as his own forces were untrustworthy. There appeared so much enthusiasm for Monmouth amongst his troops that, fearing their desertion, he drew back. The result was that the whole body was speedily thrown into disorder, that panic seized them, and that they fled pell-mell towards Exeter, flinging away their arms and uniforms to expedite their escape. Monmouth, however, probably not aware of the extent of the rout, steadily pursued his march to Chard, and thence to Taunton, where he arrived on the 18th of June, just a week after his landing, and was received by the whole place with the warmest demonstrations of joy.

All this seemed auspicious and encouraging, but it did not satisfy Monmouth. He knew that, without the adhesion of the army and the leading gentry, he should never make his way to the crown. Their adhesion had been promised him, but where were they? Not a regiment had given a sign of being ready to join him. Lords Macclesfield, Brandon, Delamere, and other Whig noblemen—who, he had been assured, would instantly fly to his standard—lay all still. Trenchard of Taunton, who had promised to join him, unlike his townsmen, fled at his approach, and made his way into Holland, to the Prince of Orange. Wildman, who had promised such wonders of county support and of money, did not appear. On the contrary, the nobility and gentry from all parts of the country, with the clergy, were pouring in addresses of attachment and support to James. Parliament, both Lords and Commons, displayed the same spirit.

The common people might believe that the son of Lucy Walters was legitimate, but the educated classes knew better, and that Monmouth could never be king. Parliament, therefore, at once voted James four hundred thousand pounds for present necessities, and laid new taxes for five years on foreign silks, linen, and spirits. They ordered Monmouth's declaration to be burnt by the hangman, and rapidly passed against him a Bill of Attainder, setting a reward of five thousand pounds on his head. They were ready to go farther, and the Commons actually passed a Bill for the preservation of the king's person and government, making it high treason to say that Monmouth was legitimate, or to make any motion in Parliament to alter the succession. But James, knowing the uselessness of any such Act, adjourned Parliament without waiting for the Act passing the Lords, and dismissed the nobles and gentry to defend his interests in their different localities. He took care, however, to revive the censorship of the press, which had expired in 1679.

When Monmouth, with consternation, noted these adverse circumstances, Ferguson was ready with a reason. It was that Monmouth had committed a capital error in not taking the title of king. The style and title of king, he asserted, carried a wonderful weight with the English. But of this right he had deprived himself by abjuring this title and leaving it entirely to James. The majority would fight for the man who was in possession of the royal name, but for whom were they to fight who fought for Monmouth? Nobody could tell, and the result must be discouragement. Grey seconded Ferguson: Wade and the Republicans opposed the scheme. But probably Monmouth was only too willing to be persuaded, and, accordingly, on the 20th of June, he was proclaimed in the market-place of Taunton. As the names of both rivals were James, and James II. would continue to mean James who now had that title, Monmouth was styled King Monmouth. Immediately on taking this step, Monmouth issued four proclamations. Following the example of James, he set a price on the head of James, late Duke of York; declared the Parliament sitting at Westminster an unlawful assembly, and ordered it to disperse; forbade the people to pay taxes to the usurper; and proclaimed Albemarle a traitor, unless he forthwith repaired to the standard of King Monmouth, where he would be cordially received.

Almost every part of this proceeding was a gross political blunder. By assuming the royal title he lost nearly everything, and gained nothing. He offended the Republican party, and divided the allegiance of his little army, some of the most energetic of whose officers, as Wade and others, were of that political faith. He offended that great Protestant party which was looking forward to the Protestant succession of William of Orange and the Princess Mary, and in case of their want of issue to the Princess Anne. He cut off all retreat to Holland in case of failure, and all hope of mercy from James if he fell into his hands. By pledging himself on landing not to aspire to the crown, and thus immediately breaking his pledge, he inspired the thinking portion of the people with deep distrust, as inducing the same disregard of his word as had been so long conspicuous in the Stuarts. With all the influential Protestants who might have joined him, so soon as events gave hope of success, considering him the champion of a Protestant succession, he had placed himself in a hopeless position, because that succession could only come through a legitimate issue. By denouncing the Parliament that body became his mortal foes. The only party from which he could now expect any support was the people, and without means, without leaders, without military training, the result could only be failure, utter and fearful.

And despite the persuasions of Ferguson, the melancholy truth seemed already to stare the unhappy Monmouth in the face. He received a secret answer from Albemarle, addressed to James Scott, late Duke of Monmouth, telling him that he knew who was his lawful king, and that he had better have let rebellion alone. As he rode out of Taunton on the 22nd of June towards Bridgewater, it was remarked that he looked gloomy and dejected; the very people who crowded in the road to greet him with huzzas, could not help remarking how different was the expression of his countenance to what it had been in his gay procession there five years before. The only man who seemed elated with anticipation of triumph was Ferguson, and if, as is suspected to have been the case, he were playing the traitor to the unfortunate Monmouth, he might now well grow confident of his diabolical success.

THE CROSS, BRIDGEWATER, WHERE MONMOUTH WAS PROCLAIMED KING.

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On reaching Bridgewater, where there existed a strong Whig body, Monmouth was again well received. The mayor and aldermen in their robes welcomed him, and preceded him in procession to the Cross, where they proclaimed him king. He took up his abode in the castle, encamped his army on the castle field, and crowds rushed to enlist in his service. His army already amounted to six thousand men, and might soon have been doubled or trebled; but his scanty supply of arms and equipments was already exhausted. He had no money, and men without weapons were useless. Numbers of them endeavoured to arm themselves, mob-fashion, with scythes, pitchforks, and other implements of husbandry and of mining.

Meanwhile, troops were drawing from all quarters, and preparing to overwhelm the invaders. Lord Feversham and Churchill, afterwards Marlborough, were ordered to march with strong bodies of troops to the West. Churchill was already arrived, and Feversham rapidly approaching. The militias of Sussex and Oxfordshire were drawing that way, followed by bodies of volunteer gownsmen from Oxford. To prevent any of the Whig party from affording Monmouth aid, they and the Nonconformists were closely watched, and many seized and imprisoned.

From Bridgewater Monmouth advanced to Glastonbury, and thence to Wells and Shepton Mallet. He appeared to have no precise object, but to seek reinforcements; from Shepton Mallet he directed his march on Bristol, which was only defended by the Duke of Beaufort and the muster of his tenantry. Bristol, once gained, would give them a strong position, and afford large supplies of money, stores, and arms. But Churchill harassed his rear on the march, and to reach the Gloucestershire side of the town, which was easiest of assault it was necessary to march round by Keynsham Bridge, which was partly destroyed. Men were despatched to repair it, and Monmouth following, on the 24th of June was at Ponsford, within five miles of the city. On reaching Keynsham Bridge, it was found to be repaired, but they were there encountered by a body of Life Guards under Colonel Oglethorpe, and Bristol having received reinforcements, the attack on it was abandoned. It was then proposed to get across the Severn and march for Shropshire and Cheshire, where he had been enthusiastically received in his progress; but the plan was not deemed practicable, and he advanced to Bath, which was too strongly garrisoned to make any impression upon. On the 26th they halted at Philip's Norton.

Feversham was now at their heels, and attacked them, the charge being led by the Duke of Grafton—the son of Charles and the Duchess of Cleveland—who fought bravely, but was repulsed. Monmouth, however, took advantage of the night to steal away to Frome, which was well affected to his cause, but had been just visited and disarmed by the Earl of Pembroke with the Wiltshire militia. The night march thither had been through torrents of rain and muddy roads; Frome could afford neither assistance nor protection; and, to add to his disappointment, here news reached him of the total failure of Argyll's expedition into Scotland, and that Feversham was now joined by his artillery and was in pursuit of him. Under these disastrous circumstances, and not a man of note, not a regiment of regulars or militia (as had been so liberally promised him by Wildman and Danvers) having come over to him, Monmouth bitterly cursed his folly in having listened to them, and resolved to ride off with his chief adherents, and get back to the Continent and his beloved Lady Wentworth. But from this ignominious idea he was dissuaded by Lord Grey, and they retreated again towards Bridgewater, where a report represented fresh assembling of armed peasantry. They reached that town on the 2nd of July, and, whilst throwing up trenches for defence, on the 5th Feversham arrived with about five thousand men, and pitched his tents on Sedgemoor, about three miles from the town. Feversham himself, with the cavalry at Weston Zoyland, and the Earl of Pembroke with the Wiltshire militia, about fifteen hundred in number, camped at the village of Middlezoy. Monmouth and his officers ascended the tower of the church and beheld the disposition of the enemy. Sedgemoor had formerly been a vast marsh, where Alfred, in his time, had sought a retreat from the triumphant Danes, and it was now intersected by several deep ditches, as most fen lands are, behind which the royal army lay. Near Chedzoy were some regiments of infantry which Monmouth had formerly commanded at Bothwell Bridge.

It was reported that the soldiers were left, by the reckless incapacity of the general, to drink cider and preserve little watch; and Monmouth, who saw that they lay in a very unconnected condition, conceived that by a skilful night attack he could easily surprise them. The gormandising incapacity of Louis Duras, now Lord Feversham, a foreigner who had been advanced by Charles II., was notorious, and the transcendent military talents of Churchill, who was in subordinate command, were yet little known. Preparations were therefore instantly made for the surprise. Scouts were sent out to reconnoitre the ground, who reported that two deep ditches full of mud and water lay between them and the hostile camp, which would have to be passed. At eleven o'clock at night the troops, with "Soho" for their watchword, marched out of Bridgewater in profound silence, taking a circuitous route, which would make the march about six miles. It was a moonlight night, but the moor lay enveloped in a thick fog, and about one in the morning the troops of Monmouth approached the royal camp. Their guides conducted the soldiers by a causeway over each of the two ditches, and Monmouth drew up his men for the attack, but by accident a pistol went off; the sentinels of the division of the army—the Foot Guards—which lay in front of them, were alarmed, and, listening, became aware of the trampling of the rebels as they were forming in rank. They fired their carbines and flew to rouse the camp. There was an instant galloping and running in all directions. Feversham and the chief officers were aroused, and drums beat to arms, and the men ran to get into rank. No time was to be lost, and Monmouth ordered Grey to dash forward with the cavalry, but he was suddenly brought to a halt by a third dyke, of which they had no information. The Foot Guards on the other side of the dyke demanded who was there, and on the cry of "King Monmouth!" they discharged a volley of musketry with such effect, that the untrained horses of Grey's cavalry became at once unmanageable; the men, thrown into confusion, were seized with panic and fled wherever they could find a way or their horses chose to carry them. Grey, as usual, was in the van of the fugitives. But, on the other hand, Monmouth came now rushing forward with his infantry, and, in his turn, finding himself stopped by the muddy dyke, he fired across it at the enemy, and a fierce fight took place, which was maintained for three-quarters of an hour. Nothing could be more brave and determined than Monmouth and his peasant soldiers. But day was now breaking, the cavalry of Feversham, and the infantry of Churchill, were bearing down on their flanks from different quarters, and Monmouth, then seeing that his defeat was inevitable, forgot the hero and rode off to save his life, leaving his brave, misguided followers to their fate. If anything could have added to the base ignominy of Monmouth's desertion of his adherents, it was the undaunted courage which they showed even when abandoned. They stood boldly to their charge; they cut down the horsemen with their scythes, or knocked them from their saddles with the butt end of their guns; they repulsed the vigorous attack of Oglethorpe, and left Sarsfield for dead on the field. But, unfortunately, their powder failed, and they cried out for fresh supplies in vain. The men with the ammunition waggons had followed the flight of the cavalry, and driven far away from the field. Still the brave peasantry and soldiers fought desperately with their scythes and gunstocks, till the cannon was brought to bear on them, and mowed them down in heaps. As they began to give way the royal cavalry charged upon them from the flank, the infantry poured across the ditch, the stout men, worthy of a better fate and leader, were overwhelmed and broke, but not before a thousand of them lay dead on the moor, or before they had killed or wounded more than three hundred of the king's troops.

The unfortunate rebels were pursued with fury, and hunted through the day out of the neighbouring villages, whither they had flown for concealment. The road towards Bridgewater was crowded with flying men and infuriated troopers following and cutting them down. Many of those who rushed frantically into the streets of Bridgewater fell and died there of their wounds, for the soldiers, who were treated by the farmers to hogsheads of cider, were drunk with drinking, with blood and fury. A vast number of prisoners were secured, for they were a profitable article of merchandise in the Plantations; five hundred were crowded into the single church of Weston Zoyland, and the battle and pursuit being over, the conqueror commenced that exhibition of vengeance which was always so dear to James. Gibbets were erected by the wayside, leading from the battle-field to Bridgewater, and no less than twenty of the prisoners were hanging on them. The peasantry were compelled to bury the slain, and those most suspected of favouring the rebels were set to quarter the victims who were to be suspended in chains. Meanwhile Monmouth, Grey, and Buyse, the Brandenburger, were flying for their lives. They took the north road, hoping to escape into Wales. At Chedzoy Monmouth drew up a moment to hide his George and procure a fresh horse. From the summit of a hill they turned and saw the final defeat and slaughter of their deluded followers. They pushed forward for the Mendip Hills, and then directed their course towards the New Forest, hoping to obtain some vessel on that coast to convey them to the Continent. On Cranborne Chase their horses were completely exhausted; they therefore turned them loose, hid their saddles and bridles, and proceeded on foot. But the news of the defeat of the rebels had travelled as fast as they, and in the neighbourhood of Ringwood and Poole parties of cavalry were out scouring the country, in hopes of the reward of five thousand pounds for Monmouth. Lord Lumley and Sir William Portman, the commanders, agreed to divide the sum among their parties if successful, and early on the morning of the 7th, Grey and the guide were taken at the junction of the two cross roads. This gave proof that the more important prize was not far off. The officers enclosed a wide circle of land, within which they imagined Monmouth and Buyse must yet be concealed; and at five the next morning the Brandenburger was discovered. He confessed that he had parted from Monmouth only four hours before, and the search was renewed with redoubled eagerness. The place was a network of small enclosures, partly cultivated and covered with growing crops of pease, beans, and corn, partly overrun with fern and brambles. The crops and thickets were trodden and beaten down systematically in the search, and at seven o'clock Monmouth himself was discovered in a ditch covered with fern.

"AFTER SEDGEMOOR."

From the Painting by W. Rainey, R.I.

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Monmouth, though mild and agreeable in his manners, had never displayed any high moral qualities. Indeed, if we bear in mind the frivolous and debauched character of the Court in which he had grown up, whether it were the Court of the exile or of the restored king, it would have been wonderful if he had. He was handsome, gay, good-natured, but dissolute and unprincipled. He was ready to conspire against his father or his uncle, to profess the utmost contrition when defeated, and to forget it as soon as forgiven. He has been properly described as the Absalom of modern times. If he merely deserted his miserable followers on the battle-field, he now more meanly deserted his own dignity. He continued, from the moment of his capture to that when he ascended the scaffold, prostrating himself in the dust of abasement, and begging for his life in the most unmanly terms. He wrote to James instantly from Ringwood, so that his humble and agonised entreaties for forgiveness would arrive with the news of his arrest. James admitted the crawling supplicant to the desired interview, but it was in the hope of the promised word of wondrous revelation, not with any intention of pardoning him. He got him to sign a declaration that his father had assured him that he was never married to his mother, and then coolly told him that his crime was of too grave a dye to be forgiven. The queen, who was the only person present besides James and the two Secretaries of State, Sunderland and Middleton, is said to have insulted him in a most merciless and unwomanly manner. When, therefore, Monmouth saw that nothing but his death would satisfy the king and queen, he appeared to resume his courage and fortitude, and rising with an air of dignity, he was taken away. But his apparent firmness lasted only till he was out of their presence. On his way to the Tower he entreated Lord Dartmouth to intercede for him—"I know, my lord," he said, "that you loved my father; for his sake, for God's sake, endeavour to obtain mercy for me." But Dartmouth replied that there could be no pardon for one who had assumed the royal title. Grey displayed a much more manly behaviour. In the presence of the king he admitted his guilt, but did not even ask forgiveness. As Monmouth was under attainder, no trial was deemed necessary, and it was determined that he should be executed on Wednesday morning, the next day but one. On the fatal morning of the 15th he was visited by Dr. Tenison, afterwards archbishop, who discoursed with him, but not very profitably, on the errors of his ways. Before setting out for the scaffold, his wife and children came to take leave of him. Lady Monmouth was deeply moved; Monmouth himself spoke kindly to her, but was cold and passionless. When the hour arrived, he went to execution with the same courage that he had always gone into battle. He was no more the cringing, weeping supplicant, but a man who had made up his mind to die. A disgusting scene of butchery followed, owing to the nervousness of the executioner. The populace were so enraged at the man's clumsiness, that they would have torn him to pieces if they could have got at him. Many rushed forward to dip their handkerchiefs in Monmouth's blood, and the barbarous circumstances of his execution and the unfeeling persecution of the prelates, did not a little to restore his fame as a martyr to liberty and Protestantism.

Whilst these things were going on in London, the unfortunate people in the West were suffering a dreadful penalty for their adherence to Monmouth. Feversham was called to town, and covered with honours and rewards, though it was notorious that he had done nothing towards the victory. Buckingham even declared that he had won the battle of Sedgemoor in bed. In his place was left one of the most ferocious and unprincipled monsters that ever disgraced the name of soldier. This was Colonel Kirke, who had been governor of Tangier until it was abandoned, and now practised the cruelties that he had learned in his unrestrained command there. In that Settlement, left to do his licentious will on those in his power, he acquired a name for arbitrary, oppressive, and dissolute conduct, which in ordinary times would have insured his death. He now commanded the demoralised soldiers that he had brought back with him, and who, whilst they were capable of every atrocity, were called "Kirke's lambs," because, as a Christian regiment sent against the heathen, they bore on their banner the desecrated sign of the Lamb. His debauched myrmidons were let loose on the inhabitants of Somersetshire, and such as they could not extort money from, they accused on the evidence of the most abandoned miscreants, and hanged and quartered, boiling the quarters in pitch, to make them longer endure the weather on their gibbets. The most horrible traditions still remain of Kirke and his lambs. He and his officers are said to have caused the unhappy wretches brought in, who were not able to pay a heavy ransom, to be hanged on the sign-post of the inn where they messed, and to have caused the drums to beat as they were in the agonies of death, saying they would give them music to their dancing. To prolong their sufferings, Kirke would occasionally have them cut down alive, and then hung up again; and such numbers were quartered, that the miserable peasants compelled to do that revolting work, were said to stand ankle deep in blood. All this was duly reported to the king in London, who directed Lord Sunderland to assure Kirke that "he was very well satisfied with his proceedings." It was asserted in London that in the single week following the battle, Kirke butchered a hundred of his victims, besides pocketing large sums for the ransom of others, yet he declared that he had not gone to the lengths to which he was ordered. On the 10th of August he was sent for to Court, to state personally the condition of the West, James being apprehensive that he had let the rich delinquents escape for money, and the system of butchery was left to Colonel Trelawny, who continued it without intermission, soldiers pillaging the wretched inhabitants, or dragging them away to execution under the forms of martial law. But a still more sweeping and systematic slaughter was speedily initiated under a different class of exterminators—butchers in ermine.

MONMOUTH'S INTERVIEW WITH THE KING. (See p. 303.)

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Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys, the most diabolical judge that ever sat on the bench—now rendered furious by nightly debauch and daily commission of cruelties; in his revels hugging in mawkish and disgusting fondness his brutal companions; in his discharge of his judicial duties passing the most barbarous sentences in the most blackguard and vituperative language; in whose blazing eye, distorted visage, and bellowing voice raged the unmitigated fiend,—was sent forth by his delighted master to consummate his vengeance on the unhappy people whom the soldiers had left alive and cooped up in prison. He was already created Baron of Wem, dubbed by the people Earl of Flint, and, the Lord Keeper just now dying, he was promised the Great Seal if he shed blood enough to satisfy his ruthless king. Four other judges were associated with him, rather for form than for anything else, for Jeffreys was the hardened, daring, and unscrupulous instrument on whom James confidently relied.

Jeffreys' Bloody Assize, as it was then and always has been termed, both from its wholesale slaughter and from the troops which accompanied him throughout the circuit—a name constantly used by the unfeeling king himself—was opened at Winchester on the 27th of August, and commenced with a case of hitherto unexampled ruthlessness. Mrs. Alice Lisle—or, as she was generally called, Lady Alice, her husband, one of the judges of Charles I., having been created a lord by Cromwell—was now an infirm and aged woman, deaf and lethargic. Her husband had been murdered, as we have related, by the Royalists, as he was entering the church at Lausanne. Lady Alice was known far and wide for her benevolence. Though her husband was on the other side, she had always shown active kindness to the followers of the king during the Civil War, and on this account, after her husband's death, his estate had been granted to her. During the rebellion of Monmouth her son had served in the king's army against the invader; yet this poor old lady was now accused of having given a night's shelter to Hicks, a Nonconformist minister, and Nelthorpe, a lawyer, outlawed for his concern in the Rye House Plot. They were fugitives from Sedgemoor, and the law of treason was that he who harbours a traitor is liable to death, the punishment of a traitor. Mrs. Lisle had no counsel, and pleaded that though she knew that Hicks was a Presbyterian minister, she did not know that he and Nelthorpe were concerned in the rebellion, and there was no direct proof of the fact.

Jeffreys terrified the witnesses, and then came the turn of the jury. They retired to consult, but not coming to a speedy conclusion, for they were afraid of the judge, and yet loth to condemn the prisoner, Jeffreys sent them word that if they did not agree he would lock them up all night. They then came into court and expressed their doubts of Mrs. Lisle knowing that Hicks had been with Monmouth. Jeffreys told them that their doubt was altogether groundless, and sent them back to agree. Again they returned, unable to get rid of their doubt. Then Jeffreys thundered against them in his fiercest style, and declared that were he on the jury, he would have found her guilty had she been his own mother. At length the jury gave way and brought in a verdict of guilty. The next morning Jeffreys pronounced sentence upon her amid a storm of vituperation against the Presbyterians, to whom he supposed Mrs. Lisle belonged. He ordered her, according to the rigour of the old law of treason, to be burned alive that very afternoon.

This monstrous sentence thoroughly roused the inhabitants of the place; and the clergy of the cathedral, the staunchest supporters of the king's beloved arbitrary power, remonstrated with Jeffreys in such a manner, that he consented to a respite of five days, in order that application might be made to the king. The clergy sent a deputation to James, earnestly interceding for the life of the aged woman, on the ground of her generous conduct on all occasions to the king's friends. Ladies of high rank, amongst them the Ladies St. John and Abergavenny, pleaded tenderly for her life. Feversham, moved by a bribe of a thousand pounds, joined in the entreaty, but nothing could move that obdurate heart, and all the favour that James would grant her was that she should be beheaded instead of burnt. Her execution, accordingly, took place at Winchester on the 2nd of September, and James II. won the unenviable notoriety of being the only tyrant in England, however implacable, who had ever dyed his hands in woman's blood for the merciful deed of attempting to save the lives of the unfortunate. What made this case worse was, that neither Hicks nor Nelthorpe had yet been tried, so that the trial of Mrs. Lisle was altogether illegal, and the forcing of the jury completed one of the most diabolical instances of judicial murder on record.

From Winchester Jeffreys proceeded to Dorchester. He came surrounded by still more troops, and, in fact, rather like a general to take bloody vengeance, than as a judge to make a just example of the guilty, mingled with mercy, on account of the ignorance of the offenders. The ferocious tyrant was rendered more ferocious, from his temper being exasperated by the agonies of the stone which his drunken habits had inflicted on him. He had the court hung with scarlet, as if to announce his sanguinary determination. When the clergyman who preached before him recommended mercy in his sermon, he was seen to make a horrible grimace, expressive of his savage disdain of such a sentiment. It was whilst preparing to judge the three hundred prisoners collected there, that he received the news of his elevation to the woolsack. He had received orders from James to make effectual work with the rebels, and he now adopted a mode of despatching the unhappy wretches in wholesale style. As it would be a very tedious work to try all that number one by one, he devised a more expeditious plan. He sent two officers to them into the prison, offering them mercy or certain death. All who chose to make confession of their guilt should be treated with clemency, all who refused should be led to immediate execution. His clemency amounted to a respite of a day or two—he hanged them all the same. Writing to Sunderland, Jeffreys said on the 16th of September:—"This day I began with the rebels, and have despatched ninety-eight." Of the three hundred, two hundred and ninety-two received sentence of death. Eighty only were hanged, the rest were, for the most part, sent to the Plantations as slaves.

From Dorchester he went to Exeter, where two hundred and forty-three prisoners awaited their doom. He proceeded in the same way, and condemned the whole body in a batch, and as they saved him much trouble, he did not hang so many of them. Taunton, the capital of Somersetshire, the county where the rebellion was the strongest, presented him with no fewer than a thousand prisoners. Here he perfectly revelled in his bloody task. The work seemed to have the effect of brandy or champagne upon him. He grew every day more exuberant and riotous. He was in such a state of excitement from morning to night, that many thought him drunk the whole time. He laughed like a maniac, bellowed, scolded, cut his filthy jokes on the astounded prisoners, and was more like an exulting demon than a man. There were two hundred and thirty-three prisoners hanged, drawn, and quartered in a few days. The whole number hanged in this bloody campaign has been variously stated at from three to seven hundred. Probably the medium is the most correct. But so many were hung in chains, or their jointed quarters and limbs displayed on the highways, village greens, and in the market-places, that the whole country was infected with the intolerable stench. Some of their heads were nailed on the porches of parish churches; the whole district was a perfect Golgotha. It was in vain that the most distinguished people endeavoured to check the infuriated judge's rage; he only turned his evil diatribes on them, and gave them what he called "a lick with the rough side of his tongue." Because Lord Stowell, a Royalist, complained of the remorseless butchery of the poor people of his neighbourhood, he gibbeted a corpse at his park gate.

The fate of the transported prisoners was worse than death itself. They were eight hundred and forty in number, and were granted as favours to the courtiers. Jeffreys estimated that they were, on an average, worth from ten pounds to fifteen pounds apiece to the grantee. They were not to be shipped to New England or New Jersey, because the Puritan inhabitants might have a sympathy with them on account of their religion, and mitigate the hardship of their lot. They were to go to the West Indies, where they were to be slaves, and not acquire their freedom for ten years. They were transported in small vessels with all the horrors of the slave trade. They were crowded so that they had not room for lying down all at once; were never allowed to go on deck; and in darkness, starvation, and pestiferous stench, they died daily in such quantities that the loss of one-fifth of them was calculated on. The rest reached the Plantations, ghastly, emaciated, and all but lifeless. Even the innocent school girls, many under ten years of age, at Taunton, who had gone in procession to present a banner to Monmouth, at the command of their mistress, were not excused. The queen, who had never preferred a single prayer to her husband for mercy to the victims of this unprecedented proscription, was eager to participate in the profit, and had a hundred sentenced men awarded to her, the profit on which was calculated at one thousand pounds. Her maids of honour solicited a share of this blood-money, and had a fine of seven thousand pounds on these poor girls assigned to them.

The only persons who escaped from this sea of blood were Grey, Sir John Cochrane, who had been in Argyll's expedition, Storey, who had been commissary to Monmouth's army, Wade, Goodenough, and Ferguson. All these owed their escape to money or their secret services in giving information against their old friends, except Ferguson, who by some means escaped to the Continent. On the other hand, Bateman, the surgeon who had bled Oates in Newgate after his scourging, and by his attentions saved his life, was, for a mere duty of his profession, arrested, tried, hanged, and quartered.

James now seemed at the summit of his ambition. He had established an actual reign of terror. The dreadful massacre of the West struck dumb the most courageous, and this gloomy tyrant gave full play to his love of cruelty. The Nonconformists were everywhere beset by informers, who imprisoned, robbed, and abused them at pleasure. They could only meet for worship in the most obscure places and in the most secret manner. Their houses were broken into and searched on pretence of discovering conventicles. Their ministers were seized and thrust into prison. Baxter was there; Howe was obliged to escape abroad. Never, even in the time of Laud, had the oppression been so universal and crushing. All spirit of resistance appeared to be quenched in terror. The close of the year 1685 was long remembered as one of indescribable and unexampled depression and speechless misery.

James, on the contrary, never was so triumphant. He believed that he had now struck effectual terror into the country, and might rule at will. He had increased the army, and openly declared the necessity of increasing it further. He had in many instances dispensed with the Test Act in giving many commissions in the army to Catholics, and he resolved to abolish both that Act and the Habeas Corpus Act. His great design was to restore the Roman religion to full liberty in England; he believed that he was able now to accomplish that daring deed. Parliament was to meet in the beginning of November, and he announced to his Cabinet his intention to have the Test Act repealed by it, or, if it refused, to dispense with it by his own authority. This declaration produced the utmost consternation. Halifax, however, was the only member who dared to warn him of the consequences, and avowed that he would be compelled to oppose the measure. James endeavoured to win him over to his views, but finding it vain, determined to dismiss him from office. His more prudent Councillors cautioned him against such an act on the eve of the meeting of Parliament, on the ground that Halifax possessed great influence, and might head a dangerous opposition. But James was the last man to see danger ahead, and Halifax ceased to be President of the Council. The news was received with astonishment in England, with exultation in Paris, and with discontent at the Hague.

The dismissal of Halifax produced a great sensation out of doors. The Opposition gathered new courage. Danby and his party showed themselves early to coalesce with the adherents of Halifax. The whispered assurance that Halifax was dismissed for refusing to betray the Test and Habeas Corpus Acts created general alarm, and even the leading officers of the army did not hesitate to express their disapprobation. Just at this crisis, only a week before Parliament would assemble, came the news of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV. This Edict had been issued under the ministry of Richelieu, and had closed the long and bloody war between Catholic France and its Protestant subjects. Under certain restrictions the Huguenots were tolerated, and were contented. But Louis, urged by the Jesuits, had long been infringing on the conditions of the treaty. He had dismissed all Huguenots from his service, had forbade them to be admitted to the profession of the law, and compelled Protestant children to be educated by Catholics. Now at length he abolished the Edict altogether, by which the Huguenots were once more at the mercy of dragoons and ruffian informers and constables. Their ministers were banished, their children torn from them, and sent to be educated in convents. The unhappy people seeing nothing but destruction before them, fled out of the kingdom on all sides. No less than fifty thousand families were said to have quitted France, some of them of high rank and name, the bulk of them weavers in silk and stuffs, hatters, and artificers of various kinds. Many settled in London, where they introduced silk weaving, and where their descendants yet remain, still bearing their French names, in Bethnal Green and Spitalfields. Others carried their manufacturing industry to Saxony, and others emigrated to the Cape as vine growers. France, by this blind act of bigotry, lost a host of her best citizens, and had her arts carried to her rivals.

This was a terrible blow to the scheme of James for restoring Romanism to power in England. The people justly said, if a politic monarch like Louis could not refrain at such a serious cost from persecuting Protestants, what was England to expect should Romanism gain the ascendency here, under a bigoted and narrow-minded king like James? James himself saw the full extent of the, to him, inopportune occurrence, and professed to join heartily in the universal outcry of Europe, not excepting the very Pope himself, and Spain, the land of Jesuits and inquisitions; for those parties who were suffering from the aggressions of Louis found it, like James, convenient to make an outcry. What more irritated James was an address which the French clergy in a body had presented to Louis, applauding the deed and declaring that the pious king of England was looking to Louis for his aid in reducing his heretical subjects. This address was read with astonishment and terror by the English people, and James hastened to condemn the revocation of the Edict, and to promote and contribute to the relief of the refugees who had sought shelter here. This affected sympathy did not last long.

On the 9th of November James met his Parliament. He congratulated them on the suppression of the rebellion in the West, but observed that it had shown how little dependence could be placed on the militia. It would be necessary to maintain a strong regular force, and that would, of course, require proportionate funds. He had, he observed, admitted some officers to commissions who had not taken the test, but they were such as he could rely on, and he was resolved to continue them there. On their return to their House the Lords tamely voted him an address of thanks, but with the Commons a demur on this head arose, and a delay of three days was voted before considering an address. This was ominous, and during the interval the ambassadors of Austria and the Pope advised James not to quarrel with the Parliament. Barillon, on the contrary, urged him towards the fatality, for which he required little stimulus. If he quarrelled with his Parliament, he must become Louis's slave, and leave Austria, Spain, and Italy at his mercy. When the Parliament resumed the question, the members, both Whigs and Tories, who were alike opposed to James's projected aggressions, carefully avoided any irritating topic except that of the army. They took no notice of the atrocities committed in the west; they did not revert to the illegal practices by which members in the interest of Government had been returned, but they skilfully proposed improvements in the militia, so as to supersede the necessity of a standing army. When the vote for Supply was proposed, the House carried a motion for bringing in a Bill for rendering the militia more effective, and on this motion Seymour of Exeter, a Tory, as well as Sir William Temple, and Sir John Maynard, who had taken a leading part in the Parliamentary struggle against Charles I., and was now upwards of eighty years of age, took part: several officers of the army, including Charles Fox, Paymaster of the Forces, voted on the popular side of the question. Of course they were dismissed. But the House now having broken the ice, voted an address to the king on the subject of maintaining inviolate the Test Act. When they went into Committee for the Supply, the king demanded one million two hundred thousand pounds, the House proposed four hundred thousand pounds. They were afterwards willing to advance the sum to seven hundred thousand pounds, but the Ministers put the motion for the original sum to the vote, and were defeated. The next day the Commons went in procession to Whitehall, with their address regarding the test. James received them sullenly, and told them that whatever they pleased to do, he would abide by all his promises. This was saying that he would violate the Test Act as he had done. On returning to their House, John Coke of Derby said he hoped they were all Englishmen, and were not to be frightened from their duty by a few high words. As the House had been careful to avoid any expressions disrespectful to the king, they resented this manly but incautious speech, and committed Coke to the Tower. The Court took courage at this proceeding, but though the Commons had not all at once recovered their independent tone, the discontent was strongly fermenting, and though Seymour had at first in vain called on them to examine the abuses of the franchise during the last election, they now took up the question, and Sir John Lowther of Cumberland, another Tory member, headed this movement. The same spirit in the same day broke out in the Lords. Though they had voted thanks for the address, Halifax now contended that that was merely formal, and the Earl of Devonshire, William Cavendish, the bosom friend of Lord William Russell, and Viscount Mordaunt, afterwards the celebrated Earl of Peterborough, proposed to consider the king's speech, and vehemently denounced a standing army. What was still more significant was, that Compton, the Bishop of London, a Royalist, and the son of a Royalist—that Earl of Northampton who had fought for Charles I.,—and who had, moreover, been the educator of the two princesses, not only spoke for himself, but for the whole bench and Church, and declared that the constitution, civil and ecclesiastic, was in danger. Here was a quick end of the doctrine of Non-resistance. Jeffreys endeavoured to reply to these ominous harangues, but the bully of the bench, where he had it all his own way, here cut a very different figure. He was scarified in a style of refined sarcasm, against which his coarse Billingsgate was worse than harmless; it recoiled upon his own head, and this brutal monster, cowardly as he was insolent, sank prostrate before the whole House, and even gave way to a dastardly flood of tears of shame. James, astonished and enraged, but not warned by this first breath of the rising tempest, the next morning hurried to the House of Lords and prorogued Parliament till the 10th of February; but it never met again, being repeatedly prorogued, till the national spirit arose which drove him from the throne.

JUDGE JEFFREYS. (After a Painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller.)

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The prorogation of Parliament was followed by the trial of three Whig leaders of eminence. These were Gerard, Lord Brandon, the eldest son of the Earl of Macclesfield, Hampden, the grandson of the patriot, and Henry Booth, Lord Delamere. Hampden and Gerard were accused afresh of having been concerned in the Rye House Plot, Delamere of having been in league with Monmouth. Grey, Earl of Stamford, had been on the eve of being tried by the Peers on a similar charge of concern in the Rye House Plot, but the prorogation defeated that, and he was soon after liberated. These were the men against whom Grey had been induced to give information, and who, with Wade and Goodenough, were witnesses. Hampden and Gerard were tried at the Old Bailey and condemned. But Grey had stipulated that their lives should be safe, and they were redeemed by their relatives at a heavy price. Delamere, as a peer of the realm, was tried by a High Court of Peers, and as he was accused of having been engaged with Monmouth, his life was in danger. Jeffreys was appointed Lord High Steward, and he selected thirty peers as triers, all of whom in politics were opposed to Delamere, and half of them ministers and members of the royal household. He did not stop there, but as he had a personal spite against Delamere for having complained of him to Parliament when Chief Justice of Chester, and called him a "drunken jackpudding," he did his best personally to condemn him. But in spite of the murderous bias with which the villainous judge had contrived the prisoner's death, the Lords Triers unanimously acquitted him. This was a fact that equally electrified James and the country. Both saw that there was a spirit abroad that was no longer to be trifled with. The people openly rejoiced; the infatuated tyrant raged, but took no warning. The very Tories who had carried the Crown hitherto through every attempt, the Established Church which had preached Non-resistance, saw the gulf, to the edge of which their principles had brought them. Their loyalty paused at the threshold of Romanism, and the destruction of the safeguards of the liberty of the subject. The deadly artifices which an abandoned judge and a lawless monarch had employed against the life of Delamere, might soon be practised against every one of them. The spell of despotism, therefore, was broken. The spirit of an unconquerable suspicion had reached the very cabinet and the household of the Romish king, and his power was at an end.

But the greater the danger the more recklessly the bigotry-blinded monarch rushed upon it. His father had been bent on destroying the Constitution, but stood firm to the Anglican Church; James was resolved to root out both Church and Constitution together; but to his narrow intellect it never occurred that if his father lost his head in attempting half of this impossible enterprise, his danger was double in aiming at the whole. At the very beginning of the year 1686 he took a sudden stride in the direction of avowed Romanism, and during the whole year he marched forward with an insane hardihood that struck the boldest and most adventurous of his friends with consternation. The fact as to whether Charles II. had died a Catholic or a Protestant was still a matter of dispute. A few knew the truth, more surmised, but the bulk of the people still believed him to have been a Protestant. James determined to sweep away the remaining delusion. He therefore brought forth the two papers from Charles's strong box, and challenged the whole bench of bishops to refute them. He especially called on Sancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to do it; but as the Primate from policy declined it, James took it for granted that they were secretly admitted to be unanswerable. He therefore had them printed in magnificent style, and appended to them his own signature, asserting that they were his late brother's own composition, and left in his own handwriting. He had this proof of Charles's Romanism distributed liberally to his courtiers, to the prelates and dignitaries of the Church, and amongst the people, even delivering them out of his coach window to the crowds as he drove about. He thus at once made known that his late brother had been secretly a Romanist, and that he was himself an open and uncompromising one.

His next step was to throw all the power of the Government into the hands of the most unscrupulous Catholics. His brother-in-law, Rochester, the Lord Treasurer, was nominally his Prime Minister, but Sunderland and a knot of Catholics were the really ruling junto. Sunderland, one of the basest men that ever crawled in the dust of a Court's corruption, was the head of this secret cabal. Sunderland, in the last reign, had been a violent Exclusionist. He had intrigued with the Duchess of Portsmouth, through her, if possible, to bring Charles to consent to this measure; but so soon as James was on the throne, he became his most servile tool, declaring that as he had nothing to hope but from the king's clemency and his own efforts to make compensation for the past, James could have no more efficient servant. James, who was a mean soul himself, did not spurn this meanness, but made use of it, and truly Sunderland earned his dirty bread. Avarice was his master vice, and he would have sold two souls for money if he had them. He retained the post of President of the Council, and held with it his old one of Secretary of State; whilst observing the course which James was taking, he did not despair to wrest from the staunch Protestant Rochester his still more lucrative office of Lord Treasurer. He had not the foresight to perceive that the project which James entertained to restore Romanism must bring speedy destruction on them all. This sordid minister was, at the same time, in the pay of Louis, at the rate of six thousand pounds a year, to betray all his master's most secret counsels to him.

With Sunderland were associated in the secret Romish junto—Sunderland himself not being an avowed Catholic, but a private professor—some of those Catholic lords who had been imprisoned on account of the Popish plots—Arundel, Bellasis, and William Herbert, Earl of Powis. To these were added Castlemaine, the man who for a title and revenue had sold his wife to Charles II. He had been imprisoned, too, on account of the Popish plot, and was ready to take vengeance by assisting to destroy his Protestant enemies and their Church together. With him were associated two of the most profligate and characterless men of that profligate age—Jermyn, celebrated for his duels and his licentious intrigues, and lately created by James Lord Dover, and a man familiarly named Dick Talbot—whom James had also for these crimes, which were merits in James's eyes, made Earl of Tyrconnel. These merits were, that Talbot was ready for any service of unmanly villainy that his master could desire. Like another prime favourite and associate of James, Lord Chancellor Jeffreys, Tyrconnel was notorious for his drinking, gambling, lying, swearing, bullying, and debauchery. He was equally ready to lie away a woman's character or to assassinate a better man than himself. In the last reign, when it was desired by the Court to ruin the character of James's wife, Anne Hyde, that she might be got rid of, he joined with Colonel Berkeley in the infamous assertion that they had had the most familiar intrigues with her. When they did not succeed with James, they as readily confessed that the whole was a lie. A man with the least spark of honour in him would have remembered this unpardonable villainy to his now deceased wife, and have banished the wretch from Court. James promoted him, and made him one of his most intimate companions. Tyrconnel offered to murder the Duke of Ormond, and was rewarded for his readiness by being made commander of the forces in Ireland; but his services were chiefly at present demanded at Court.

FOURPENNY PIECE OF JAMES II.

To this precious cabal was added Father Petre, the Jesuit Provincial, brother of Lord Petre, and the organ of the Jesuits at Court. The Pope, too, had his agents at Court, Adda, his nuncio, and a vicar-apostolic; but these advocated cautious measures, for Innocent XI. had a difficult card to play in the Popedom. Louis, the greatest of the Catholic kings, was the most dangerous enemy of the temporal power of the Pope, as of every other temporal power, and the Jesuits were all at variance with him, because he leaned toward the Jansenist party, which at this time was in the ascendency, through the triumphant attacks on the Jesuits by Pascal in his "Lettres Provinciales." The Jesuits, on the contrary, advocated all James's views. These generally subtle men seemed driven, by their falling estimation all over Europe, to clutch at a hope of power in England, and they had at all times been famed for their sly policy of insinuation rather than for their caution and moderation when successful. For their high-handed proceedings they had then, as they have since, been driven again and again from almost every Christian country. They did not display more than their ordinary foresight in the affairs of James.

But we should not possess a complete view of the position and character of James's Court if we did not take in a few other actors—the French king's agents, and the king's mistresses. To Barillon, who had so long been ambassador at the English Court, and the agent of Louis's bribes, the French king had sent over Bonrepaux; and whilst Barillon attached himself to Sunderland and the secret Catholic cabal, Bonrepaux devoted his attentions to Rochester and his section of the ministry, so that Louis learned the minutest movements and opinions of both parties. These parties, in their turn, made use of the king's mistresses; for James, although in disposition the very opposite of Charles, was, with all his morose profession of zealous piety, just as loose in his adulteries.

FIVE-GUINEA PIECE OF JAMES II.

With the aid of the Council of his Catholic cabal, James now began in earnest to put down Protestantism in this kingdom, and restore Romanism. As there was no hope of money from Parliament, he made his peace with the King of France, stooped his shoulder to the burden, and became once more a servant unto tribute. He abandoned all the best interests of England, apologised to Louis for having received the Huguenots, and took measures to defeat the very subscription in their favour which he had commenced and recommended. He arrested John Claude, one of the refugees who had published an account of the persecutions of the Huguenots by Louis, and caused his book to be publicly burnt. In spite of this and his open discouragement, the subscription amounted to forty thousand pounds, but he took good care that the unfortunate Huguenots should never get the money, by ordering every one who applied for it to first take the Sacrament according to the Anglican ritual, which he knew differed so much from their own mode, as to form an effectual bar, which it did. And this was the man who complained of the Test Act as a violation of conscience. He had himself dispensed with this Act in defiance of the law, but he now sought to obtain a sanction from the judges for the breach of the Act. To Parliament he durst not appeal; he therefore called on the twelve judges to declare that he possessed this dispensing power as part of his prerogative. The judges to a man refused; he dismissed them and appointed more pliant ones. But the law officers of the Crown were equally stubborn. Sawyer, the Attorney-General, told the king that he dared not do it, for it was not to abolish a statute, but the whole statute law from the accession of Elizabeth. Sawyer was too useful to be dismissed, but Heneage Finch, the Solicitor-General, was turned out, and Powis, a barrister of no mark, was put in his place. A case was immediately tried in the Court of King's Bench, to obtain the judges' sanction. Sir Edward Hales was formally prosecuted for holding a commission in the army, being a Catholic; but the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Edward Herbert, took the opinion of the new judges upon it, which was, that the king possessed the power to dispense with the Act, and judgment was given accordingly. No sooner was James in possession of this decision of the King's Bench, than he appointed the four Catholic lords of his secret cabal members of the Privy Council—namely, Arundel, Bellasis, Powis, and Dover.

Having perpetrated this daring act in the Council, James hastened to exercise the same power in the Church. Encouraged by the known opinions and intentions of the king, several clergymen who had outwardly conformed to the Church of England and held livings, now threw off the mask and proclaimed themselves of the Catholic Church, and applied to James to authorise them still to hold their livings. These were Obadiah Walker, Master of University College, Oxford; Boyce, Dean, and Bernard, fellows of different colleges; and Edward Sclater, curate of Putney and Esher. The king granted them dispensations to hold their livings, despite their avowed conversion to the doctrines of another Church, on the plea that he would not oppress their consciences. But to support men in holding livings in a Church which they had abandoned was so outrageous a violation of that Church's conscience, that it was impossible long to be submitted to. James, in his very contracted mind, imagined that, because the bishops and ministers had so zealously advocated absolute submission to his will, they would practise it. How little could he have read human nature. Of these sudden converts, Sclater and Walker as suddenly reconverted themselves at the Revolution.

James having now his hand in, went on boldly. He had permitted professed converts to Catholicism to retain their Protestant livings, he next appointed a Catholic to a Church dignity. John Massey, a Fellow of Merton, who had gone over to Rome, was, in violation of every local and national statute, appointed Dean of Christ Church. Massey at once erected an altar and celebrated Mass in the cathedral of Christ Church, and James told the Pope's nuncio that this should soon be the case in Cambridge. It remained now only to fill the sees of the Church with Catholic bishops as they fell vacant; and to enable him to do that, it was necessary, in the first place, to possess himself of a power in the Church like that which he had assumed in the State. He must have a tribunal before which he could summon any refractory clergy, as he could now by his pliant judges control any appeal to the bench. He therefore determined to revive the Court of High Commission, that terrible engine of the Tudors and the Stuarts, which the Long Parliament had put down. This court had power not only to cite any clergyman before it who dared to preach or publish anything reflecting on the views or measures of the king, but "to correct, amend, and alter the statutes of the universities, churches, and schools," or where the statutes were bad to make new ones, and the powers of the Commission were declared to be effectual for these purposes, "notwithstanding any law or statute to the contrary." In fact, all the powers of the High Commission were revived, and the old device and motto were adopted on the seal.

This was a direct and daring declaration of war on the Church. The Act of Supremacy was thus turned against it, and every clergyman, professor, and schoolmaster, from the Primate to the simple curate and tutor, was laid at the mercy of this insane tyrant. The alarm of the whole Court and country when this outstanding fact was made known, was indescribable. The staunchest courtiers trembled at the temerity of the monarch: the French ministers and the Jesuits alone applauded. The new and terrible power of the tribunal was quickly brought into play. The Commission was made known about the middle of July, and seven commissioners were named. At their head stood Jeffreys, who was now to display his truculent spirit in the character of a Grand Inquisitor. The six other commissioners were Archbishop Sancroft, Bishops Crewe of Durham and Sprat of Rochester, Lords Rochester, Sunderland, and the Chief Justice Herbert. Sancroft excused himself from acting on the plea of ill-health, and James in anger immediately ordered him to be omitted in the summons to the Privy Council, saying, if his health were too bad to attend the Commission, it was equally so to attend the Council, and Cartwright, Bishop of Chester, was put on the Commission in his stead. These pliant Churchmen and courtiers were quickly shown what work they had to do. Amongst the clergymen who had ventured to preach against the Roman Church, and to reply to the attacks which the Romish preachers were now emboldened to make on the Anglican Church, beginning at Whitehall itself, Sharp, Dean of Norwich, and one of the royal chaplains, had been honest enough to defend his own faith, and expose the errors of Rome, in a sermon at his own Church of St. Giles's-in-the-Fields. Compton, the Bishop of London, was immediately called upon by Sunderland to suspend him. But Compton, though he had lately fallen under the royal displeasure for opposing James's designs in the House of Lords, and had been dismissed from the Privy Council, and from his post of Dean of the Royal Chapel, replied that he could not suspend Sharp without hearing him in his defence. Thereupon Compton was at once summoned before the new Commissioners. He demurred, declared the Court illegal, that he was a prelate, and amenable only to his peers in the Church, or, as lord of Parliament, to his peers in Parliament. Consenting, however, at length to appear, he was abruptly asked by Jeffreys why he had not suspended Sharp. Compton demanded a copy of the Commission, to see by what right they summoned him. This roused the base blood of Jeffreys, who began to insult the prelate, as he had done many a good man before, declaring that he would take another course with him; but the rest of the Commissioners recalled the brutal bully to a sense of the respect due to the bishop. After the hearing of the case, Rochester, Herbert, and Sprat declared for his acquittal; but James, enraged at his Treasurer, vowed if he did not give his vote against Compton, he would dismiss him from his office. The place-loving minister gave way. Compton was suspended from his spiritual functions, but dared the Court to touch his revenues; and the Chief Justice warned James that did he attempt to seize them, he would be defeated at common law. For awhile, therefore, James was obliged to restrain his proceedings till, as he resolved, he had put the laws more completely under his feet.

But enough had already been done to produce a change such as never had been seen in England since the days of Queen Mary. Encouraged by the king's countenance and proceedings, the Catholics now openly set at nought all the severe laws against them, their chapels, and priests. Though it was still death by the law for any Romish clergyman to appear in England, and all meetings of Catholics for worship were forbidden under the severest penalties, the streets now swarmed with the clergy in full canonicals, and Popish chapels were opened in every part of the kingdom. The Protestant public gazed in astonishment at sights which neither they nor their fathers had beheld in England. The frieze cowls, and girdles of rope, crosses, and rosaries, passed before them as apparitions of an almost fabulous time. James threw open the old chapel at St. James's, where a throng of Benedictine monks located themselves. He built for himself a public chapel at Whitehall, and induced Sandford, an Englishman, but the envoy of the Prince Palatine, to open a third in the City. A brotherhood of Franciscans established themselves in Lincoln's Inn Fields; another of Carmelites appeared in the City; a convent was founded in Clerkenwell, on the site of the ancient cloister of St. John, and a Jesuit church and school were opened in the Savoy, under a rector named Palmer.

The same ominous change appeared all over the country, especially in those districts where Catholics were numerous. But neither in town nor country were the common people disposed to see the whole empire of Popery thus restored. They assembled and attacked the Catholics going into their chapels, insulted them, knocked down their crosses and images, and turned them into the streets. Hence riots ran high and fiercely in London, Worcester, Coventry, and other places. The Lord Mayor ordered the chapel of the Prince Palatine in Lime Street to be closed, but he was severely threatened by the king and Jeffreys. The mob then took the matter into their hands; they attacked the chapel at high Mass, drove out the people and priests, and set the cross on the parish pump. It was in vain that the train bands were ordered out to quell the riot; they refused to fight for Popery.

But this spirit, which would have caused a wiser monarch to pause, only incensed James, and he assembled an army of thirteen thousand men on Hounslow Heath to overawe the City, and conveyed thither twenty-six pieces of artillery, and ample supplies of ammunition from the Tower. But it boded little prospect of support from his army that the people of London immediately fraternised with it, and the camp became the great holiday resort of all classes, resembling, in the strange concourse of strange characters who appeared there, Schiller's description of the camp of Wallenstein. James, however, was proud of his army, and flattered himself that from his having formerly been a general in the French service, he could command it to some purpose. But there were as clever tacticians as himself at work. He allowed Mass to be publicly celebrated in the tent of Lord Dumbarton, the second in command, and this, with the known fact that many officers were Catholics, and the sight of priests and friars strolling about amongst the tents, roused the zeal of Protestant patriots. Foremost amongst these was Dr. Samuel Johnson, who had been chaplain to Lord William Russell, and was a man of liberal ideas of government, and a sturdy champion of Protestantism. In the last reign he had written a severe satire on James, under the title of "Julian the Apostate," in which he drew a vigorous parallel between the Roman apostate and the English one. Julian, according to him, an idolater even when he pretended not to be, was a persecutor when he pretended freedom of conscience, and robbed cities of their municipal charters, which were zealous for the true faith. For this daring philippic he was prosecuted and imprisoned in the King's Bench, but this did not prevent him from still making war on the Popish prince. "Julian" Johnson, as he was called, had found, while imprisoned in the King's Bench, congenial society in the companionship of a fellow-prisoner, whose name was Hugh Speke. This man, Speke, being of a gloomy, seditious temperament, furnished "Julian" Johnson with money to print, and encouraged him by every kind of argument in endeavouring to excite in the Hounslow camp an active spirit of hostility to the Romish schemers. Thereupon Johnson wrote and published a stirring address to the soldiers, which was distributed in thousands amongst the army. There could be no mistake concerning the style of this document, even if the writer and his friend had kept their counsel, as they did not. The publication was speedily traced to Johnson, who was thereupon brought up to the bar of the King's Bench, and, after a long examination, condemned to stand three times in the pillory, to be whipped from Newgate to Tyburn, and to pay a fine of five hundred marks.

Johnson was one of those sturdy, uncompromising reformers—always found, like the petrel, just before the occurrence of a storm—who are regarded with almost more terror and aversion by men of more moderate views or weaker nerves, than by the national offenders whom they attack. When assured by the judge that he might be thankful to the Attorney-General that he had not arraigned him of high treason, he indignantly replied that he thanked him not; that he did not consider himself favoured by being degraded and whipped like a hound, when Popish writers disseminated with impunity what they pleased. This was denied by the Attorney-General and the bench; but Johnson was prepared for them, and pulling a whole mass of such publications from his pocket, which were issued by permission of the royal censor, he read their titles aloud, saying, "There, let Mr. Attorney-General now show whether he will do his duty by them." To spare the priesthood degradation in the person of Johnson, he was cited, at the command of the High Commission, before Crewe and Sprat, the royal Commissioners, accompanied by the Bishops of Rochester and Peterborough, to the chapter-house of St. Paul's, and personally degraded from his order. In having the Bible taken from him in the ceremony, Johnson shed some tears, but said, "You cannot deprive me of its blessed promises." He received two hundred and seventeen lashes in enforcing his punishment, but bore it stoutly, and declared that he could have sung a psalm had he not deemed that it might appear like bravado.

Though the clergy blamed Johnson, and stood aloof from him as a firebrand, because he preached resistance to Popery, which they were soon to do themselves, they were now loud in their pulpits in replying to its attacks, and exposing its lying legends, and its mummery of relics, its tricks of priestcraft, its denial of the Scriptures and the Cup to the laity, the celibacy of the clergy, the abuse of the confessional, and the idolatry of image worship, and prayers to saints. Distinguished amongst these declaimers were Tillotson, Tenison, Stillingfleet, Sherlock, Prideaux, Wake, Atterbury, and many lesser lights in the pulpit. But this zeal was not confined to preachers, for the printing presses of the Universities were kept constantly going. The Catholics, under royal patronage, replied as actively, and the war of pamphlets and pulpits foreshadowed a war of actual arms. James, as blind to all signs of the times as his father had been, went insanely on his way, now eagerly endeavouring to convert his daughter Anne, and now as resolutely scheming to deprive his daughter Mary of the succession. In Scotland and Ireland his crusade against the constitution of the realm and the Protestant religion was equally fierce and reckless.

To Scotland James sent down orders to the Government to dispense with the test and admit Catholics to all offices, and nothing was to be published without the Chancellor's licence, so that no reflections might be made on the Catholic religion or the king's order. The Duke of Queensberry—who was Lord Treasurer, and therefore regarded as Prime Minister—though a Tory, declared that he would not undertake to do anything against the Protestant religion, but there were not wanting sycophants who were ready to attempt just what the king pleased, in the hope of supplanting Queensberry. These were Lord Perth, the Chancellor, and his brother Lord Melfort, Secretary of State. They went over to Romanism as a means of preferment, and were imitated by the Earl of Murray, a descendant of the Regent, and a member of the Privy Council. Perth opened a Catholic chapel in his house, and soon received a cargo of priests' dresses, images, crosses, and rosaries. The incensed mob attacked the house during Mass, tore down the iron bars from the windows, chased the worshippers from their shrine, and pelted Lady Perth with mud. The soldiers were called out, and considerable bloodshed followed. James, irritated instead of being warned, sent down orders to punish the rioters severely, to screen the Catholics from penalties, and to renew the persecution of the Covenanters with all rigour. Alarmed at these insensate commands, three members of the Privy Council—the Duke of Hamilton, Sir George Lockhart, and General Drummond—hastened up to London to explain to James the impossibility of enforcing them, but made no impression.

On the 29th of April the time arrived for the meeting of the Scottish Parliament, when a letter from James was read calling on the Estates to pass a Bill freeing the Catholics from all penalties; but so far from the Parliament accepting such a proposition, the Lords of the Articles, whose business it was to introduce the propositions for new measures, and who had been chosen by James himself, declined to comply with the proposal. In vain they were urged by Perth, Melfort, and Murray; they remained refractory for three weeks, and then only dared to recommend that the Catholics should be permitted to worship in their own houses. But even this the Parliament would not consent to, and, after a week's debate, threw out even this very much modified scheme. James, who had during this discussion seen the intense anxiety in England to learn the news of the progress of the debate, perpetrated one of the most audacious acts of arbitrary power that modern times have witnessed. He sent for the mail bags from the North regularly, and detained all correspondence thence till the matter was ended. No single Scottish letter was issued in London for a whole week.

When at last the news, in spite of him, burst forth amid loud rejoicings, he was enraged, but, like his father, he declared that he would do by his own royal authority what he wanted; that he had been only foolish in asking for what the Act of Supremacy gave him in Scotland as perfectly as in England. He therefore launched the bolts of his vengeance at those who had disputed his will. Queensberry was dismissed from all his offices, the Bishop of Dunkeld ejected from his see, and crowds of Papists were appointed to the posts of those who had refused to obey the royal mandate. Without the ceremony of an Act of Parliament, James proceeded to usurp the rights of boroughs, and to appoint provosts and town councillors at his will; he ordered the judges to declare all the laws against Catholics void, and announced his intention of fitting up a Roman Catholic chapel in Holyrood. These measures struck a momentary terror and deep silence into the Scottish people, but it was only the silence preceding the storm.

In Ireland James had a preponderating body of Catholics eager to receive justice and the restoration of their estates at his hands. But only a wise and cautious monarch could succeed in making decent recompense to the native Irish for their many sufferings and spoliations. Their lands, by the Act of Settlement, were for the most part in the hands of a sturdy race of Englishmen, both Episcopalians and Presbyterians, who had been placed there at successive periods, and extensively by the Commonwealth. To announce that he would repeal this Act, and reinvest the natives with their ancient demesnes, was at once to rouse to arms a body of such pluck and nerve as the Celtic race had no chance with, notwithstanding their numbers. At the news that the Act was to be revoked, and the Church and Government of Ireland to be put into the hands of Catholics, the timid English gentry fled, the trade of the island received a paralysing blow, and the sturdy Saxon population prepared not only to defend their possessions, but to exterminate, if necessary, the aboriginal tribes.

Clarendon, the Lord-Lieutenant, the brother of Rochester, the Prime Minister of England, in great alarm wrote to James, detailing the immediate effects of this announcement; but James persisted in his obstinate course. He declared that the Protestants were his enemies, and that it was necessary to fortify himself with his friends; that his father had lost his head by conceding—he should have said by conceding too late,—and that he would concede nothing. He went on putting Catholics into the Privy Council, into the corporations and the army, dismissing Protestants to make room for them. He then sent out Tyrconnel, as his unscrupulous instrument, to occupy the post already his, of head of the army; he was at the same time furnished with instructions to take virtually all the functions of government into his hands, and reduce Clarendon to a cipher. Clarendon, like all the Hydes, was meanly attached to office and its emoluments, or he would at once have resigned rather than suffer the indignity of beholding his office usurped by a bullying ruffian like Tyrconnel. This desperate gambler, duellist, and debauchee, soon began to talk of the Act of Settlement as a damned and villainous thing; set about remodelling the army so as to exclude all Protestants, and replace them by Catholics; officers and men of the Protestant faith were dismissed by wholesale; he was in league with the priests to drill the entire Papist population, so as to confer the whole power of the island on them, and place every Protestant throat at their mercy. In a very few weeks he had introduced two thousand Popish soldiers into the army, and gave out that by Christmas the whole of the troops would be native Catholic. In the Church and the State he pushed on rudely the same measures, and with a violence of conduct and of language which appeared more like drunken madness than anything else. Taking the cue from him, and instructed by the priests, everybody treated Clarendon with marked insult and contempt. Still clinging meanly to office, he appealed to his brother in London to obtain for him more honourable treatment, but was thunderstruck by the news that Rochester himself had been dismissed.

Rochester, the champion to whom the Protestants of the Anglican Church looked up for aid, had, as miserably as his brother, disgraced himself by suffering his honour to be compromised by the love of office and income. He saw the career which James was running, and which no remonstrance or popular menace could arrest, and instead of resigning with dignity when his counsels became useless, he had even flattered James with the hope of his conversion. But he did not deceive the Jesuit Cabal which surrounded and governed James. They assured the king that nothing would ever make Rochester a genuine supporter of Catholic views, and the sooner he cut himself loose from the connection the better. Accordingly, on the 19th of December, the king, with many professions of regard, took from his brother-in-law Rochester the Treasurer's staff, but softened his fall by granting him out of Lord Grey's estate lands to the yearly value of seventeen hundred pounds, and an annuity of four thousand pounds for his own life and that of his son. He was spared also the mortification of seeing his rival Sunderland invested with his office; the Treasurership was put in commission; Lord Arundel received the Privy Seal, and Bellasis was made First Lord of the Treasury, whilst Dover, a ruined gambler, and Godolphin received places at the board.

The fall of Clarendon followed rapidly on that of Rochester. On the 8th of January, 1687, he received the order to resign his post to Tyrconnel. Such was the panic at this news, that no less than fifteen hundred families of gentlemen, merchants, and tradesmen, are said to have fled from Dublin to England in a week, and a reign of terror commenced all over Ireland. The known intentions of the king, and the character of his Lord-Lieutenant, were the signals for proscription to all Protestants, and they were turned out of the army, the offices of State, from the bench, and the magistracy, with an indecency which astonished the moderate Catholics themselves. Law and justice appeared to be at an end. The worst passions of a population long loaded with every species of injustice were let loose, and the once dominant race now saw themselves the objects of unconcealed hatred and recrimination. The wild population drove off their cattle, set fire to their houses, and the newly-raised soldiery devoted themselves with the gusto of vengeance to pillaging, murdering, and outraging the Protestant settlers with a frightful exultation.

Such were the ominous circumstances under which the year 1687 opened. By driving from him his relatives, the Hydes, James had severed the last ties between him and Protestantism; had demolished the last guarantees of Protestant security. The whole Protestant public, and many of the more clear-sighted Catholics, looked forward with an awful sense of impending mischief, and they were only too correct in their apprehensions.

James was determined to push forward his schemes for the restoration of Romanism in defiance of every long-cherished prejudice of the people, and of every constitutional principle. Besides the conversions which interest had made amongst the courtiers, there were a few other persons of more or less distinction who for royal favour had apostatised, but the number was most insignificant. The Earl of Peterborough, and the Earl of Salisbury—the descendant of Cecil, Elizabeth's minister,—had embraced Catholicism, and amongst literary men some half dozen. There were Wycherley, the obscene dramatist, Haines, a low comedian, and Tindal, who afterwards became a professed deist; but the most remarkable and deplorable instance was that of the poet Dryden. Dryden had sufficiently degraded his fine talents by plays and other compositions which could not be read now without a blush; but his compliance with the impure taste of the age had not enriched him. He enjoyed a pension of one hundred pounds a year from Charles, but that expired with Charles, and James, on renewing it, withdrew the usual butt of sack which accompanied it. After that no further notice was taken of the poet who had rendered such services to the royal cause, and, pressed by his needs, Dryden declared himself a Papist, and was speedily rewarded by royal notice and emolument. Henceforward his pen was employed to defend the royal religion, and the most remarkable result of his labours remains in his celebrated poem of "The Hind and Panther."

Slight as were these triumphs over the steadfast minds of Englishmen, James began now to be aware that he must win over bodies which he really hated, and had hitherto persecuted with all his might, if he meant to succeed. We have had occasion to relate the horrible cruelties and sanguinary ferocity with which he had pursued the Covenanters in Scotland and the Puritans in England, but he now deemed it necessary to pretend himself their friend. The Church had so uniformly and vehemently proclaimed the doctrine of Non-resistance, that he imagined he was pretty sure of it; but in Scotland and England the Nonconformists were a numerous and sturdy race, and danger from them might be apprehended in case Romanism was too exclusively reinstated. He therefore concluded to make his approaches to this object by feigning a love of religious liberty. He commenced first in Scotland by issuing a Declaration of Indulgence, on the 12th of February, 1687, but with an avowal of absolutism and a niggardly concession of religious liberty, which were not likely to be very gratefully received by the Scots. "We, by our sovereign authority, prerogative royal and absolute power, do hereby give and grant our royal toleration. We allow and tolerate the modern Presbyterians to meet in their private houses, and to hear such ministers as have been or are willing to accept of our indulgence; but they are not to build meeting-houses, but to exercise in houses. We tolerate Quakers to meet in their form in any place or places appointed for their worship; and we, by our sovereign authority, suspend, stop, and disable all laws and Acts of Parliament made and executed against any of our Roman Catholic subjects, so that they shall be free to exercise their religion and to enjoy all; but they are to exercise in houses or chapels; and we cass, disannul, and discharge all oaths by which our subjects are disabled from holding offices."

Thus James had declared himself absolute, above all laws, and at liberty to discharge any Act of Parliament. The same breath which gave a decree of religious liberty, annihilated every other liberty, and made the whole nation dependent on the will of one man. But whilst thus sweeping away all the labours of all past Parliaments at his pleasure, he with an inconsistency which betrayed a secret feeling that the power of Parliament was not so easily set aside, even then contemplated calling Parliament together if he could have but a prospect that it would confirm what he had done in Scotland, and proposed immediately to do in England. He therefore commenced a system of what has been called "closetings." He sent for the Tory members of Parliament, who were in town, one by one, and taking them into his closet at Whitehall, tried by personal persuasions and by bribes—for though dreadfully penurious, he now all at once became liberal of promises, and tolerably liberal of money—and entreated the members to oblige him by voting for the abolition of the laws against Catholics, which he told them had been, in truth, directed against himself; and whilst he promised, he threatened, too, in case his wishes were not complied with. Whilst he made this experiment in town, the judges now on circuit were ordered to send for the members in the country to the different county towns, and use the same persuasions. The result was by no means satisfactory. If there was one feeling stronger than another which had taken possession of the public mind, it was, then and long after, that the Catholics were not to be trusted with power, and that to grant them opportunity would be to restore the horrors of Queen Mary's days. James himself met with some signal rebuffs, and in every instance he dismissed the refusers from any office that they held; amongst them Herbert, Master of the Robes, and Rear-Admiral of England.

As no good was to be obtained from Parliament, he at once prorogued it again till November, asserting that he would grant toleration on his own authority; and on the 8th of April he issued his "Declaration of Indulgence for England." This Declaration, though in not quite positive and reiterated terms, set forth the same principle of absolutism, and independence of Parliament. "We have thought fit, by virtue of our royal prerogative, to issue forth this our declaration of indulgence, making no doubt of the concurrence of our two Houses of Parliament when we shall think it convenient for them to meet." He made no secret in it of wishing to see Catholicism the religion of the land; but, as the people did not seem willing to accept it, he had resolved to give to all professions of religion the same freedom. He talked like a philosopher about the virtues and justice of entire toleration, and the impolicy as well as injustice of persecution—conveniently ignoring that his practice, whenever he had had the power, had been in direct opposition to these smooth maxims. He not only then proceeded to abolish all the penal acts which had ever been passed, giving free right of worship, public or private, to all denominations, but denounced the utmost vengeance of the laws against any one who should disturb any congregation or person in the exercise of their religion.

The substance of the Declaration was admirable; it was so because it was the Christian truth; but the deed had two defects, and they were fatal ones. It was granted at the expense of the whole Constitution; and to admit that it was valid was to abandon Magna Charta and the Petition of Right, and accept instead the arbitrary will of the monarch. The second and equally fatal objection was that every one knew, from James's practice, and his proved deceitfulness, and his obstinate persistency, that the whole was but a snare to introduce Romanism, and then tread down every other form of religion. James boasted to the Pope's nuncio that the Declaration would be a great blow, and that in a general liberty of conscience the Anglican Church would go down, for persecution of the Dissenters would then be revenged upon her, and, unsupported by the Crown, she would meet with deserved contempt. And, had the toleration been legitimately obtained and guaranteed, after the servile conduct of the Church at that time, this might have been the case. The Dissenters had every reason to be thankful for toleration. They had been trodden down by the Anglican hierarchy; they had been dragged before the arbitrary High Commission, and plundered and imprisoned at pleasure. The bishops had supported every unrighteous act against them—the Conventicle Acts, the Test Act, the Five-Mile Act, the Act of Uniformity; and now they could enjoy their property, the peace of their firesides, their liberty, and their worship in the open sight of God and man. These were great boons, and, therefore, a great number of Nonconformists expressed their gratitude for them. The Quakers in particular sent up a grateful address, which was presented by Penn with an equally warm speech; but both they and the other Dissenters restricted themselves to thanking James for the ease they enjoyed, without going into the question of his right to grant it. Some few individuals, in their enthusiasm, or worked upon by the Court, went beyond this; but the general body of the Nonconformists were on their guard, and some of the most eminent leaders refused even to address the king in acknowledgment of the boon. Amongst these were Baxter, who had been so ignominiously treated by Jeffreys; Howe, who had had to flee abroad; and Bunyan, who had suffered twelve years' imprisonment for his faith; they boldly reminded their followers of the unconstitutional and, therefore, insecure basis on which the relief rested; that a Protestant successor might come—even if before that Popery, grown strong, had not crushed them—and again subject them to the harsh dominance of the Anglican hierarchy.

No exertions were omitted to induce the Dissenters to send up addresses; and they were actively canvassed by members of their different bodies, as Carr, Alsop, Lobb, and Rosewell, the last of whom was liberated from prison for the purpose. James took care to throw all the blame of the past persecutions on the Church, which, he said, had been at the bottom of all those councils. The Church, on the other hand, deserted by the Crown, retorted the accusation, and attributed every act of persecution to the Government, to which it professed unwillingly to have submitted. Thus was seen the edifying sight of the two arch-oppressors quarrelling, and in their bitter recriminations letting out the confession that they both knew very well how base and un-Christian their conduct had been.

But there was a third party to which all alike looked with anxiety in this crisis, and this consisted of William of Orange and his wife. As Protestants, and the probable successors of James, if they approved of the Indulgence, they would greatly strengthen the king; if they disapproved of it altogether, it would give a shock to the Protestant interest in England. But William was too politic not to see all the bearings of the question, and he and the princess jointly avowed their entire approval of complete toleration of all phases of the Christian religion, but their disapproval of the illegal means by which James aimed to effect it, and of Catholics being admitted to place and power. These were precisely the views of the great majority of Englishmen; and accordingly James sank still deeper in public odium on this publication, and William and Mary rose in popularity. They seized the opportunity to organise a most powerful party in their favour, and thus pave the way to an accession to the throne, which their sagacity assured them would much sooner arrive than the natural demise of the king. Mary has been censured for so readily uniting in a plan to drive her father from the throne. So long as the policy of James promised a continuance of his power, no steps were taken by Mary to supersede him; so soon as it became evident that no earthly power, to say nothing of justice or right, could keep him on the throne, it became a mere act of prudence to take care that no alien interest usurped her own. That Mary contemplated or committed any act of personal cruelty or harshness towards her father beyond securing her succession against an intruder, remains to be shown. Her husband, with all his virtues, was not proof against allowing, if not perpetrating, questionable acts; and he had been so jealous of his dignity and power, that for years he brooded in gloomy discontent on the prospect of Mary's succession to the crown of England without his having any claim to share it, not even communicating his splenetic feeling to her. But this secret was penetrated by Burnet, explained to Mary and, through her generosity, at once the difficulty was dissipated by her engaging to admit him to a full share of her hereditary authority. From that moment William redoubled his zeal to secure the succession; but there is no question that Mary exerted her filial regard to secure her father against any personal injustice.

William now despatched to England orders to his ambassador, Dykvelt, to use his endeavours to knit up the different sections of the discontented into one paramount interest in his favour. The scattered elements of an overwhelming power lay around the throne, which James, by his blind folly and tyranny, had made hostile to himself, and prepared ready to the hand of a master to combine for his destruction. Danby, who had fallen in the late reign for his opposition to the French influence, and who had been the means of uniting Mary to William, had regained extensive influence amongst both Tories and Whigs, and was driven by James into determined opposition. Halifax, who had been the chief champion of James's accession by opposing the Exclusion Bill, and whose dangerous eloquence made him especially formidable, had been dismissed and neglected by him. Finch, Earl of Nottingham, a zealous Tory and Churchman, and one of the most powerful orators of the House of Lords, he made his enemy by his dismissal of his younger brother from the post of Solicitor-General for not acquiescing in the king's dispensing powers, and by his attacks on the Church and the Constitution. The Earl of Devonshire he had managed, by imprisonment and a monstrous fine, equally to disgust; and the Earl of Bedford he had completely alienated by the execution of his son, Lord William Russell. Compton, the Bishop of London; Herbert, lately Rear-Admiral of England; Clarendon, Rochester, Lumley, Shrewsbury, had all, by a most insensate folly, been offended by dismission and private injuries. There was not a man of any talent or influence whom this fatuous tyrant had not driven from him in his obstinate resolve to set Romanism and despotism along with him on the throne, except Lord Churchill, upon whom he continued to heap favours, but who was too worldly-wise not to see that his benefactor was running headlong to ruin, and who was by no means the man to share ruin out of gratitude. Dykvelt executed his mission so well, that in four months he returned to the Hague with a packet of letters in his possession from all those noblemen, bishops, and others, including Admiral Russell, the cousin of the decapitated Lord William Russell, promising William their most enthusiastic support. From the Princess Anne, who was bound up heart and soul with Churchill and his clever wife—afterwards the celebrated Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough—her sister Mary also received the most cordial assurances that nothing should induce her to abandon her religion, or her attachment to her sister's rights.

Dykvelt returned from England on the 9th of June; and, to continue the effect produced in that country, on the 8th of August another agent in the person of General Zulestein was despatched thither. His ostensible mission was to offer an address of condolence on the death of the queen's mother, the Duchess of Modena; but his real one was to strengthen the connection with the malcontents, which he could the more unsuspectedly do from his military character, and from his having taken no particular part in diplomacy. Zulestein was completely successful; but these proceedings could not entirely escape James or his envoy at the Hague, the Catholic Marquis of Abbeville, who succeeded in getting Burnet, the active adviser of William, removed from open intercourse with the Court. But Burnet was still not far off, and through his chief counsellors, Bentinck and Halweyn, William still consulted with him on every step of the plans regarding England. James also sought to reach William through Stewart, a Scottish lawyer, who had fled from his persecutions of the Covenanters to the Hague, but who, on the appearance of the Declaration of Indulgence, most suddenly went to the king's side, in hopes of promotion. Stewart wrote a letter to Fagel, the Grand Pensionary, who had great influence with William, which he confessed was at the suggestion of the king, strongly urging him to use his power with William to persuade him to support James's act; but Fagel, with a dexterous policy, replied in another letter, stating that the prince and princess were advocates for the most ample toleration, but not for the abolition of the Test, or of any other Act having the inviolability of the Anglican Church for its object. This was calculated to satisfy the Catholics of every privilege which they could reasonably expect from the laws and the public opinion of England, whilst it fully assured the Church of its safety under William and Mary.

Every fresh movement thus contributed to strengthen the position of William, and to show to James, had he had sufficient mind to comprehend it, how completely his conduct had deprived him of the confidence of his subjects. Even the Pope took no pains to conceal how suicidal he deemed his policy. He would have sufficiently rejoiced in any rational prospect of the return of England to the Church of Rome, but he was not dull enough to imagine the sentiment of the king the sentiment of the nation; on the contrary, he was persuaded that the rash cabals of the Jesuits were inevitably hastening a crisis which must the more deeply root the Anglican antipathy to Popery. James had despatched Castlemaine as ambassador to Rome with a splendid retinue. It was not enough that this open affront was done to his country by sending a Catholic ambassador to the Pope, and in the person, too, of a man who had no distinction except the disgraceful one of having purchased his title by the prostitution of his wife; but Castlemaine was deputed to solicit a dispensation from Innocent for Father Petre to receive the Episcopal dignity, which was forbidden to a Jesuit. James contemplated nothing less than making Petre Archbishop of York, which see he kept vacant for the purpose; but the Pope was too much at enmity with the Jesuits, as well as with James for his impolitic conduct, and his alliance with the great French aggressor, to concede any such favour. Castlemaine, who was living in pomp at Rome, threatened to take his departure if this request was not granted, and Innocent only sarcastically replied by bidding him start in the cool of the morning, and take care of his health on the journey.

This discourtesy shown him by the head of that religion for which he was putting everything to the hazard, had, however, only the effect of further raising the pugnacity of James. He determined only the more to honour and exalt Popery in England. The nuncio, Adda, had been made Archbishop of Amasia—a mere title of honour, in consequence of James's desire that he should be publicly acknowledged at his Court. Hitherto both he and the Vicar-Apostolic, Leyburn, had been instructed by the Papal Court to keep a careful incognito; but James would no longer consent to this; and, accordingly, on the 1st of May, 1686, Adda had been publicly consecrated at Whitehall, by the titular Archbishop of Ireland, assisted by Leyburn, the Vicar-Apostolic. In the evening of that day the nuncio was received into the royal circle, in the queen's apartments; and James shocked and disgusted his courtiers by falling on his knees before him and imploring his blessing. It was the first time that an English Court had seen their monarch, for a very long period, doing homage at the feet of a Papal nuncio, and the effect was humiliating. On the 3rd of July the nuncio was favoured with a public reception at Windsor. He went thither attended by a numerous procession of the ministers and of officials of the Court, and was conveyed in a royal coach, wearing a purple robe, and a brilliant cross upon his breast. In his train were seen with surprise and contempt the equipages of Crewe, Bishop of Durham, and Cartwright, Bishop of Chester. The Duke of Somerset, as First Lord of the Bedchamber, was expected to introduce him; but he declined, representing the penalties to which the act would expose him. This refusal was the less expected, because he had not objected to carry the sword of State before his Majesty when the king had gone to the royal Papal chapel. James was indignant. "I thought," he said, "that I was doing you a great honour by appointing you to escort the minister of the first of all crowned heads." Somerset, moved to a firmness of demeanour and language unusual even in him, declared that he dared not break the law. James replied, "I will make you fear me as well as the law. Do you not know that I am above the law?" "Your Majesty," replied Somerset, with commingled dignity and affected humility, "may be above the law, but I am not; and I am only safe while I obey the law." The king, not used to being thwarted, much less to language of so plain a sort, turned from him in a rage, and the next day issued a decree depriving him of his posts in the Household and of his command in the Guards.

This most impolitic conduct James followed, on the 1st of February, 1687, by a still more absurd and ludicrous, but equally mischievous, reception. It was that of Cocker, an English Benedictine monk, who, being more deeply implicated in treason than his friends cared to confess, had narrowly escaped with his life in the trials of the Popish plot. This man the Elector of Cologne had appointed his Resident at the English Court—probably at the suggestion of James, and in defiance of public opinion; and James now insisted that he should receive a public introduction to Court, in the habit of his order, and attended by six other monks in a like costume. Thus James took a pleasure in violating the laws and insulting public opinion at every turn, to show that he was independent of both; and he now prepared to commence in earnest the destruction of the Church.

Before advancing to this dangerous experiment, however, he deemed it necessary to tighten the discipline of the army, which had shown no little disgust at his proceedings.

Many of James's soldiers had deserted, and it was found that they were under no oath or obligation which rendered such desertion liable to serious punishment. But James determined to punish them, even condignly, in order to strike a sufficient terror into the whole army. He consulted the judges as to whether he did not possess this power; they said that he did not. Instead of accepting this answer, James dismissed Herbert, the Chief Justice of the King's Bench, Sir John Holt, another judge of the same bench and Recorder of London, and put in their places Sir Robert Wright, a creature of Jeffreys', a man of ruined and base character, Richard Allibone, and Sir Bartholomew Shower as Recorder. With these infamous instruments he went to work; and, instead of trying the offenders by court-martial, he brought them before these men in the King's Bench and in the Old Bailey, and hanged them in sight of their regiments. By these outrages on every law and principle of constitutional safety James thought he had terrified the army into obedience; and he now attacked the very existence of the Universities, in order to give the education of the country into the hands of Popery.

James commenced his encroachments on the Universities by ordering one Alban Francis, a Benedictine monk, to be admitted a Master of Arts of Cambridge. That many persons not strictly admissible by the rules of the University had received honorary degrees, including foreigners of different forms of faith, and even a Turk, was indisputable; but the object of these favours was so clear that no mischief could arise from the practice. But now the Universities were but too well aware that James aimed at a thorough usurpation of these schools by the Catholics to lightly pass the matter by. The heads of colleges sent hastily to Albemarle, their Chancellor, begging him to explain to the king that the person named could not be admitted according to the statutes; at the same time they conceded so far as to offer to admit Francis on his taking the Oaths of Supremacy and Obedience.

He refused. James menaced the authorities, but in vain, and he summoned them before the High Commission Court. John Pechell, the Vice-Chancellor of the University, attended by eight fellows, including the illustrious Isaac Newton—afterwards Sir Isaac—appeared, and were received by Jeffreys with all his devilish bluster. Pechell was soon terrified at this most brutal monster, whose employment alone would have sufficiently stamped the character of James; and, when any of the other fellows attempted to speak, Jeffreys roared out, "You are not Vice-Chancellor; when you are, you may talk; till then, hold your tongue." Finding, however, that, though he could embarrass, he could not bend the Vice-Chancellor, Jeffreys, by order of James, declared Pechell dismissed from the office of Vice-Chancellor, and all his emoluments suspended. This was a gross violation of the rights of the University, and Jeffreys added to the outrage a piece of his usually blasphemous advice to the fellows—"Go your way and sin no more, lest a worse thing befall you."

JAMES DOING HOMAGE TO THE PAPAL NUNCIO. (See p. 323.)

The decease of the President of Magdalen College, Oxford, enabled James to follow up his plans without loss of time. Magdalen was one of the very richest of the English foundations, and consisted of a president, forty fellows, and thirty scholars, called Demies. It was the law of the foundation that the President could only be elected from those who were or had been members of that college, or of New College. The President died in March, 1687, and the 13th of April was fixed for the election of the new one. A Dr. Smith, a learned Orientalist, and an enthusiastically loyal man, applied for the royal consent, but was informed that the king was determined to give it only to one of his own religion; and, to the astonishment and disgust of the college, one Anthony Farmer was named as the royal nominee. The choice seemed made to insult the University in the highest degree possible, for not only was Farmer a Popish convert, but a man of the most drunken, debauched, and infamous character that could have been picked from the vilest haunts of unnamable wickedness. The astounded fellows humbly but earnestly remonstrated, but in vain. On the appointed day, despite the king's positive injunctions, and the presence of his agent, the choice fell on a distinguished and highly virtuous member of the college, John Hough.

The irate king summoned the fellows before the beastly Jeffreys and the High Commission, as he had summoned the heads of the University of Cambridge. There Jeffreys exhibited his wonted display of insufferable Billingsgate; and when Dr. Fairfax, one of the fellows, had the boldness to call in question the legality of the High Commission, he lost all patience. "Who is this man? What commission has he to be impudent here? Seize him; put him into a dark room. What does he do without a keeper? He is under my care as a lunatic. I wonder nobody has applied to me for the custody of him." But, after all, the character of Farmer was shown to be so vilely reprobate, that he was dropped, and the college ordered to receive Dr. Parker, Bishop of Oxford.

Parker was not an openly acknowledged Papist, but was understood to be really one; but he was neither a fellow of Magdalen nor of New College, and the fellows were firm enough to stand by their own election of Dr. Hough. James determined to go in person to Oxford and overawe these obstinate men; and he was the more bent upon it, having in the meantime suffered a similar defeat in endeavouring to force a Catholic into the hospital connected with the Charterhouse School. The trustees refused, and were called before Jeffreys. There he began browbeating the master, Thomas Burnet, but was unexpectedly opposed by the venerable Duke of Ormond. At this the bully swagger of this most hideous and contemptible judge that ever sat on a bench at once gave way, for he had no real courage. He stole from the court, and the scheme failed for the day. But the High Commission having sentenced Hough to be deposed from the presidentship of Magdalen, and Fairfax from his fellowship, again met, and summoned the trustees of the Charterhouse. Here again they were awed by a letter addressed to the king, signed by the trustees, including the names of Ormond, Halifax, Danby, and Nottingham, the chiefs of all the great parties who secured to James his crown, and still by their forbearance kept it on his head, so that they were compelled to pause before proceeding farther.

On the 16th of August James set out on a progress, with every display of royal state which could impress on the minds of his subjects an idea of his kingly position. He proceeded to Portsmouth, Southampton, Bath; thence by Gloucester and Worcester to Ludlow, Shrewsbury, and Chester; whence he again turned south, and reached Oxford on the 3rd of September. Everywhere he had been attended by the High Sheriffs of the counties with splendid retinues; and the clergy in the towns had flocked around him in great numbers, though he continued on his progress to neglect their preaching for Mass. If outward circumstances could be relied on, it might have been supposed that the king had never been more popular; and, with all the prestige of this tour, he summoned the refractory fellows of Magdalen before him, and rated them soundly on their disobedience. They knelt and offered him a petition, but he haughtily refused to look at it, bidding them go that instant and elect the Bishop of Oxford, or expect his high displeasure. But the fellows could not be thus brought to submission, and James quitted the town in high dudgeon.

On the 20th of October James sent down a special commission, consisting of Cartwright, Bishop of Chester, Wright, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, and Jenner, a baron of the Exchequer, attended by three troops of cavalry, with drawn swords, to Oxford, to expel Hough and instal Parker. Parker was installed, but the fellows would not acknowledge him. James, therefore, ejected them altogether. In a few weeks Parker died, and then the king proceeded to put the whole college into the hands of Papists, appointing Gifford, one of the four vicars-apostolic, president; for now, in the regular progress of his system, James had admitted four vicars-apostolic instead of one, which had been the case before. It may be imagined what resentment this arbitrary proceeding occasioned, not only in the Universities themselves, but amongst the clergy in every quarter of the kingdom, who now saw that nothing would deter the king from uprooting the deepest foundations of the Church.

Still more daring and atrocious schemes were agitated by James and his Popish cabal. Soon after his accession it had been proposed to set aside the claims of the Princess of Orange, and make Anne heir-apparent, on condition that she embraced Popery. Anne refused. It was then proposed to make over Ireland to Louis of France in case Mary of Orange could not be prevented from succeeding to England; and Louis expressed his assent to the proposal. Tyrconnel was to make all necessary preparations for this traitorous transfer. But at this moment a new light broke on James, which quashed these unnatural and unnational projects: the queen was declared pregnant. The news of this prospect was received by the public with equal incredulity and suspicion. The queen had had several children, who had died in their infancy; and there was nothing improbable in the expectation of another child, although five years had elapsed since her last confinement. The prospect of an heir, however, true or false, drove James on further and more desperate projects. Should a son be born, and live, which none of the queen's children had done hitherto, the Popish heir would be exposed to the danger of a long minority. James might die before the son had been firmly rooted in the Catholic faith, and the Protestant bishops and nobles would surround him with Protestant instructors, and most likely ruin all James's plans of perpetuating Popery. To obviate this, he determined to have an Act of Parliament, settling the form of the child's guardianship and education, and vesting all the necessary powers in Catholic hands. Any prudent man would at least have waited to see the birth and probable life of the child before rushing on so desperate a scheme; for, to have an Act, he must call a Parliament; and to call a Parliament in the present feeling of the nation was to bring together one of the most determinedly Protestant assemblies of men that had ever been seen. But James was of that mole-eyed, bigot character which rushed headlong on the most perilous issues. He determined to pack a Parliament by means which none but a madman would have attempted. Whether from county or borough, he could expect nothing but a most obstinate and universal demonstration in favour of the Church and Constitution. His brother Charles, for his own purposes, had deprived the towns of their charters, because they were Whig and often Nonconformist, and had given them others, which put them into the hands of the Tories and Churchmen, and these were the very men who now would resist James's plans to the death. The country was equally Church and Tory, but all this did not daunt James. He determined to remodel the corporations, and to change every magistrate in the counties that was not ready to carry out his views. He appointed a Board of Regulators at Whitehall to examine into the state of the corporations and introduce new rules and new men as they thought fit. These regulators were seven in number, and all Catholics and Jesuits, except the king's incarnate devil, Jeffreys. These men appointed deputations of chosen tools to visit the different corporations, and report to them; and James issued a proclamation announcing his intention to revise the commissions of the peace, and of the lieutenancy of counties. In fact, James proceeded like a man who was satisfied that he could do just as he pleased with the Constitution of a country which, through all ages, had shown itself more jealous of its Constitution than any other in the world.

He sent for the lords-lieutenants, and delivered to them a paper of instructions, with which they were each to proceed to their several counties. They were to summon all the magistrates, and tell them what his Majesty expected from them on the ensuing election of Parliament, and to send him up their individual answers, along with the list of all the Catholic and Dissenting gentlemen who might take the place of those who should dare to object to the king's plans on the bench or in the militia. The proposal was so audacious, that the greater proportion of the lords-lieutenants peremptorily refused to undertake any such commission; these included the noblest names in the peerage, and they were at once dismissed. The sweeping measure of turning out the Duke of Somerset, the Viscounts Newport and Falconberg, the Earls of Derby, Dorset, Shrewsbury, Oxford, Pembroke, Rutland, Bridgewater, Thanet, Abingdon, Northampton, Scarsdale, Gainsborough, and many others, showed how far James was gone in his madness. As the king could not get any noblemen to take the places of the dismissed, he filled them up as he could, and even made his butcher, Jeffreys, lord-lieutenant of two counties. But all was in vain; he soon received answers from every quarter that the whole nation, town and country, absolutely refused to obey the king's injunctions. Even those who had gone most zealously to work were obliged to return with most disconsolate reports, and to assure the king that, if he turned out every magistrate and militia officer, the next would still vote against Popery. Catholics and Nonconformists, though glad of indulgence, would not consent to attempt measures which could only end in defeat and confusion. The Nonconformists would not move a finger to endanger Protestantism. It was the same in the corporations. Some of these James could deprive of their charters, for the new ones frequently contained a power of revocation; but when he had done this he found himself no forwarder, for the new ministers upon the points that he had at heart were as sturdy as the old. Other towns from which he demanded the surrender of their charters refused. Wherever James could eject the Church members of corporations he did so, from London to the remotest borough, and put in Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists. It was perfectly useless; they were as Protestant as the Church. Even where he obtained a few truckling officials, they found it impossible to make the people vote as they wished; and in the counties the Catholic or Dissenting sheriffs were equally indisposed to press the Government views, or unable to obtain them if they did. He changed the borough magistrates in some cases two or three times, but in vain. Some of the people in the towns did not content themselves with mere passive resistance; they loudly declared their indignation, and the tyrant marched soldiers in upon them; but only to hear them exclaim that James was imitating his dear brother of France, and dragonading the Protestants.

Whilst these things were going on all over the country, James was putting on the same insane pressure in every public department of Government. The heads of departments were called on to pledge themselves to support the wishes of the king, and to demand from their subordinates the same obedience. The refractory were dismissed, even to the highest law officers of the Crown; and James demanded from the judges a declaration that even the Petition of Right could not bar the exercise of his prerogative; but the bench consulted in secret, and the result was never known. He even contemplated granting no licences to inns, beer-houses, or coffee-houses, without an engagement to support the king, in spite of Church or magistrate; but another of his measures now brought things to a crisis.

James determined to make his intentions known for fully restoring Popery by a new Declaration of Indulgence, in which he reminded his subjects of his determined character, and of the numbers of public servants that he had already dismissed for opposing his will. This Declaration he published on the 27th of April, 1688, and he ordered the clergy to read it from all pulpits in London on the 20th and 27th of May, and in the country on the 3rd and 10th of June. This was calling on the bishops and clergy to practise their doctrine of Non-resistance to some purpose; it was tantamount to demanding from them to co-operate in the overthrow of their own Church. They were, as may be supposed, in an awful dilemma; and now was the time for the Dissenters—whom they had so sharply persecuted and so soundly lectured on the duty of entire submission—to enjoy their embarrassment. But the Dissenters were too generous, and had too much in common at stake. They met and sent deputations to the clergy, and exhorted them to stand manfully for their faith, declaring that they would stand firmly by them. A meeting of the metropolitan clergy was called, at which were present Tillotson, Sherlock, Stillingfleet—great names—and others high in the Church. They determined not to read the Declaration on the 20th, and sent round a copy of this resolution through the City, where eighty-five incumbents immediately signed it.

The bishops meanwhile met at Lambeth, and discussed the same question. Cartwright of Chester, one of the king's most servile tools, and a member of the High Commission, took care to be there, to inform the king of what passed; but during his stay nothing but a disposition to compliance appeared to prevail, and he hurried away to Whitehall with the news. No sooner, however, was he gone than letters were secretly despatched, summoning the bishops of the province of Canterbury; and another meeting took place on the 18th, or two days prior to the Sunday fixed for the further reading of the Declaration. The bishops concluded not to read it, and six of them waited on the king with the written resolution. James was confounded, having assured himself that they meant to comply. He used the most menacing language, and declared that they had set up the standard of rebellion; and ordered them from his presence to go at once and see that he was obeyed. To prevent the publication of the resolution, he detained it; but that very evening it was printed and hawked through the streets, where it was received with acclamations by the people. Any but a mad bigot, seeing the feelings of the public, would have instantly revoked the declaration; but James was not that man. Sunday arrived, and out of all the hundred churches, the Declaration was only read in four, and with the effect of instantly clearing them, amid murmurs of indignation. Still it was not too late to recall the Order in Council; and even James himself, with all his folly and infatuation, was now staggered. It was strongly recommended in the Council to abandon the Declaration; but James listened to his evil genius, the brutal Jeffreys, and determined to bring the seven signing bishops to trial before the Court of King's Bench, on a charge of seditious libel. The fatal counsel was adopted, and they were summoned to appear before the Privy Council on the 8th of June.

In the interval the bishops and clergy in all parts of England, with few exceptions, showed the same resolute spirit. The Bishops of Gloucester, Norwich, Salisbury, Winchester, Exeter, and London, signed copies of the same petition. The Bishop of Carlisle regretted that, not belonging to the province of Canterbury, he could not do the same. The Bishop of Worcester refused to distribute the Declaration amongst his clergy; and the same spirit showed itself amongst the parochial clergy, who almost to a man refused to read it.

On the evening of the day appointed, the seven prelates—namely, Sancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lloyd of St. Asaph, Ken of Bath and Wells, Turner of Ely, Lake of Chichester, White of Peterborough, and Trelawney of Bristol—attended the Privy Council. Jeffreys took up the petition, and, showing it to Sancroft, asked him if that was not the paper which he had written, and the six bishops present had signed. Sancroft and his colleagues had been instructed by the ablest lawyers in England as to the course they should pursue, and the dangers to be avoided. The Primate, therefore, instead of acknowledging the paper, turned to the king and said—"Sir, I am called hither as a criminal, which I never was before; and, since I have that unhappiness, I trust your Majesty will not be offended if I decline answering questions which may tend to criminate me." "This is mere chicanery," said James. "I hope you will not disown your own handwriting." Lloyd of St. Asaph said that it was agreed by all divines that no man in their situation was obliged to answer any such question; but, as James still pressed for an answer, Sancroft observed that, though he were not bound to accuse himself, yet, if the king commanded it, he would answer, taking it for granted that his Majesty would not take advantage to bring his admission there in evidence against him. James said he would not command him; but Jeffreys told them to withdraw for awhile, and when they were called back, James commanded the Primate, and he acknowledged the writing. They were then again sent out, and, on coming back, were told by Jeffreys that they would be proceeded against, not before the High Commission, but, "with all fairness," before the King's Bench.

They were then called upon to enter into recognisances, but they refused, on the plea that they were peers of Parliament, and that no peer of Parliament could be required to enter into recognisances in case of libel. This greatly disconcerted James, for it compelled him to send them to prison, and he justly feared the effect of it on the public. But there was no alternative; a warrant was signed for their commitment to the Tower, and they were sent thither in a barge.

The scene which immediately took place showed that James had at length a glimmering of the danger which he had raised. The whole river was crowded with wherries full of people, who crowded round the bishops to entreat their blessings, many rushing breast-high into the water to come near enough. James, in terror, ordered the garrison and guards of the Tower to be doubled; but the same spirit animated the soldiers, who knelt at the approach of the prelates, and also solicited their blessing. Presently the soldiers were found carousing to the health of their prisoners; and when Sir Edward Hales, who had been made Lieutenant of the Tower for his going over to Popery, desired the officers to put a stop to it, they returned and told him that it was impossible, for the soldiers would drink nobody's health but the bishops'. Every day the gates of the Tower were besieged by the equipages of the chief nobility. The very Nonconformists came in bodies to condole with their old persecutors; and Tower Hill was one constant throng of people manifesting their sympathy.

Two days only after the bishops were sent to the Tower—namely, the 10th of June—was announced what, under other circumstances, would have been a most auspicious event for James—the birth of an heir. But the nation was so full of suspicion, both of the monarch and the Jesuits that he had around him, that it would not credit the news that the healthy boy which was born was the actual child of James and his queen. It was certainly of the highest moment that James should have taken every precaution to have the birth verified beyond dispute; but in this respect he had been as singularly maladroit as in all his other affairs. As the Protestants were, of course, highly suspicious, he should have had the usual number of Protestant witnesses ready. But the queen, who sat playing cards at Whitehall till near midnight, was suddenly taken ill a month before the calculated time, and there was neither the Princess Anne present—she was away at Bath,—nor the Archbishop of Canterbury, nor the Dutch ambassador—whom it was so necessary to satisfy on behalf of the Prince and Princess of Orange,—nor any of the Hyde family, not even the Earl of Clarendon, the uncle of Mary and Anne. On the contrary, there were plenty of Jesuits, and the renegades Dover, Peterborough, Murray, Sunderland—who directly afterwards avowed himself a Catholic—Mulgrave, and others. The consequence was that the whole people declared the child spurious; that it had been introduced into the bed in a warming-pan; and when the public announcement was made, and a day of solemn thanksgiving was appointed, there was no rejoicing. Fireworks were let off by order of Government; but the night was black and tempestuous, and flashes of lurid lightning paled the artificial fires, and made the people only the more firm in the belief that heaven testified against the imposture. And yet there was no imposture. There were some Protestants present—sufficient to prevent any collusion, and particularly Dr. Chamberlain, the eminent accoucheur; but James, by his folly and tyranny, had deprived himself of the public confidence, and fixed on his innocent offspring a brand of disavowment, which clung to him and his fortunes, and has only been removed by the cooler judgment of recent times. William of Orange sent over Zulestein to congratulate James on the birth of an heir; but that minister brought back the account that not one person in ten believed the child to be the queen's.

On Friday, the 15th of June, the first day of term, the bishops were brought from the Tower to the King's Bench, and, pleading not guilty, they were admitted to bail till the 29th of June. During this fortnight the public excitement continued to augment, and from every quarter of the kingdom—even from the Presbyterians of Scotland, who had shown themselves such determined opponents of prelacy, and had been such sufferers from it—came messages of sympathy and encouragement to the bishops. On that day immense crowds assembled to receive their blessings, and to utter others on their way to Westminster Hall; and this homage was the warmer because the prelates had resisted the demand of Sir Edward Hales, the Lieutenant of the Tower, for his fees, this renegade having shown them little courtesy, and now plainly letting them know that, if they came again into his hands, they should lie on the bare stones.

Every means had been taken to pack a jury. Sir Samuel Astrey, the Clerk of the Crown, had been summoned to the palace, and been instructed by James and his great legal adviser, Jeffreys. The judges, too, were of the most base and complying character. They were such as had been raised from the very lowest ranks of the bar for their servile fitness, and because the more eminent lawyers would not stoop to such ignominy. They were Wright; Allibone, a Papist; Holloway and Powell; the Attorney-General, Sir Thomas Powis, an inferior lawyer; the Solicitor-General, Sir William Williams, a man of ability and vigour, but rash, imperious, and unpopular. Ranged against these were the most brilliant lawyers of the time—Sawyer and Finch, formerly Attorney- and Solicitor-General; Pemberton, formerly Chief Justice; Maynard; Sir George Treby, who had been Recorder of London, and others. Somers, afterwards Lord Chancellor in William's reign, was the bishops' junior counsel. The foreman of the jury was Sir Roger Langley. On the side of the prosecution, the judges, and even the blustering Jeffreys, betrayed a sense of terror.

The trial commenced at nine in the morning, and not till seven in the evening did the jury retire to consider their verdict. The lawyers for the prisoners raised great difficulties as to proving the handwriting of the libel, and next in proving its being published in Westminster. The Crown lawyers were obliged to bring into court Blathwayt, a clerk of the Privy Council, for this object; and then the counsel for the prisoners stopped him, and compelled him to state what had passed there between the bishops and the king—much to the chagrin of the Government party. Before the publication could be proved, even Sunderland was obliged to be brought into court in a sedan. He was pale, trembled violently from fright and shame of his late apostacy, and gave his evidence with his eyes fixed on the ground. But even then, when the judges came to consider the bishops' petition, they were divided in opinion. Wright and Allibone declared it a libel, and contended for the royal right of the dispensing power; but Holloway conceded that the petition appeared to him perfectly allowable from subjects to their sovereign; and Powell set himself right with the public and wrong with the Court—a significant sign—by boldly declaring both the Dispensing Power and the Declaration of Indulgence contrary to law.

With such sentiments developing themselves on the bench, there could be little doubt what the verdict would be; yet the jury sat all night, from seven o'clock till six the next morning, before they were fully agreed, there being, however, only three dissentients at first. When the court met at ten o'clock, the crowd, both within and without, was crushing and immense; and when the foreman pronounced the words "Not guilty," Halifax was the first to start up and wave his hat; and such a shout was sent up as was heard as far as Temple Bar. The news flew far and wide; the shouting and rejoicing broke out in every quarter of the town. The whole population, nobility, clergy, people, all seemed gone mad. There were more than sixty lords who had stood out the trial, and now threw money amongst the throngs as they drove away. The people formed a line down to the water's edge, and knelt as the bishops passed through, asking their blessing. The Attorney-General, Williams, was pursued in his coach with curses and groans; and Cartwright, the Bishop of Chester, and James's tool of the High Commission, being descried, was hooted at as "That wolf in sheep's clothing!" and, as he was a very fat man, one cried, "Room for the man with the Pope in his belly!"

The whole town was in an intoxication of delight. Bonfires were lit, guns fired, bells rung all night, and the Pope in effigy was burnt in several places—one before the door of Whitehall itself; another was kindled before the door of the Earl of Salisbury, who had lately gone over to Popery; and his servants, in their ill-timed zeal, rushing out to extinguish it, were attacked, and, firing on the people, killed the parish beadle, who was come to attempt what they themselves were attempting—to put out the fire. That morning James had gone to review his troops on Hounslow Heath. He received the news of the acquittal by a special messenger while in Lord Feversham's tent. He was greatly enraged, and set out at once for London. Before, however, he was clear of the camp the news had flown amongst the soldiers, and a tremendous cheering startled him. "What noise is that?" demanded James. "Oh!" said the general, "it is nothing but the soldiers shouting because the bishops are acquitted." "And call you that nothing?" asked James; and added angrily, "but so much the worse for them."

The very day which pronounced the acquittal of the bishops saw signed and despatched an invitation from the leading Whigs to William of Orange to come over and drive the tyrant from the throne. The Whigs had long been contemplating and preparing for this end; they now saw that the crisis was come. The brutal and besotted king had effectually alienated all hearts from him. From him nothing but destruction of every liberty and sentiment that Englishmen held dear was to be expected; and in the heir which was now, as was generally believed, foisted on the nation by the king and the Jesuits, there was only the pledge of the reign of Popery and proscription, and of the extermination of all those high hopes and privileges which were entwined with Protestant freedom. The Whig leaders had sent repeatedly to William to stimulate him to the enterprise; but, apart from his habitual caution and the salutary fear that Monmouth's reception had inspired, the Prince of Orange had many difficulties to contend with from the peculiar constitution of the Dutch Republic, and the peculiar views and interests of his allies. Though at the head of the Dutch confederation, he had always experienced much opposition from individual states and cities, especially Amsterdam, which his great enemy, Louis of France, managed to influence. This invitation called him to expel from his throne a Catholic king, and replace his Government by a Protestant one, though the Pope and Spain, the most Catholic of countries, were his close allies, and must not be offended. He had, therefore, stipulated that he should receive such an invitation under the hands and seals of the Whig leaders as should leave little doubt of his reception, and that he should be regarded as the saviour from an intolerable ruler, and not forced to attempt a conquest which must in its very success bring ruin by wounding the national pride of England.

He now received a paper, signed by the Earls of Shrewsbury, Devonshire, and Danby, Lord Lumley, Bishop Compton, Edward Russell, the Admiral of England, and Henry Sidney, the brother of the late Algernon Sidney, and afterwards Earl of Romney. This paper, which had been furnished at William's request, was but the result of negotiations between himself and the Whig leaders for some time. He now called into council with the English envoy his confidential friends, Bentinck and Dykvelt, and it was resolved that the time for action was come, and that the invitation should be accepted. In the meantime, whilst William began in earnest, but as secretly as circumstances would allow, his preparations, James at home did everything which a foolish and obstinate ruler could do to complete the alienation of the affections of his subjects. He returned from his camp to his capital only to find it in transports of delight over his own defeat, and resounding with the explosions of guns and crackers, with drinkings of the health of the bishops in the streets, and with the effigy of the Pope blazing before his own gate. So far from making him pause at the contemplation of the avowed and universal spirit of his people, he was only the more exasperated, and continued muttering, "So much the worse for them." He determined to take summary vengeance on the clergy, on the lawyers who had opposed or deserted him, on the army, and on the people. He at once promoted Mr. Solicitor-General Williams, for his unscrupulous conduct on the trial of the bishops, to a baronetcy, and would have placed so convenient a man on the bench could he have spared him at the bar. He dismissed Powell and Holloway; he determined to visit with his vengeance all the clergy throughout the kingdom who had refused to read the Declaration; and an order was issued to all the chancellors of the dioceses and the archdeacons to make a return of them. No matter that they approached ten thousand in number; if necessary, he would drive them all from their benefices. The judges on the circuits were ordered to denounce these refractory clergy, and to speak in the most derogatory terms of the bishops. He broke up his camp, the soldiers of which had been intended to overawe the capital, and stand by whilst he destroyed the national Constitution and the national religion; but had now terrified and disgusted him by drinking the healths of the liberated bishops.

But all his angry attempts only recoiled on himself, and showed more clearly than ever that the reins of power were irrecoverably slipping from his fingers. The spell of royalty—a people's respect—was utterly broken. The chancellors and archdeacons paid no attention to the order for reporting their independent brethren; the High Commission met, and, so far from finding any returns, received a letter from one of the most truckling of their own body, Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, resigning his place in the High Commission. If such a man saw the handwriting on the wall, the warning, they felt, must be imminent, and they departed in confusion. The judges, on their part, found themselves deserted on their circuits; nobody but the sheriff and his javelin men came to meet them, and then went through their duties amid every sign of indifference to their dignity. They were treated, not as the high-minded judges of England, but as the base and venal tools of a most lawless and mischievous monarch. The soldiers were as bold in their separate quarters as they had been in camp. James thought he could deal with them separately, and tried the experiment by ordering a regiment of infantry, which had been raised in the Catholic district of Staffordshire, to sign an engagement to support him in dispersing all the rest, or to quit the army. Almost to a man they piled their arms, and the confounded king was obliged to withdraw the order. But James had a remedy even for the defection of the army. In Ireland the brutal and debauched Tyrconnel had been busily engaged in drilling Irish Celts, and preparing an army so strongly Catholic that he might by this means carry out the royal design of repealing the Act of Settlement, and driving the Protestant colonists from their lands. These troops James sent for, regiment after regiment, and the people of England saw, with equal indignation and alarm, that their liberties, their religion, their laws, were to be trodden down, and the kingdom reduced to a miserable abode of slaves by the wild tribes of the sister island, vengeful with centuries of unrequited oppressions. This put the climax to the national resentment, and still more pressing messages were sent over to William to hasten his approach, and leaders of party in large numbers contemplated a speedy transit to his standard. It was at this juncture that the wild genius of Wharton gave vent to the pent-up feelings of Protestant wrath, by the adaptation of the old Irish tune of "Lillibullero" to English words.

William, meanwhile, was making strenuous preparations for his enterprise. He formed a camp at Nimeguen, collecting troops and artillery from the different fortresses. Twenty-four additional ships of war were fitted out for service, and arms and accoutrements were in busy preparation in every manufactory in Holland. He had saved up unusual funds for him, and had money also pouring in from England and from the refugee Huguenots, who hoped much from his enterprise in favour of Protestantism. It was impossible that all this preparation could escape the attention of other nations, and especially of the quick-sighted Louis XIV. of France. But William had a ready answer—that he wanted an extra squadron to go in pursuit of a number of Algerine corsairs which had made their appearance off the Dutch coasts. The military preparations were not so easily explained; but though Louis was satisfied that they were intended against England, James, blind to his danger, as strongly suspected that they were meant to operate against France. The only enemies which William had to really dread were Louis and the Council of Amsterdam, which Louis had so long influenced to hostility to William, and without whose consent no expedition could be permitted. But the ambition and the persecuting bigotry of Louis removed this only difficulty out of William's way in a manner which looked like the actual work of Providence. The two points on which Amsterdam was pre-eminently sensitive were trade and Protestantism. Louis contrived to incense them on both these heads. His unrelenting persecution of the Huguenots, including also Dutch Protestants who had settled in France, raised an intense feeling in Amsterdam, stimulated by the outcries and representations of their relatives there. To all appeals for tolerance and mercy Louis was utterly deaf; and whilst this feeling was at its height, he imposed a heavy duty on the importation of herrings from Holland into France. Sixty thousand persons in Holland depended on this trade, and the effect was, therefore, disastrous. In vain did the French envoy, Avaux, represent these things; Louis continued haughty and inexorable.

These circumstances, in which the pride and bigotry of Louis got the better of his worldly policy, completed the triumph of William of Orange. He seized on them to effect a removal of the long-continued jealousies of the Council of Amsterdam against him. He entered into negotiations with the leading members of the Council through his trusty friends Bentinck and Dykvelt, and as they were in the worst of humours with Louis, the old animosities against William were suffered to sleep, and he obtained the sanction of the States-General to his proposed expedition for the release of England from the French and Catholic influences, and its reception into the confederation of Protestant nations. Another circumstance just at this crisis occurred to strengthen all these feelings in Holland and Germany, and to account for any amount of troops collected at Nimeguen. The aggressions of Louis had roused and combined all Europe against him. Powers both Catholic and Protestant had felt themselves compelled to unite in order to repress his attempts at universal dominion. The King of Spain, the Emperor of Germany, the King of Sweden had entered into the League of Augsburg to defend the empire; and to these were added various Italian princes, with the Pope Innocent XI. himself at their head. Louis had not hesitated to insult the Pope on various occasions, and now he saw the pontiff in close coalition with heretic princes to repel his schemes.

In May of this year died Ferdinand of Bavaria, the Elector of Cologne. Besides Cologne, the elector possessed the bishoprics of LiÉge, MÜnster, and Hildesheim. In 1672 Louis had endeavoured to secure a successor to the Elector in the French interest. He therefore proposed as his coadjutor the Cardinal Furstemberg, Bishop of Strasburg; and he would have succeeded, but it was necessary, in order to his choice, that Furstemberg should first resign his bishopric; to this the Pope, in his hostility to Louis, would not consent; he refused his dispensation. But now, the Elector having died, the contest was renewed. Louis again proposed the cardinal; the allies of the League of Augsburg nominated the Prince Clement of Bavaria, who was elected and confirmed by the Pope, though a youth of only seventeen years of age. The allies were equally successful in the bishoprics of LiÉge, MÜnster, and Hildesheim; but the principal fortresses, Bonn, Neutz, Kaiserswerth, and Rheinberg, were held by the troops of Furstemberg, and therefore were at the service of France. Louis was, however, exasperated at the partial defeat of his plans, and complained loudly of the partiality of the Pope, and began to march troops to the support of Furstemberg.

But whilst Louis was actually planning a sweeping descent on the German Empire, in which William of Orange lay pre-eminently in his way, he was at the same time in danger of a more momentous occurrence—that of William leaving the way open by sailing for England. If William should succeed in placing himself on the throne of England, he would be able to raise a far more formidable opposition to his plans of aggrandisement than he had ever yet done. Even with his small resources he had proved a terrible enemy, and had arrayed all Europe against him; what would he do if he could bring all the powers of England by land and sea to co-operate with Holland, Spain, Austria, Sweden, and the Netherlands? The stupidity of James and the offended pride of Louis saved William in this dilemma, and led Louis to commit on this occasion the cardinal blunder of his reign.

It was impossible that Louis could be ignorant of what William was doing. The preparations of ships and troops were indications of a contemplated attack somewhere. It might be directed to resist the French on the side of Germany; but other facts equally noticeable demonstrated that the object was England. Avaux, the French envoy at the Hague, in the absence of Abbeville, who was on a visit to England, noticed, in the months of April and May, a swift sailing boat, which made rapid and frequent passages between England and Rotterdam; and he noticed that, after every arrival from England, there were closetings of William and the English Whig leaders at the Hague, especially Russell. After the birth of the heir-apparent of England, William despatched Zulestein to London with his professedly warm, though they could not be very sincere, congratulations on the event; but soon after, on the escape to the Hague of Rear-Admiral Herbert, who was supposed to carry the invitation of the leading Whigs to William, the prince omitted the child's name in the prayers for the royal family of England, and openly expressed his doubts of his being the real child of the queen.

These circumstances, the continued activity of the military preparations, the constant sailings of this mysterious boat, and the subsequent closetings, with the continual growth of the number of distinguished English refugees at the Hague, satisfied the French envoy that a descent on England was certain and nigh at hand. Avaux not only warned Louis of the imminent danger, but he warned James by every successive mail from the Hague, through Barillon. Louis took the alarm. He despatched Bonrepaux to London to arouse James to a due sense of his peril, and offered to join his fleet with an English one to prevent the passage of the Dutch armament. He held a powerful body of troops ready to march to the frontiers of Holland, and ordered Avaux to announce to the States-General that his master was fully cognisant of the warlike preparations of the Stadtholder; that he was quite aware of their destination, and that, as the King of England was his ally, he should consider the first act of hostility against James as a declaration of war against himself. He at the same time declared the Cardinal Furstemberg and the Chapter of Cologne under his protection. Simultaneously the same message was delivered to the Spanish Governor of Flanders, and Marshal d'HumiÈres was despatched to take the command of the French army in that quarter.

This plain declaration fell like a thunderbolt into the midst of the States-General. There was the utmost evident confusion. A poor and embarrassed excuse was made, and a courtier sent post haste to fetch William from Minden, where he was in secret negotiation with the Elector of Brandenburg. If James took the alarm, and Louis, as was his intent, went heartily into the coalition to defeat the enterprise, it must become a most hazardous undertaking, even if it were at all feasible. But the folly of that most wrong-headed of the Stuarts again saved the Prince of Orange, and removed the last difficulty out of the way of his enterprise. James would not believe a word of the warning. He would not believe that his own daughter would sanction an attempt at his dethronement. He would not believe that William's armament had any other object than the King of France himself. He highly resented the declaration of Louis that there was an alliance between them, as calculated to alarm his own subjects, especially his Protestant ones. He received Bonrepaux with cold hauteur in return for his offers of assistance; and Van Citters, the Dutch ambassador, with proportionate cordiality, who hastened on the part of the States to assure him that the French communications were sheer inventions. He gave orders that all the foreign ministers should be informed that there was no such league between France and England as Louis had pretended for his own purposes.

In fact, James was living all this time in the midst of a set of traitors, who, even to his most confidential minister, Sunderland, had secretly gone over to William, and were putting him in possession of every daily thought, word, and intention of their master. Besides the seven that had signed, and of whom Admiral Russell was already with William, the Earl of Shrewsbury had fled to him, having mortgaged his estates and taken forty thousand pounds with him, and offered it to the prince. The two sons of the Marquis of Winchester, Lord Wiltshire, and a younger brother; Halifax's son, Lord Eland; Danby's son, Lord Dumblaine; Lord Lorne, the son of the unfortunate Earl of Argyll; Lord Mordaunt, Gerard, Earl of Macclesfield, and Admiral Herbert were already with him. Herbert had been appointed Admiral to the Dutch fleet, with a pension of six thousand pounds a year. Wildman, Carstairs, Ferguson, Hume, who had escaped from the Argyll and Monmouth expeditions, went there; and, whilst the sons of Halifax and Danby were with William, they themselves, though remaining in England with Devonshire, Lumley, and others, were sworn to rise in his favour the moment he landed. But the worst of the unsuspected traitors at his own Court were the Lords Churchill and Sunderland. James had made Churchill almost everything that he was; on Sunderland he had heaped benefits without stint or measure. He had scraped money together by all possible means; and James did not merely connive at it, he favoured it. This meanest of creeping things was in the pay of France to the amount of six thousand pounds per annum; he had a pension from Ireland of five thousand pounds more; as President of the Council he occupied the post of Prime Minister, and derived immense emoluments from fines, forfeitures, pardons, and the like. Rather than lose his place, he had openly professed Catholicism; but scarcely had he thus sold his soul for his beloved pelf and power, when he saw as plainly as any one else that the ground was sliding from under the feet of his foolish master, and was overwhelmed with consternation. He hastened again to sell himself to William, on condition that his honours and property should be secure; and thus had James his very Prime Minister, his most confidential and trusted servant, at every turn drawing out all his plans and thoughts, and sending them to his intended invader. Sunderland's wife was the mistress of Sidney, who was at the Hague; and, through her, this most contemptible of men sent constantly his traitorous communications to her paramour, and so to William.

With such snakes in the grass about him, James was completely blinded to his danger. Churchill and Sunderland persuaded him that there was no danger from Holland, and inflamed his resentment at what they called the presumption of Louis. They were completely successful; and Sunderland, after the establishment of William in England, made a boast of this detestable conduct. Louis was so much disgusted by the haughty rejection of his warning, that he himself committed a gross political error. Instead of preventing the descent on England, and the aggrandisement of his great opponent William—by far the most important measure for him—by directly attacking the frontiers of Holland, and keeping William engaged, in his vexation he abandoned the besotted James, and made an attack on the German Empire. Dividing his army, one portion of it, under the Marquis of Boufflers, seized Worms, Mainz, and Treves; a second, under HumiÈres, made itself master of Bonn; and a third, under the Duke of Duras and Marshal Vauban, took Philippsburg by storm. The greater part of the Rhine was at once in Louis's hands, and great was the triumph in Paris. But not the less was the exultation of William of Orange; for now, the French army removed, and the mind of Louis incensed against James, the way was wide open for him to England.

No time was now lost in preparing to depart. A Memorial, professing to be addressed by the Protestants of England to the States, but supposed to have been drawn up by Burnet, was published, accompanied by two declarations in the name of William to the people of England and Scotland. These latter were the work of the Grand Pensionary Fagel, but condensed and adapted more to the English taste by Burnet. In the Memorial the people of England were made to complain of the wholesale violation of the Constitution and the liberties of his subjects by James, and of the attempt to fix a false and Popish heir on the nation. They called on William to come over and vindicate the rights of his wife, and at the same time to rescue the country of her birth and her rightful claims from Popery and arbitrary power.

The Declaration to England and Scotland in reply was drawn with consummate art. William admitted that he had seen with deep concern the fundamental and continual violations of the laws of the kingdom. The contempt of Acts of Parliament; the expulsion of just judges from the bench to make room for the servile instruments of oppression; the introduction of prohibited persons into both the State and Church, to the jeopardy of freedom and true religion; the arbitrary treatment of persons of dignity by the illegal High Commission Court; the forcible introduction of Papists into the colleges; the removal of lords-lieutenants, and the destruction of corporations which stood firmly for the rights and religion of the nation; the attempt to impose a spurious and Popish issue on the throne, and the equally atrocious attempt to tread down English liberties by an army of Irish Papists: for these reasons William declared himself ready to comply with the prayers of the English people, and to come over with a sufficient force for his own protection, but with no intention or desire of conquest, but simply to restore freedom by an independent Parliament, to inquire into the circumstances attending the birth of the pretended prince, and to leave everything else to the decision of Parliament and the nation. He declared that he should endeavour to re-establish the Church of England and the Church of Scotland, and at the same time to protect the just rights of other professors of religion willing to live as good subjects in obedience to the laws.

When copies of these papers were sent to James by his ambassador, Abbeville, from the Hague, the delusion of the affrighted monarch was suddenly and rudely dissipated. He gazed on the ominous documents—in which his subjects invited a foreign prince to take possession of his throne, and that prince, his son-in-law, accepted the proposal—with a face from which the colour fled, and with a violently trembling frame. Fear at once did that which no reason, no accumulation of the most visible signs of his vanishing popularity could ever effect. He at once hastened to make every concession. He summoned his Council, and forwarded a despatch to the Hague, declaring that he regarded the siege of Philippsburg by Louis as a breach of the Treaty of Nimeguen, and that he was ready to take the field against him in conjunction with the forces of Spain and Holland. Before an answer could be received, James hurried forward the work of retractation. When he looked around him there was not a power or party that he had not alienated—the Cavaliers and Tories who fought for his father, and supported his brother through a thousand arbitrary measures; the Church, the Dissenters, the army, the navy, the bench, the bar, the whole people, held in constant terror of being made the abject victims of Popish domination, he had, in his insane rage for his religion, offended, injured, and alarmed beyond measure. He now sought to win back the able Halifax; he issued a proclamation, protesting that he would protect the Church, and maintain the Act of Uniformity; that Catholics should no longer be admitted to Parliament or the Council. He sent for the bishops, and asked for their earnest advice in the restoration of public affairs. He ordered the restoration of the deposed magistrates and lords-lieutenants; he reinstated Compton, Bishop of London; he gave back the charter to the City, and, a few days after, the charters of the provincial corporations; he immediately abolished the Court of High Commission; and finally replaced Dr. Hough and the ejected fellows of Magdalen College in full possession of their house and privileges.

These sweeping concessions showed plainly that the tyrant knew very well how odious his encroachments had been, and that nothing but fear could force their abandonment from his ungenerous soul. They had, therefore, the less effect. There was public rejoicing, indeed, but it was for the victory over the mean despot, not for gratitude for concessions which it was felt would be resumed the moment danger should pass; and this feeling was deepened by an accident. The Bishop of Winchester was sent down to Oxford to formally reinstate the principal and fellows of Magdalen, but was as suddenly recalled; and this event, coupled with a rumour that the Dutch fleet had put to sea, but was dispersed by a storm and put back, made the people more firmly conclude that no faith could be reposed in the words of James. The bishop, it was contended, had been temporarily recalled on urgent affairs; but the effect remained the same. Still, the City of London celebrated the recovery of its charter with much rejoicing, and sent a deputation to express their gratitude to the king. The Dukes of Somerset, Ormond, and Newcastle, the Marquis of Winchester, the Earls of Derby, Nottingham, and Danby, and the Bishop of London, declared their fidelity, and the prelates issued a form of prayer for the safety and prosperity of the royal family.

WILLIAM OF ORANGE EMBARKING TO JOIN THE "BRILL." (See p. 338.)

Whilst James was exerting himself to conciliate his subjects, he was equally industrious in putting the kingdom into a posture of defence. He made Lord Dartmouth Commander of the Fleet, which consisted of thirty-seven men-of-war, and seven fire-ships—a naval force inferior to that of the prince, and, still worse, weak in the principles of loyalty, though Dartmouth himself might be relied on. His army, including about six thousand Irish and Scots, amounted to forty thousand men—more than enough to repel the force of the invaders, had the hearts of the men been in the cause.

William was compelled to delay his embarkation for more than a week by tempestuous weather. His fleet, under the command of Herbert, which was lying off Scheveningen, on the 28th of September, was compelled to seek shelter in Helvoetsluys. The wind raged furiously till the 15th of October, and public prayers were offered in the churches for more favourable weather. All attempts to invade England had, since William of Normandy's enterprise, been notoriously defeated by storms; and the people became so superstitious on this head that it was found necessary, under severe penalties, to forbid foreboding language. On the 16th, the wind abating, William took a solemn leave of the States-General. He thanked them for their long and devoted support of him in his endeavours for the independence of Europe, and committed his wife to their protection whilst he was absent for the same great object, and the security of the Protestant religion. He declared that if he died it would be as their servant; if he lived, it would be as their friend. The Pensionary Fagel, now old and failing, replied with great emotion; and, amid the tears of most present, William stood like a stoic, without any visible agitation. The deputies of the principal towns accompanied him to the water side, and that evening he went on board his frigate the Brill. The next day a public fast was held in the Hague, with sermons and prayers for the success of the expedition, and Mary continued to retain her place in the church in public during the long service from half-past ten in the morning till half-past seven in the afternoon.

On the afternoon of the 19th the fleet sailed from Helvoetsluys, the men-of-war, in three divisions, forming a long line out at sea, and the transports driving before the breeze nearer land. The day was fine, the wind steady from the south-west; and as the eventful squadron passed the sandy downs of Scheveningen, the inhabitants of the Hague crowded them in thousands, and raised acclamations of anticipated success. But the scene rapidly changed. By ten o'clock at night a furious tempest was again raging, which dispersed the fleet, sank one ship, damaged many others, compelled them to throw overboard great quantities of stores, and destroyed a thousand horses through their being closed down under hatches. The fleet managed to regain Helvoetsluys, which William himself reached on the 21st. He refused to go on shore, but sent to the States for fresh supplies, and busied himself in pushing on his repairs.

The news of this disaster reached England with many aggravations, so that it was imagined that the expedition would be given up for that season; and James declared with much satisfaction that it was what he expected, the Host having been exposed for several days. He seized, however, the time afforded by this delay to assemble an extraordinary body, the members of the Privy Council, the peers who were in or near London, the judges, the law officers of the Crown, the Lord Mayor and aldermen, the queen-dowager, and two-and-twenty women—some ladies about the queen, some menials. The Princess Anne was summoned, but excused herself on account of indisposition. "I have called you together," said James, "upon a very extraordinary occasion; but extraordinary diseases must have extraordinary remedies. The malicious endeavours of my enemies have so poisoned the minds of many of my subjects, that, by the reports I have from all hands, I have reason to believe that many do think this son which God has pleased to bless me with be none of mine, but a supposititious child." The witnesses were all examined on oath except the queen-dowager, and presented such a mass of evidence as was undoubtedly complete, and it was enrolled in chancery and published. But such was the intense prejudice of the age that it failed to convince the public at large. As Anne was not present, the Council waited on her with a copy of the evidence, on which she observed, "My lords, this was not necessary; the king's word is more to me than all these depositions." Yet her uncle, Clarendon, assures us that she never mentioned the child but with ridicule, and only once was heard to call it the Prince of Wales, and that was when she thought it was dying. Anne, in fact, was devoted to the cause of the Prince of Orange; and Barillon says that she avoided every opportunity of convincing herself of what she did not wish to believe.

This singular deed of verification of the child's identity was the last act of the ministry of Sunderland. His treason had not escaped observation. A letter of his wife's had been intercepted and shown to him by the king, in which she was found in close correspondence with Sidney. He strictly denied all knowledge of it, and did not hesitate to advert to his wife's liaison with Sidney as sufficiently exculpatory of himself. For a time he lulled James's suspicions, but they again revived; and, on the very evening of this extraordinary council, James sent Middleton and demanded the Seals. To the last Sunderland acted the part of injured innocence; but was not long in getting away to the Hague, not, however, in time to join William before his second embarkation. His office of Secretary to the Southern Department was given to Middleton, and of Secretary to the Northern Department to Lord Preston, both Protestants. Petre was dismissed from the Council, but retained his post as Clerk of the Closet at Whitehall. But all this did not alter the tone of public feeling. The very day before the assembling of the extraordinary council, the London mob demolished a new Catholic chapel; and on the 14th of October, the king's birthday, there had been no sign of rejoicing, not even the firing of the Tower guns; but the people reminded one another that it was the anniversary of the landing of William the Conqueror. Their thoughts were running on the landing of another William.

On the 1st of November the Prince of Orange again set sail, and this time with a favourable though strong gale from the east. Besides the English noblemen and gentlemen whom we have mentioned, including also Fletcher of Saltoun, William had with him Marshal Schomberg, an able and experienced general, who was appointed second in command; Bentinck, Overkirk, and Counts Solmes and Sturm. Herbert was the chief admiral, much to the chagrin of the Dutch admirals, but very wisely so determined by William, who well knew the hereditary jealousy of the Dutch fleet, and the remembered boast and besom of Van Tromp in England. He resolved that, if they came to conflict with Lord Dartmouth, it should be English commander against English, or his cause might receive great prejudice. For twelve hours William drove before the breeze towards the coasts of Yorkshire, as if intending to land there; then, suddenly tacking, he stood down the Channel before the gale. Dartmouth attempted to issue from the mouth of the Thames to intercept him, but the violent wind which favoured William perfectly disabled him. His vessels as they came out to sea were driven back with much damage, compelled to strike yards and top-masts, and to lie abreast the Longsand; whilst William, leading the way in the Brill, sailed rapidly past with his whole fleet and a crowd of other vessels that had gathered in his rear, to the amount of nearly seven hundred. It was twenty-four hours before Dartmouth could give chase, and on the 5th of November William reached Torbay, his real destination.

William took up his quarters in a cottage whilst his troops were landing, and from its thatched roof waved the flag of Holland, bearing the significant motto, "I will maintain the Protestant Religion and the Liberties of England." Burnet was one of the first to congratulate William on his landing on English soil; and, at the recommendation of Carstares, the first thing on the complete disembarkation was to collect the troops, and return public thanks to Heaven for the successful passage of the armament. The next day William marched in the direction of Exeter; but the rains continued, and the roads were foul, so that he made little progress. It was not till the 9th that he appeared before the city. The people received him with enthusiasm, but the magistracy shrank back in terror, and Bishop Lamplough and the dean had fled to warn the king of the invasion. The city was in utter confusion, and at first shut its gates; but as quickly agreed to open them, and William was accommodated in the vacated deanery. But the people of the West had suffered too much from the support of Monmouth not to have learnt caution. A service was ordered in the cathedral to return thanks for the safe arrival of the prince; but the canons absented themselves, and only some of the prebendaries and choristers attended, and, as soon as Burnet began to read the prince's declaration, these hurried out as fast as they could. On Sunday, which was the 11th, Burnet was the only clergyman that could be got to preach before the prince, and the Dissenters refused the fanatic Ferguson admittance to their chapel. This extraordinary person, however, who appears to have been one-third enthusiast and two-thirds knave, called for a hammer, and exclaiming, "I will take the kingdom of heaven by storm!" broke open the door, marched to the pulpit with his drawn sword in his hand, and delivered one of those wild and ill-judged philippics against the king which did so much mischief in the attempt of Monmouth.

Altogether, so far the cause of William appeared as little promising as that of Monmouth had done. Notwithstanding the many earnest entreaties from men of high rank and of various classes—nobles, bishops, officers of the army and navy,—a week had elapsed, and no single person of influence had joined him. The people only, as in Monmouth's case, had crowded about him with shouts of welcome. William was extremely disappointed and chagrined; he declared that he was deluded and betrayed, and he vowed that he would re-embark, and leave those who had called for him to work out their own deliverance, or receive their due punishment. But on Monday, the 12th, his spirits were a little cheered by a gentleman of Crediton, named Burrington, attended by a few followers, joining his standard. This was immediately followed, however, by the news that Lord Lovelace, with about seventy of his tenants and neighbours, had been intercepted by the militia at Cirencester, taken prisoners, and sent to Gloucester Castle. The slow movement of the disaffected appears to have originated in William's not having landed in Yorkshire, as was expected, but in the west, where he was not expected. In the North Lords Delamere and Brandon in Cheshire, Danby and Lumley in Yorkshire, Devonshire and Chesterfield in Derbyshire, in Lancashire the Earl of Manchester, in Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire Rutland and Stamford, and others were all waiting to receive him. The very army which had been encamped on Hounslow Heath was the seat of a secret conspiracy of officers, with Churchill himself at their head, who kept up constant communication with the club at the "Rose" tavern in Covent Garden, of which Lord Colchester was president. But all this concert was paralysed for a time by William's appearance in so distant a quarter.

But the elements of revolt, which had suffered a momentary shock, now began to move visibly. The very day that Lord Lovelace was captured, Lord Colchester marched into Exeter, attended by about seventy horse, and accompanied by the hero of "Lillibullero," Thomas Wharton. They were quickly followed by Russell, the son of the Duke of Bedford, one of the earliest promoters of the revolution, and still more significantly by the Earl of Abingdon, a staunch Tory, who had supported James till he saw that nothing but the reign of Popery would satisfy him. A still more striking defection from the king immediately followed. Lord Cornbury, the eldest son of the Earl of Clarendon, pretended to have received orders to march with three regiments of cavalry stationed at Salisbury Moor, to the enemy in the west. He was a young man entirely under the influence of Lord Churchill, having been brought up in the household of his cousin, the Princess Anne, where Churchill and his wife directed everything; and there can be no doubt that this movement was the work of Churchill. As the cavalry proceeded from place to place by a circuitous route to Axminster, the officers became suspicious, and demanded to see the orders. Cornbury replied that his orders were to beat up the quarters of the army in the night near Honiton. The loyal officers, who had received hints that all was not right, demanded to see the written orders; but Cornbury, who had none to produce, stole away in the dark with a few followers who were in the secret, and got to the Dutch camp. His regiment, and that of the Duke of Berwick, James's own (natural) son, with the exception of about thirty troops, returned to Salisbury; but the third regiment, the Duke of St. Albans', followed the colonel, Langton, to Honiton, where General Talmash received them; and most of the officers and a hundred and fifty privates declared for the prince, the rest being made prisoners, but soon afterwards discharged.

The news of this defection of one so near to the king's family created the greatest consternation in the palace. In his terror James summoned a military council. He was anxious to receive the assurances of fidelity from his other officers—as if any assurances, under the circumstances, anything but leading them against the enemy, could test the loyalty of these men. He told them that he wished to be satisfied that there were no more Cornburys amongst them; and that if any had scruples about fighting for him, he was ready to receive back their commissions. Of course they protested the most ardent devotion to his cause, though there was not a man of them that was not already pledged to desert him. Churchill, recently made a lieutenant-general, and the Duke of Grafton, the king's nephew, were especially fervid in their expressions of loyalty; so, too, were Trelawney, smarting secretly over the persecution of his brother, the Bishop of Bristol, and the savage Kirke, who, when James had importuned him to turn Papist, had replied that he "was sorry, but he had already engaged to the Grand Turk that if he changed his religion he would become a Mussulman." Reassured by these hollow professions, James gave orders for joining the camp at Salisbury; but the next morning, before he could set out, he was waited on by a numerous deputation of lords spiritual and temporal, with Sancroft at their head, praying that a free Parliament might be immediately called, and communication opened with the Prince of Orange.

James received the deputation ungraciously. In all his hurried concessions he had still shown his stubborn spirit by refusing to give up the Dispensing power; and now, though he declared that what they asked he passionately desired, he added that he could not call a Parliament till the Prince of Orange quitted the kingdom. "How," he asked, "can you have a free Parliament whilst a foreign prince, at the head of a foreign force, has the power to return a hundred members?" He then fell foul of the bishops, reminding them that the other day they refused to avow under their hands their disapproval of the invasion, on the plea that their vocation was not in politics; and yet here they were at the very head of a political movement. He charged them with fomenting the rebellion, and retired, declaring to his courtiers that he would not concede an atom. He then appointed a council of five lords—of whom two were Papists, and the third Jeffreys—to keep order during his absence, sent off the Prince of Wales to Portsmouth to the care of the Duke of Berwick, the commander, and set out for Salisbury. He reached his camp on the 19th of November, and ordered a review the next day at Warminster, of Kirke's division. Churchill and Kirke were particularly anxious that he should proceed to this review, and Kirke and Trelawney hastened on to their forces, on pretence of making the necessary preparations. On the other hand, Count de Roye as earnestly dissuaded James from going to Warminster. He told him that the enemy's advanced foot was at Wincanton, and that the position at Warminster, or even that where they were at Salisbury, was untenable. James, however, was resolved to go; but the next morning, the 20th, he was prevented by a violent bleeding at the nose, which continued unchecked for three days.

Scarcely had this impediment occurred when news came that the king's forces had been attacked at Wincanton, and worsted by some of the division of General Mackay. James was now assured that, had he gone to Warminster, he would have been seized by traitors near his person, and carried off to the enemy's quarters. He was advised to arrest Churchill and Grafton; but, with his usual imprudence, he refused, and summoned them along with the other officers to a military council, to decide whether they should advance or retreat. Feversham, Roye, and Dumbarton argued for a retreat; Churchill persisted in his recommendation of an advance to the post at Warminster. The council lasted till midnight, when Churchill and Grafton, seeing that their advice was not followed, felt the time was come to throw off the mask, and therefore rode directly away to the prince's lines. The next morning the discovery of this desertion filled the camp with consternation, and this was at its height when it was known that Churchill's brother, a colonel, Trelawney, Barclay, and about twenty privates had ridden after the fugitives. It was said that Kirke was gone too, but it was not the fact; and he was now arrested for having disobeyed orders sent to him from Salisbury; but he professed such indignation at the desertion of Churchill and the others, that the shallow-minded king set him again at liberty. The deserters were received by William with a most gracious welcome, though Schomberg remarked of Churchill that he was the first lieutenant-general that he had ever heard of running away from his colours.

In James's camp all was confusion, suspicion, and dismay. There was not a man who was sure of his fellow, and the retreat which commenced more resembled a flight. Numbers who would have fought had they been led at once to battle, now lost heart, and stole away on all sides. The news that found its way every hour into the demoralised camp was enough to ruin any army. From every quarter came tidings of insurrection. The Earl of Bath, the Governor of Plymouth, had surrendered the place solemnly to William; Sir Edward Seymour, Sir William Portman, Sir Francis Warre—men of immense influence in Devon, Somerset, and Dorset—were already with William at Exeter; a paper had been drawn up and signed by the leading persons there to stand by the prince, and, whether he succeeded or whether he fell, never to cease till they had obtained all the objects in his declaration; Delamere had risen in Chester, and had reached Manchester on his way south; Danby had surprised the garrison at York; the town had warmly welcomed him, and a great number of peers, baronets, and gentlemen were in arms with him. Devonshire had called together the authorities and people of Derby, and published his reason for appearing in arms, calling on them to assist all true men in obtaining a settlement of the public rights in a free Parliament. At Nottingham he was met by the Earls of Rutland, Stamford, Manchester, Chesterfield, and the Lords Cholmondeley and Grey de Ruthyn.

These were tidings of a reaction as determined as James's headstrong career had been; but the worst had not yet overtaken him. On the evening of November 24th he had retreated towards London as far as Andover. Prince George of Denmark, the husband of the Princess Anne, and the Duke of Ormond, supped with him. Prince George was a remarkably stupid personage, whose constant reply to any news was, "Est-il possible?" When the intelligence of one desertion after another came he had exclaimed, "Est-il possible?" But the moment supper was over and the king gone to bed, Prince George and Ormond rode off to the enemy too. When James the next morning was informed of this mortifying news, he coolly replied, "What! Is 'Est-il possible' gone too? Were he not my son-in-law, a single trooper would have been a greater loss." With the prince and Ormond had also fled Lord Drumlanrig, the eldest son of the Duke of Queensberry, Mr. Boyle, Sir George Hewit, and other persons of distinction. The blow was severe; and though James at the first moment, being stunned, as it were, seemed to bear it with indifference, he pursued his way to London in a state of intense exasperation. There the first news that met him was the flight of his own daughter Anne. Anne was bound up, soul and body, with the Churchills, and it had no doubt been for some time settled amongst them that they should all get away to the prince her brother-in-law.

It was towards evening of the same day that Anne fled that James arrived at Whitehall, agitated by the awful desertions of his highest officers and his nearest relatives. This announcement put the climax to his torture. He exclaimed, "God help me! My very children have forsaken me." Severe as the punishment of his desperate treason against his people deserved to be, this certainly was a cruel fate. For some days a lady near his person records that she thought she saw in him occasional aberrations of intellect. That night he sat late in council, and it was urged on him to call together such peers and prelates as were in London to consult on the necessary steps in this crisis. The next day came together nearly fifty peers and bishops, and James asked their advice as to calling a Parliament. On this head there appeared no difference of opinion; but Halifax, Nottingham, and others, urged with equal earnestness that all Catholics should be dismissed from office, and a general amnesty published for all in arms against him. James assented to the calling a Parliament, but his eyes were still not opened to the folly of his past conduct, and he would give no assurance of dismissing the Papists, and broke out into vehement language at the proposal to pardon his enemies. "My lords," he said, "you are wonderfully anxious for the safety of my enemies, but none of you troubles himself about my safety." And he vowed that he would yet take vengeance on those who had deserted him, and, above all, on Churchill. Clarendon, who was on the eve of running off to William, took the opportunity to utter the bitter feelings which his dismissal from the Lord-Lieutenancy of Ireland to make way for Tyrconnel had no doubt long left in his mind. He upbraided James with his dogged and incurable Popery, with sacrificing everybody and everything for it; declaring that, even at that moment, James was raising a regiment from which Protestants were rigorously excluded. He taunted him with running away from the enemy, and asked him who was likely to fight for him when he himself was the first to flee.

After this severe treatment by his closest connections, James appeared to comply with the advice of the lords. He sent for Halifax, Nottingham, and Godolphin, and informed them that he had appointed them Commissioners to treat with William. He dismissed Sir Edward Hales from the Tower, and placed Bevil Skelton, a Protestant, there. But the nature or the intention of this most obtuse of bigots was by no means changed; he was internally as determined as ever to reverse every concession on the first possible occasion. Barillon tells us that he assured him that all this was a mere feint; that he only sent the Commissioners to William in order to gain time for sending his wife and child into France; that as to calling a Parliament, that would only be to put himself into their power, and compel him to submit to their conditions; that he had no faith in his troops, except the Irish; none of the rest would fight for him; and, therefore, as soon as the queen and young prince were safe, he should get away to Ireland, Scotland, or France, and await the turn of events. Such was the utterly hopeless character of the Stuart race!

To clear the way for the escape of the royal infant, Lord Dover was put in command at Portsmouth, and James sent orders to Lord Dartmouth to see that the child was safely conveyed to the French coast. In anticipation of the accomplishment of this object, he made every preparation for his own flight. He sent to Jeffreys to bring the Great Seal, and take up his quarters with it in the palace, lest by any means it should fall into the hands of the invader, and thus give an air of authority to his proceedings. But his escape was delayed by unpleasant news from Lord Dartmouth. The announcement of the calling of a Parliament, and of attempted agreement with the Prince of Orange, had spread exultation through the navy, and the officers had despatched an address of fervent thanks to James, when the arrival of the infant prince awoke a general suspicion that all was still hollow, and that James meant nothing but escape. The officers were in great agitation, and plainly pointed out to Dartmouth his heavy responsibility if he allowed the prince to quit the kingdom. Dartmouth, therefore, wrote James, declaring that he would risk his life for the support of the Crown, but that he dared not undertake to facilitate the escape of the Prince of Wales. This was confounding news, and James took instant measures for the return of his son to London, and for his escape by another means to France.

Meanwhile William was gradually advancing towards the capital, and, on the 6th of December, the king's Commissioners met him at Hungerford, where they found the Earls of Clarendon and Oxford already swelling the Court of the invader. They were received with much respect, and submitted their master's proposal that all matters in dispute should be referred to the Parliament for which the writs were ordered, and that, in the meantime, the Dutch army should not advance nearer than forty miles from London. The Whigs in William's Court were decidedly averse from reconciliation with James, whose implacable nature they knew; but William insisted on acceding to the terms, on condition that the royal forces should remove the same distance from the capital, and that the Tower of London and Tilbury Fort should be put into the keeping of the City authorities. If it were necessary for the king and prince to proceed to Westminster during the negotiations, they should go attended only by a small guard. Nothing could be fairer; but William knew well the character of his father-in-law, and felt assured that he would by some means shuffle out of the agreement, and throw the odium of failure on himself; and he was not deceived. Never had James so fair an opportunity of recovering his position and securing his throne, under constitutional restraints, for his life; but he was totally incapable of such wisdom and honesty.

On the very day that the royal Commissioners reached William's camp, James received the Prince of Wales back from Portsmouth, and prepared to send him off to France by another route. On the night of the 10th of December he sent the queen across the Thames in darkness and tempest, disguised as an Italian lady, and attended by two Italian women, one of whom was the child's nurse, and the other carried the boy in her arms. They were guarded by two French refugees of distinction—Antonine, Count of Lauzun, and his friend Saint Victor. They arrived safely at Gravesend, where a yacht awaited them, on board of which were Lord and Lady Powis. Saint Victor returned to inform James that they had got clear off, and in a few hours they were safely in Calais.

Scarcely did Saint Victor bring the cheering news of the auspicious sailing of the yacht, when the Commissioners arrived with the conditions that had been agreed on by William. Here was the guarantee for a speedy adjustment of all his difficulties; but the false and distorted-minded James only saw in the circumstance a wretched means of further deceit and contempt of his people and of all honourable negotiation. He pretended to be highly satisfied, summoned for the morrow a meeting of all the peers in town, and of the Lord Mayor and aldermen, and directed that they should deliberate freely and decide firmly for the good of the country. This done, he retired to rest, ordered Jeffreys to be with him early in the morning, said to Lord Mulgrave, as he bade him good night, that the news from William was most satisfactory, and, before morning, had secretly decamped, leaving his kingdom to take care of itself rather than condescend to a pacification with his son-in-law and his subjects, which should compel him to rule as a constitutional king.

But James was not satisfied with this contemptible conduct; he indulged himself before going with creating all the confusion that he could. Had the writs, which were preparing, been left for issue on the 15th of January, 1689, a new Parliament would be in existence, ready to settle the necessary measures for future Government; he therefore collected the writs and threw them into the fire with his own hands, and annulled a number which were already gone out, by an instrument for the purpose. He also left a letter for Lord Feversham, announcing his departure from the kingdom, and desiring him no longer to expose the lives of himself and his soldiers "by resistance to a foreign army and a poisoned nation;" then, taking the Great Seal in his hand, he bade the Earl of Northumberland, who was the Lord of the Bedchamber on duty, and lay on a pallet bed in the king's room, not to unlock the door till the usual hour in the morning, and then, disguised as a country gentleman, disappeared down the back stairs. He was waited for by Sir Edward Hales, whom he afterwards created Earl of Tenterden, and they proceeded in a hackney-coach to Millbank, where they crossed the river in a boat to Vauxhall. When in mid-stream, he flung the Great Seal into the water, trusting that it would never be seen any more; but it was afterwards dragged up by a fishing-net. James, attended by Hales and Sheldon, one of the royal equerries, drove at a rapid pace for Elmley Ferry, near the Isle of Sheppey, having relays of horse ready engaged. They reached that place at ten in the morning, and got on board the Custom House hoy which was waiting for them, and dropped down the river.

In the morning, when the Duke of Northumberland opened the king's chamber door, and it was discovered that James had fled, the consternation in the palace may be imagined. The courtiers and the numbers of persons who were waiting to fulfil their morning duties, and the lords who had been summoned to council, spread the exciting tidings, and the capital became a scene of the wildest and most alarming confusion. Feversham obeyed the orders of the king left in his letter, without pausing to ask any advice, or to calculate what might be the consequences. These were as serious as might have been expected. There was no Government, no constituted authority to appeal to. Lord Rochester had continued loyal to the last; but the base desertion of James and the imminent danger at once decided him. He bade the Duke of Northumberland muster the Guards, and declare for William. The officers of the other regiments in London followed the advice, and endeavoured to keep together their men, declaring for the Prince of Orange. The lords who had been summoned to Council hastened into the City to concert measures with the Lord Mayor and aldermen for the public safety. A meeting was hastily called in Guildhall, where the peers, twenty-five in number, and five bishops, with Sancroft and the new Archbishop of York at their head, formed themselves into a provisional council to exercise the functions of Government till the Prince of Orange should arrive, for whom they sent a pressing message, praying him to hasten and unite with them for the preservation of the Constitution and the security of the Church. The two Secretaries of State were sent for, but Preston alone came; Middleton denied the authority of the self-created Council. The Lieutenant of the Tower, Bevil Skelton, was ordered to give up the keys to Lord Lucas, and an order was sent to Lord Dartmouth, desiring him to dismiss all Popish officers from the fleet, and attempt nothing against the Dutch fleet. But no measures could prevent the outbreak of the mob in London. The feeling against the Catholics displayed itself on all sides. Under pretence of searching for Papists, the hordes of blackguards from every low purlieu of London swarmed forth and broke into houses, and plundered them at their pleasure. The vile Jeffreys was with difficulty saved from the fury of the mob.

James, his heartless master, was also seized. The Custom House hoy in which he embarked was found wanting in ballast, and the captain was obliged to run her ashore near Sheerness. About eleven at night on the 12th of December, before the hoy could be floated again by the tide, she was boarded by a number of fishermen who were on the look-out for fugitives, and the appearance of the king immediately attracted their notice. "That is Father Petre," cried one fellow; "I know him by his hatchet face." James was immediately seized and searched; but, though he had his coronation ring in his pocket, besides other jewels, they missed them, and did not recognise him. They carried him ashore at Feversham, where, at the inn, amid the insults of this rabble, he declared himself their king. The Earl of Winchelsea, hearing of the king's detention, hastened to his assistance, had him removed to the house of the Mayor, and sent word of his capture to London.

When the countryman who carried the messages from Lord Winchelsea arrived at Whitehall, the news of the king's detention occasioned the greatest embarrassment. The lords had sent for William, and hoped that they were well rid of the foolish king. Nothing could have been easier than their course if James had got over to the Continent. The throne would be declared vacant, and the Prince and Princess of Orange invited to occupy it, on giving the necessary guarantees for the maintenance of the Constitution. But now the whole question was involved in difficulties. If James persisted in his right to the throne, in what capacity was William to be received? Could any safe measures be arranged with a man like James? Was he to be deposed, and his son-in-law and daughter forcibly placed on his throne? The dilemma was equally embarrassing to the lords and prelates, and to the prince himself. When the messenger was introduced, and delivered a letter from James, but without any address, Halifax moved that they should instantly adjourn, and thus leave the letter unnoticed. Halifax was deeply incensed at the trick which James had played off upon him in sending him to negotiate with William merely that he might get away, and was now resolved to adhere to the prince; but Lord Mulgrave prevailed on the lords to retain their seats, and obtained from them an order that Lord Feversham should take two hundred Life Guards, and protect the king from insult. Feversham demanded the precise powers of his order, and was told that he must defend the king from insult, but by no means impede the freest exercise of his personal freedom. This meant that they would be glad if he facilitated his escape. Halifax immediately left London, and joined the Prince of Orange, who was now at Henley-on-Thames. Sancroft and the clergy, as soon as they were aware that the king had not left the country, retired from any further participation in the Council. William and his adherents were extremely chagrined at this untoward turn of affairs. When the messenger arrived at Henley he was referred to Burnet, who said, "Why did you not let the king go?"

But when Feversham arrived at the town whose name he bore, the king was no longer disposed to escape. His friends who had gathered about him, Middleton and Lord Winchelsea especially, had endeavoured to show him that his strength lay in remaining. Had he vacated the throne by quitting the kingdom, it had been lost for ever; but now he was king, and might challenge his right; and the prince could not dispossess him without incurring the character of a usurper, and throwing a heavy odium of unnatural severity on himself and his wife. James had sufficient mind left to perceive the strength thus pointed out to him. He resolved to return to his capital, and from Rochester despatched Feversham with a letter to William, whom he found advanced to Windsor, proposing a conference in London, where St. James's should be prepared for the prince. By this time William and his Council had determined on the plan to be pursued in the great difficulty. He had calculated on James's being gone, and had issued orders to the king's army and to the lords at Whitehall in the style of a sovereign. His leading adherents had settled amongst themselves the different offices that they were to occupy as the reward of their adhesion. It was resolved, therefore, if possible, to frighten James into a second flight. No sooner had Feversham delivered his despatch than he was arrested, and thrown into the Round Tower on the charge of having disbanded the army without proper orders, to the danger of the capital, and of having entered the prince's camp without a passport. Zulestein was despatched to inform James that William declined the proposed conference, and recommended him to remain at Rochester.

James, however, was now bent on returning to London. He had not waited for the prince's answer, but on Sunday, the 16th of December, he entered his capital in a sort of triumphal procession. He was preceded by a number of gentlemen, bareheaded. Immense crowds assembled as if to welcome him back again. They cheered him as he rode along. The bells were rung, and bonfires were lit in the streets. Elated by these signs, as he imagined them, of returning popularity, he no sooner reached Whitehall than he called around him the Jesuits who had hidden themselves, stationed Irish soldiers as guards around his palace, had grace said at his table by a Jesuit priest, and expressed his high indignation at the lords and prelates who had presumed to usurp his functions in his absence—who had, in fact, saved the capital from destruction when he had abandoned it. His folly, however, received an abrupt check. Zulestein was announced, and delivered the stern message of William. James was confounded, but again repeated his invitation for his nephew to come to town, that they might settle all differences in a personal conference. Zulestein coldly assured him that William would not enter London whilst it contained troops not under his orders. "Then," said James, "let him bring his own guards, and I will dismiss mine, for I am as well without any as such that I dare not trust." Zulestein, however, retired without further discussion, and the moment he was gone, James was informed of the arrest of Feversham.

Alarmed at these proofs of the stern spirit of William, James sent in haste to Stamps and Lewis, the leading members of the City Council—the Lord Mayor had never recovered his terror of Jeffreys' presence,—to offer to place himself under their protection till all necessary guarantees for the public liberties had been given and accepted. But the Common Council had not had time to forget his seizure of their charter, and they prudently declined to enter into an engagement which, they said, they might not be able to fulfil. Whilst James was thus learning that though the City acclamations might be proofs of regret for his misfortunes, they were by no means proofs of a desire for his continuing to reign, William, on the same day, the 17th, bade all his leading adherents hold a solemn council, to consider what steps should be taken in this crisis. It was understood that he would never consent to enter London whilst James was there, and it was resolved that he should be removed to Ham House, near Richmond, which the brutal Lauderdale had built out of the bribes of Louis XIV. and the money wrung from the ravaged people of Scotland. Halifax, Shrewsbury, and Delamere were despatched to James with this intimation, though Clarendon had done all in his power to have James seized and confined in some foreign fortress till Tyrconnel surrendered Ireland to the prince's party.

Simultaneously with the three lords, William ordered his forces to advance towards London. In the evening of the 17th James heard that the Dutch soldiers had occupied Chelsea and Kennington. By ten o'clock at night Solmes, at the head of three battalions of infantry, was already making across St. James's Park, and sent word that his orders were to occupy Whitehall, and he advised the Earl of Craven, who commanded the Coldstream Guards, to retire. Craven—though now in his eightieth year, was still possessed of the courage and chivalry which he had displayed in the wars of Germany, and which had won him the heart of Elizabeth of Bohemia, who was said to be married to him—declared that, so long as he retained life, no foreign prince should make a King of England a prisoner in his own palace. James, however, ordered him to retire. The Coldstream Guards withdrew, and the Dutch guards surrounded the palace. James, as if there were no danger to his person, went composedly to bed, but only to be roused out of his first sleep to receive the deputation from the prince. On reading the letter proposing his removal to Ham, which Halifax informed him must be done before ten o'clock in the morning, James seems to have taken a final resolve to get away. He protested against going to Ham, as a low, damp place in winter, but offered to retire to Rochester. This was a pretty clear indication of his intention to flee—the very object desired. A messenger was despatched in all speed to the prince, who returned with his full approbation before daybreak.

The morning of the 18th was miserably wet and stormy, but a barge was brought to Whitehall Stairs, and the wretched monarch went on board, attended by the Lords Arran, Dumbarton, Dundee, Lichfield, and Aylesbury. The spectators could not behold this melancholy abdication—for such it was—of the last potentate of a most unwise line, who had lost a great empire by his incurable infatuation, without tears. Even Shrewsbury and Delamere showed much emotion, and endeavoured to soothe the fallen king; but Halifax, incurably wounded in his diplomatic pride by the hollow mission to the prince at Hungerford, stood coldly apart. Boats containing a hundred Dutch soldiers surrounded his barge as it dropped down the river. James landed and slept at Gravesend, and then proceeded to Rochester, where he remained four days.

Though his advisers entreated him not to fly, James had now sunk the last manly feeling of a monarch who would dare much and sacrifice more to retain a noble empire for his family. A dastardly fear that if he remained he would be put to death like his father took possession of him. He made a last offer to the bishops, through the Bishop of Winchester, as he had done to the City of London, to put himself into their hands for safety, but they also declined the responsibility, and he then gave all over as lost. On the evening of the 22nd of December he sat down before supper, and wrote a declaration of his motives for quitting the kingdom. About midnight he stole quietly away with the Duke of Berwick, his natural son, and, after much difficulty, through storm and darkness, reached a fishing smack hired for the purpose, which, on Christmas Day, landed him at Ambleteuse, on the coast of France. Thence he hastened to the castle of St. Germains, which Louis had appointed for his residence, and where, on the 28th, he found his wife and child awaiting him. Louis also was there to receive him, had settled on him a revenue of forty-five thousand pounds sterling yearly, besides giving him ten thousand pounds for immediate wants. The conduct of Louis was truly princely, not only in thus conferring on the fallen monarch a noble and delightful residence, with an ample income, but in making it felt by his courtiers and all France, that he expected the exiled family to be treated with the respect due to the sovereigns of England.

The flight of James had removed the great difficulty of William—that of having recourse to some measure of harshness towards him, as imprisonment, or forcible deposition and banishment, which would have greatly lowered his popularity. The adherents of James felt all this, and were confounded at the advantage which the impolitic monarch had given to his enemies. The joy of William's partisans was great and unconcealed. In France the success of William was beheld with intense mortification, for it was the death-blow to the ascendency of Louis in Europe, which had been the great object of all his wars, and the expensive policy of his whole life. In Holland the elevation of their Stadtholder to the head of the English realm was beheld as the greatest triumph of their nation; and Dykvelt and Nicholas Witsen were deputed to wait on him in London and congratulate him on his brilliant success. But, notwithstanding all these favourable circumstances, there were many knotty questions to be settled before William could be recognised as sovereign. The country was divided into various parties, one of which, including the Tories and the Church, contended that no power or law could affect the divine right of kings; and that although a king by his infamy, imbecility, or open violation of the laws might be restrained from exercising the regal functions personally, those rights remained untouched, and must be invested for the time in a regent chosen by the united Parliament of the nation. Others contended that James's unconstitutional conduct and subsequent flight amounted to an abdication, and that the royal rights had passed on to the next heir; and the only question was, which was the true heir—the daughter of James, the wife of William, or the child called the Prince of Wales? The more determined Whigs contended that the arbitrary conduct of the House of Stuart, and especially of James, who attempted to destroy both the Constitution and the Church, had abrogated the original compact between prince and people, and returned the right of electing a new monarch into the hands of the people; and the only question was, who should that choice be? There were not wanting some who advised William boldly to assume the crown by right of conquest; but he was much too wise to adopt this counsel, having already pledged himself to the contrary in his Declaration, and also knowing how repugnant such an assumption would be to the proud spirit of the nation.

To settle these points he called together, on the 23rd of December, the peers, all the members of any Parliament summoned in the reign of Charles II. who happened to be in town, and the Lord Mayor and aldermen, with fifty other citizens of London, at St. James's, to advise him as to the best mode of fulfilling the terms of his Declaration. The two Houses, thus singularly constituted, proceeded to deliberate on the great question in their own separate apartments. The Lords chose Halifax as their Speaker; the Commons, Henry Powle. The Lords came to the conclusion that a Convention was the only authority which could determine the necessary measures; that in the absence of Charles II. a Convention had called him back to the throne, and therefore a Convention in the absence of James might exercise the same legitimate function. When the Lords presented an address to this effect on the 25th, William received it, but said it would be necessary to receive the conclusion of the Commons before any act could take place. On the 27th the Commons came to the same decision, and William was requested to exercise the powers of the executive till the Convention should assemble.

In issuing orders for the election of the members of the Convention, William displayed a most politic attention to the spirit of the Constitution. He gave direction that no compulsion or acts of undue persuasion should be exercised for the return of candidates; no soldiers should be allowed to be present in the boroughs where the elections were proceeding; for, unlike James, William knew that he had the sense of the majority of the people with him. The same measure was adopted with regard to Scotland. There, no sooner had William arrived in England, than the people rose against James's Popish ministers, who were glad to flee or conceal themselves. Perth, the miserable renegade and tyrant, endeavoured to escape by sea; he was overtaken, brought ignominiously back, and flung into the prison of Kirkcaldy. The Papists were everywhere disarmed, the Popish chapels were attacked and ransacked. Holyrood House, which swarmed with Jesuits, and with their printing presses, was not exempt from this summary visitation; and bonfires were made of all sorts of Popish paraphernalia—crosses, books, images, and pictures. William now called together such Scottish noblemen and gentlemen as were in London, who adopted a resolution requesting him to call a Convention of the Estates of Scotland, to meet on the 14th of March, and in the meantime to take on himself the same executive authority as in England. William was, therefore, the elected ruler of the whole kingdom for the time. This power he proceeded to exercise with a prudence and wisdom which were in striking contrast to the antagonism of James. All parties and religions were protected as subjects; Feversham was released, and the administration of justice proceeded with a sense of firmness and personal security which gave general confidence.

On the 22nd of January, 1689, the Convention met. The Lords again chose Halifax as Speaker, the Commons, Powle. The Catholic lords had not been summoned, and were not there. In the Lords, Bishop Sherlock and a small knot of Tories were for recalling James, and attempting the impossible thing of binding him to the Constitution; another party, of which Sancroft was known to be the head, though he had not the courage to go there and advocate it, were for a regency; whilst Danby contended for proclaiming the Princess Mary in her own right; and the Whigs were for nominating William as an elective prince. In the Commons, similar parties appeared; but the great majority were for declaring the throne vacant, and, on the 28th, they passed a resolution to that effect, and the next day another, that no Popish king could possess the throne. These carried up to the Lords were, after a debate of two days, also adopted, but only by small majorities.

James now sent a letter to each House, declaring that he had not abdicated, but had been compelled to withdraw by necessity; and he offered to return and redress every grievance. Both Houses refused to receive the letters; but in both the question as to who should be the successor to the throne was violently debated. Lord Lovelace and William Killigrew presented a petition to the Commons, demanding that the crown should be given to the Prince and Princess of Orange jointly. A member asked if the petition were signed, and Lovelace replied "No," but added that he would soon procure signatures enough. In fact, there were noisy crowds about the House; and Lovelace was suspected of having brought the mob from the City to intimidate the opponents. His proceedings were strongly protested against, and William himself sent for him and expressed his disapprobation of bringing any such influence to force the deliberations of the Convention. The Earl of Devonshire then gathered a meeting of the advocates of the prince and princess at his house, where the question was discussed, and where Halifax concluded for William and Danby for Mary. To obtain, if possible, some idea of the leaning of William, who had preserved the most profound silence during the debates, Danby put the question to a friend and countryman of William's present what was the real wish of William. He replied that it was not for him to say, but that, if he must give an opinion, he did not believe that the prince would consent to be gentleman-usher to his wife. This opened the eyes of Danby, who said, "Then you all know enough, and I far too much." In fact, blind must all have been who had studied the character of William not to have seen from the first that he came there to be king, and that on equal terms at least with his wife. The man who had for years brooded in jealous secrecy over the idea that his wife would one day be raised over his own head by her claim on the British crown, was not likely to accept less than an equal throne with her.

Whilst this question was still agitating both Houses, Mary herself settled it by a letter to Danby, in which she thanked him for his zeal in her behalf; she declared that she was the wife of William, and had long resolved, if the throne fell to her, to surrender her power, by consent of Parliament, into his hands. This was decisive, and the enemies of William had only the hope left that the Princess Anne might protest against William, and insist on the precedence of her rights and those of her issue. But Anne had long been perfectly accordant with William and Mary, and declared herself entirely willing that William should hold the throne for his life.

Mary and Anne having spoken out, William now sent for Halifax, Danby, Shrewsbury, and the other leaders, and told them that, having come for the good of the nation, he had thought it right to leave the nation to settle its election of a ruler, and that he had still no desire to interfere, except to clear their way so far as he himself was concerned. He wished therefore to say that, if they decided to appoint a regent, he declined to be that man. On the other hand, if they preferred placing the princess, his wife, on the throne, he had nothing to object; but if they offered to give him during his life the nominal title of king, he could not accept it; that no man respected or esteemed the princess more than he did, but that he could never consent to be tied to the apronstrings of any woman, even the very highest and best of her sex; that if they chose to offer him the crown for life, he would freely accept it; if not, he would return cheerfully to his own country, having done that which he had promised. He added that he thought, in any case, the rights of Anne and her issue should be carefully protected.

This left no doubt as to what must be the result. A second conference was held on the 5th of February between the two Houses, where the contest was again renewed as to whether the throne was actually vacant, and they parted without coming to any agreement; but the Lords, on returning to their own House, yielded, and sent down to the Commons the new oaths, and the resolution that the prince and princess should be declared king and queen. The Commons, who had already come to this conclusion, would not, however, formally pass it till they had taken measures for securing the rights of the subject before finally conferring the crown. They therefore drew up what was called the "Declaration of Rights," by which, while calling William and Mary to the throne, they enumerated the constitutional principles on which the crown should be held. This Declaration was passed on the 12th of February, and about a year afterwards was formally enacted, under the title of the "Bill of Rights," which contains the great charter of the liberties of the English people.

The Declaration stated that, whereas the late king, James II., had assumed and exercised a power of dispensing with and suspending laws without consent of Parliament, and had committed and prosecuted certain prelates because they had refused to concur in such arbitrary powers; had erected an illegal tribunal to oppress the Church and the subject; had levied taxes, and maintained a standing army in time of peace without consent of Parliament; had quartered soldiers contrary to law; had armed and employed Papists contrary to law; had violated the freedom of election, and prosecuted persons in the King's Bench for causes only cognisable by Parliament; and whereas, besides these, the personal acts of the late king, partial and corrupt juries had been returned, excessive fines had been imposed, illegal and cruel punishments inflicted, the estates of persons granted away before forfeiture or judgment; all these practices being utterly contrary to the known laws, statutes, and freedom of the realm:

And whereas the said king, having abdicated the throne, and the Prince of Orange, who under God had delivered the realm from this tyranny, had invited the estates of the realm to meet and secure the religion and freedom of the kingdom; therefore, the Lords spiritual and temporal, and the Commons in Parliament assembled, did, for the vindication and assertion of their ancient rights, declare—That to suspend the execution of the laws, or to dispense with the execution of laws by regal authority without consent of Parliament, that to erect boards of commissioners, and levy money without Parliament, to keep a standing army in time of peace without the will of Parliament, are all contrary to law; that the election of members of Parliament ought to be free, speech in Parliament free, and to be impeached nowhere else; no excessive bail, or excessive fines, nor cruel or unjust punishments can be awarded; that jurors ought to be duly impanelled, and, in trials for high treason, be freeholders; that grants and promises of fines before conviction are illegal and void; and that, for redress of grievances and the amendment of laws, Parliaments ought to be frequently held. All these things are claimed by the Declaration as the undoubted rights and inheritance of Englishmen; and, believing that William and Mary, Prince and Princess of Orange, will preserve from violation all these rights and all other their rights, they resolve and declare them to be King and Queen of England, France, and Ireland for their joint and separate lives, the full exercise of the administration being in the prince; and, in default of heirs of the Princess Mary, the succession to fall to the Princess Anne of Denmark; and, in the default of such issue to the Princess Anne of Denmark, to the posterity of William. On the same 12th of February on which this most important document was passed, the Princess Mary landed at Greenwich.

The next morning, Wednesday, the 13th of February, 1689, the two Houses waited on William and Mary, who received them in the Banqueting room at Whitehall. The prince and princess entered, and stood under the canopy of State side by side. Halifax was speaker on the occasion. He requested their Highnesses to hear a resolution of both Houses, which the Clerk of the House of Lords then read. It was the Declaration of Rights. Halifax then, in the name of all the Estates of the realm, requested them to accept the crown. William, for himself and his wife, accepted the offer, declaring it the more welcome that it was given in proof of the confidence of the whole nation. He then added for himself, "And as I had no other intention in coming hither than to preserve your religion, laws, and liberties, so you may be sure that I shall endeavour to support them, and be willing to concur in anything that shall be for the good of the kingdom, and to do all that is in my power to advance the welfare and the glory of the nation."

This declaration was no sooner brought to an end than it was received with shouts of satisfaction by the whole assembly, and, being heard by the crowds without, was re-echoed by one universal "Hurrah!" The Lords and Commons, as in courtesy bound, then retired; and, at the great gate of the palace, the heralds and pursuivants, clad in their quaint tabards, proclaimed William and Mary King and Queen of England, at the same time praying for them, according to custom, "a long and happy reign." The dense mass of people, filling the whole street to Charing Cross, answered with a stunning shout; and thus, in three months and eight days from the landing of William at Torbay, the Great Revolution of 1688 was completed.