An interval of repose—Revival of continental troubles—Death of Charles II.—Expedition of Monmouth—Mission of Dykvelt—James's growing unpopularity—Invitation to William—Attempted intervention by France—William's declaration—He sets sail, and is driven back by storm—Second expedition and landing.
For the next six or seven years the life of the Prince of Orange was to be unmarked by any striking external incidents. He was occupied with all his wonted patience in the reparation of the mischiefs of the Treaty of Nimeguen, and in the laborious construction of that great European league by means of which he was afterwards destined to arrest the course of French aggression. In this undertaking, and in watching and retaliating upon the encroachments which Louis XIV., almost on the morrow of the treaty, began making upon its provisions, William was sufficiently employed. In 1684 these encroachments became intolerable. Louis having vainly demanded of the Spaniards certain towns in Flanders, on the pretext of their being rightful dependencies on places ceded to him by the Treaty of Nimeguen, seized Strasbourg and besieged Luxembourg in physical enforcement of his claim. Spain declared war, and William, though thwarted by the States (mainly through the instrumentality of the city of Amsterdam, which was always ill-disposed towards him), and denied the levy of 16,000 men which he had asked for, took the field notwithstanding in support of his Spanish ally. The united forces, however, were too weak to effect much. Luxembourg speedily surrendered, and as the result a twenty years' truce, on terms not very favourable for William, was concluded with France.
During this period, as always, affairs in England no doubt demanded general vigilance; but it was not till 1685 that they showed signs of becoming critical. The death of Charles, and the known designs of Monmouth, placed William in a very delicate position. During Charles's life-time he had extended his protection to the exiled Duke, and had even insisted so punctiliously on proper respect being shown to him, that a difference had arisen between William and the English Court with reference to the Duke's receiving salutes from the English troops, and was actually unadjusted at Charles's death. Upon James's accession, however, either to clear himself of all suspicion of abetting a pretender to the throne, or, as some have asserted, to thwart the new king's design of having his nephew seized and sent a prisoner to England, William procured his departure from Dutch territory. Monmouth retired to Brussels, but at the instance of James, who wrote a letter to the Governor of the Spanish Netherlands charging him with high treason, he was ordered by that functionary to quit the King of Spain's dominions, and returned to Holland. Then followed his ill-fated enterprise, throughout the brief course of which William maintained an attitude of strict loyalty towards his father-in-law. He not only despatched the six English and Scotch regiments in the Dutch service to assist in suppressing the insurrection, but he offered, if James wished, to take command of the royal troops in person. The offer was declined, very likely from motives of suspicion by the King, but it is impossible to suggest any plausible reason for questioning its bona fides. The idle story that it was prompted by William's disgust at Monmouth's proclaiming himself king, in breach of a promise to raise William himself to the throne, bears absurdity on its face. The Princess stood next in succession to the throne as it was; and if the Prince had conceived a project of anticipating his wife's inheritance, he certainly would not have entrusted the execution of that project to the feeble hands and flighty brain of Monmouth.
But two years had scarcely passed before it really became necessary for him to look after the interests of her reversion. As early as the spring of 1687 it was beginning to be suspected by men of foresight, both in England and in Holland, that James II.'s position was precarious. No one, indeed, who was capable of forming a correct estimate of his character and capacities could find in them any guarantees of prolonged rule. He was as obstinate and insincere as his father, as selfish and unscrupulous as his brother, while he was destitute alike of the former's power of enlisting the devotion of individuals, and of the latter's easy popularity with the common people. It would be unjust to him not to admit that many of his gravest difficulties were prepared for him in his brother's time, if not by his brother's means; but it cannot be denied that he had made astonishing haste to convert these grave difficulties into the most formidable dangers. In little more than two years from his accession in February 1685, his nephew found it expedient to send over an emissary to England for the purpose of sounding English political leaders, not as yet, indeed, with any definitely-formed design of intervening by force in English affairs, but rather probably that, in the event of the King rendering himself "impossible," the people might know where to look for a substitute, and might understand that the heiress-presumptive and her consort were not only the most natural, but, as a matter of fact, the most eligible choice for the people to make in the circumstances. Dykvelt, a judicious diplomatist, made the best use of his time, and while continuing to give no just ground of remonstrance to James, to whom he was of course nominally accredited, he managed to bring back information and assurances of much value from many English politicians of eminence.
Meantime, and while James was still industriously undermining his throne, his relations with his destined successor were becoming more strained. A dispute arose between them with reference to the six English regiments lent to the States under treaty. The King made a demand that these regiments should be officered by Catholics—a claim put forward either with the object of insuring their fidelity to him in case of future rupture with Holland, or else merely to invite refusal and create a pretext for insisting on their recall. At any rate the refusal came, and on James's demanding the return of the troops, the States refused this also, appealing to the terms of the treaty as only authorising the King of England to require restitution of these forces in the event of his being actually engaged in warfare with a foreign foe. An acrimonious correspondence ensued between the two governments; but James failed to move the States from their firm attitude. Equally unsuccessful was he in an attempt to inveigle the Prince into an approval of that policy of pretended toleration by which he was seeking to further the interests of the Catholic at the expense of those of the Protestant religion in England. A Scots lawyer named Stuart, who had taken refuge in Holland from the religious persecution during the late reign, having made, or been bribed to make, his submission to the royal authority, was procured to open a correspondence with the Grand Pensionary Fagel, in which he pressed the latter to advise the Prince of Orange to support his uncle's policy, declaring that James would not repeal the penal laws unless the tests were repealed also. Fagel for some time returned no answer, but at last, finding the rumour in circulation that the Prince had associated himself with the King's measures, he wrote a reply, which had no doubt been drafted by William, to the refugee's request. In this remarkably politic document the Prince contrived to hold the balance equally between the English Protestants, with whom he was particularly anxious to stand well, and the Catholic continental sovereigns, whom in his struggle with France he could not afford to offend. While maintaining his former attitude with regard to the tests, William declared that he would gladly see all other grievances on the part of the English Catholics removed. He would have no man subjected to punishment for his opinions, but—and on this point he instanced the practice of the States-General themselves with respect to Roman Catholics—he was not prepared to remove all official disabilities founded on religious opinion. This letter was forwarded by Stuart to the King, and was by him considered in council. Burnet declares that all the lay papists of England who were not engaged in the intrigues of the priests earnestly pressed him to accept the Prince's terms as being what would render them safe and easy for the future; but the King as usual was obstinate, and no resolution was taken on the matter.
During most of the remainder of this year the King was filling up the measure of his political offences. From March till October the dispute with Magdalen College had raged, and the breach between James and the once devoted Church of England proportionately widened. But at the end of the year 1687 a momentous announcement was made to the Court. The Queen was pronounced to be pregnant, and in July of the following year she was delivered of a male child. That an infant brought into the world at so opportune a moment should have been loudly alleged to be supposititious by the inflamed political partisans of the time was naturally to be expected. A word or two more will be said on that point hereafter; it is here only necessary to remark that whether William shared the suspicions of his partisans or not his outward behaviour on the occasion was irreproachable. He congratulated his father-in-law on the auspicious event; and the infant prince was duly prayed for in his private chapel at the Hague, until the protest hereafter to be referred to was made against the ceremony by his English partisans. Meanwhile the events of the eventful year 1688 had been ripening fast to their destined issue. The end of April had witnessed the second promulgation of the Declaration of Indulgence, and the ferment occasioned by that new assertion of the dispensing power. In July, in almost exact coincidence of time with the Queen's accouchement, came the memorable trial of the Seven Bishops, which gave the first demonstration of the full force of that popular animosity which James's rule had provoked. Some months before,[1] however, Edward Russell, nephew of the Earl of Bedford and cousin of Algernon Sidney's fellow-victim, had sought the Hague with proposals to William to make an armed descent upon England, as vindication of English liberties and the Protestant religion.[2] William had cautiously required a signed invitation from at least a few representative statesmen before committing himself to such an enterprise, and on the day of the acquittal of the Seven Bishops a paper, signed in cipher by Lords Shrewsbury, Devonshire, Danby, and Lumley, by Compton, Bishop of Northampton, by Edward Russell, and by Henry Sidney, brother of Algernon, was conveyed by Admiral Herbert to the Hague. William was now furnished with the required security for English assistance in the projected undertaking, but the task before him was still one of extreme difficulty. He had to allay the natural disquietudes of the Catholic supporters of his continental policy without alarming his Protestant friends in England; to win over the States-General, not by any means universally favourable either to his designs against James or to his attitude towards Louis (Amsterdam, for instance, had sided with the former monarch in his dispute with William about the return of the English regiments); and, above all, he had to make his naval and military preparations for a descent upon England without exciting suspicions, or provoking an anticipatory attack. That he managed matters with much address is evident from the result, but it is no less clear that luck was on his side. A quarrel of the French king with the Pope, on a question of diplomatic extra-territorial rights in the papal city, and his arrogant interference in the election of the Elector of Cologne, had arrayed against Louis the spiritual and temporal forces of Catholicism, represented respectively by the Papacy and the Empire; his ill-timed persecutions of Protestants, and certain prohibitive measures adopted by him against Dutch trade, had the effect of alienating his partisans in the States-General. In the meanwhile the combined blindness and obstinacy of James permitted William to prosecute his military preparations unmolested, if not unsuspected. These preparations were very extensive and conspicuous, and seem to have had their commencement at an earlier date than is consistent with Burnet's theory referred to in the note on a previous page. It was not, however, till the summer was beginning to give place to autumn that they began to excite any very distinct suspicions as to their object. The Cologne quarrel formed a plausible excuse enough for them; for if Louis, as events seemed to threaten, were to occupy the Rhine provinces with an army, it would be obviously necessary for Holland to stand on guard. By the middle of August the French king had become uneasy, and despatched a special envoy in the person of M. Bonrepos to awaken James to a sense of his danger. He had authority, according to Burnet (whom, however, Macaulay, who mostly follows him, on this point contradicts[3]), to offer James not only naval but military assistance to repel the invasion with which he believed him to be threatened. Bonrepos was directed by his master to promise the King of England that ten or fifteen thousand (others, according to Ralph, say thirty thousand) men should be landed at Portsmouth if required, and asked that that place should be put into his hands to keep the communication between the two kingdoms. Sunderland, acting perhaps bona fide, but more probably not, most earnestly counselled James to reject the offer, and it was rejected accordingly, the King's characteristic imbecility of judgment being never more characteristically shown than in his unwillingness to offend the patriotic prejudices of his subjects by accepting an offer which, had he been aware of their true feelings towards him, he would have recognised as his last chance of saving his crown and kingdom. At this juncture Ronquillo, the Spanish ambassador, went out of his way to assure James of what he probably knew to be false, and certainly had no reason to believe true—namely, that no descent upon England was in contemplation on the part of William. On an early day in September, however, Albeville was despatched to the Hague with instructions to present a memorandum of complaint on the subject of the Dutch preparations; and the day following d'Avaux delivered, on the part of Louis, a threatening note to the States, in which he warned them to desist from their designs upon a monarch to whom he was bound by "such ties of friendship and alliance" as would oblige him, if James were attacked, to come to his assistance. That Louis's motive in taking this step was to commit his brother of England to the alliance which he pretended to exist it is almost impossible to doubt; but James, more and more bent upon repudiating the assistance of France the more necessary it became to him, did his utmost to assure the States that there was nothing in the nature of an alliance between himself and Louis. William, however, and his partisans in the States-General, asked nothing better than this excuse for continuing their preparations, and the Dutch armament was actively pushed forward. In October the final alienation of the Dutch friends of France was brought about by Louis's despatching an army under the Dauphin to besiege Philipsburg, and simultaneously issuing manifestos against the Emperor and the Pope. Avignon had been seized by him the day before the siege of Philipsburg was opened; and the attack on the latter place was followed by the rapid seizure of most of the important towns of the Palatinate.
On the 10th of October, matters now being ripe for such a step, William, in conjunction with some of his English advisers, put forth his famous declaration. Starting with a preamble to the effect that the observance of laws is necessary to the happiness of states, the instrument proceeds to enumerate fifteen particulars in which the laws of England had been set at naught. The most important of these were—(1) the exercise of the dispensing power; (2) the corruption, coercion, and packing of the judicial bench; (3) the violation of the test laws by the appointment of papists to offices (particularly judicial and military offices, and the administration of Ireland), and generally the arbitrary and illegal measures resorted to by James for the propagation of the Catholic religion; (4) the establishment and action of the Court of High Commission; (5) the infringement of some municipal charters, and the procuring of the surrender of others; (6) interference with elections by turning out of all employment such as refused to vote as they were required; and (7) the grave suspicion which had arisen that the Prince of Wales was not born of the Queen, which as yet nothing had been done to remove. Having set forth these grievances, the Prince's manifesto went on to recite the close interest which he and his consort had in this matter as next in succession to the crown, and the earnest solicitations which had been made to him by many lords spiritual and temporal, and other English subjects of all ranks, to interpose, and concluded by affirming in a very distinct and solemn manner that the sole object of the expedition then preparing was to obtain the assembling of a free and lawful Parliament, to which the Prince pledged himself to refer all questions concerning the due execution of the laws, and the maintenance of the Protestant religion, and the conclusion of an agreement between the Church of England and the Dissenters, as also the inquiry into the birth of the "pretended Prince of Wales"; and that this object being attained, the Prince would, as soon as the state of the nation should permit of it, send home his foreign forces.
About a week after, on the 16th of October, all things being now in readiness, the Prince took solemn leave of the States-General, thanked them for their past kindness to him, called them to witness that the motives of his enterprise were solely those set forth in his declaration, namely, the vindication of the liberties of England, and the defence of the Protestant religion, and commended his wife to their care. The scene was an affecting one, and many among the assembly were melted to tears; only the Prince himself, says Burnet, "continued firm in his usual gravity and phlegm." Two days later the States came to a formal resolution to assist the Prince of Orange with ships and forces on his expedition to England, having heard his explanations thereof and found them satisfactory; and authorised their ministers at the various European Courts to make use of this resolution in whatever way they might find most convenient.
On the 19th William and his armament set sail from Helvoetsluys, but was met on the following day by a violent storm which forced him to put back on the 21st.[4] On the 1st of November the fleet put to sea a second time, and for the first twelve hours held its course towards the north-west. It was calculated that thus the scouting vessels sent out by Dartmouth would carry back word that the landing might be expected to take place on the Yorkshire coast; and, this ruse successfully effected, the fleet tacked and sailed southward for the Channel. William was naturally most desirous to avoid a conflict with the English fleet, and the heavy weather which prevented Dartmouth from leaving the Thames enabled him to attain his object. His fleet passed the Straits of Dover at midday of the 3d of November, and made for Torbay, where it had been determined to land. In the haze, however, of the morning of the 5th of November the pilot overshot the mark, and took the fleet some miles to the west. Its situation became critical. Plymouth was the next port, and of Lord Bath, who there commanded the King's forces, William was by no means sure. From the east the royal fleet under Dartmouth was believed to be approaching. Russell, who had told Burnet that "all was over," and that he might "go to prayers," was just upon taking boat for the Prince's ship when the "Protestant wind," as the long prayed-for easterly gale had hitherto been called, having now by force of circumstances become a breeze of a distinctly Catholic tendency, was, as all good Protestants of that day believed, providentially lulled. A wind of the right direction and denomination sprang up shortly after, and in four hours' time, by noon of the 5th of November, the Prince's fleet was wafted safely into Torbay.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] In April or May. Macaulay (after Burnet) says May; and the point is of some importance, because if, as Ralph maintains and proves by reference to the date of the Elector of Brandenburg's death (an event referred to by Burnet as still prospective at the date of the conference with Russell), this interview really took place in April, it does prove, as Ralph says, that "measures were forming in England against the King and embraced in Holland before the second Declaration of Indulgence was published, or the Order in Council which was founded thereon, or the Prosecution of the Bishops was thought of; which his lordship (Burnet) holds of such weight for the justification of those measures." Ralph i. 998.
