Gloomy European prospects—Campaign of 1692 in the Netherlands—Defeat of Steinkirk—Attempt of Grandval—Session of 1692—Place Bill and Triennial Bill—Campaign of 1693—William outwitted by Luxembourg—Defeat of Landen—Session of 1693-94—Louis's overtures of peace.
Never perhaps in the whole course of his unresting life were the energies of William more severely taxed, and never did his great moral and intellectual qualities shine forth with a brighter lustre, than in the years 1692-93. The great victory of La Hogue and the destruction of the flower of the French fleet did, it is true, relieve England of any immediate dread either of insurrection or invasion, and so far the prospect before him acquired a slight improvement towards the summer of 1692. But this was the only gleam of light in the horizon; elsewhere the darkness gathered more thickly than ever as the months rolled on. The years 1692 and 1693 were years of diplomatic difficulties and military reverses—the one encountered with unerring sagacity and untiring patience, the other sustained with a noble fortitude. The great coalition of Powers which he had succeeded in forming to resist the ambition of Louis was never nearer dissolution than in the spring of 1692. The Scandinavian states, who had held aloof from it from the first, were now rapidly changing the benevolence of their neutrality into something not easily distinguishable from its reverse. The new Pope Innocent XII. showed himself far less amicably disposed towards William than his two predecessors. The decrepitude of Spain and the arrogant self-will of Austria were displaying themselves more conspicuously than ever. Savoy was ruled by a duke who was more than half suspected of being a traitor. Out of materials so rotten and so ill-assorted as these had the one statesman of the whole group to build up and maintain the barrier which he was bent on erecting against the inroads of France. By what incessant toil and unfailing tact, with what insistences here and concessions there, with what appeals to the vanity of this potentate, the bigotry of that, the cupidity of the third, and the apprehensions of all, he succeeded in keeping them side by side and with their faces to the common enemy it would be impossible to describe, in a manner at all worthy of the subject, within the space at my command. Suffice it to say that William did succeed in saving the league from dissolution, and in getting their armies once more into the field. But not, unfortunately, to any purpose. The campaign of the present year was destined to repeat the errors of the last, and these errors were to be paid for at a heavier cost. Mons had fallen in 1691, through the delays and mismanagement of the allied armies; and in 1692 a greater fortress than Mons was to share its fate. The French king was bent upon the capture of the great stronghold of Namur, and the enemy, as in the case of Mons, were too slow in their movements and too ineffective in their dispositions to prevent it. Marching to the assault of the doomed city, with a magnificence of courtly pageantry which had never before been witnessed in warfare, Louis sat down before Namur, and in eight days its faint-hearted governor, the nominee of the Spanish viceroy of the Netherlands, surrendered at discretion. Having accomplished, or rather having graciously condescended to witness the accomplishment of this feat of arms, Louis returned to Versailles, leaving his army under the command of Luxembourg. The fall of Namur was a severe blow to the hopes of William, but yet worse disasters were in store for him. He was now pitted against one who enjoyed the reputation of the greatest general of the age, and William, a fair but by no means brilliant strategist, was unequal to the contest with his accomplished adversary. Luxembourg lay at Steinkirk, and William approaching him from a place named Lambeque, opened his attack upon him by a well-conceived surprise which promised at first to throw the French army into complete disorder. Luxembourg's resource and energy, however, were equal to the emergency. He rallied and steadied his troops with astonishing speed, and the nature of the ground preventing the allies from advancing as rapidly as they had expected, they found the enemy in a posture to receive them. The British forces were in the front, commanded by Count Solmes, the division of Mackay, a name now honourable for many generations in the annals of continental, no less than of Scottish warfare, leading the way. These heroes, for so, though as yet untried soldiers, they approved themselves, were to have been supported by Count Solmes with a strong body of cavalry and infantry, but at the critical moment he failed them miserably, and his failure decided the fortunes of the day. After a desperate struggle, in which they long sustained the attack of the French household troops, the flower of Louis's army, Mackay's division began to give way. But no effective help arrived from Solmes. His cavalry could not act from the nature of the ground, and he refused to devote his infantry to what he declared was useless slaughter. The division was practically annihilated. Its five regiments, "Cutts's, Mackay's, Angus's, Graham's, and Leven's, all," as Corporal Trim relates pathetically, "cut to pieces, and so had the English Life-guards been too, had it not been for some regiments on the right, who marched up boldly to their relief, and received the enemy's fire in their faces, before any one of their own platoons discharged a musket." Bitter was the resentment in the English army at the desertion of these gallant troops by Count de Solmes, and William gave vent to one of his rare outbursts of anger at the sight. We have it indeed on the authority above quoted—unimpeachable as first-hand tradition, for Sterne had heard the story of these wars at the knees of an eye-witness of and actor in them—that the King "would not suffer the Count to come into his presence for many months after." The destruction of Mackay's division had indeed decided the issue of the struggle. Luxembourg's army was being rapidly strengthened by reinforcements from that of Boufflers, and there was nothing for it but retreat. The loss on both sides had been great, but the moral effect of the victory was still greater. William's reputation for generalship, perhaps unduly raised by his recent exploits in Ireland, underwent a serious decline. The French were exultant at the demonstration of his inferiority to Luxembourg, and the victory of Steinkirk inflamed the national pride to an overweening degree.
William's popularity with his own army and people, however, was at this time about to receive one of those friendly "lifts" which his more unscrupulous enemies were continually giving it throughout his life. Grandval, a French officer, undertook, at the instigation it is said of Barbesieux, the French Minister, and with the connivance of James II., to assassinate him, and set out with that purpose, accompanied by two accomplices, for the camp of the allies. Both of these men, however, appear, with an originality and independence of initiative not often found among traitors, to have played him false simultaneously, yet without any collusion with each other. Grandval had not been long in the Netherlands before he was arrested, brought to trial before a court-martial, and, on his own confession, sentenced to death. His statement, attested by the officers constituting the court-martial, was published immediately after his execution, and the world then learnt that the dying man's meditated crime was, according to his solemn asseveration, suggested to him by a minister then, and after the exposure still retained, in the service of Louis XIV.; and that James had signified to him at an interview at St. Germains that he had been informed of the "business" on which he was setting out, and that if Grandval and his companions rendered him that service "they should never want." Neither the French king nor his Minister ever made any reply to Grandval's confession; but James, though he put forth no public disclaimer, denied on this as on other occasions that he had ever participated in any of the schemes for killing William. Probably the projectors of such schemes were careful never to mention the ugly word assassination in the royal ears, so that it might always be possible for his ex-Majesty to assume that nothing was contemplated but William's "taking-off" in a less serious than the Shakspearean sense. Plots to kidnap the "usurper" were almost as commonly broached as plots to assassinate him; and it was convenient that exalted personages should be able to persuade others, if not themselves, that they were thinking only of seizing William's person when their humbler instruments were in reality bent upon taking his life.
Towards the end of October William arrived in England, and was received with an amount of popular acclamation to which the crime of Grandval had contributed more than his own military prowess. In a few days Parliament met, and the King addressed the two Houses in a judicious speech, in which he congratulated them on their great naval victory, condoled with them on their military reverses, referred with concern to the distress occasioned by the failure of the last harvest, and informed them in effect that yet more money would be required for the effective prosecution of the war. The address in reply was amiable enough, but the Parliament, as the event soon proved, was in no very manageable mood. The confusion of parties caused by William's perseverance in his well-meant attempt at mixed government was now at its height, and the state of things created was undoubtedly not favourable either to executive or legislative efficiency. An assembly divided as was the then House of Commons by two intersecting lines of cleavage, with its Whig and Tory demarcation, traversed by a cross division into "court party" and "country party," was obviously not a body likely to display much unity and vigour. Jealousy of officialism forbade ministers to reckon on the consentaneous support even of members of their own way of political thinking, while on the other hand party differences prevented the formation of a strong opposition.
The session of 1692 was, however, fruitful both in legislative achievement and in successful legislative effort. In this year was made that valuation for the land-tax, which subsisted until the tax itself was made perpetual and redeemable more than a century afterwards in 1798; and the first loan of one million sterling, contracted by the Government in the name of a National Debt, which has now increased to almost a thousand times that amount. But the measures with which the biographer of William is more directly concerned were the Place Bill and the Triennial Bill. Of both of these legislative projects I shall have more to say hereafter. Here let it be enough to note that the former was lost in the House of Lords by a majority of three votes; and that the latter after passing both Houses was held in suspense by William until just the eve of the prorogation, and then vetoed. The occasion is one of special interest to English literature, as it was in reference to this Bill that the King consulted Sir William Temple, whose strong advice to his master to assent to the Bill was conveyed through the medium of his young secretary Jonathan Swift. After making several ministerial changes, including as the most important the elevation of Lord Somers to the Chancellorship, William prorogued Parliament, and once more, in the perpetual succession of the toils of war to the labours of Government, betook himself to the Netherlands. The outlook of the continental struggle had not improved; and the task before him, both diplomatic and military, was as formidable as ever. He had as usual petty quarrels to compose among the allied Powers, and wounded vanities to soothe, to animate the energies of the lagging, and to keep an eye on the movements of the false. The effort in which he was the least successful was the last mentioned but one; he was unable with all his efforts to collect a force equal to that of Luxembourg. He managed, however, to take the field in greater strength than he had mustered on some previous years, and as Louis had now again put himself, with the usual elaboration of gorgeous ceremony, at the head of his army, William promised himself the satisfaction of looking his lifelong enemy once more in the face upon a battlefield. Louis, however, whether from personal cowardice or from having really contracted under the influence of perpetual adulation a sort of religious reverence for his own life, had none of William's military ardour. He liked directing sieges, but had no taste for commanding in pitched battles. In other words, he preferred those operations of war in which the most adventurous of generals must necessarily remain in the rear to those in which the most cautious of generals may find himself imperatively called upon to go to the front. He had hoped that the more agreeable form of warfare would be provided for him, and that he would have an opportunity of taking Liege or Brussels as he had taken Ghent. When, however, he found William posted in his path with a considerable if numerically inferior army, his martial ardour underwent a rapid reduction of temperature, and he at once signified his intention of returning to Versailles. The disappointment of Luxembourg, who had assured him of certain victory over William, was aggravated by the fact that the King insisted on detaching Boufflers with a portion of the army of the Netherlands to reinforce the troops in the Palatinate; which movement having been effected, he went home to Madame de Maintenon.
Luxembourg, however, though reduced in strength, had still the advantage over William in point of numbers, and he succeeded in further increasing the disparity by a feint in the direction of Liege, which deceived William into despatching more than twenty thousand men of his army to protect that city from attack. He was thus left with only fifty thousand men to oppose a force exceeding his own by more than half. His position, however, on the bank of the Gette was a naturally strong one, and by extraordinary efforts with the spade he succeeded in adding most formidably to its strength. On the morning of the 19th of July the men of Luxembourg's army found themselves confronted by a powerful line of earthworks manned by a brave and steady foe. Relying, however, upon a numerical superiority which he rightly regarded as more than counterbalancing William's advantages of position, Luxembourg at an early hour of the morning gave orders for the attack, and the two armies closed in a struggle more bloody and obstinate than that of Steinkirk. For eight hours the battle raged fiercely along the whole line, but most fiercely round the village of Neerwinden on the English right. This, the position of most strategic importance on the field, was disputed with extraordinary fury. Twice did the French troops succeed in making themselves masters of it, and twice were they driven out by the allies, leaving their dead in heaps behind them. At last the household troops, who had done such service at Steinkirk, were sent against this village; it was captured a third time, and this time it was held. William weakened his centre and left in desperate attempts to retake it, but in vain; and at last, as the day was wearing towards the evening, the line of the allies gave way. The French troops poured into and over the entrenchments; the position was captured; nothing remained for the commander of the beaten army but to arrest disorganisation and save retreat from becoming flight. To the moral appeal of the situation William's great nature might be trusted to respond, and it seems to have equally stimulated his strategic capacities. The praise of his famous opponent is sufficient testimony to his skilful conduct of the military operation; the memory of his fiery valour was perpetuated in the traditions of the English army. No doubt it was from some old messmate of Roger Sterne's that the future author of Tristram Shandy gathered the materials of that vivid picture of the retreat across the bridge of Neerspeeken which he has put into the mouth of My Uncle Toby. "The King," Trim reminds his master, "was pressed hard, as your honour knows, on every side of him." "Gallant mortal," cried my Uncle Toby, caught up with enthusiasm, "this moment, now that all is lost, I see him galloping across me, corporal, to the left, to bring up the remains of the English horse along with him to support the right and tear the laurel from Luxembourg's brows if yet 'tis possible. I see him with the knot of his scarf just shot off, infusing fresh spirits into poor Galway's regiment, riding along the line, then wheeling about and charging Conti at the head of it. Brave! brave! by heaven! He deserves a crown!"
With Galway's regiments, we learn from the same tradition, were those of "Wyndham and Lumley." Talmash "brought off the foot with great prudence; but the number of wounded was prodigious, and no one had time to think of anything but his own safety." It is indeed pretty evident that only William's cool heroism saved his army from annihilation. Solmes, the fainÉant of Steinkirk, was left dead on the field. Galway himself, the refugee Ravigny, was taken prisoner; Sarsfield on the other side received a mortal wound. It was by far the deadliest battle of the whole war, and it is difficult to understand why a blow so crushing should have been so slackly followed up. One cannot help thinking what a French army and a French general would have made of such a defeat inflicted upon the troops of a continental coalition on such a battlefield some hundred years later. But the terrible rapidity of those movements with which, as with hammerstrokes, Napoleon was wont to drive home the nail of victory was then unknown to warfare. Town upon town would probably have fallen after Landen had the fruits of the victory been seized, as they would have been at a later day. But, either through the indolence of Luxembourg or the comparative immobility of a seventeenth-century army, William obtained a priceless respite. He was rejoined by the troops whom the enemy had so fatally decoyed to Liege; and three weeks after his defeat he was once more at the head of an army stronger than he had commanded at Landen. The danger to the allied cause was past. Luxembourg besieged and took Charleroi for sole trophy of his great victory, and the campaign closed for the year.
On the 31st of October William landed in England, and prepared for a meeting with his Parliament, to which he could hardly have looked forward with much pleasure. He had a bad account to give and receive. Over the whole Continent, in Spain, Germany, and Italy, as well as Flanders, the allies had met with adverse fortune; at sea the vast "Smyrna fleet" of merchantmen, four hundred strong, had, through the incapacity of our naval commanders, been surprised in the Bay of Lagos by the combined Brest and Toulouse fleets of France, and, its imprudently reduced convoy of twenty English and Dutch sail having been easily mastered, nearly three-fourths of it suffered capture or destruction. His Parliament, however, met him as a matter of fact in a commendably patriotic mood. William made no attempt to ignore the serious losses which the nation had incurred by land and sea, though of the former he said (not perhaps with perfect impartiality towards his own tactical errors) that "they were only occasioned by the great numbers of our enemies, which exceeded ours in all places"; while the latter he described as "having brought great disgrace upon the nation." And, admitting that the charges of the war had already been very great, "I am yet persuaded," he added, "that the experience of the summer is sufficient to convince us all that to arrive at a good end of it there will be a necessity of increasing our forces both by sea and land." The reply of the Commons was cordial, and manifested no hesitation as to granting the increased supplies; and their patriotic spirit encouraged William to hold his ground on a question in which the minds of the allies were just now about to be exercised. Louis XIV., insatiable in war as he had hitherto been, was beginning to feel that he, and still more that France, had had enough of the struggle. Five years of hostilities carried on in half a dozen quarters of Europe, with a failure of the French harvest and the vintage, had almost prostrated the country. Distress was rife in the provinces; even that most patient of people showed signs of disaffection. Louis made private overtures to the States-General with the intention, of course, of his proposals being brought to the ear of William. Through the neutral King of Denmark he signified his willingness to restore all the conquests he had made during the present war, to renounce his pretensions to the Low Countries, and to agree that the Elector of Bavaria should have the Spanish Netherlands in case of the death of the King of Spain, and that the commercial arrangements of Europe should be put on their old footing. The great crux of the negotiations, and of all negotiations with a similar object, was, and was known to be, the question of the recognition or non-recognition of the de facto King and Queen of England. On this question, so far as we can now judge, the mouth-pieces of Louis gave forth an uncertain sound. The King of Denmark told the allies that he was making efforts to induce the King of France to waive the demand for the restoration of James; the French Ambassador hinted at a compromise. This, it has been suggested, was that "James should waive his rights, and that the Prince of Wales should be sent to England, be bred a Protestant, and, being adopted by William and Mary, be declared his heir." To such an arrangement Macaulay thinks that William would probably have had no objection, but that he "neither would nor could have made it a condition of peace with France, since the question who should reign in England was to be decided by England alone." Undoubtedly William "could" not have independently assented to a condition which, to acquire the least validity, would have necessitated the statutory revision of the succession settlement, as effected by the Convention and ratified by the Convention Parliament; but there does not seem to be much evidence that he would have assented to the condition if he could. There is no trace of any endeavour on his part to sound the chiefs of his parliamentary parties on the subject, and I cannot but think it far more likely that neither in this nor in any other matter of foreign policy was William at all disposed to share any of his discretionary powers in his capacity of virtual Foreign Minister with his Parliament, so long as he could obtain what he wanted from that body without admitting it any more fully to his confidence. His rejection of Louis's overtures, including this offer of compromise, if it was made, was probably not dictated by any high constitutional considerations at all. He thought, and rightly, that pacific advances made by so haughty an enemy indicated greater exhaustion than had been suspected, and reckoning justly that another year or two of fighting would get him better terms still, he decided that another year or two of fighting there should be. The supplies had been cheerfully voted him, and that was enough. That the Parliament which had voted them had any paramount right to decide whether they would go on voting money or accept Louis's terms almost certainly never entered his mind. To suppose that it did is to attribute to him a theory of the constitution anachronistic by fully fifty years. That such a theory is more or less designedly attributed to him in the above-quoted passage from Macaulay appears unquestionable; and the Whig historian's anticipation of history in this respect is of a piece with his exaggeration of the permanent significance of the constitutional changes which fall to be treated of in the next chapter.
