Invasion of Ireland—Campaign of 1689—Parliamentary strife—The conduct of the war—The Oates Case—The Succession Bill—Attempts to pass an Indemnity Bill—Rancour of the Whigs—Their factious opposition to William's Irish plans—Dissolution of Parliament.
An address from Parliament praying the sovereign to declare war against a foreign state is far from a common incident in our history; and even in this instance the initiative then taken by the Commons was one of form rather than of fact. The descent of James upon Ireland, under the convoy of a French fleet of fifteen sail of the line, and accompanied by a force of 2500 French soldiers, amounted to an act of war on the part of France, if ever such an act was committed by one nation upon another; and it was not till more than a month after the perpetration of this outrage that the address referred to in the last chapter was presented to the King. James landed at Kinsale on the 12th of March; the address to the King is dated, as has been said, on the 19th of April. England, moreover, was not the first of the coalition of Powers which the patient diplomacy of William had formed against Louis to take action against the common enemy. The declaration of the German Diet had appeared in February, and that of the States-General in March.
On the 24th of March James entered Dublin, which, in common with all the other cities of the three southern provinces of Ireland, had declared for his cause; but after only three weeks' stay in the capital it was decided, against the advice of his chief French counsellor, d'Avaux, who with the Lord Deputy Tyrconnel, and the Irish Catholic party in general, were for keeping him among the Celtic population of the island, that he should go northward and take command of the royal army in Ulster. He accordingly set out on the 14th of April, and after some further hesitations caused by conflicting reports as to the results of a skirmish between the Protestants and a body of his own men at Strabane, arrived a few days later among his troops, who were quartered a few miles south of Londonderry, a city which, with Inniskillen, had formed the rallying point for the Protestant minority when the outbreak of the Revolution, awakening the hopes of the Catholic population, appeared to threaten the "English garrison" with a repetition of the horrors of 1641. Here it had been fully expected by James's more sanguine counsellors that he would be, if not loyally, at any rate submissively received. The appearance of their lawful sovereign before their walls would at any rate, it was thought, confirm the wavering allegiance of the military under the command of the Governor, Colonel Lundy. As a matter of fact, it only served to arouse a spirit of determined resistance in the townsmen, to unite the soldiery in the same cause, and to precipitate the flight of the Jacobite governor. James and his retinue, on approaching the gate, were fired on from the nearest bastion; a subsequent demand for surrender was contemptuously rejected, and after a few days' delay before the town its rejected sovereign set off in chagrin and disappointment to return to Dublin, leaving Londonderry to prepare for that heroic defence of three months against the combined forces of war, disease, and famine, which has made her name famous among the cities of the world. James's first act on his return to the capital was to summon a Parliament, and a Parliament, of a sort, responded to the summons. That is to say, out of a hundred temporal peers then in Ireland, fourteen, of whom ten were Catholics, obeyed the summons, while the fidelity at any rate of the faithful Commons was guaranteed by the fact that only six out of the total number of two hundred and fifty were Protestants. Having assembled, they promptly proceeded to attest this virtue by the wholesale confiscation of the lands of Protestants, and the proscription of their heads. Ulster, however, was still unreduced, and while that was so, denunciatory and spoliatory decrees might well turn out to be mere waste paper. The dashing Inniskilleners—the cavalry, so to speak, of that Protestant army in which Londonderry played the part of the immovable square of infantry—had actually meditated, though they never carried out, an attempt to relieve their beleaguered sister city, and at Newtown Butler they were able to render signal service to their cause by the defeat of General Macarthy and 6000 Irish. By the end of July Londonderry had been relieved; early in August Marshal Schomberg, then one of the most renowned of European generals, landed at Carrickfergus with 16,000 men, and it became evident even to the most hopeful of James's adherents that the northern province was lost to him irretrievably.
William meanwhile still remained in London busied with the task, at once delicate and laborious, of administering the government of a distrustful and almost unfriendly people through the agency of two bitterly divided factions. The parliamentary session had become more prolific of quarrels and more barren of counsel as it proceeded. The two Houses and the two parties had agreed with little difficulty to do justice to some of the admitted victims of the oppression practised under the last two sovereigns. The attainders of Sidney, Russell, and others were reversed without recorded dissent, but the case of Oates gave rise to acute conflict between the Lords and Commons—a conflict in which, though the conduct of the former assembly was undoubtedly arbitrary, the temper, or, at any rate, the motives of the latter appear by no means worthy of the unqualified praise bestowed upon them by the great Whig historian. Undoubtedly the Peers were without justification in refusing to reverse a sentence which the judges had solemnly pronounced illegal; but it is ridiculous to represent the Commons, as a body of judicially minded legislators, doing violence to their natural sentiments in their determination to obtain justice for Oates. Such a theory is at once refuted by the fact that, after his release under royal pardon, his personal adherents in the Commons proved numerous enough to disgrace their party and their country by procuring a pension of three hundred a year for perhaps the most infamous wretch who ever disgraced human nature. The dispute is of importance because it has been suggested that to the bitterness of feeling engendered by it was due the subsequent quarrel between the two Houses over the succession clauses in the Bill of Rights. At the end of this famous enactment—the statutory affirmation of the claims formulated by the Convention in the Declaration of Right—it had been proposed at William's suggestion that to the several enumerated reversions of the British Crown a further remainder should be added. In the Declaration, as will be remembered, the crown was settled, after the death of the King or Queen, upon the survivor, and after the death of such survivor upon the heirs of Mary, failing whom upon Anne and her heirs, failing whom upon the issue of William by any other wife than Mary. It appearing by no means improbable, having regard to the fact that the King and Queen were childless, and that Anne had repeatedly failed to rear the children to whom she had given birth, that there might be a failure of all the named reversioners, and that the otherwise legal right of some Catholic prince might thereupon come into conflict with the statutory exclusion of Catholic sovereigns, William proposed to entail the crown after the last mentioned limitation upon an undoubted Protestant, Sophia of Hanover, granddaughter of James I., and her issue, being Protestants. That the proposal was a well-conceived one is evidenced by the fact that it was actually adopted by Parliament in the succeeding reign; but though the Lords to whom it was submitted by Burnet accepted it unanimously, the Commons would have none of it. The irritation left by the Oates quarrel may in part have accounted for this, but Macaulay attributes too childish a temper to the Lower House in implying as he does that ill-humour is the sole explanation of their resistance. They in fact alleged several grounds of objection of unequal weight, but of which one at least has every appearance of bona fides, viz. that the mentioning of the House of Hanover would give an opportunity to foreigners of intermeddling too far in the affairs of the nation. But whatever the excuse, we can readily imagine that William regarded the action of the Commons as purely factious, and although the birth at this juncture of another son and heir to the Princess Anne deprived the succession dispute of its urgency, the cool-headed Dutchman can hardly but have been impressed with the keenness of that political strife which could keep the two branches of the legislature asunder when the cost of their dissension was the postponement of the greatest statutory assertion of their liberties since Magna Charta. For as a consequence of the irreconcilable dispute on the succession clause, the Bill of Rights had of course to be dropped; and between this date and the 20th of August, when Parliament was prorogued, the breach between William and the Whigs was still further widened by the rancour with which they pursued their political enemies, and resisted the attempts of the King to procure a statutory amnesty for past political offences. Impartiality was easier of course for him than them, but William's natural affinities of mind and politics cannot but have been rather with the Whigs than the Tories, and the steadiness of purpose with which he persisted in his patriotic though hopeless attempt at combining representatives of both political parties in his councils is, upon any view of the matter, highly honourable to him. It was the Whigs who from the first made the experiment hopeless, and who finally determined its failure. We owe them the English Constitution, but we owe them also, at any rate in the rigid inflexible shape which it has since assumed, that genius vultu mutabilis albus et ater, the English party-system.
Parliament met again after a two months' recess on the 19th of October, and seemed at first disposed to act with somewhat more of unity in support of the Executive. They unanimously affirmed their determination to assist the King in the reconquest of Ireland, and in a vigorous prosecution of the war with France, for which purposes they voted an extraordinary supply of two millions, a portion of which it was at first proposed, on principles which the enactors of the Bill of Rights (passed this session without William's suggested amendment) had inherited in a slightly modified form from the signatory of Magna Charta, to raise by a special tax upon Jews. Supplies voted, however, disunion recommenced. The Whigs had come back from their short holiday more bloodthirsty than ever. Beginning with a legitimate cause of complaint against the administration in respect of the mismanagement of the war in Ireland, where the whole organisation of the commissariat seems to have been almost of a Crimean inefficiency, they easily converted this just grievance into a general protest against the presence of Tories in the Government. An attempt was made to induce William to say by whose advice he had employed Henry Shales, the knavish Commissary-General, to whom the scandal was mainly if not wholly due—the object of course being to found an accusation against some one or other of the Tory officials to whom Shales's retention in his post was assumed to be due. It would have been enough for William to reply that he found the man Commissary on his accession, and simply continued him in office. He refused to gratify the malicious curiosity of the address presented to him on the subject, though he assented very readily to another for the appointment of a commission to examine into the state of affairs in Ireland.
The Tories were next destined to cross the sorely-troubled king by the resistance which they offered to him on a delicate question connected with the provision for his sister-in-law. On the vote of the Civil List, and the question arising under it as to the establishment of the Princess Anne, it had been originally proposed by William that he himself should undertake this charge out of his own revenues; but through the instrumentality of the Churchills a strong party was formed among the Tories to insist upon Anne having a settlement independent of the Crown. Seventy thousand a year was the (for those days) extravagant sum which they demanded, and which proved too much even for an indulgent House of Commons to grant. The vote was reduced to £50,000, and though William's dislike to the idea of a parliamentary settlement upon his sister-in-law induced him to raise his own original offer of £30,000 to £50,000 Anne still held out, and a yearly income of the amount last mentioned was accordingly secured to her for life by Act of Parliament. In none of the parts played by the various actors in this little political drama (the sequel to which was the permanent estrangement of the Queen and King from the Princess) is it easy to discern the promptings of any public principle, or indeed of any decorously avowable motive whatever. The Tories would seem to have been wholly swayed either by party and ecclesiastical prepossessions, or by personal interests of a lower kind—either by sentimental sympathy with a High Churchwoman, or by a practical eye to the Marlborough gold. As to William it was eminently natural that he should wish to retain at least one string of this puppet of the Churchills in his own hands; as natural as that the Churchills themselves should wish to deprive him of it, and that the puppet herself should respond to the vigorous pulling of the strings which they already held. Neither of the two latter parties would probably have cared to allege any public motive for their behaviour in the transaction. It is to be presumed, however, that William would have done so if he could; and it is at least noteworthy that the only objection which he seems to have taken to Anne's parliamentary settlement affords no logical support to his own alternative proposal. That Anne should have her income settled on her for life, while his was only voted to him annually, was doubtless a just ground of complaint; but the proper redress of the anomaly would have been to subject his sister-in-law's income like his own to the annual revision of the House of Commons. The fact that the King was dependent upon Parliament could be no reason for making the Princess dependent not upon Parliament, but upon the King.
Meanwhile the session wore on, and William's cherished project of an Act of Indemnity was no nearer realisation. He had earnestly recommended it to Parliament in the Speech from the Throne, but nothing was further from the hearts of the dominant party in the Commons than the idea of amnesty. They seemed bent on assuring themselves the tranquil exit of Marshal Narvaez, who died in peace with all mankind by dint of leaving himself no enemies to forgive. An Indemnity Bill was for form's sake brought in at the beginning of November, but no progress was made with it. Proscription took the place of purgation. Lords Salisbury and Peterborough, Sir Edward Hales, and others, were marked out for impeachment and summoned according to their status to the bar of one or the other House. The Lords appointed a committee to inquire into the judicial murders of Russell and Sidney, and Sir Dudley North and Lord Halifax were cited before this body to answer for their shares, real or alleged, in these dark transactions. John Hampden, a grandson of the greater John, was conspicuous for the violence of his hostility to the official Tories, and by his instrumentality a committee was appointed to prepare an address to the King to remove the authors of the late failures and to appoint "unsuspected persons" to the management of affairs. The address, however, presented by Hampden was sharply criticised for the violence of its language, and the House of Commons ultimately laid it aside. So plainly, indeed, was the Whig party now losing ground in that House, and so grave had become their apprehensions of declining popularity in the country, that with a view of at least recovering their position at the polling-booths they resolved upon one of the boldest and most unscrupulous strokes of party tactics which our history records. Into a Bill then before the House for restoring the charters to these corporations which had surrendered them to the Crown, they introduced a clause excluding from municipal office all persons who had been implicated in the surrenders of such charters—or, in other words, all Tories, thus designing to fill the municipalities with Whig office-bearers and to secure the control of the elections to the Whig party. Smuggled into the Bill in a House half depleted of its members by the approach of Christmas, it needed a vigorous whip of the Tories to procure the rejection of this clause by a narrow majority; and William's disgust at this manoeuvre was further intensified by the attachment to his much-desired Indemnity Bill of a bill of pains and penalties against political delinquents. So acute at this moment became his chagrin and disappointment at the condition of English politics that he was strongly tempted to wash his hands of the whole distasteful and thankless business, and he was with difficulty prevailed upon by his ministers to abandon his design of bidding adieu to the country which he had come to deliver and retiring to his native land. Dissuaded from this, he resolved that he would at least reduce Ireland to submission if he had failed to compose the quarrels of his Parliament; and he let it be known that he was about to quit the capital for the headquarters of his army in Ulster. But against this, too, the Whigs vehemently protested. An address deprecatory of the project was said to be preparing; and William, his patience exhausted by this last sally of faction, determined to appeal to the good sense and patriotism of the country.
Accordingly, on the 27th of January, after having in a speech from the throne announced his resolve to go to Ireland in person, "and with the blessing of God Almighty endeavour to reduce that kingdom, that it may no longer be a charge to this," the King, to the high satisfaction of the Tories and the proportional discomfiture of the Whigs, proceeded to prorogue Parliament with a view to its early dissolution.
