Parliament of 1690—Tory majority—Settlement of the royal income—Case of the Princess Anne—The "Act of Grace"—Detection of Preston's conspiracy—William's departure for Ireland—Battle of the Boyne—Battle of Beachy Head—Marlborough's Irish campaign—Session of 1690.
The elections were contested with the utmost energy of party spirit. Both Whigs and Tories strove their hardest for the victory, but the policy of the King's appeal to the country was justified by the success of the latter. A Tory majority was returned to the House of Commons, and William felt that there was now at last a fair prospect of his effectually mediating between factions. To have replaced a party to whom he owed everything by a party who owed everything to him was undoubtedly a great step towards the attainment of his ends. He had at least secured a majority who could affect no right to dictate his policy, and had reduced those who could and did advance this pretension to a minority. His first act was to remodel his Ministry. Halifax resigned the Privy Seal, which was placed in commission; Danby, who had been raised at the distribution of honours accompanying the coronation to the Marquisate of Caermarthen, became Lord President; Sir John Lowther, First Lord of the Treasury—not then, as now, the chief office in the Administration. Whigs and Tories were still mingled in the Government, but no longer in the old proportions.
On the 20th of March the new Parliament met, and the King addressed it in a speech in which he announced his intention of proceeding to Ireland as soon as might be, and recommended to the prompt attention of the two Houses the question of the settlement of the royal revenue and of the enactment of an amnesty. In the former of these matters their action was more conformable to sound constitutional principle than agreeable to the King. In addition to the hereditary revenues which had passed with the crown to William and Mary, the Commons would only agree to settle absolutely upon the King and Queen about one third of the fiscal revenues which had been assured to the last two sovereigns for the term of their lives. That portion of the excise, estimated at £300,000, which had been settled upon James II. for life, was now settled upon William and Mary for their joint and separate lives. But, on the other hand, the customs duties, amounting to £600,000, which had been settled for life on Charles and James successively, were granted to the Crown for a term of only four years. This restriction, in which Whigs and Tories concurred, was not unnaturally displeasing to a sovereign who justly valued himself on the ability, integrity, and thrift which made him, as he conceived, at once the most efficient and the most trustworthy steward of the national resources; but that he should have resented the action of Parliament in this matter not merely as a limitation upon the free play of his policy, but as a personal slight to himself, instructively illustrates the very limited extent to which the principles of the British Constitution, as we now know it, had established themselves in the joint recognition of the sovereign and the legislature. If there was one principle more inevitably implied in the Revolution that William had headed than another, it was that no personal claims of any individual sovereign could be allowed either to suspend or in any degree to qualify the general rule of parliamentary control. Had William contended, whether reasonably or unreasonably, that the restraint placed on him by Parliament was more severe than needed to be imposed upon any sovereign, his position would have been a defensible one; but his complaint, as Burnet testifies, was that the Commons were showing an undue and ungenerous jealousy of their particular sovereign for the time being. His claim to enjoy the same amount of freedom as his predecessor had abused was founded simply on the fact that James was James and that he was William; and that was obviously one of these circumstances of which the administrators of a general rule, intended to apply to any number of future Jameses and Williams, could not possibly take into account. Had this general rule been recognised with anything approaching to its acceptance in these days, it is impossible to suppose that so clear and fair an intelligence as William's could have missed its application to himself.
No doubt it may have caused him some irritation to observe with what rapidity the coalition of Whigs and Tories, which had formed for the purpose of limiting his independence, dissolved again when that work was done. In a few weeks the two parties were as fiercely at odds as ever upon a Whig Abjuration Bill, the main object of which, though in one quite indefensible clause it went far beyond this, was to impose a test which the official Tories could not swallow, and so to drive them from office. It was not enough that a man should have sworn allegiance to King William; he must also expressly abjure allegiance to King James. Who knew but that he might have taken the former oath in some non-natural sense or with some mental reservations? And though the answer seemed obvious that he might take the latter in the same sense and with the same reservations, the Bill was prosecuted to its rejection in the House of Commons by a majority of thirty-three. An Abjuration Bill of a somewhat less stringent kind was then introduced into the House of Lords, the debate upon which William personally attended. He had let it be known, however, that he was opposed to the former measure, and it is probable that he had no great liking for the latter. Anyhow, it underwent so much mutilation in committee that its authors did not care to persevere with it.
The Tory majority, however, was soon after employed to an even more useful purpose in the final accomplishment of William's policy of pacification. Resolved that on this occasion the measure of indemnity should not be defeated by delay, the King submitted it personally to the Upper House in the form of an Act of Grace for political offences—a proceeding which, according to constitutional practice, abridged its deliberative stages in each House of Parliament to a single reading. Introduced under such auspices, and assured of the support of a party always dominant in the Upper House, and now possessing a majority in the Lower, it passed without any opposition into law, and is undoubtedly entitled to take its place among the most honourable and statesmanlike acts of William's career. Its value as a political precedent was scarcely capable of exaggeration even by Macaulay; and if he somewhat inordinately applauds the enlightened clemency which it was as easy for any brave and dispassionate foreigner to recommend as it was difficult for English parties embittered by the mutual wrongs of a generation of conflict to accept, it would be falling into the converse error to insist on any serious qualification of the historian's praises. William's great qualities were his own; they must at least divide the credit of his high-minded and sagacious policy with the accident of his antecedents in his own country and of his position in ours; nor would it be gracious to attempt too nice an apportionment of the shares.
Impatience to proceed to Ireland had probably something to do with the expeditious form of procedure adopted by the King in the case of the Indemnity Act. On the 20th of May it became law. On the same day William informed the Houses that his departure for the seat of war could be delayed no longer; and after having given his assent to an Act empowering the Queen to administer the government during his absence, he prorogued Parliament until the 14th of July. Then, having appointed from the list of Privy Councillors a small interior Council of Nine to advise the Queen, and having delayed no longer than was necessary to place in their hands the threads of a newly-discovered conspiracy,[12] William took a tender farewell of his wife, and set forth on the strange errand of defeating the army, if not destroying the life, of his wife's father. "God send," he exclaimed, "that no harm may come to him." His anxiety on this score for the Queen's sake was painful; but otherwise, though he belonged to that order of brave men whose spirits are fortified rather than exhilarated by danger, he was cheered by the approach of the hour of action. Ireland in the hands of a hostile army, the shores of England threatened by a hostile fleet, a dangerous conspiracy only detected on the eve of success, a formidable insurrection imminent in the country he was leaving behind him, he could still say to Burnet—"As for me, but for one thing I should enjoy the prospect of being on horseback and under canvas again. For I am sure that I am fitter to direct a campaign than to manage your Houses of Lords and Commons."
On the 14th of June he landed at Carrickfergus, and immediately set out for Belfast to take over the command from Schomberg. All Ulster rose with enthusiasm to receive him, and the soldiers, whom treachery and incompetency had been sacrificing by the hundred to the ravages of disease and privation, took heart once more. After ten days spent in concentrating his forces at Loughbrickland, William started southward at the head of 36,000 men. Two days after his nephew's landing James had left Dublin to lead his troops to Dundalk with the view either of giving battle at that point, or merely, as has been suggested, of eating up the country between the capital and the invading army, so as to impede its advance by difficulties of supply. But if the former were the original object of the movement it was soon abandoned. When William's army approached Dundalk James fell back upon Ardee; and the former still pressing southwards, the latter still continued his retreat, until the pursuer was brought to a halt on the morning of the 30th of June by the halt of the pursued, and the English and Irish armies at last looked each other in the face across the now historic waters of the Boyne. Lauzun, who had succeeded De Rosen in the command of James's forces, was a courtier rather than a general, but the position he had here taken up, behind entrenchments and with a river in front, was strategically a strong one—so strong indeed that the veteran Schomberg doubted his master's wisdom in resolving upon an immediate attack. But William, as he had told the Ulster men, had not come to Ireland to "let the grass grow under his feet." He had the advantage in numbers; the advantage in generalship; above all, the advantage in the quality of his troops, who, if but few of them were as good as the trained French soldiers of his adversary, were none of them so bad as the rapparee Irish levies who formed the bulk of James's forces. The day passed in an exchange of shots across the river, from one of which William had well-nigh lost his life. Having sat down to breakfast somewhat close to the brink of the Boyne, he attracted the attention of the Irish sentries on the opposite shore. Two field-pieces were planted opposite to him, and, on his rising and remounting his horse, were discharged at the group of which he was the centre. The first shot killed a man and two horses at some distance from him; the second, better aimed, struck the river bank and grazed the King's shoulder in its ricochet, inflicting a slight flesh wound. His staff thronged anxiously about him, but William, in his usual dry and stoical fashion, relieved their fears. He was unharmed, he told them, but "there was no need for any bullet to come nearer." His wound was dressed, and he remained in the saddle till nightfall. At nine o'clock he held a council of war, and, against the advice of Schomberg, declared his determination of effecting a passage of the river on the following day. Unable to dissuade his master from the rash project, as he deemed it, the veteran general urged that at least a portion of the army should be sent up the stream at midnight to Slane Bridge, and crossing it at that point, should be in readiness either to assist them in the event of their attack being unsuccessful, by a diversion in the rear of James's army, or, in case the river should have been carried, to cut off the retreat of the Irish by the pass of Duleek. This plan, which, if adopted, would probably, as one of William's biographers points out, have ended the campaign at a stroke, was rejected: why, does not very clearly appear. The tactics were such as might have been thought likely to commend themselves to William, and he could apparently have well spared the men to execute them. It is said by the biographer above referred to that the plan was opposed "by the Dutch generals"; but it is not impossible that the objection may have really come from the King himself, and have been founded not on strategical but on political considerations. William, as we know, was especially solicitous about his father-in-law's life, and not perhaps suspecting how well it would be cared for by its owner, whom he must have remembered to have once been brave, he may have rejected Schomberg's scheme for its very completeness, and because he not unnaturally assumed that in cutting off the retreat of James's army he would be cutting off the retreat of James himself. The too complimentary assumption that the royal general would be last rather than first in the flight had yet to be rebutted by events. But whatever the reason, the Marshal's plan was rejected; he retired, chagrined and hurt, from the council, and the last night of the old soldier's life was spent, it is melancholy to think, in displeasure with the master whom he had so long and faithfully served.
The morning of the 1st of July broke fair, and a little after sunrise the English army advanced in three divisions to the attack. The right under the younger Schomberg, assisted by the Earl of Portland and James Douglas, was detailed for the same operation which the Marshal would have had executed four hours earlier, and by a surprise. Having marched a few miles up the river to Slane Bridge, and finding there but one regiment of Irish dragoons, they easily beat them back, crossed the bridge, and made good their footing on the southern bank of the Boyne. Lauzun, apprehensive for his command of the pass of Duleek, had detached the best of his troops—his own countrymen—to resist the further advance of the English right; and the centre and left of William's army were opposed at the lower fords by the Irish Catholics alone. Between them and the Dutch Guards, the French Huguenots, the men of Londonderry and Inniskillen, it was impar congressus indeed.[13] Schomberg in command of the centre took the water at the ford of Old Bridge. William at the head of the left wing, consisting entirely of cavalry, made for a more difficult and dangerous crossing lower down. At one point only does the passage of the river appear to have been for more than a moment doubtful. The Danes and Huguenots under Cambon and Caillemot were set upon in the act of landing by the Irish cavalry under Richard Hamilton; the former were driven back again into the water, and the latter, unarmed with pikes, began to give ground. The conflict raged hotly for a short space at the southern exit of the ford; Caillemot fell mortally wounded; the whole brigade was wavering; when old Schomberg, who had been watching the action from the northern bank, dashed impetuously into the river. "Allons, Messieurs!" he cried to the Huguenots, as he pointed to the French Catholics in James's ranks, "voila vos persÉcuteurs!" As he uttered the words a small band of Irish horsemen came galloping in upon the main body, the Huguenots, mistaking them for friends, having allowed them to pass. In the confused melÉe which followed the Marshal was surrounded; he received two sabre cuts on his head, and a musket shot, said in one account to have been fired in a fatal mistake "by one of his own men," laid him dead upon the ground. The arrival of William, who had with difficulty forced his way across through the strongly flowing tide, at once decided the doubtful struggle. "Men of Inniskillen, what will you do for me?" was his inspiriting question to the sorely pressed Protestants of Ulster; and drawing his sword with an arm yet stiff from the wound of the previous morning, he led his Dutch Guards and Inniskilleners against the still unbroken Irish centre. Ulstermen and Hollanders vied with each other in steadiness and valour; Schomberg's cavalry came opportunely to their support; De Ginkell's horse effected as timely a diversion on the enemy's left. Hamilton and his riders being thus driven back, the heart of the defence was broken, and after one more brief stand at Plottin Castle, where the Inniskilleners were temporarily checked and had again to be rallied, and where Hamilton was wounded and made prisoner, the defeat of the Irish army became a rout, and their retreat a flight. James, who had watched the battle from the hill of Donore till it went against him, had already hurried through the pass of Duleek, and was making the best of his way to Dublin. His army, now a broken and confused mass of fugitives, struggled after him through the defile. The battle of the Boyne was won.
The victory, though not so immediately decisive as it might have been if Schomberg's plan had been adopted, was practically fatal to the Jacobite cause. Drogheda surrendered the next day. James, who had reached Dublin on the evening of the battle, quitted it the day after for ever. On the 3d of July he reached Waterford, whence he embarked on board a French frigate and sailed for Brest. Lauzun and Tyrconnel collected their straggling forces as best they could, and, evacuating the Irish capital immediately after James's flight, marched westward with the design of reorganising resistance at such still remaining strongholds of the deposed monarch as Limerick and Athlone.
William fixed his headquarters at Finglas, near Dublin, but enjoyed no long period of unmixed satisfaction with his victory. The day before the two armies closed upon the Boyne, the French fleet, under De Tourville, had encountered what should have been the combined fleets of England and the States off Beachy Head, but by the supineness or treachery of the English Admiral the Dutch had been left to bear the brunt of the battle alone. After hours of hard fighting they drew off with the worst of the encounter, and Admiral Herbert, destroying some of the Dutch ships, and taking the rest in tow, sailed up the Thames, leaving the enemy in undisputed possession of the Channel. The news of this defeat, and of the alarm for our unprotected coasts which it had occasioned in London, reached William on the 27th of July at Carrick-on-Suir, where he was encamped, after having reduced Waterford. He immediately hurried to Dublin with the intention of embarking to England; but, reassured by later advices informing him that the French attempt at a descent on the Devonshire coast had proved a failure, he returned to headquarters, and hastened to prosecute the campaign. The glory of the Boyne, however, was destined to be somewhat dimmed before many weeks were past. At Limerick the Celtic Irish showed, with the variability of their unstable race, that they could fight bravely when "i' th' humour." Sarsfield, left in command by the departure in disgust of Lauzun and Tyrconnel, approved himself a leader of vigour and resource. He intercepted and destroyed William's heavier battering-train before it could reach him. The besieged of Limerick, fighting with a desperate courage, which even their women imitated, beat back an assault of the English forces with much bloodshed, and on the 30th of August, fearing the ravages of disease with the approach of the autumnal rains, William raised the siege of the city and returned to England. The campaign thus left undecided was to be taken in hand by a greater commander than himself. Landing in Ireland some three weeks later, the Earl of Marlborough gave promise of his future military prowess in the remarkable speed and success of his operations. In five weeks after leaving Portsmouth he had taken Cork and Kinsale, and had not his fast sickening army constrained his retirement, would probably have settled the whole Irish business out of hand. He returned to London to receive from William, who, besides being incapable of jealousy, was in the habit of underrating his own generalship, the graceful compliment that "no officer living who has seen so little service as my Lord Marlborough is so fit for great commands."
On the 2d of November the King once more met his Parliament, and under more favourable auspices than ever before during his reign. The imminent dangers to which the nation had been exposed had brought about a temporary truce between parties; the skill, energy, and valour with which the King had borne his part in averting them had, moreover, united them in a common sentiment of admiration and gratitude. Thanks were voted both to William, and separately to Mary, who had indeed well merited them by the spirit and vigour which she had displayed during the critical days that followed the defeat of Beachy Head. Supplies of unusual magnitude were voted with unusual readiness, and the short session, marked only by an abortive bill for confiscating the property of Jacobites, passed tranquilly away. On the 5th of January William thanked the Houses for their supplies, and assuring them, in words on which later events were to place an awkward commentary, that he would not grant away any of the forfeited property in Ireland till they had had an opportunity of declaring their wishes in that matter, he adjourned Parliament, and on the following day he quitted London to return for the first time in two years to his native country.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] The conspiracy known as Preston's—a plan of inviting the French king to land troops in England, and offering to second his efforts by an insurrection, and, if possible, the treacherous surrender of the whole or a part of the British fleet. Clarendon and Dartmouth, with other more or less eminent personages, were implicated in it, including, at least as was suspected, the Quaker, William Penn. The conspirators were betrayed by an accomplice, and some of them sent to the Tower. Lord Preston, a Scotch peer, a ringleader of the conspiracy, was tried and convicted for high treason, but subsequently pardoned.
