Death of the Electoral Prince of Bavaria—Renewed negotiations—Second Partition Treaty—The Irish forfeitures—The Resumption Bill—Will and death of the King of Spain.
The political event on which William had founded hopes of re-opening the army question has been indirectly referred to in the last chapter. This event, as has been said, was one which might reasonably have been thought likely to dispose the English Parliament to a more liberal view of the military necessities of the country by bringing once more into prominence a European danger which diplomacy had been hitherto believed to have averted. In the early days of 1699 the Electoral Prince of Bavaria—the youthful heir-designate of the Spanish monarchy—took his departure from a troubled world whose confusions were to be formidably increased by his quitting it. The English Parliament, as we have seen, refused to allow the Prince's death to modify their policy. But William could not afford to overlook it; for it, of course, reopened at once the whole question which had been closed by the First Partition Treaty, and rendered it necessary to nominate a new successor to the Spanish kingdom and its possessions in the New World. Louis XIV. was the first to move in the matter. He instructed De Tallard to sound William as to a new Treaty, and, after one or two candidates had been mentioned and rejected, it was finally agreed between the French and English sovereigns that the Archduke Charles, the son of the Emperor Leopold, should be the future King of Spain and the Indies, and that the Milanese, which had been allotted to him under the First Treaty, should go to Louis, by whom it was to be bartered for Lorraine. The arrangement was complete in all respects except that of having received the sanction of the Emperor by the summer or early autumn of 1699; but the rumour of it caused a violent outbreak of indignation in Spain. The Marquis of Canales, Spanish Ambassador at the English Court, was instructed to protest, which he did in terms so insolently imperious that William, on being informed at Loo of the language used by him, at once directed that the Marquis's passports should be handed to him, and at the same time recalled our own ambassador at Madrid. By whose means the provisions of the new Treaty were communicated to the Spanish Court and people is not certainly known; but considering that one of the parties to whom it had been submitted rejected it (for the Emperor at the eleventh hour refused to sign), and, moreover, that another party—the French king—had never, in all probability, sincerely assented to it, there is no need for much speculation on this point. Leopold had known and obvious motives for disclosing it to the unhappy Charles, and Louis is more than suspected of having private motives for doing so. But whichever of the two was the medium of communication, Louis was indisputably the gainer. The news aroused a powerful anti-Austrian feeling in the minds of the Spanish people, of which the French King, who was far better served at the Court of Madrid than the Emperor, was not slow to take advantage. From the autumn of 1699 till the 1st of November 1700, when the few and miserable days of Charles II. came to an end, the agents of France worked persistently, and in the end successfully, to overcome the Austrian leanings of the dying monarch, and to convince him that on grounds of patriotism, no less than of legal and moral obligation, he was bound to devise his dominions to his lawful French heir, and away from the Prince to whom Louis had solemnly agreed with William that they should pass.
The final consummation of these intrigues, however, was still a year distant, and meanwhile an incident of extreme interest, and at the time of exceeding gravity, in English politics, has to be recorded. On the 19th of November Parliament met again, and in a mood which boded ill for the relations between the sovereign and the third estate of his realm. The session began with one of the numerous abortive attacks made upon Somers in the course of his distinguished career, and an equally unsuccessful attempt was made to procure the disgrace of that perpetual bugbear of the Tories, Bishop Burnet. But these were merely in the nature of preliminary skirmishes; it was not long before hostilities were opened upon William and his Ministers in a more serious way. It will be remembered that at the close of the last session the Commons tacked to the Land Tax Bill a clause appointing seven commissioners to inquire into the Irish forfeitures, and that the Lords, after some demur to the manner in which the proposal was being forced upon them, passed the measure. The report of these commissioners, who had been pursuing their inquiries in Ireland during the recess, was now ready, and early in the session it was presented to Parliament, signed by four of the commissioners, the other three dissenting. Disfigured by many exaggerations and some wilful misstatements, this important document contained, nevertheless, an amount of discreditable truth sufficient not only to excite considerable popular feeling against William at the time, but to inflict some permanent injury on his historical reputation.
The four commissioners reported that all the lands in the several counties in Ireland belonging to the forfeited persons amounted, as far as they could reckon, to 1,060,762 acres, worth £211,623 per annum, and computed therefrom to be of the capital value of £2,685,138. That some of these lands had been restored to the old proprietors by virtue of the Articles of Limerick and Galway, or by his Majesty's favour through reversal of outlawries, and royal pardons obtained chiefly by gratifications to such persons as had abused his Majesty's royal bounty and compassion; and that besides these restitutions, which they thought to be corruptly procured, there were seventy-six grants and "custodians" under the Great Seal of Ireland, of which they made a recital—as, for instance, to the Lord Romney, three grants now in being, containing 49,517 acres; to the Earl of Albemarle, in two grants, 106,633 acres in possession and reversion; to William Bentinck, Esq., Lord Woodstock (Portland's eldest son), 135,820 acres of land; to the Earl of Athlone in two grants, 26,480 acres; to the Earl of Galway one grant of 36,148 acres, etc. That the estates so mentioned did not indeed yield so much to the grantees as they were valued at, because as most of them had abused his Majesty on the real value of their estates, so their agents had imposed upon them, and had either sold or let the greatest part of these lands at an undervalue; but that after all deductions and allowances there yet remained £1,699,343: 14s. which they laid before the Commons as the gross value of the estates forfeited since the 13th day of February 1689, and not restored. The commissioners went on, in excess, as it should seem, of their attributions,[20] to report that William had conferred the forfeited Irish estates of the late King James, estimated at 95,649 acres, worth £25,998 a year, on his mistress, the Countess of Orkney. Excluding this item, however, the value of the restorations and royal grants against which the commissioners reported amounted, it will be seen, to close upon a million sterling.
It is very probable, indeed it may be said to be certain, that the total value of these forfeitures was grossly exaggerated by the commissioners; it is possible that it was to some extent wilfully exaggerated for party purposes. The lands forfeited in Ireland during the Revolution may have been worth "nearer half a million sterling than two millions and a half." It does not seem to me, however, that this is a point of the importance which Macaulay seems to attach to it. Even if it could be shown that the proportion of the royal grants to the total forfeitures was unduly magnified through an over-estimate of the value of the former, I cannot see that it would affect the merits of the case. The real gist of the charge against William in respect of these grants—assuming, that is to say, that he was justified in making them at all without the sanction of Parliament—is to be sought not in a comparison of the royal benefactions with the amount of the property at his disposal, but in an examination of their proportions inter se. Even if it be shown that he distributed property of the value not of a million sterling, but of only a fifth of that sum, it remains equally true in either case, that more than one-tenth of his bounty went to a single favourite who had little or no public services to show for them, and very nearly an eighth to a young man whose only claim upon him was that of being an able and faithful servant's eldest son. The grants to Albemarle and Woodstock are impossible to defend, and the latter almost impossible to explain. William had already loaded Portland with benefits, and to the vast estates he had bestowed upon him in England his eldest son would, in the natural course of events, succeed. On what ground, either of justice or even of sentiment, it could have been thought well to enrich the expectant heir of so much English landed property with 135,820 acres of forfeited Irish land is a mystery which has never been satisfactorily explained. As to the grant to Albemarle, it was of even worse example. Woodstock was at least the son of a counsellor to whom William owed much, and whom he might conceivably have regarded himself as rewarding in the person of his heir; but what had Keppel, a mere favourite, a young courtier with no other recommendations but his youth, his good looks, and his complaisance, a personality too closely recalling that of a "minion" of Henri Trois, and which in the Jacobite libels, not wisely to be thus supplied with colourable pretexts for their calumnies, was openly so described—what, one cannot but ask, had Keppel done to deserve a grant of 106,633 acres of the forfeited Irish land? Compare these two largesses, Woodstock's and Albemarle's, with those bestowed on Lord Romney, an ex-Secretary of State, and one of the leaders of the movement which brought William to England; on Lord Athlone, the stout Dutch soldier who, as General Ginkel, had given and taken many a hard knock in his master's service; on Lord Galway, that gallant Marquis de Ruvigny who had turned the flank of the Irish on the bloody day of Aghrim. Albemarle's, the smaller of the two, is more than twice that of Romney, nearly thrice that of Galway, more than four times that of Athlone. It was impossible for William to contend in the face of this evidence that he had simply been using the forfeited lands of Irish rebels to reward those public servants who had done most by valour in the field, or wisdom in the council-chamber, to establish firmly on the throne of England, the Prince chosen by the nation; and that therefore he was merely anticipating the national reward which would have been conferred upon them, and virtually drawing upon one national fund in relief of prospective charges upon another. He could not even contend, as we have seen, that this was the main use to which he had put the forfeitures; for though wisdom and valour had come in for a share of the spoils, their share was lamentably smaller than that which was won by mere arts of courtiership. There is, in short, no denying the fact that while William applied a part of this property to strictly public objects, or, in other words, to objects to which, but for such application of it, the public would have to contribute in another shape, he devoted far too large a portion of it to purposes of purely private benefaction, for which he would otherwise have had to resort to drafts upon his Civil List.[21]
But even this does not exhaust all the disagreeable elements in the transaction. Had the Irish forfeitures been simply in the nature of property "within the order and disposition" of the sovereign, and impressed with only a constructive trust for the benefit of the nation, the King's dealings with it would have been open to grave reprehension. As a matter of fact, however, the property in question was the subject not of a mere constructive trust, but of an express recognition on William's part of its fiduciary character, and of a distinct promise that Parliament, as representing the cestui que trust, should have an opportunity of deciding on the proper mode of its application. On the 5th of January 1691 the King had closed the short autumn with a speech, in which he assured the Houses that he would not "make any grant of the forfeited lands in England and Ireland till there be another opportunity of settling that matter in Parliament, in such manner as shall be thought most expedient." This undertaking had reference to a Bill which had actually passed the Commons for applying the Irish forfeitures, and which only failed to become law because William, who was due at the Congress then about to meet at the Hague, was compelled to prorogue Parliament before the Lords had had time to consider the measure. It is vain to contend that this promise was fulfilled, because several "opportunities" were given to Parliament to deal with the question—in the sense that several sessions were allowed to pass without Parliament moving in the matter—before William himself proceeded to grant away the forfeited lands. William was not entitled, under the circumstances, to infer any surrender of parliamentary control over the forfeitures from mere parliamentary inaction. Such an inference would in any case have been a somewhat questionable one; but this was a case in which the wishes of one branch of the Legislature had already been recorded in the form of a distinct legislative project. The King knew, in short, that the Commons desired to make Irish rebellion as far as possible pay for its own suppression; he knew that they looked to the value of the rebels' lands to afford partial relief to the English tax-payer from the heavy imposts to which he was being subjected; and when, knowing this, he proceeded to grant away large tracts of these lands, thus affected to the national service, at his own will and pleasure, and in many cases to persons whom the nation would never have consented to endow so munificently out of its own pocket, he was unquestionably dealing with his Parliament and people after a fashion which, in the case of a private individual standing in analogous relation to other parties, would be severely condemned. If he intended to ignore his promise of January 1691 altogether, his grants were mere high-handed usurpations of right; if he relied upon the mere "allowance of opportunities" in the manner above mentioned as being a fulfilment of that promise, then he was guilty of something which can only be described in modern phraseology as sharp practice.
Undoubtedly the House of Commons might have proceeded with more moderation than they displayed, but the majority in that House felt that they had a good, and what was still better, a popular case against the King and his advisers; they knew that the country was sore with the weight of taxation, and jealous of the amount of royal favour bestowed upon foreigners; and they felt that they might rely upon the combined force of these two sentiments to support them in extreme measures. Having gained their first triumph in the committal to the Tower of Sir Richard Levinge, one of the dissentient commissioners who had charged his colleagues with speaking disrespectfully of the sovereign in connection with these benefactions, they introduced the famous Resumption Bill, a measure by which all the royal grants were invalidated, and the whole of the alienated property resumed to the use of the State. In the Bill sent up to the Lords from the Lower House in 1690 it had been proposed to reserve a third part of the forfeitures to the King, and William was not without hopes that this reservation, which would just about have covered his grants to Woodstock, Albemarle, and the three other peers whose names have been mentioned above, would be renewed. The imperious majority, however, refused to hear of any such modification of their demands. They rejected a clause moved by Ministers for reserving at least some portion of the forfeitures to the King; and they carried resolutions to the effect that "the advising, procuring, and passing of the grants in Ireland had been the occasion of contracting great debts, and laying heavy burdens upon the people; that the said grants reflected highly upon the King's honour; and that the officers and instruments concerned in procuring and passing them had highly failed in the performance of their duty." These resolutions were presented to William at Kensington by the Speaker and leaders of the Opposition. William replied that he had thought himself bound to reward out of the forfeited property those who had served him well, and especially those who had borne a principal part in the reduction of Ireland. The war, he said, had undoubtedly left behind it a heavy debt, and he should be glad to see that debt reduced by just and effectual means.
The answer, though undoubtedly weak enough, seems scarcely open to one of the criticisms which Macaulay pronounces upon it[22]. It would have been not so much injudicious as absurd on William's part to "hint" that the Irish forfeitures "could not justly be applied to the discharge of the public debts." His meaning could only have been that it would not be just to the grantees to resume their property in order to apply it to public uses. It would appear, however, that the House of Commons understood his words in the wider and less defensible sense. The Resumption Bill was pushed vigorously through the House of Commons, and in order to paralyze the expected resistance of the Lords, the expedient of tacking was again resorted to. The Bill was tacked to a Land Tax Bill for raising two shillings in the pound for the service of the next year, and then sent to the Upper House. It passed its second reading by a considerable majority, but in committee and on the third reading several amendments were carried. It is highly significant, however, that though William was known to be very solicitous to obtain the confirmation of at least some of his Irish grants, and though the majority in the Lords in favour of the amendment may be supposed desirous of doing all that they reasonably could to gratify him, the Bill as regards his dealings with the Irish forfeitures was left untouched. The majority contented themselves with modifying certain arbitrary and inequitable provisions whereby the Lower House had sought to usurp jurisdiction over property which had never come to the Crown by forfeiture at all, and to grant estates and sums of money of their own authority, and without the constitutional intermediation of the Crown, to certain favoured individuals. Thus amended, the Bill was sent back to the Lower House, where it met of course with the very reception which the expedient of tacking was designed, in the event of its coming back with amendments, to secure for it. Parties had been much divided as to the policy of tacking the Resumption Bill to a money Bill; but as to the duty of resisting an attempt on the part of the Lords to amend a Bill sent up to them in this fashion parties were united. The amendments were rejected nemine dissentiente, and at the conference which followed the Lords were informed by the managers of the Commons that the point of constitutional practice was too well settled to be arguable, and that the Bill was left in their hands along with the responsibility of all the serious consequences which must follow its rejection. The Lords nevertheless for a time stood firm; they resolved by a majority of thirteen to adhere to their amendments, and on the following day the Bill was, on a second conference, returned once more to the Commons, by whom it was once more sent back to the Lords, with an intimation that the determination of the Lower House was unalterable. This was on the 10th of May, and the whole of that day and night the greatest public excitement prevailed. The deadlock between the two Houses had reached such a point that if both refused to give way, and the supplies were consequently lost, a complete dislocation of the national business, accompanied in all probability by dangerous popular disturbance, would have assuredly followed.
From this peril the country was saved at the critical moment by the good sense and magnanimity of William. His behaviour was the more creditable to him because not only was he eager, as has been said, for the rejection of the Resumption Bill, but he had taken so active a part in the attempt to bring about that result that surrender must necessarily subject him to additional humiliation. There can be no doubt from the account given by Burnet, whose own painful perplexity between the claims of courtiership and patriotism increases the value of his testimony on the subject, that William had tried hard to procure the defeat of the measure. "The King," says the Bishop, "seemed resolved to venture on all the ill consequences that might follow the losing this Bill, though these would probably have been fatal. As far as we can judge either another session of that Parliament or a new one would have banished the favourites and begun the Bill anew with the addition of obliging the grantees to refund all the mesne profits. Many in the Lords, that in all other things were very firm to the King, were for passing the Bill, notwithstanding the King's earnestness for it, since they apprehended the ill consequences that were like to follow if it was lost." On the 5th of April he told Portland that if the Bill was not stopped in the Upper House he should count all lost; and on the same day he declared that he was resolved not to pass the Bill, and that the only question was whether he should prorogue the Parliament on that day or on the following Monday. On or before the 10th of April he had reflected more maturely on the situation, and with that intuitive recognition of when to give way, which only strong rulers ever seem to exhibit, and which the masterful Elizabeth had displayed before him, he saw that the time had arrived to yield. He took steps to have it conveyed to his adherents in the Upper House that he desired the Bill to pass; and on the sitting of the following day, May 11, the Lords withdrew their amendments and accepted the Bill in its original form. Thus passed away a most perilous crisis, and William, by the fine temper and moral courage with which he thus submitted to perhaps the most galling rebuke ever inflicted upon a monarch by a legislative assembly, must be admitted to have gone far to atone for the serious error of his previous action. He was, however, and not unnaturally, of opinion that he had done enough in the cause of the peace, and the next day, in order to prevent the presentation to him of an address from the Commons, praying that no person not a native, except Prince George of Denmark, should be admitted to his Majesty's Councils in England or Ireland, he came down and prorogued Parliament without a speech.
The whole of the year 1700 was destined to abound in fresh troubles for this sorely-tried and now fast waning life. No sooner had the English Parliament separated than the Scotch Parliament met; and their first business was to espouse the cause of their foolish and unlucky countrymen who had taken part in the famous "Darien expedition," and were now under detention by the Spanish Government at Carthagena. The notable scheme in which these men had thus lost their liberty, and so many thousands of other Scotchmen their property, was originated by an adventurer of the name of Paterson, and depended for its success on the double assumption that the territorial owners of the country on which they proposed to found a trading station for the avowed purpose of diverting trade from these owners' hands into their own would respect their occupancy, and that the burning heat and malarious climate of an equatorial region would spare their lives. Neither of these assumptions had been realised. The sun and the swamps had thinned the number of the settlers to a handful, and this remnant had been besieged, forced to capitulate, and expelled from the isthmus by the forces of Spain. William promised, in reply to an address from the Edinburgh legislators, to demand the release of the Carthagena prisoners; but when the Scotch Parliament proceeded to pass a resolution affirming that the colony in Darien was a legal and rightful settlement, and that the Parliament would maintain and support the same, the King thought it high time to put a check on their proceedings. This he endeavoured to do through the royal commissioner by means of repeated adjournments carried to such an extent as to cause riots in Edinburgh, and at last, by dint of conciliatory replies to their resolutions, and possibly by gratifications of a more substantial kind, succeeded not only in pacifying his northern subjects on this matter, but in bringing them, before the close of the session at the end of the year, into a state of such loyal complaisance that, unlike their English brethren, the Scotch legislators voted for keeping on foot the whole of the land forces that existed in the kingdom when the session began.The time was now fast approaching when William's military policy was to be justified by events. Throughout the whole of this year the struggle of rival Powers over the fast decaying body of the unhappy Charles had gone spiritedly forward at the Court of Madrid. The combatants, however, were unequally matched. On the side of France were enlisted the services of Cardinal Portocarrero, who soon succeeded in removing the King's confessor—an Austrian instrument—and substituting another in the French interests. The terrors of religion were then brought to bear upon the wretched sovereign in a strength sufficient to overcome his natural leanings in the matter of the disposition of his crown and kingdom towards his own Austrian flesh and blood. They persuaded the unhappy imbecile that he had been bewitched through Austrian agency; they persuaded the populace of Madrid that the partisans of Austria had brought about a famine. Having at last succeeded in utterly discrediting the rival party, and working upon the superstition of Charles until he believed that if he ousted his Bourbon heir from the succession he would be inevitably damned, the French faction finally induced him to sign a will appointing Philip, Duke of Anjou, universal successor to the Spanish monarchy. A month afterwards this miserable slave of the priest and the plotter at last obtained his manumission. He died on the 1st of November 1700, and William then learnt for the first time that the months of laborious negotiations spent on the successive framing of two carefully-drawn treaties had been completely thrown away. For a brief space of time, indeed, he remained in doubt whether Louis really intended to play him false, but before the middle of the month of November all uncertainty was at an end. Louis threw over the Partition Treaty and adopted the will. The Duke of Anjou was despatched into Spain with the historic exclamation touching the effacement of the Pyrenees—mountains certainly not in this instance removed by "faith,"—and William had the intolerable chagrin of discovering not only that he had been befooled, but that his English subjects had no sympathy with him or animosity against the royal swindler who had tricked him. "The blindness of the people here," he writes sadly to the Pensionary Heinsius, "is incredible. For though the affair is not public, yet it was no sooner said that the King of Spain's will was in favour of the Duke of Anjou, than it was the general opinion that it was better for England that France should accept the will than fulfil the Treaty of Partition."
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