 History of England, Chapter 7, Part 1 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information and to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The History of England from the Excession of James II by Thomas Bubbington Macaulay, Chapter 7, Part 1 The place which William Henry, Prince of Orange Nassau, occupies in the history of England and of mankind, is so great that it may be desirable to portray with some minuteness the strong lineaments of his character. He was now in his 37th year, but both in body and in mind he was older than other men of the same age. Indeed it might be said that he had never been young. His external appearance is almost as well known to us as it is to his own captains and counsellors, sculptors, painters and medalists. Exerted their utmost skill in the work of transmitting his features to posterity, and his features were such as no artist could fail to seize, and such as, one scene, could never be forgotten. His name at once calls up before us a slender and feeble frame, a lofty and ample forehead, a nose curved like the beak of an eagle, an eye rivalling that of an eagle in brightness and keenness, a thoughtful and somewhat solemn brow, a firm and somewhat peevish mouth, a cheek pale, thin and deeply furrowed by sickness and by care, that pensive, severe and solemn aspect could scarcely have belonged to a happy or a good human man. But it indicates in a manner not to be mistaken capacity equal to the most arduous enterprises and fortitude not to be shaken by reverses or dangers. Nature had largely endowed William with the qualities of a great ruler, and education had developed those qualities in no common degree. With strong natural sense and rare force of will, he found himself, when first his mind began to open, a fatherless and motherless child, the chief of a great but depressed and disheartened party, and the heirs of vast and indefinite pretensions which excited the dread and a version of the oligarchy, then supreme in the United Provinces. The common people fondly attached during a century to his house, indicated whenever they saw him, in a manner not to be mistaken, that they regarded him as their rightful head, the able and experienced ministers of the Republic, mortal enemies of his name, came every day to pay their feigned civilities to him, and to observe the progress of his mind. The first movements of his ambition were carefully watched. Every unguarded word uttered by him was noted down, nor had he near him any advisor on whose judgment reliance could be placed. He was scarcely fifteen years old when all the domestics who were attached to his interest, or who enjoyed any share of his confidence, were removed from under his roof by the jealous government. He remonstrated with energy beyond his years, but in vain. Vigilant observers saw the tears more than once rise in the eyes of the young state prisoner. His health, naturally delicate, sank for a time under the emotions which his desolate situation had produced. Such situations bewilder and unnerve the weak. But call forth all the strength of the strong, surrounded by snares in which an ordinary youth would have perished. William learned to tread at once, warily, and firmly. Long before he reached manhood, he knew how to keep secrets, how to baffle curiosity by dry and guarded answers, how to conceal all passions under the same show of grave tranquillity. Meanwhile he made little proficiency in fashionable or literary accomplishments. The manners of the Dutch nobility of that age wanted the grace which was found in the highest perfection amongst the gentlemen of France, and which, in an inferior degree, embellished the court of England, and his manners were altogether Dutch, even his countrymen thought him blunt. To foreigners he often seemed churlish. In his intercourse with the world in general he appeared ignorant or negligent of those arts, which doubled the value of a favour, and take away the sting of a refusal. He was little interested in letters or science. The discoveries of Newton and Leibniz, the poems of Dryden and Bwaluw, were unknown to him. Dramatic performances tired him, and he was glad to turn away from the stage, and to talk about public affairs, while Orestes was raving, or while Tartuffe was pressing Elmira's hand. He had indeed some talent for sarcasm, and not seldom employed, quite unconsciously, a natural rhetoric quaint indeed but vigorous and original. He did not, however, in the least affect the character of a wit or of an orator. His attention had been confined to those studies which formed strenuous and sagacious men of business. From a child he listened with interest when high questions of alliance, finance, and war were discussed. Of geometry he learned as much as was necessary for the construction of a raveling or a hornwork, of languages by the help of a memory singularly powerful. He learned as much as was necessary to enable him to comprehend and answer without assistance everything that was said to him, and every letter which he received. The Dutch was his own tongue. He understood Latin, Italian, and Spanish. He spoke and wrote French, English, and German. Inelegantly it is true, and inexactly, but fluently and intelligibly. No qualification could be more important to a man whose life was to be passed in organizing great alliances and in commanding armies assembled from different countries. One class of philosophical questions had been forced on his attention by circumstances, and seemed to have interested him more than might have been expected from his general character. Among the Protestants of the United Provinces, as among the Protestants of our island, there were two great villages parties, which almost exactly coincided with two great political parties. The chiefs of the municipal oligarchy were Aminians, and were commonly regarded by the multitude as little better than papists. The Princes of Orange had generally been the patrons of the Calvinistic divinity, and owed no small part of their popularity to their zeal for the doctrines of election and final perseverance, a zeal not always enlightened by knowledge or tempered by humanity. William had been carefully instructed from a child in the theological system to which his family was attached, and regarded that system with even more than the partiality which men generally feel for a hereditary faith. He had ruminated on the great enigmas which had been discussed in the Synod of Dought, and had found in the austere and inflexible logic of the Genovese school something which suited his intellect and his temper. That example of intolerance, indeed which some of his predecessors had set, he never imitated. For all persecution he felt a fixed aversion which he avowed, not only where the avowal was obviously politic, but on occasions where it seemed that his interest would have been promoted by dissimulation or by silence. His theological opinions, however, were even more decided than those of his ancestors. The tenets of predestination was the keystone of his religion. He often declared that if he were to abandon that tenet he must abandon with it all belief in a superintending providence, and must become a mere epicurean. Except in this single instance all the sap of his vigorous mind were early drawn away from the speculative to the practical. The faculties which are necessary for the conduct of important business ripened in him at a time of life when they have scarcely begun to blossom in ordinary men. Since Octavius the world had seen no such instance of precocious statesmanship. Skillful diplomatists were surprised to hear the weighty observations which had seventeen the prince made on public affairs, and still more surprised to see a lad in situations in which he might have been expected to betray strong passion, preserve a composure as imperturbable as their own. At eighteen he sates among the fathers of the Commonwealth. Grave, discreet, and judicious as the oldest among them. At twenty-one in a day of gloom and terror he was placed at the head of the administration. At twenty-three he was renowned throughout Europe as a soldier and a politician. He had put domestic factions under his feet, he was the soul of a mighty coalition, and he had contended with honour in the field against some of the greatest generals of his age. His personal tastes were those rather of a warrior than of a statesman. But he, like his great-grandfather the silent prince who founded the Batavian Commonwealth, occupies a far higher place among statesmen than among warriors. The event of battles indeed is not an unfailing test of the abilities of a commander, and it would be peculiarly unjust to apply this test to William, for it was his fortune to be almost always opposed to captains who were consummate masters of their art, and to troops far superior in discipline to his own. Yet there is reason to believe that he was by no means equal as a general in the field, to some who ranked far below him in intellectual powers. To those whom he trusted he spoke on this subject with the magnanimous frankness of a man who had done great things and who could well afford to acknowledge some deficiencies. He had never, he said, served an apprenticeship to the military profession. He had been placed while still a boy at the head of an army. Among his officers there had been none competent to instruct him. His own blunders and their consequences had been his only lessons. I would give he once exclaimed a good part of my estates to have served a few campaigns under the Prince of Cond before I had to command against him. It is not improbable that the circumstance which prevented William from attaining any eminent dexterity in strategy may have been favourable to the general vigor of his intellect. If his battles were not those of a great tactician, they entitled him to be called a great man. No disaster could for one moment deprive him of his firmness or of the entire possession of all his faculties. His defeats were repaired with such marvellous celerity that before his enemies have sung the Te Deum he was again ready for conflict, nor did his adverse fortune ever deprive him of the respect and confidence of his soldiers. That respect and confidence he owed in no small measure to his personal courage. Courage in the degree which is necessary to carry a soldier without disgrace through a campaign is possessed or might under proper training be acquired by the great majority of men. But courage like that of William is rare indeed. He was proved by every test, by war, by wounds, by painful and depressing maladies, by raging seas, by the imminent and constant risk of assassination, a risk which has shaken very strong nerves, a risk which severely tried even the adamantine fortitude of Cromwell. Yet none could ever discover what that thing was which the Prince of Orange feared. His advisers could with difficulty induce him to take any precaution against the pistols and daggers of conspirators. Old sailors were amazed at the composure which he preserved amidst roaring breakers on a perilous coast. In battle his bravery made him conspicuous even among tens of thousands of brave warriors, drew forth the generous applause of hostile armies, and was never questioned even by the injustice of hostile factions. During his first campaigns he exposed himself like a man who sought for death, was always foremost in the charge and last in the retreat, fought sword in hand in the thickest press and with musket-ball in his arm and the blood streaming over his caress still stood his ground and waved his hat under the hottest fire. His friends adjured him to take more care of a life invaluable to his country, and his most illustrious antagonist, the great Condor, remarked after the bloody day of Senef, that the Prince of Orange had in all things borne himself like an old general, except in exposing himself like a young soldier. William denied that he was guilty of temerity. It was, he said, from a sense of duty, and on a cool calculation of what the public interest required, that he was always at the post of danger. The troops which he commanded had been little used to war, and shrank from a close encounter with a veteran soldier of France. It was necessary that their leader should show them how battles were to be won, and in truth, more than one day which had seemed hopelessly lost, was retrieved by the hardy-hood with which he rallied his broken battalions and cut down with his own hand the cowards who set the example of flight. Sometimes, however, it seemed that he had a strange pleasure in venturing his person. It was remarked that his spirits were never so high, and his manners never so gracious and easy as amidst the tumult and carnage of a battle. Even in his pastimes he liked the excitement of danger. Cards, chess, and billiards gave him no pleasure. The chase was his favourite recreation, and he loved it most when it was most hazardous. His leaps were sometimes such that his boldest companions did not like to follow him. He seems, even to have thought, the most hardy field-sports of England if eminence, and to have pined in the great park of Windsor for the game which he had been used to drive to bay in the forest of Gelder's. Wolves, wild boars, and huge stags with sixteen antlers. The audacity of his spirit was the more remarkable because his physical organisation was unusually delicate. From a child he had been weak and sickly. In the prime of manhood his complaints had been aggravated by a severe attack of smallpox. He was asthmatic and consumptive. His slender frame was shaken by a constant horse cough. He could not sleep unless his head was propped by several pillows, and could scarcely draw his breath in any but the purest air. Cruel headaches frequently tortured him. Exertion soon fatigued him. The physicians constantly kept up the hopes of his enemies by fixing some dates beyond which, if there were anything certain in medical science, it was impossible that his broken constitution could hold out. Yet through a life which was one long disease the force of his mind never failed on any great occasion to bear up his suffering and languid body. He was born with violent passions and quick sensibilities, but the strength of his emotions was not suspected by the world. From the multitude his joy and his grief, his affection, and his resentment were hidden by a phlegmatic serenity which made him pass for the most cold blooded of mankind. Those who brought him good news could seldom detect any sign of pleasure. Those who saw him after a defeat looked in vain for any trace of vexation. He praised and reprimanded, rewarded and punished with the stern tranquility of a mohawk chief. But those who knew him well and saw him near were aware that under all this ice a fierce fire was constantly burning. It was seldom that anger deprived him of power over himself. But when he was really enraged the first outbreak of his passion was terrible. It was indeed scarcely safe to approach him. On these rare occasions however, as soon as he regained his self-command, he made such ample reparation to those whom he had wronged as tempted them to wish that he were going to a fury again. His affection was as impetuous as his wrath. Where he loved, he loved with the whole energy of his strong mind, when death separated him from what he loved, the few who witnessed his agonies trembled for his reason and his life. To a very small circle of intimate friends, on whose fidelity and secrecy he could absolutely depend, he was a different man from the reserved and stoical William whom the multitude supposed to be destitute of human feelings. He was kind, cordial, open, even convivial, and jacose would sit at table many hours and would bear his full-share infestive conversation. Highest in his favour stood a gentleman of his household named Bentink, sprung from a noble Batavian race and destined to be the founder of one of the great patrician houses of England. The fidelity of Bentink had been tried by no common test. It was while the United Provinces were struggling for existence against the French power that the young prince on whom all their hopes were fixed was seized by the smallpox. That disease had been fatal to many members of his family, and at first war, in his case, a peculiarly belignant aspect, the public consternation was great. The streets of the Hague were crowded from daybreak to sunset by persons anxiously asking how his highness was. At length his complaint took a favourable turn. His escape was attributed partly to his own singular equanimity and partly to the intrepid and indefatigable friendship of Bentink. From the hands of Bentink alone, William took food and medicine. By Bentink alone, William was lifted from his bed and laid down in it. Whether Bentink slept or not while I was ill said William to temple with great tenderness, I know not. But this I know, that through sixteen days and nights I never once called for anything but that Bentink was instantly at my side. Before the faithful servant had entirely performed his task, he had himself caught the contagion. Still, however, he bore up against drowsiness and fever till his master was pronounced convalescent. Then, at length, Bentink asked leave to go home. It was time, for his limbs would no longer support him. He was in great danger, but recovered, and as soon as he left his bed, hastened to the army, where during many sharp campaigns he was ever found, as he had been in peril of a different kind, close to William's side. Such was the origin of a friendship as warm and pure as any that ancient or modern history records. The descendants of Bentink still preserve many letters written by William to their ancestor, and it is not too much to say that no person who has not studied those letters can form a correct notion of the Prince's character. He, whom even his admirers generally accounted the most distant and frigid of men, here forgets all distinctions of rank, and pours out all his thoughts with the ingenuousness of a schoolboy. He imparts without reserve secrets of the highest moment. He explains with perfect simplicity vast designs affecting all the governments of Europe. Mingled with his communications on such subjects, are other communications of a very different, but perhaps not of a less interesting kind. All his adventures, all his personal feelings, his long runs after enormous stags, his carousels on St. Hubert's Day, the growth of his plantations, the failure of his melons, the state of his stud, his wish to procure an easy pad-nag for his wife, his vexation at learning that one of his household, after ruining the girl of a good family, refused to marry her, his fits of seasickness, his coughs, his headaches, his devotional moods, his gratitude for the divine protection after a great escape, his struggles to submit himself to the divine will after a disaster, are described with an amiable garrulity, hardly to have been expected from the most discreet and sedate statesman of the age. Still more remarkable is the careless effusion of his tenderness, and the brotherly interest which he takes in his friend's domestic felicity. When an heir is born to Bentink, he will live, I hope, says William, to be as good a fellow as you are, and if I should have a son, our children will love each other, I hope as we have done. Through life he continues to regard the little Bentinks with paternal kindness. He calls them by endearing diminutives. He takes charge of them in their father's absence, and though vexed at being forced to refuse them any pleasure, will not suffer them to go on a hunting-party, where there would be risk of a push from a stag's horn, or to sit up late to write a supper. When their mother is taken ill during her husband's absence, William, in the midst of business of the highest moment, finds time to send off several expresses in one day, with short notes containing intelligence of her state. On one occasion, when she is pronounced out of danger after the severe attack, the prince breaks forth into fervent expressions of gratitude to God. I write, he says, with tears of joy in my eyes. There is a singular charm in such letters, penned by a man whose irresistible energy and inflexible firmness extorted the respect of his enemies, whose cold and ungracious demeanour repelled the attachment of almost all his partisans, and whose mind was occupied by gigantic schemes which have changed the face of the world. His kindness was not misplaced. Bentink was early pronounced by temple, to be the best and truest servant that ever prince had the good fortune to possess, and continued through life to merit that honourable character. The friends were indeed made for each other. William wanted neither a guide nor a flatterer, having a firm and just reliance on his own judgment. He was not partial to counsellors who dealt much in suggestions and objections. At the same time, he had too much discernment and too much elevation of mind to be gratified by sycophancy. The confidence of such a prince ought to be a man not of inventive genius or commanding spirit, but brave and faithful, capable of executing orders punctually, of keeping secrets inviolably, of observing facts vigilantly, and of reporting them truly, and such a man was Bentink. End of Chapter 7, Part 1 William was not less fortunate in marriage than in friendship. Yet his marriage had not at first promised much domestic happiness. His choice had been determined chiefly by political considerations. Nor did it seem likely that any strong affection would grow up between a handsome girl of sixteen, well disposed indeed, and naturally intelligent, but ignorant and simple, and a bridegroom who, though he had not completed his twenty-eighth year, was in constitution older than her father, whose manner was chilling and whose head was constantly occupied by public business or by field sports. For a time William was a negligent husband. He was indeed drawn away from his wife by other women, particularly by one of her ladies, Elizabeth Villiers, who though destitute of personal attractions, and disfigured by a hideous squint, possessed talents which well fitted her to partake his cares. He was indeed ashamed of his errors, and spared no pains to conceal them. But in spite of all his precautions, Mary well knew that he was not strictly faithful to her. Spies and tailbearers encouraged by her father did their best to inflame her resentment. A man of very different character, the excellent Ken, who was her chaplain at the Hague during some months, was so much incensed by her wrongs that he, with more zeal than discretion, threatened to reprimand her husband severely. She, however, bore her injuries with a meekness in patience which deserved, and gradually obtained, William's esteem and gratitude. Yet there still remained one cause of estrangement. A time would probably come when the Princess, who had been educated only to work embroidery, to play on the spinet, and to read the Bible, and the whole duty of man, would be the chief of a great monarchy, and would hold the balance of Europe, while her lord, ambitious, versed in affairs, and bent on great enterprises, would find in the British government no place marked out for him, and would hold power only from her bounty and during her pleasure. It is not strange that a man so fond of authority as William, and so conscious of a genius for command, should have strongly felt that jealousy which, during a few hours of royalty, put dissension between Guilford Dudley and the Lady Jane, and which produced a rupture still more tragical between Darnley and the Queen of Scots. The Princess of Orange had not the faintest suspicion of her husband's feelings. Her preceptor, Bishop Compton, had instructed her carefully in religion, and had especially guarded her mind against the arts of Roman Catholic divines, but had left her profoundly ignorant of the English constitution and of her own position. She knew that her marriage vow bound her to obey her husband, and it had never occurred to her that the relation in which they stood to each other might one day be inverted. She had been nine years married before she discovered the cause of William's discontent, nor would she ever have learned it from himself. In general, his temper inclined him rather to brood over his griefs than to give utterance to them. And in this particular case, his lips were sealed by a very natural delicacy. At length, the complete explanation and reconciliation were brought about by the agency of Gilbert Burnett. The fact that the fame of Burnett has been attacked with singular malice and pertinacity. The attack began early in his life, and is still carried on with undiminished vigor, though he has now been more than a century and a quarter in his grave. He is indeed, as fair a mark, as factious animosity and petulant wit could desire. The faults of his understanding and temper lie on the surface and cannot be missed. They were not the faults which are ordinarily considered as belonging to his country. Alone among the many Scotsmen who have raised themselves to distinction and prosperity in England, he had that character which satirists, novelists, and dramatists have agreed to ascribe to Irish adventurers. His high animal spirit, his boastfulness, his undisembled vanity, his propensity to blunder, his provoking indiscretions, his unabashed audacity afforded inexhaustible subjects of ridicule to the Tories. Nor did his enemies admit to compliment him, sometimes with more pleasantry than delicacy, on the breadth of his shoulders, the thickness of his calves, and his success in matrimonial projects on amorous and opulent widows. Yet Burnett, though open in many respects to ridicule, and even to serious censure, was no contemptible man. His parts were quick, his industry unwearied, his reading various and most extensive. He was at once a historian, an antiquary, a theologian, a preacher, a pamphleteer, a debater, and an active political leader, and in every one of these characters made himself conspicuous among able competitors. The many spirited tracks which he wrote on passing events are now known only to the curious, but his history of his own times, his history of the Reformation, his exposition of the articles, his discourse of pastoral care, his life of Hale, his life of Wilmot, are still reprinted, nor is any good private library without them. Against such a fact as this, all the efforts of his detractors are vain. A writer whose voluminous works in several branches of literature find numerous readers 130 years after his death may have had great faults, but must also have had great merits. And Burnett had great merits, a fertile and vigorous mind, a style far indeed removed from faultless purity, but always clear, often lively, and sometimes rising to solemn and fervid eloquence. In the pulpit, the effect of his discourses, which were delivered without any note, was heightened by a noble figure and a pathetic action. He was often interrupted by the deep hum of his audience, and when, after preaching out an hourglass, which in those days was part of the furniture of the pulpit, he held it up in his hand, the congregation clamorously encouraging him to go on till the sand had run off once more. In his moral character, as in his intellect, great blemishes were more than compensated by great excellence. Though often misled by prejudice and passion, he was emphatically an honest man. Though he was not secure from the seductions of vanity, his spirit was raised high above the influence, either of cupidity or of fear. His nature was kind, generous, grateful, forgiving. His religious zeal, though steady and ardent, was in general restrained by humanity, and by a respect for the rites of conscience. Strongly attached to what he regarded as a spirit of Christianity, he looked with indifference on rites, names, and forms of ecclesiastical polity, and was by no means disposed to be severe even on infidels and heretics whose lives were pure, and whose errors appeared to be the effect rather of some perversion of the understanding than of the depravity of the heart. But like many other good men of that age, he regarded the case of the Church of Rome as an exception to all ordinary rules. Burnett had during some years a European reputation. His history of the Reformation had been received with loud applause by all Protestants, and had been felt by the Roman Catholics as a severe blow. The greatest doctor that the Church of Rome has produced since the schism of the 16th century, Bussuette, Bishop of Mill, was engaged in framing an elaborate reply. Burnett had been honoured by a vote of thanks from one of the zealous parliaments, which had sate during the excitement of the Popish plot, and had been exhorted in the name of the Commons of England to continue his historical researchers. He had been admitted to familiar conversation with both Charles and James, and had lived on terms of close intimacy with several distinguished statesmen, particularly with Halifax, and had been the spiritual guide of some persons of the highest note. He had reclaimed from atheism and from licentiousness one of the most brilliant libertines of the age, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Lord Stafford, the victim of votes, had, though a Roman Catholic, been edified in his last hours by Burnett's exhortations, touching those points on which all Christians agree. A few years later, a more illustrious sufferer, Lord Russell, had been accompanied by Burnett from the Tower to the scaffold in Lincoln's infield. The court had neglected no means of gaining so active and able a divine. Neither royal blandishments nor promises of valuable preferment had been spared. But Burnett, though infected in early youth by those servile doctrines which are commonly held by the clergy of that age, had become on conviction a wig, and he firmly adhered through all vicissitudes to his principles. He had, however, no part in that conspiracy, which brought so much disgrace and calamity on the wig party, and not only abhorred the mergers' designs of Goodano and Ferguson, but was of opinion that even his beloved and honoured friend, Russell, had gone to unjustifiable lengths against the government. A time at length arrived when innocence was not a sufficient protection. Burnett, though not guilty of any legal offence, was pursued by the vengeance of the court. He retired to the continent and, after passing a year in those wanderings through Switzerland, Italy and Germany, of which he has left us an agreeable narrative, reached the Hague in the summer of 1686 and was received there with kindness and respect. He had many free conversations with the princess on politics and religion, and soon became her spiritual director and confidential advisor. William proved a much more gracious host than could have been expected, for of all faults, officiousness and indiscretion were the most offensive to him, and Burnett was allowed, even by friends and admirers, to be the most officious and indiscreet of mankind. But the sagacious prince perceived that this pushing, talkative divine, who was always blabbing secrets, asking impertinent questions, obtruding unasked advice, was nevertheless an upright, courageous and able man, well acquainted with the temper and the views of the British sex and factions. The fame of Burnett's eloquence and erudition was also widely spread. William was not himself a reading man, but he had now been many years at the head of the Dutch administration, in an age when the Dutch press was one of the most formidable engines by which the public mind of Europe was moved, and, though he had no taste for literary pleasures, was far too wise and too observant to be ignorant of the value of literary assistance. He was aware that a popular pamphlet might sometimes be of as much service as a victory in the field. He also felt the importance of having always near him some person well informed as to the civil and ecclesiastical polity of our island, and Burnett was eminently qualified to be of use as a living dictionary of British affairs. For his knowledge, though not always accurate, was of immense extent, and there were in England and Scotland a few eminent men of any political or religious party with whom he had not conversed. He was therefore admitted to as large a share of favour and confidence, as was granted to any but those who composed the very small innermost knot of the prince's private friends. When the doctor took liberties, which was not seldom the case, his patron became more than unusually cold and sullen, and sometimes uttered a short dry sarcasm which would have struck dumb any person of ordinary assurance. In spite of such occurrences, however, the amity between the singular pair continued with some temporary interruptions till it was dissolved by death. Indeed, it was not easy to wound Burnett's feelings. His self-complacency, his animal spirits, and his want of tact were such that, though he frequently gave offence, he never took it. All the peculiarities of his character fitted him to be the peacemaker between William and Mary, when persons who ought to esteem and love each other are kept asunder, as often happens, by some case which three words of frank explanation would remove. They are fortunate if they possess an indiscreet friend who blurts out the whole truth. Burnett plainly told the princess what the feeling was which preyed upon her husband's mind. She learned for the first time, with no small astonishment, that when she became Queen of England, William would not share her throne. She warmly declared that there was no proof of conjugal submission and affection which she was not ready to give. Burnett, with many apologies and with solemn protestations that no human being had put words into his mouth, informed her that the remedy was in her own hands. She might easily, when the crown devolved on her, induce her parliament not only to give the regal title to her husband, but even to transfer to him by a legislative act the administration of the government. But, he added, your royal highness ought to consider well before you announce any such resolution, for it is a resolution which, having once been announced, cannot safely or easily be retracted. I want no time for consideration, said Mary. It is enough that I have an opportunity of showing my regard for the Prince. Tell him what I say, and bring him to me, that he may hear it from my own lips. Burnett went in quest of William, but William was many miles off after a stag. It was not till the next day that the decisive interview took place. I did not know till yesterday, said Mary, that there was such a difference between the laws of England and the laws of God. But I now promise you that you shall always bear all, and in return I ask only this, that as I shall observe the precept which enjoins wives to obey their husbands, you will observe that which enjoys husbands to love their wives. Her generous affection completely gained the heart of William. From that time till the sad day when he was carried away in fits from her dying bed, there was entire friendship and confidence between them. Many of her letters to him are extant, and they contain abundant evidence that this man, unamable as he was in the eyes of the multitude, had succeeded in inspiring a beautiful and virtuous woman born his superior with a passion fond even to idolatry. End of Part Two This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The History of England From the Accession of James II by Thomas Babbington Macaulay Chapter Seven, Part Three The service which Burnett had rendered to his country was of high moment. A time had arrived at which it was important to the public safety that there should be entire concord between the Prince and Princess. Till after the suppression of the Western insurrection, grave causes of dissension had separated William, both from wigs and Tories. He had seen with displeasure the attempts of the wigs to strip the executive government of some powers which he thought necessary to its efficiency and dignity. He had seen with still deeper displeasure the countenance given by a large section of that party to the pretensions of Monmouth. The opposition, it seemed, wished first to make the crown of England not worth the wearing, and then to place it on the head of a bastard and imposter. At the same time, the Prince's religious system differed widely from that which was the badge of the Tories. They were Arminians and Trelatists. They looked down on the Protestant churches of the continent and regarded every line of their own liturgy and rubric as scarcely less sacred than the Gospels. His opinions touching the metaphysics of theology were Calvinistic. His opinions respecting ecclesiastical polity and modes of worship were latitudinarian. He owned that episcopacy was a lawful and convenient form of church government, but he spoke with sharpness and scorn of the bigotry of those who thought episcopal ordination essential to a Christian society. He had no scruple about the vestments and gestures prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer, but he avowed that he should like the rites of the Church of England better if they reminded him less of the rites of the Church of Rome. He had been heard to utter an ominous growl when first he saw in his wife's private chapel an altar decked after the Anglican fashion and had not seemed well pleased at finding her with Hooker's ecclesiastical polity in her hands. He therefore long observed the contest between the English factions attentively but without feeling a strong predilection for either side. Nor in truth did he ever, to the end of his life, become either a wig or a tory. He wanted that which is the common groundwork of both characters, for he never became an Englishman. He saved England, it is true, but he never loved her and he never obtained her love. To him she was always a land of exile, visited with reluctance and quitted with delight. Even when he rendered to her those services of which at this day we feel the happy effects, her welfare was not his chief object. Whatever patriotic feeling he had was for Holland. There was the stately tomb where slept the great politician whose blood, whose name, whose temperament, and whose genius he had inherited. There the sound of his title was a spell which had, through three generations, called forth the affectionate enthousiasms of boars and artisans. The Dutch language was the language of his nursery. Among the Dutch gentry he had chosen his early friends. The amusements, the architecture, the landscape of his native country had taken hold on his heart. To her he turned with constant fondness from a prouder and fair arrival. In the gallery of Whitehall he pined for the familiar house in the wood at the Hague, and never was so happy as when he could quit the magnificence of Windsor for his far humbler seats at Lou. During his splendid banishment it was his consolation to create round him by building, planting, and digging, a scene which might remind him of the formal piles of red brick, of the long canals, and of the symmetrical flowerbeds amidst which his early life had been passed. Yet even his affection for the land of his birth was subordinate to another feeling which early became supreme in his soul, which mixed itself with all his passions, which impelled him to marvellous enterprise, which supported him when sinking under mortification pain, sickness, and sorrow, which towards the close of his career seemed during a short time to languish, but which soon broke forth again fiercer than ever, and continued to animate him even while the prayer for the departing was read at his bedside. That feeling was enmity to France, and to the magnificent king who, in more than one sense, represented France, and who, to virtues and accomplishments eminently French, joined in large measure that unquiet, unscrupulous, and vane glorious ambition which was repeatedly drawn on front the resentment of Europe. It is not difficult to trace the progress of the sentiment which gradually possessed itself of William's whole soul. When he was little more than a boy, his country had been attacked by Louis in ostentatious defiance of justice and public law, and had been overrun, had been desolated, had been given up to every excess of rapacity, licentiousness, and cruelty. The Dutch had in dismay humbled themselves before the conqueror, and had implored mercy. They had been told in reply that if they desired peace they must resign their independence and do annual homage to the House of Bourbon. The injured nation, driven to despair, had opened its dykes, and had called in the sea as an ally against French tyranny. It was in the agony of that conflict, when peasants were flying in terror before the invaders, when hundreds of fair gardens and pleasure houses were buried beneath the waves, when the deliberations of the states were interrupted by the fainting and the loud weeping of ancient senators who could not bear the thought of surviving the freedom and glory of their native land that William had been called to the head of affairs. For a time it seemed to him that resistance was hopeless. He looked round for succor and looked in vain. Spain was unnerved, Germany distracted, England corrupted. Nothing seemed left to the young stat holder, but to perish, sword in hand, or to be the anus of a great emigration and to create another Holland in countries beyond the reach of the tyranny of France. No obstacle would then remain to check the progress of the House of Bourbon. A few years and that house might add to its dominions, Lorraine and Flanders, Castile and Aragon, Naples and Milan, Mexico and Peru. Louis might wear the imperial crown, might place a prince of his family on the throne of Poland, might be sole master of Europe from the Scythian deserts to the Atlantic Ocean, and of America from regions north of the Tropic of Cancer to regions south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Such was the prospect which lay before William when first he entered on public life and which never ceased to haunt him till his latest day. The French monarchy was to him what the Roman Republic was to Hannibal, what the Ottoman power was to Scandaburg, what the Southern Dominion was to Wallace. Religion gave her sanction to that intense and unquenchable animosity. Hundreds of Calvinistic preachers proclaimed the same power which had set apart Sampson from the womb to be the scourge of the Philistine and which had called Gideon from the threshing floor to smite the Midianite had raised up William of Orange to be the champion of all free nations and of all pure churches, nor was this notion without influence on his own mind. To the confidence which the heroic fatalist placed in his high destiny and in his sacred cause is to be partly attributed to his singular indifference to danger. He had a great work to do until it was done nothing could harm him. Therefore it was that in spite of the prognostications of the physicians he recovered from maladies which seemed hopeless, that bands of assassins conspired in vain against his life, that the open skiff to which he trusted himself on a starless night, on a raging ocean and near a treacherous shore brought him safe to land, and that on twenty fields of battle the cannonballs passed him by to right and left. The ardour and perseverance with which he devoted himself to his mission has scarcely any parallel in history. In comparison with his great object he held the lives of other men as cheap as his own. It was but too much the habit even of the most humane and generous soldiers of that age to think very lightly of the bloodshed and devastation inseparable from great martial exploits. And the heart of William was steeled not only by professional insensibility but by that sterner insensibility which is the effect of a sense of duty. Three great coalitions, three long and bloody wars in which all Europe from the Vistula to the western ocean was in arms, are to be ascribed to his unconquerable energy. When in 1678 the state's general, exhausted and disheartened, were desirous of repose, his voice was still against sheathing the sword. If peace was made it was made only because he could not breathe into other men a spirit as fierce and determined as his own. At the very last moment in the hope of breaking off the negotiations which he knew to be all but concluded he fought one of the most bloody and obstinate battles of that age. From the day on which the treaty of Nemegwen was signed he began to mediate a second coalition. His contest with Louis transferred from the field to the cabinet was soon exasperated by a private feud. In talents, temper, manners and opinions, the rivals were diametrically opposed to each other. Louis, polite and dignified, profuse and voluptuous, fond of display and a verse from danger, a munificent patron of arts and letters and a cruel persecutor of Calvinists, presented a remarkable contrast to William, simple in tastes, ungracious in demeanor, indefatigable and intrepid in war, regardless of all the ornamental branches of knowledge and firmly attached to the theology of Geneva. The enemies did not long observe those courtesies which men of their rank even when opposed to each other at the head of armies seldom neglect. William indeed went through the form of tendering his best service to Louis, but this civility was rated at its true value and requited with a dry reprimand. The great king affected contempt for the petty prince, who was the servant of a confederacy of trading towns, and to every mark of contempt the dauntless stut holder replied by a fresh defiance. William took his title, a title which the events of the preceding century had made one of the most illustrious in Europe, from a city which lies on the banks of the Rhône not far from Avignon, and which, like Avignon, though enclosed on every side by the French territory, was properly a thief not of the French but of the imperial crown. Louis, with that ostentatious contempt of public law which was characteristic of him, occupied orange, dismantled the fortifications, and confiscated the revenues. William declared aloud at his table before many persons that he would make the most Christian king repent the outrage, and when questioned about these words by the count of Avot, positively refused either to retract them or to explain them away. The quarrel was carried so far that the French minister could not venture to present himself at the drawing-room of the princesses for fear of receiving some affront. The feeling with which William regarded France explains the whole of his policy towards England. His public spirit was an European public spirit. The chief object of his care was not our island, not even his native Holland, but the great community of nations threatened with subjugation by one too powerful member. Those who commit the error of considering him as an English statesman must necessarily see his whole life in a false light, and will be unable to discover any principle, good or bad, wig or Tory, to which his most important acts can be referred. But when we consider him as a man whose a special task was to join a crowd of feeble, divided and dispirited states in a firm and energetic union against a common enemy, when we consider him as a man in whose eyes England was important chiefly because, without her, the great coalition which he projected must be incomplete, we shall be forced to admit that no long career recorded in history has been more uniform from the beginning to the close than that of this great prince. The clue of which we are now possessed will enable us to track without difficulty the course in reality consistent, though in appearance sometimes tortuous, which he pursued towards our domestic factions. He clearly saw what had not escaped persons far inferior to him in sagacity, that the enterprise on which his whole soul was intent would probably be successful if England were on his side, would be of uncertain issue if England were neutral and would be hopeless if England acted as she had acted in the days of the cabal. He saw not less clearly that between the foreign policy and the domestic policy of the English government there was a close connection, that the sovereign of this country acting in harmony with the legislature must always have a great sway in the affairs of Christendom and must also have an obvious interest in opposing the undue and grandisement of any continental potentate, that on the other hand the sovereign, distrusted and thwarted by the legislature could be of little weight in European politics and that the whole of that little weight would be thrown into the wrong scale. The prince's first wish therefore was that there should be concord between the throne and the parliament. How that concord should be established and on which side concessions should be made were in his view questions of secondary importance. He would have been best pleased no doubt to see a complete reconciliation affected without the sacrifice of one tittle of the prerogative. For in the integrity of that prerogative he had a reversionary interest, and he was by nature at least as covetous of power and as impatient of restraint as any of the stewards. But there was no flower of the crown which he was not prepared to sacrifice. Even after the crown had been placed on his own head if he could only be convinced that such a sacrifice was indispensably necessary to his great design. In the days of the Popish plots therefore, though he disapproved of the violence with which the opposition attacked the royal authority, he exhorted the government to give way. The conduct of the commons he said as respected domestic affairs was most unreasonable, but while the commons were discontented the liberties of Europe could never be safe, and to that paramount consideration every other consideration ought to yield. On these principles he acted when the exclusion bill had thrown the nation into convulsions. There is no reason to believe that he encouraged the opposition to bring forward that bill, or to reject the offers of compromise which were repeatedly made from the throne. But when it became clear that, unless that bill were carried there would be a serious breach between the commons and the court, he indicated very intelligibly, though with decorous reserve, his opinion that the representatives of the people ought to be conciliated at any price. When a violent and rapid reflux of public feeling had left the weak party for a time utterly helpless, he attempted to attain his grand object by a new road perhaps more agreeable to his temper than that which he had previously tried. In the altered temper of the nation there was little chance that any parliament disposed across the wishes of the sovereign would be elected. Charles was for a time master. To gain Charles, therefore, was the Prince's first wish. In the summer of 1683, almost at the moment at which the detection of the Rye House plot made the discomforture of the Whigs and the triumph of the King complete, events took place elsewhere which William could not behold without extreme anxiety and alarm. The Turkish armies advanced to the suburbs of Vienna. The great Austrian monarchy, on the support of which the Prince had reckoned, seemed to be on the point of destruction. Bintink was therefore sent in haste from the Hague to London, was charged to admit nothing which might be necessary to conciliate the English court, and was particularly instructed to express in the strongest terms the horror with which his master regarded the Whig conspiracy. During the 18 months which followed there was some hope that the influence of Halifax would prevail, and that the court of Whitehall would return to the policy of the Triple Alliance. To that hope William fondly clung. He spared no effort to propitiate Charles, the hospitality which Monmouth found at the Hague is chiefly to be ascribed to the Prince's anxiety to gratify the real wishes of Monmouth's father. As soon as Charles died, William, still adhering unchangeably to his object, again changed his course. He had sheltered Monmouth to please the late King. That the present King might have no reason to complain, Monmouth was dismissed. We have seen that when the Western insurrection broke out, the British regiments in the Dutch service were by the active exertions of the Prince sent over to their own country on the first requisition. Indeed William even offered to command in person against the rebels, and that the offer was made in perfect sincerity cannot be doubted by those who have perused his confidential letters to Bentink. The Prince was evidently, at this time inclined to hope, the great plan to which, in his mind everything else was subordinate, might obtain the approbation and support of his father-in-law. The high tone which James was then holding towards France, the readiness with which he consented to a defensive alliance with the United Provinces, the inclination which he showed to connect himself with the House of Austria, encouraged this expectation, but in a short time the prospect was darkened. The disgrace of Halifax, the breach between James and the parliament, the prorogation, the announcement distinctly made by the King to the foreign ministers that continental politics should no longer divert his attention from internal measures tending to strengthen his prerogative and to promote the interest of his church, put an end to the delusion. It was plain that when the European crisis came, England would, if James or her master, either remain inactive or act in conjunction with France. And the European crisis was drawing near. The House of Austria had, by a succession of victories, been secured from danger on the side of Turkey and was no longer under the necessity of submitting patiently to the encroachments and insults of Louis. Accordingly, in July 1686, a treaty was signed at Augustburg by which the princes of the empire bound themselves closely together for the purpose of mutual defence. The kings of Spain and Sweden were parties to this compact. The king of Spain as sovereign of the provinces contained in the circle of Burgundy, and the king of Sweden as Duke of Pomerania. The Confederates declared that they had no intention to attack and no wish to offend any power, but that they were determined to tolerate no infraction of those rights which the Germanic body held under the sanction of public law and public faith. They pledged themselves to stand by each other in case of need, and fix the amount of force which each member of the league was to furnish if it should be necessary to repel aggression. The name of William did not appear in this instrument, but all men knew that it was his work, and foresaw that he would in no long time be again the captain of a coalition against France. Between him and the vassal of France they could, in such circumstances, be no cordial goodwill. There was no open rupture, no interchange of menaces or reproaches, but the father-in-law and the son-in-law were separated completely and forever. At the very time at which the prince was thus estranged from the English court, the causes which had hitherto produced a coolness between him and the two great sections of the English people disappeared. A large portion, perhaps a numerical majority, of the Whigs had favoured the pretensions of Monmouth, but Monmouth was now no more. The Tories, on the other hand, had entertained apprehensions of the interests of the Anglican Church may not be safe under the rule of a man bred among Dutch Presbyterians, and well known to hold latitudinarian opinions about robes, ceremonies, and bishops. But since that beloved church had been threatened by far more formidable dangers from a very different quarter, these apprehensions had lost almost all their power. Thus, at the same moment, both the great parties began to fix their hopes and their affections on the same leader. Old Republicans could not refuse their confidence to one who had worthily filled, during many years, the highest magistracy of a republic. Old royalists conceived that they acted according to their principles in paying profound respect to a prince so near to the throne. At this conjuncture, it was of the highest moment that there should be entire union between William and Mary. A misunderstanding between the presumptive heiress of the crown and her husband must have produced a schism in that vast mass, which was from all courses gathering round one common rallying point. Happily, all risk of such misunderstanding was averted in the critical instant by the interposition of Burnett, and the prince became the unquestioned chief of the whole of that party, which was opposed to the government, a party almost co-extensive with the nation. There is not the least reason to believe that he at this time meditated the great enterprise to which a stern necessity afterwards drove him. He was aware that the public mind of England, though heated by grievances, was by no means ripe for revolution. He would doubtless gladly have avoided the scandal which must be affected of a moral quarrel between persons bound together by the closest ties of consanguity and affinity. Even his ambition made him unwilling to owe to violence at greatness, which might be his in the ordinary course of nature, for he well knew that if the crown descended to his wife regularly, all his prerogatives would descend unimpaired with it, and that if it were obtained by election it must be taken subject to such conditions as the electors might think fit to impose. He meant therefore, as it appears, to wait with patience for the day when he might govern by an undisputed title, and to content himself in the meantime with exercising a great influence on English affairs, as first prince of the blood, and as head of the party which was decidedly preponderant in the nation, and which was certain whenever a parliament should meet to be decidedly preponderant in both houses. Already it is true he had been urged by an advisor, less sagacious and more impetuous than himself, to try a bolder course. This advisor was the young lord Mordount. That age had produced no more inventive genius and no more daring spirit. But if a design was splendid, Mordount seldom inquired whether it was practicable. His life was a wild romance made up of mysterious intrigues, both political and amorous, of violent and rapid changes of scene and fortune, and of victories resembling those of Amadis and Lancelot rather than those of Luxembourg and Eugene. The episodes, and dispersed in this strange story, were of a peace with the main plot. Among them were midnight encounters with generous robbers, and rescues of noble and beautiful ladies from ravishes. Mordount, having distinguished himself by the eloquence and audacity with which in the House of Lords he had opposed the court, repaired soon after the prorogation to the Hague, and strongly recommended an immediate dissent on England. He had persuaded himself that it would be as easy to surprise three great kingdoms as he long afterwards found it to surprise Barcelona. William listened, meditated, and replied, in general terms, that he took a great interest in English affairs, and would keep his attention fixed on them. Whatever his purpose had been, it is not likely that he would have chosen a rash and vain glorious knight's errant for his confidant. Between the two men there was nothing in common except personal courage, which rose in both to the height of fabulous heroism. Mordount wanted merely to enjoy the excitement of conflict and to make men stare. William had one great end ever before him. Towards that end he was impelled by a strong passion which appeared to him under the guise of a sacred duty. Towards that end he toiled with a patience resembling, as he once said, the patience with which he had seen a boatman on a canal, strained against an adverse eddy, often swept back, but never ceasing to pull, and content, if by the labour of hours a few yards could be gained. Exploit, which brought the prince no nearer to his object, however glorious they might be in the estimation of the vulgar, were in his judgment boyish vanities, and no part of the real business of life. He determined to reject Mordount's advice, and there can be no doubts that the determination was wise. Had William, in 1686 or even in 1687, attempted to do what he did with such signal success in 1688, it is probable that many wigs would have risen in arms at his call. But he would have found that the nation was not yet prepared to welcome an armed deliverer from a foreign country, and that the church had not yet been provoked, and insulted into forgetfulness of the tenets which had long been her particular boast. The old cavaliers would have flocked to the royal standard. They would probably have been, in all the three kingdoms, a civil war as long and fierce as that of the preceding generation, while that war was raging in the British Isles, what might not Louis attempt on the continent, and what hope would there be for Holland, drained of her troops, and abandoned by her start-holder. William, therefore, contented himself for the present, with taking measures to unite and animate that mighty opposition of which he had become the head. This was not difficult. The fall of the hides had excited throughout England strange alarm and indignation. Men felt that the question now was not whether Protestantism should be dominant, but whether it should be tolerated. The treasure had been succeeded by a board, of which a papist was the head. The privy seal had been entrusted to a papist. The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland had been succeeded by a man who had absolutely no claim to high place except that he was a papist. The last person, whom a government having in view the general interests of the empire would have sent to Dublin as deputy, was Tyconel. His brutal manners made him unfit to represent the Majesty of the Crown. The feebleness of his understanding and the violence of his temper made him unfit to conduct grave business of state. The deadly animosity which he felt towards the possessors of the great part of the soil of Ireland made him especially unfit to rule that kingdom. But the intemperance of his bigotry was thought amply to atone for the intemperance of all his other passions. And in consideration of the hatred which he bore to the reformed faith, he was suffered to indulge without restraint his hatred of the English name. This then was the real meaning of his Majesty's respect for the rites of conscience. He wished his parliament to remove all the disabilities which had been imposed on papists merely in order that he might himself impose disabilities equally garling on the Protestants. It was plain that under such a prince apostasy was the only road to greatness. It was a road, however, which few ventured to take. For the spirit of the nation was thoroughly roused, and every renegade had to endure such an amount of public scorn and detestation as cannot be altogether unfelt even by the most callous natures. End of Part 4. History of England, Chapter 7, Part 5 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. History of England, from the accession of James II, by Thomas Babington Macaulay, Chapter 7, Part 5 It is true that several remarkable conversions had recently taken place, but they were such as did little credit to the Church of Rome. Two men of high rank had joined her communion. Harry Mordent, Earl of Peterborough, and James Cecil, Earl of Salisbury. But Peterborough, who had been an active soldier, courtier, a negotiator, was now broken down by ears and by infirmities, and those who saw him totter about the galleries a wide hall, leaning on a stick and sweated up in flannels and plasters, comforted themselves for his defection by remarking that he had not changed his religion till he had outlived his faculties. Salisbury was foolish to a proverb. His figure was so bloated by sensual indulgence as to be almost incapable of moving, and the sluggish body was the abode of an equally sluggish mind. He was represented in popular lampoons as a man made to be duped, as a man who had either to be the prey of game-sters, and who might as well be the prey of friars. A pasquinade, which about the time of Rochester's retirement was fixed on the door of Salisbury House in the Strand, described in coarse terms the horror with which the wise Robert Cecil, if he could rise from his grave, would see to what a creator his honors had descended. These were the highest in station among the proselytes of James. There were other renegades of a very different kind, needy men of parts who were a destitute of principle and of all sense of personal dignity. There is reason to believe that among these was William Witcherley, the most licentious and hard-hearted writer of a singularly licentious and hard-hearted school. It is certain that Matthew Tyndall, who at a later period acquired great notoriety by writing against Christianity, was at this time received into the bosom of the infallible church, a fact which as may easily be supposed the deviance with whom he was subsequently engaged in controversy did not suffer to sink into oblivion. A still more infamous apostate was Joseph Haines, whose name is now almost forgotten, but who was well known in his own time as an adventurer of versatile part, sharper, coiner, false witness, shambale, dancing master, buffoon, poet, comedian. Some of his products and epilogues were much admired by his contemporaries, and his merit as an actor was universally unknowledged. This man professed himself a Roman Catholic, and went to Italy in the retinue of a castle main, but was soon dismissed for misconduct. If any credit is due to a tradition which was long preserved in the Green Room, Haines had the impudence to affirm that the Virgin Mary had appeared to him and called him to repentance. After the revolution he attempted to make his peace with the town by a penance more scandalous than his offence. One night, before he acted in a farce, he appeared on the stage in a white sheet with a torch in his hand, and recited some profane and indecent doggerel, which he called his recantation. With the name of Haines was joined in many liables the name of a more illustrious renegade, John Dryden. Dryden was now approaching the decline of life. After many successes and many failures, he added length attained by general consent, the first place among living English poets. His claims on the gratitude of James were superior to those of any man of letter in the kingdom, but James cared little for verses and much for money. From the day of his accession, he set himself to make small economical reforms, such as bring on a government the reproach of menace without producing any perceptible relief to the finances. One of the victims of this injiditious parsimony was the Perth Laureate. Orders were given that in the new patent which the demise of the crown made necessary, the annual butt of sack, originally granted to Johnson and continued to Johnson's successors, should be omitted. This was the only notice which the king, during the first year of his reign, deigned to bestow of the mighty satirist, who, in the very crisis of the great struggle of the exclusion bill, had spread terror through the weak ranks. Dryden was poor and impatient of poverty. He knew little and cared little about religion. If any sentiment was deeply fixed in him, that sentiment was an aversion to priests of all persuasions, Levites, Augusts, Muftis, Roman Catholic Divines, Presbyterian Divines, Divines of the Church of England. He was not naturally a man of highest spirit, and his pursuits had been by no means such as were likely to give elevation or delicacy to his mind. He had, during many years, earned his daily bread by pandering to the vicious taste of the pit, and by grossly fettering rich and noble patrons. Self-respect in the fine sense of the becoming were not to be expected from one who had led a life of mendicancy and adulation. Finding that, if he continued to call himself a protestant, his services would be overlooked, he declared himself a papist. The king's parsimony instantly relaxed. Dryden was gratified with a pension of a hundred pounds a year, and was employed to defend his new religion both in prose and verse. Two eminent men, Samuel Johnson and Walter Scott, have done their best to persuade themselves and others that this memorable conversion was sincere. It was natural that they should be desirous to remove a disgraceful stain from the memory of one whose genius they justly admired, and with whose political feelings they strongly sympathized, but the impartial historian must with regret pronounce a very different judgment. There will always be a strong presumption against the sincerity of a conversion by which the convert is directly a gainer. In the case of Dryden, there is nothing to countervade this presumption. His theological writings abundantly prove that he had never sought with diligence and anxiety to learn the truth, and that his knowledge both of the church which he quitted and of the church which he entered was of the most superficial kind, nor was his subsequent conduct that of a man whom a strong sense of duty had constrained to take a step of awful importance. Had he been such a man, the same conviction which had led him to join the church of Rome, would surely have prevented him from violating cross-lane and habitually, rules which that church, in common with every other Christian society, recognizes as binding. There would have been a marked distinction between his earlier and his later compositions. He would have looked back with remorse on a literary life of near thirty years, during which his rare powers of diction and versification had been systematically employed in spreading moral corruption. Not a line tending to make virtue contemptible or to inflame licentious desire would thus forward have proceeded from his pen. The truth, unequally, is that the dramas which he wrote after his pretended conversions are in no respect less impure or profane than those of his youth. Even when he professed to translate, he constantly wandered from his original in search of images which, if he had found them in his original, he ought to have shunned. What was bad became worse in his versions. What was innocent contracted detained from passing through his mind. He made the grossest set eyes of juvenile, more gross, interpolated loose descriptions in the tales of Boccaccio, and polluted the sweet and limpid poetry of the Georgics with filth which would have moved the loathing of Virgil. The help of Dryden was welcomed to those Roman Catholic divines who were painfully sustaining a conflict against all that was most illustrious in the established church. They could not disguise from themselves the fact that their style, disfigured with foreign idioms which had been picked up at Rome and Dwey, appeared at a little advantage when compared with the eloquence of Tilletson and Sherlock. It seemed that it was no light thing to have secured the cooperation of the greatest living masters of the English language. The first service which he was required to perform in return for his pension was to defend his church in prose against Tilling Fleet, but the art of saying things well is useless to a man who has nothing to say, and this was Dryden's case. He soon found himself unequally paired with an antagonist whose whole life had been one long training for controversy. The veteran gladiator disarmed the novice, inflicted a few contemptuous scratches, and turned away to encounter more formidable combatants. Dryden then betook himself to a weapon at which he was not likely to find his match. He retired a fraught time from the buzzle of coffee houses and theaters to a quiet retreat in Huntingdonkshire, and there composed with unwanted care and labor his celebrated poem on the points in dispute between the churches of Rome and England. The church of Rome, he represented under the similitude of a milk-wide hind, ever-imperial of death, yet faded not to die. The beasts of the field were bent on her destruction. The quaking hair, indeed, observed a timorous neutrality. But the Susanian fox, the Presbyterian wolf, the independent bear, the Anabaptist bore, glared fiercely at the spotless creator. Yet she could vent her to drink with them at the common water in place, under the protection of her friend, the kingly lion. The church of England was typified by the panther, spotted indeed but beautiful, too beautiful for a beast of prey. The hind and the panther, equally hated by the ferocious population of the forest, conferred a part on their common danger. They then proceeded to discuss the points in which they differed, and, while wagging their tails and licking their jaws, held a long dialogue, touching the real presence, the authority of popes and counselors, the penal laws, the test act, oaths, perjuries, butlers' unrequited services to the Cavalier party, stilling fleets, pamphlets, and burnous broad shoulders and fortinate matrimonial speculations. The absurdity of this plan is obvious. In truth the allegory could not be preserved and broken through ten lines together. No art of execution could redeem the faults of such a design. Yet the fable of the hind and panther is undoubtedly the most valuable addition which was made to English literature during the short and troubled reign of James II. In none of Dryden's works can be found passages more pathetic and magnificent, great ductility and energy of language, or a more pleasing and various music. The poem appeared with every advantage which royal patronage could give. A superb adhesion was printed for Scotland at the Roman Catholic Press established in Holyrood House, but men were in no humour to be charmed by the transparent style and melodious numbers of the apostate. The disgust excited by his vanity, the alarm excited by the policy of which he was the eulogist, were not to be sung to sleep. A just indignation of the public was inflamed by many who were smarting from his ridicule and by many who were envious of his renown. In spite of all the restraints under which the press lay, attacks on his life and writings appeared daily. Sometimes he was base, sometimes poet's crab. He was reminded that in his youth he had paid to the house of Cromwell the same survive court which he was now paying to the house of Stuart. One set of his assailants maliciously reprinted the sarcastic verses which he had written against Popery in days when he could have got nothing by being a papist. On the many satirical pieces which appeared on this occasion the most successful was the joint work of two young men who had lately completed their studies at Cambridge, and had been welcomed as primising novices in the literary coffee houses of London. Charles Montague and Matthew Pryor. Montague was of noble descent. The origin of Pryor was so obscure that no biographer has been able to trace it. But both of the adventurers were poor and aspiring. Both had kin and vigorous minds. Both afterwards climbed high. Both united in a remarkable degree the love of letters with the skill in those departments of business for which men of letters generally have a strong distaste. Of the fifty poets whose lives Johnson has written, Montague and Pryor were the only two who were distinguished by an intimate knowledge of trade and finance. Soon their paths diverged widely. Their early friendship was dissolved. One of them became the chief of the Whig party and was impeached by the Tories. The other was entrusted with all the mysteries of Tory diplomacy and was long kept close prisoner by the Whigs. At length, after many eventful years, the associates so long parted were united in Westminster Abbey. Whoever has read The Tale of the Hind and Panther with Attention must have perceived that while the work was in progress, a great alteration took place in the views of those who used Dryden as their interpreter. At first the Church of England is mentioned with tenderness and respect and is exhorted to ally herself with the Roman Catholics against the Puritan sects, but at the close of the poem and in the preface, which was written after the poem had been finished, the Protestant dissenters are invited to make common calls with the Roman Catholics against the Church of England. This change in the language of the court poet was indicative of a great change in the policy of the court. The original purpose of James had been to obtain for the Church of which he was a member, not only complete immunity from all penalties and from all civil disabilities, but also an ample share of ecclesiastical and academical endowments and at the same time to enforce with rigor the laws against the Puritan sects. All the special dispensations which he had granted had been granted to Roman Catholics. All the laws which bore hardest on the Presbyterians, Independents and Baptists, had been for a time severely executed by him. While Hales commanded the regiment, while Powysate at the Council Board, while Messier held a dinnery, while breviaries and mass books were printed at Toxford under a royal license, while the host was publicly exposed in London under the protection of the pikes and muskets of the foot guards, while friars and monks walked the streets of London their robes, Baxter was in jail. How was in exile? The Five Mile Act and the Conventical Act were in full vigor. Puritan writers were compelled to resort to foreign or to secret presses. Puritan congregations could meet only by night or in waste places, and Puritan ministers were forced to preach in the garb of colliers or of sailors. In Scotland the king, while his paired no exertion to extort from the estate's full relief for Roman Catholics, had demanded and obtained new status of unprecedented seriety against the Presbyterians. His conduct to the exiled Huguenots had not less clearly indicated his feelings. We have seen that when the public munificence had placed in his hands a large sum for the relief of those unhappy men, he, in violation of every law of hospitality and good faith, required them to renounce the Calvinistic ritual to which they were strongly attached, and to conform to the Church of England, before he would dole out to them any portion of the arms which had been untrusted to his care. Such has been his policy as long as he could cherish any hope that the Church of England would consent to share ascendancy with the Church of Rome. That hope at one time amounted to confidence, the enthusiasm with which the Tories had hailed his accession, the elections, the dutiful language and ample grants of his parliament, the suppression of the Western insurrection, the complete prostration of the party which had attempted to exclude him from the crown, elated him beyond the bounds of reason. He felt an assurance that every obstacle would give way before his power and his resolution. His parliament withestood him. It tried the effects of frowns and menaces. Frowns and menaces failed. It tried the effect of prerogation. From the day of the prerogation, the opposition to his designs had been growing stronger and stronger. It seemed clear that if he effected his purpose he must effect it in defiance of that great party which had given such signal proofs of fidelity to his office, to his family and to his person. The who langlican priesthood, the who cavalier gentry, were against him. In vain had he by virtue of his ecclesiastical supremacy enjoined the clergy to abstain from discussing controverted points. Every parish in the nation was warned every Sunday against the errors of Rome, and these warnings were only the more effective because they were accompanied by professions of reverence for the sovereign and of a determination to endure with patience whatever it might be his pleasure to inflict. The royalist knights and squires who through 45 years of war infection had stood so manfully by the throne, now expressed in no measured phrase their resolution to stand as manfully by the church. Dahl, as was the intellect of James, Despotic as was his temper, he felt that he must change his course. He could not safely venture to outrage all his protestant subjects at once. If he could bring himself to make concessions to the party which predominated in both houses, if he could bring himself to leave to the established irreligion all its dignities, he monuments and privileges unimpaired, he might still break up presbyterian meetings and fill the jails with Baptist preachers. But if he was determined to plunder the hierarchy, he must make up his mind to forego the luxury of persecuting the dissenters. If he was hence-forward to be at feud with his old friends, he must make a truce with his old enemies. He could overpower the Anglican church only by forming against her an extensive coalition, including sects which, though they differed in doctrine and government far more widely from each other than from her, might yet be induced by their common jealousy of her greatness and by their common dread of her intolerance to suspend their animosities though she was no longer able to oppress them. This plan seemed to him to have one strong recommendation. If he could only succeed in consolating the protestant non-conformists, he might flatter himself that he was secure against all chance of rebellion. According to the Anglican divines, no subject could by any provocation be justified in withstanding the lord's anointed by force. The theory of the Puritan sectaries was very different. Those sectaries had no scruple about smiting tyrants with the sword of Gideon. Many of them did not shrink from using the dagger of Hyude. They were probably even now meditating another western insurrection or another ryehouse plot. James therefore conceived that he might safely persecute the church if he could only gain the dissenters. The party whose principles afforded him no guarantee would be attached to him by interest. The party whose interests he attacked would be restrained from insurrection by principle. Influenced by such considerations as these, James, from the time at which he parted in anger with his parliament, began to meditate at general league of all non-conformists, Catholic and protestant against the established religion. So early as Christmas 1685, the agents of the United Provinces informed the state general that the plan of of general toleration had been arranged and would soon be disclosed. The reports which had reached the Dutch embassy proved to be premature. The separatists appear, however, to have been treated with more leniency during the year 1686 than during the year 1685. But it was only by his low degrees and after many struggles that the king could prevail on himself to form an alliance with all that he most abhorred. He had to overcome an animosity not slight or capricious, not of recent origin or hasty growth, but irredatory in his line, strengthened by great wrongs, inflicted and suffered through 120 eventful years, and intertwined with all his feelings, religious, political, domestic and personal. Four generations of Stuart had waged a war to the death with four generations of Puritans, and through that long war there had been no Stuart who had hated the Puritans so much, or who had been so much hated by them as himself. They had tried to blast his honor and to exclude him from his birthright. They had called him incendiary, cutthroat, poisoner. They had driven him from the admiralty and the privy council. They had repeatedly chased him into banishment. They had plotted his assassination. They had risen against him in arms by thousands. He had avenged himself on them by havoc such as England had never before seen. Their heads and quarters were still rotting on poles in all the market places of summits at Shire and dos at Shire. Aged women held in high honor among the sectaries for piety and charity, had for offenses which no good prince would have thought deserving even of a severe reprimand, being behaded and burned alive. Such had been even in England the relations between the king and the Puritans, and in Scotland the tyranny of the king and the fury of the Puritans had been such as Englishmen could hardly conceive. To forget an enmity so long and so deadly was no light task for a nature singularly harsh and implacable. End of part 5