CHAPTER IX

Change in the Opinion of the Tories concerning the Lawfulness of

Resistance--Russell proposes to the Prince of Orange a Descent on

England--Henry Sidney--Devonshire; Shrewsbury; Halifax--Danby--Bishop

Compton--Nottingham; Lumley--Invitation to William despatched--Conduct

of Mary--Difficulties of William's Enterprise--Conduct of James after

the Trial of the Bishops--Dismissions and Promotions--Proceedings of

the High Commission; Sprat resigns his Seat--Discontent of the Clergy;

Transactions at Oxford--Discontent of the Gentry--Discontent of

the Army--Irish Troops brought over; Public

Indignation--Lillibullero--Politics of the United Provinces; Errors of

the French King--His Quarrel with the Pope concerning Franchises--The

Archbishopric of Cologne--Skilful Management of William--His Military

and Naval Preparations--He receives numerous Assurances of Support

from England--Sunderland--Anxiety of William--Warnings conveyed to

James--Exertions of Lewis to save James--James frustrates them--The

French Armies invade Germany--William obtains the Sanction of the

States General to his Expedition--Schomberg--British Adventurers at the

Hague--William's Declaration--James roused to a Sense of his Danger;

his Naval Means--His Military Means--He attempts to conciliate his

Subjects--He gives Audience to the Bishops--His Concessions ill

received--Proofs of the Birth of the Prince of Wales submitted to

the--Privy Council--Disgrace of Sunderland--William takes leave of

the States of Holland--He embarks and sails; he is driven back by

a Storm--His Declaration arrives in England; James questions the

Lords--William sets sail the second Time--He passes the Straits--He

lands at Torbay--He enters Exeter--Conversation of the King with the

Bishops--Disturbances in London--Men of Rank begin to repair to the

Prince--Lovelace--Colchester; Abingdon--Desertion of Cornbury--Petition

of the Lords for a Parliament--The King goes to Salisbury--Seymour;

Court of William at Exeter--Northern Insurrection--Skirmish at

Wincanton--Desertion of Churchill and Grafton--Retreat of the Royal Army

from Salisbury--Desertion of Prince George and Ormond--Flight of the

Princess Anne--Council of Lords held by James--He appoints Commissioners

to treat with William--The Negotiation a Feint--Dartmouth refuses

to send the Prince of Wales into France--Agitation of London--Forged

Proclamation--Risings in various Parts of the Country--Clarendon joins

the Prince at Salisbury; Dissension in the Prince's Camp--The Prince

reaches Hungerford; Skirmish at Reading; the King's Commissioners arrive

at Hungerford--Negotiation--The Queen and the Prince of Wales sent to

France; Lauzun--The King's Preparations for Flight--His Flight

THE acquittal of the Bishops was not the only event which makes the

thirtieth of June 1688 a great epoch in history. On that day, while the

bells of a hundred churches were ringing, while multitudes were busied,

from Hyde Park to Mile End, in piling faggots and dressing Popes for

the rejoicings of the night, was despatched from London to the Hague an

instrument scarcely less important to the liberties of England than the

Great Charter.

The prosecution of the Bishops, and the birth of the Prince of Wales,

had produced a great revolution in the feelings of many Tories. At

the very moment at which their Church was suffering the last excess of

injury and insult, they were compelled to renounce the hope of peaceful

deliverance. Hitherto they had flattered themselves that the trial to

which their loyalty was subjected would, though severe, be temporary,

and that their wrongs would shortly be redressed without any violation

of the ordinary rule of succession. A very different prospect was

now before them. As far as they could look forward they saw only

misgovernment, such as that of the last three years, extending through

ages. The cradle of the heir apparent of the crown was surrounded by

Jesuits. Deadly hatred of that Church of which he would one day be the

head would be studiously instilled into his infant mind, would be the

guiding principle of his life, and would be bequeathed by him to his

posterity. This vista of calamities had no end. It stretched beyond the

life of the youngest man living, beyond the eighteenth century. None

could say how many generations of Protestant Englishmen might hive to

bear oppression, such as, even when it had been believed to be short,

had been found almost insupportable. Was there then no remedy? One

remedy there was, quick, sharp, and decisive, a remedy which the Whigs

had been but too ready to employ, but which had always been regarded by

the Tories as, in all cases, unlawful.

The greatest Anglican doctors of that age had maintained that no breach

of law or contract, no excess of cruelty, rapacity, or licentiousness,

on the part of a rightful King, could justify his people in withstanding

him by force. Some of them had delighted to exhibit the doctrine of

nonresistance in a form so exaggerated as to shock common sense and

humanity. They frequently and emphatically remarked that Nero was at

the head of the Roman government when Saint Paul inculcated the duty

of obeying magistrates. The inference which they drew was that, if an

English King should, without any law but his own pleasure, persecute his

subjects for not worshipping idols, should fling them to the lions in

the Tower, should wrap them up in pitched cloth and set them on fire to

light up Saint James's Park, and should go on with these massacres till

whole towns and shires were left without one inhabitant, the survivors

would still be bound meekly to submit, and to be torn in pieces or

roasted alive without a struggle. The arguments in favour of this

proposition were futile indeed: but the place of sound argument was

amply supplied by the omnipotent sophistry of interest and of passion.

Many writers have expressed wonder that the high spirited Cavaliers of

England should have been zealous for the most slavish theory that

has ever been known among men. The truth is that this theory at first

presented itself to the Cavalier as the very opposite of slavish. Its

tendency was to make him not a slave but a freeman and a master. It

exalted him by exalting one whom he regarded as his protector, as his

friend, as the head of his beloved party and of his more beloved Church.

When Republicans were dominant the Royalist had endured wrongs and

insults which the restoration of the legitimate government had enabled

him to retaliate. Rebellion was therefore associated in his imagination

with subjection and degradation, and monarchical authority with liberty

and ascendency. It had never crossed his imagination that a time might

come when a King, a Stuart, would persecute the most loyal of the clergy

and gentry with more than the animosity of the Rump or the Protector.

That time had however arrived. It was now to be seen how the patience

which Churchmen professed to have learned from the writings of Paul

would stand the test of a persecution by no means so severe as that of

Nero. The event was such as everybody who knew anything of human nature

would have predicted. Oppression speedily did what philosophy and

eloquence would have failed to do. The system of Filmer might have

survived the attacks of Locke: but it never recovered from the death

blow given by James. That logic, which, while it was used to prove

that Presbyterians and Independents ought to bear imprisonment and

confiscation with meekness, had been pronounced unanswerable, seemed to

be of very little force when the question was whether Anglican Bishops

should be imprisoned, and the revenues of Anglican colleges confiscated.

It has been often repeated, from the pulpits of all the Cathedrals in

the land, that the apostolical injunction to obey the civil magistrate

was absolute and universal, and that it was impious presumption in man

to limit a precept which had been promulgated without any limitation

in the word of God. Now, however, divines, whose sagacity had been

sharpened by the imminent danger in which they stood of being turned out

of their livings and prebends to make room for Papists, discovered flaws

in the reasoning which had formerly seemed so convincing. The ethical

parts of Scripture were not to be construed like Acts of Parliament, or

like the casuistical treatises of the schoolmen. What Christian really

turned the left cheek to the ruffian who had smitten the right? What

Christian really gave his cloak to the thieves who had taken his coat

away? Both in the Old and in the New Testament general rules were

perpetually laid down unaccompanied by the exceptions. Thus there was a

general command not to kill, unaccompanied by any reservation in favour

of the warrior who kills in defence of his king and country. There was a

general command not to swear, unaccompanied by any reservation in favour

of the witness who swears to speak the truth before a judge. Yet the

lawfulness of defensive war, and of judicial oaths, was disputed only by

a few obscure sectaries, and was positively affirmed in the articles of

the Church of England. All the arguments, which showed that the Quaker,

who refused to bear arms, or to kiss the Gospels, was unreasonable and

perverse, might be turned against those who denied to subjects the right

of resisting extreme tyranny by force. If it was contended that

the texts which prohibited homicide, and the texts which prohibited

swearing, though generally expressed, must be construed in subordination

to the great commandment by which every man is enjoined to promote the

welfare of his neighbours, and would, when so construed, be found not

to apply to cases in which homicide or swearing might be absolutely

necessary to protect the dearest interests of society, it was not easy

to deny that the texts which prohibited resistance ought to be construed

in the same manner. If the ancient people of God had been directed

sometimes to destroy human life, and sometimes to bind themselves by

oaths, they had also been directed sometimes to resist wicked princes.

If early fathers of the Church had occasionally used language which

seemed to imply that they disapproved of all resistance, they had also

occasionally used language which seemed to imply that they disapproved

of all war and of all oaths. In truth the doctrine of passive obedience,

as taught at Oxford in the reign of Charles the Second, can be deduced

from the Bible only by a mode of interpretation which would irresistibly

lead us to the conclusions of Barclay and Penn.

It was not merely by arguments drawn from the letter of Scripture

that the Anglican theologians had, during the years which immediately

followed the Restoration, laboured to prove their favourite tenet. They

had attempted to show that, even if revelation had been silent, reason

would have taught wise men the folly and wickedness of all resistance to

established government. It was universally admitted that such resistance

was, except in extreme cases, unjustifiable. And who would undertake to

draw the line between extreme cases and ordinary cases? Was there any

government in the world under which there were not to be found some

discontented and factious men who would say, and perhaps think, that

their grievances constituted an extreme case? If, indeed, it were

possible to lay down a clear and accurate rule which might forbid men

to rebel against Trajan, and yet leave them at liberty to rebel against

Caligula, such a rule might be highly beneficial. But no such rule had

even been, or ever would be, framed. To say that rebellion was

lawful under some circumstances, without accurately defining those

circumstances, was to say that every man might rebel whenever he thought

fit; and a society in which every man rebelled whenever he thought fit

would be more miserable than a society governed by the most cruel and

licentious despot. It was therefore necessary to maintain the great

principle of nonresistance in all its integrity. Particular cases might

doubtless be put in which resistance would benefit a community: but it

was, on the whole, better that the people should patiently endure a bad

government than that they should relieve themselves by violating a law

on which the security of all government depended.

Such reasoning easily convinced a dominant and prosperous party, but

could ill bear the scrutiny of minds strongly excited by royal injustice

and ingratitude. It is true that to trace the exact boundary between

rightful and wrongful resistance is impossible: but this impossibility

arises from the nature of right and wrong, and is found in almost every

part of ethical science. A good action is not distinguished from a bad

action by marks so plain as those which distinguish a hexagon from a

square. There is a frontier where virtue and vice fade into each other.

Who has ever been able to define the exact boundary between courage and

rashness, between prudence and cowardice, between frugality and avarice,

between liberality and prodigality? Who has ever been able to say how

far mercy to offenders ought to be carried, and where it ceases to

deserve the name of mercy and becomes a pernicious weakness? What

casuist, what lawyer, has ever been able nicely to mark the limits of

the right of selfdefence? All our jurists bold that a certain quantity

of risk to life or limb justifies a man in shooting or stabbing an

assailant: but they have long given up in despair the attempt to

describe, in precise words, that quantity of risk. They only say that

it must be, not a slight risk, but a risk such as would cause serious

apprehension to a man of firm mind; and who will undertake to say

what is the precise amount of apprehension which deserves to be called

serious, or what is the precise texture of mind which deserves to be

called firm. It is doubtless to be regretted that the nature of words

and the nature of things do not admit of more accurate legislation: nor

can it be denied that wrong will often be done when men are judges in

their own cause, and proceed instantly to execute their own judgment.

Yet who would, on that account, interdict all selfdefence? The right

which a people has to resist a bad government bears a close analogy to

the right which an individual, in the absence of legal protection, has

to slay an assailant. In both cases the evil must be grave. In both

cases all regular and peaceable modes of defence must be exhausted

before the aggrieved party resorts to extremities. In both cases an

awful responsibility is incurred. In both cases the burden of the proof

lies on him who has ventured on so desperate an expedient; and, if

he fails to vindicate himself, he is justly liable to the severest

penalties. But in neither case can we absolutely deny the existence

of the right. A man beset by assassins is not bound to let himself be

tortured and butchered without using his weapons, because nobody has

ever been able precisely to define the amount of danger which justifies

homicide. Nor is a society bound to endure passively all that tyranny

can inflict, because nobody has ever been able precisely to define the

amount of misgovernment which justifies rebellion.

But could the resistance of Englishmen to such a prince as James be

properly called rebellion? The thoroughpaced disciples of Filmer,

indeed, maintained that there was no difference whatever between the

polity of our country and that of Turkey, and that, if the King did not

confiscate the contents of all the tills in Lombard Street, and send

mutes with bowstrings to Sancroft and Halifax, this was only because His

Majesty was too gracious to use the whole power which he derived from

heaven. But the great body of Tories, though, in the heat of conflict,

they might occasionally use language which seemed to indicate that they

approved of these extravagant doctrines, heartily abhorred despotism.

The English government was, in their view, a limited monarchy. Yet how

can a monarchy be said to be limited if force is never to be employed,

even in the last resort, for the purpose of maintaining the limitations?

In Muscovy, where the sovereign was, by the constitution of the state,

absolute, it might perhaps be, with some colour of truth, contended

that, whatever excesses he might commit, he was still entitled to

demand, on Christian principles, the obedience of his subjects. But here

prince and people were alike bound by the laws. It was therefore James

who incurred the woe denounced against those who insult the powers

that be. It was James who was resisting the ordinance of God, who was

mutinying against that legitimate authority to which he ought to have

been subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake, and who

was, in the true sense of the words of Jesus, withholding from Caesar

the things which were Caesar's.

Moved by such considerations as these, the ablest and most enlightened

Tories began to admit that they had overstrained the doctrine of passive

obedience. The difference between these men and the Whigs as to the

reciprocal obligations of Kings and subjects was now no longer a

difference of principle. There still remained, it is true, many

historical controversies between the party which had always maintained

the lawfulness of resistance and the new converts. The memory of the

blessed Martyr was still as much revered as ever by those old Cavaliers

who were ready to take arms against his degenerate son. They still spoke

with abhorrence of the Long Parliament, of the Rye House Plot, and of

the Western insurrection. But, whatever they might think about the past,

the view which they took of the present was altogether Whiggish: for

they now held that extreme oppression might justify resistance, and they

held that the oppression which the nation suffered was extreme. [412]

It must not, however, be supposed that all the Tories renounced, even at

that conjuncture, a tenet which they had from childhood been taught to

regard as an essential part of Christianity, which they had professed

during many years with ostentatious vehemence, and which they had

attempted to propagate by persecution. Many were kept steady to their

old creed by conscience, and many by shame. But the greater part,

even of those who still continued to pronounce all resistance to the

sovereign unlawful, were disposed, in the event of a civil conflict,

to remain neutral. No provocation should drive them to rebel: but, if

rebellion broke forth, it did not appear that they were bound to fight

for James the Second as they would have fought for Charles the First.

The Christians of Rome had been forbidden by Saint Paul to resist the

government of Nero: but there was no reason to believe that the Apostle,

if he had been alive when the Legions and the Senate rose up against

that wicked Emperor, would have commanded the brethren to fly to arms

in support of tyranny. The duty of the persecuted Church was clear: she

must suffer patiently, and commit her cause to God. But, if God, whose

providence perpetually educes good out of evil, should be pleased,

as oftentimes He bad been pleased, to redress her wrongs by the

instrumentality of men whose angry passions her lessons had not been

able to tame, she might gratefully accept from Him a deliverance which

her principles did not permit her to achieve for herself. Most of

those Tories, therefore, who still sincerely disclaimed all thought of

attacking the government, were yet by no means inclined to defend it,

and perhaps, while glorying in their own scruples, secretly rejoiced

that everybody was not so scrupulous as themselves.

The Whigs saw that their time was come. Whether they should draw the

sword against the government had, during six or seven years, been, in

their view, merely a question of prudence; and prudence itself now urged

them to take a bold course.

In May, before the birth of the Prince of Wales, and while it was still

uncertain whether the Declaration would or would not be read in the

churches, Edward Russell had repaired to the Hague. He had strongly

represented to the Prince of Orange the state of the public mind, and

had advised his Highness to appear in England at the head of a strong

body of troops, and to call the people to arms.

William had seen, at a glance, the whole importance of the crisis. "Now

or never," he exclaimed in Latin to Dykvelt. [413] To Russell he held

more guarded language, admitted that the distempers of the state were

such as required an extraordinary remedy, but spoke with earnestness of

the chance of failure, and of the calamities which failure might bring

on Britain and on Europe. He knew well that many who talked in high

language about sacrificing their lives and fortunes for their country

would hesitate when the prospect of another Bloody Circuit was brought

close to them. He wanted therefore to have, not vague professions of

good will, but distinct invitations and promises of support subscribed

by powerful and eminent men. Russell remarked that it would be dangerous

to entrust the design to a great number of persons. William assented,

and said that a few signatures would be sufficient, if they were the

signatures of statesmen who represented great interests. [414]

With this answer Russell returned to London, where he found the

excitement greatly increased and daily increasing. The imprisonment of

the Bishops and the delivery of the Queen made his task easier than he

could have anticipated. He lost no time in collecting the voices of the

chiefs of the opposition. His principal coadjutor in this work was Henry

Sidney, brother of Algernon. It is remarkable that both Edward Russell

and Henry Sidney had been in the household of James, that both had,

partly on public and partly on private grounds, become his enemies, and

that both had to avenge the blood of near kinsmen who had, in the same

year, fallen victims to his implacable severity. Here the resemblance

ends. Russell, with considerable abilities, was proud, acrimonious,

restless, and violent. Sidney, with a sweet temper and winning manners,

seemed to be deficient in capacity and knowledge, and to be sunk in

voluptuousness and indolence. His face and form were eminently handsome.

In his youth he had been the terror of husbands; and even now, at near

fifty, he was the favourite of women and the envy of younger men. He

had formerly resided at the Hague in a public character, and had then

succeeded in obtaining a large share of William's confidence. Many

wondered at this: for it seemed that between the most austere of

statesmen and the most dissolute of idlers there could be nothing in

common. Swift, many years later, could not be convinced that one whom he

had known only as an illiterate and frivolous old rake could really have

played a great part in a great revolution. Yet a less acute observer

than Swift might have been aware that there is a certain tact,

resembling an instinct, which is often wanting to great orators and

philosophers, and which is often found in persons who, if judged by

their conversation or by their writings, would be pronounced simpletons.

Indeed, when a man possesses this tact, it is in some sense an advantage

to him that he is destitute of those more showy talents which would

make him an object of admiration, of envy, and of fear. Sidney was a

remarkable instance of this truth. Incapable, ignorant, and dissipated

as he seemed to be, he understood, or rather felt, with whom it was

necessary to be reserved, and with whom he might safely venture to be

communicative. The consequence was that he did what Mordaunt, with

all his vivacity and invention, or Burnet, with all his multifarious

knowledge and fluent elocution never could have done. [415]

With the old Whigs there could be no difficulty. In their opinion there

had been scarcely a moment, during many years, at which the public

wrongs would not have justified resistance. Devonshire, who might

be regarded as their chief, had private as well as public wrongs to

revenge. He went into the scheme with his whole heart, and answered for

his party. [416]

Russell opened the design to Shrewsbury. Sidney sounded Halifax.

Shrewsbury took his part with a courage and decision which, at a later

period, seemed to be wanting to his character. He at once agreed to

set his estate, his honours, and his life, on the stake. But Halifax

received the first hint of the project in a way which showed that it

would be useless, and perhaps hazardous, to be explicit. He was indeed

not the man for such an enterprise. His intellect was inexhaustibly

fertile of distinctions and objections; his temper calm and

unadventurous. He was ready to oppose the court to the utmost in the

House of Lords and by means of anonymous writings: but he was little

disposed to exchange his lordly repose for the insecure and agitated

life of a conspirator, to be in the power of accomplices, to live in

constant dread of warrants and King's messengers, nay, perhaps, to end

his days on a scaffold, or to live on alms in some back street of the

Hague. He therefore let fall some words which plainly indicated that

he did not wish to be privy to the intentions of his more daring and

impetuous friends. Sidney understood him and said no more. [417]

The next application was made to Danby, and had far better success.

Indeed, for his bold and active spirit the danger and the excitement,

which were insupportable to the more delicately organized mind of

Halifax, had a strong fascination. The different characters of the two

statesmen were legible in their faces. The brow, the eye, and the mouth

of Halifax indicated a powerful intellect and an exquisite sense of the

ludicrous; but the expression was that of a sceptic, of a voluptuary,

of a man not likely to venture his all on a single hazard, or to be a

martyr in any cause. To those who are acquainted with his countenance

it will not seem wonderful that the writer in whom he most delighted

was Montaigne. [418] Danby was a skeleton; and his meagre and wrinkled,

though handsome and noble, face strongly expressed both the keenness

of his parts and the restlessness of his ambition. Already he had once

risen from obscurity to the height of power. He had then fallen headlong

from his elevation. His life had been in danger. He had passed years in

a prison. He was now free: but this did not content him: he wished to

be again great. Attached as he was to the Anglican Church, hostile as he

was to the French ascendency, he could not hope to be great in a court

swarming with Jesuits and obsequious to the House of Bourbon. But, if he

bore a chief part in a revolution which should confound all the schemes

of the Papists, which should put an end to the long vassalage of

England, and which should transfer the regal power to an illustrious

pair whom he had united, he might emerge from his eclipse with new

splendour. The Whigs, whose animosity had nine years before driven

him from office, would, on his auspicious reappearance, join their

acclamations to the acclamations of his old friends the Cavaliers.

Already there had been a complete reconciliation between him and one of

the most distinguished of those who had formerly been managers of his

impeachment, the Earl of Devonshire. The two noblemen had met at

a village in the Peak, and had exchanged assurances of good will.

Devonshire had frankly owned that the Whigs had been guilty of a great

injustice, and had declared that they were now convinced of their error.

Danby, on his side, had also recantations to make. He had once held,

or pretended to hold, the doctrine of passive obedience in the largest

sense. Under his administration and with his sanction, a law had

been proposed which, if it had been passed, would have excluded from

Parliament and office all who refused to declare on oath that

they thought resistance in every case unlawful. But his vigorous

understanding, now thoroughly awakened by anxiety for the public

interests and for his own, was no longer to be duped, if indeed it ever

had been duped, by such childish fallacies. He at once gave in his

own adhesion to the conspiracy. He then exerted himself to obtain the

concurrence of Compton, the suspended Bishop of London, and succeeded

without difficulty. No prelate had been so insolently and unjustly

treated by the government as Compton; nor had any prelate so much to

expect from a revolution: for he had directed the education of the

Princess of Orange, and was supposed to possess a large share of her

confidence. He had, like his brethren, strongly maintained, as long as

he was not oppressed, that it was a crime to resist oppression; but,

since he had stood before the High Commission, a new light had broken in

upon his mind. [419]

Both Danby and Compton were desirous to secure the assistance of

Nottingham. The whole plan was opened to him; and he approved of it.

But in a few days he began to be unquiet. His mind was not sufficiently

powerful to emancipate itself from the prejudices of education. He went

about from divine to divine proposing in general terms hypothetical

cases of tyranny, and inquiring whether in such cases resistance would

be lawful. The answers which he obtained increased his distress. He at

length told his accomplices that he could go no further with them. If

they thought him capable of betraying them, they might stab him; and he

should hardly blame them; for, by drawing back after going so far, he

had given them a kind of right over his life. They had, however, he

assured them, nothing to fear from him: he would keep their secret; he

could not help wishing them success; but his conscience would not suffer

him to take an active part in a rebellion. They heard his confession

with suspicion and disdain. Sidney, whose notions of a conscientious

scruple were extremely vague, informed the Prince that Nottingham had

taken fright. It is due to Nottingham, however, to say that the general

tenor of his life justifies us in believing his conduct on this occasion

to have been perfectly honest, though most unwise and irresolute. [420]

The agents of the Prince had more complete success with Lord Lumley,

who knew himself to be, in spite of the eminent service which he

had performed at the time of the Western insurrection, abhorred

at Whitehall, not only as a heretic but as a renegade, and who was

therefore more eager than most of those who had been born Protestants to

take arms in defence of Protestantism. [421]

During June the meetings of those who were in the secret were frequent.

At length, on the last day of the month, the day on which the Bishops

were pronounced not guilty, the decisive step was taken. A formal

invitation, transcribed by Sidney but drawn up by some person more

skilled than Sidney, in the art of composition, was despatched to the

Hague. In this paper William was assured that nineteen twentieths of the

English people were desirous of a change, and would willingly join

to effect it, if only they could obtain the help of such a force from

abroad as might secure those who should rise in arms from the danger of

being dispersed and slaughtered before they could form themselves into

anything like military order. If his Highness would appear in the

island at the head of some troops, tens of thousands would hasten to

his standard. He would soon find himself at the head of a force greatly

superior to the whole regular army of England. Nor could that army

be implicitly depended on by the government. The officers were

discontented; and the common soldiers shared that aversion to Popery

which was general in the class from which they were taken. In the navy

Protestant feeling was still stronger. It was important to take some

decisive step while things were in this state. The enterprise would

be far more arduous if it were deferred till the King, by remodelling

boroughs and regiments, had procured a Parliament and an army on which

he could rely. The conspirators, therefore, implored the Prince to come

among them with as little delay as possible. They pledged their honour

that they would join him; and they undertook to secure the cooperation

of as large a number of persons as could safely be trusted with so

momentous and perilous a secret. On one point they thought it their

duty to remonstrate with his Highness. He had not taken advantage of the

opinion which the great body of the English people had formed respecting

the late birth. He had, on the contrary, sent congratulations to

Whitehall, and had thus seemed to acknowledge that the child who was

called Prince of Wales was rightful heir of the throne. This was a grave

error, and had damped the zeal of many. Not one person in a thousand

doubted that the boy was supposititious; and the Prince would be wanting

to his own interests if the suspicious circumstances which had attended

the Queen's confinement were not put prominently forward among his

reasons for taking arms. [422]

This paper was signed in cipher by the seven chiefs of the conspiracy,

Shrewsbury, Devonshire, Danby, Lumley, Compton, Russell and Sidney.

Herbert undertook to be their messenger. His errand was one of no

ordinary peril. He assumed the garb of a common sailor, and in this

disguise reached the Dutch coast in safety, on the Friday after the

trial of the Bishops. He instantly hastened to the Prince. Bentinck and

Dykvelt were summoned, and several days were passed in deliberation. The

first result of this deliberation was that the prayer for the Prince of

Wales ceased to be read in the Princess's chapel. [423]

From his wife William had no opposition to apprehend. Her understanding

had been completely subjugated by his; and, what is more extraordinary,

he had won her entire affection. He was to her in the place of the

parents whom she had lost by death and by estrangement, of the children

who had been denied to her prayers, and of the country from which she

was banished. His empire over her heart was divided only with her God.

To her father she had probably never been attached: she had quitted him

young: many years had elapsed since she had seen him; and no part of

his conduct to her, since her marriage, had indicated tenderness on his

part, or had been calculated to call forth tenderness on hers. He

had done all in his power to disturb her domestic happiness, and had

established a system of spying, eavesdropping, and talebearing under her

roof. He had a far greater revenue than any of his predecessors had ever

possessed, and regularly allowed to her younger sister forty thousand

pounds a year: [424] but the heiress presumptive of his throne had never

received from him the smallest pecuniary assistance, and was scarcely

able to make that appearance which became her high rank among European

princesses. She had ventured to intercede with him on behalf of her

old friend and preceptor Compton, who, for refusing to commit an act of

flagitious injustice, had been suspended from his episcopal functions;

but she had been ungraciously repulsed. [425] From the day on which

it had become clear that she and her husband were determined not to be

parties to the subversion of the English constitution, one chief object

of the politics of James had been to injure them both. He had recalled

the British regiments from Holland. He had conspired with Tyrconnel

and with France against Mary's rights, and had made arrangements for

depriving her of one at least of the three crowns to which, at his

death, she would have been entitled. It was now believed by the great

body of his people, and by many persons high in rank and distinguished

by abilities, that he had introduced a supposititious Prince of

Wales into the royal family, in order to deprive her of a magnificent

inheritance; and there is no reason to doubt that she partook of the

prevailing suspicion. That she should love such a father was impossible.

Her religious principles, indeed, were so strict that she would probably

have tried to perform what she considered as her duty, even to a father

whom she did not love. On the present occasion, however, she judged

that the claim of James to her obedience ought to yield to a claim more

sacred. And indeed all divines and publicists agree in this, that,

when the daughter of a prince of one country is married to a prince of

another country, she is bound to forget her own people and her father's

house, and, in the event of a rupture between her husband and her

parents, to side with her husband. This is the undoubted rule even when

the husband is in the wrong; and to Mary the enterprise which William

meditated appeared not only just, but holy.

But, though she carefully abstained from doing or saying anything that

could add to his difficulties, those difficulties were serious indeed.

They were in truth but imperfectly understood even by some of those who

invited him over, and have been but imperfectly described by some of

those who have written the history of his expedition.

The obstacles which he might expect to encounter on English ground,

though the least formidable of the obstacles which stood in the way of

his design, were yet serious. He felt that it would be madness in him

to imitate the example of Monmouth, to cross the sea with a few British

adventurers, and to trust to a general rising of the population. It was

necessary, and it was pronounced necessary by all those who invited him

over, that he should carry an army with him. Yet who could answer for

the effect which the appearance of such an army might produce? The

government was indeed justly odious. But would the English people,

altogether unaccustomed to the interference of continental powers in

English disputes, be inclined to look with favour on a deliverer who

was surrounded by foreign soldiers? If any part of the royal forces

resolutely withstood the invaders, would not that part soon have on its

side the patriotic sympathy of millions? A defeat would be fatal to the

whole undertaking. A bloody victory gained in the heart of the island by

the mercenaries of the States General over the Coldstream Guards and the

Buffs would be almost as great a calamity as a defeat. Such a victory

would be the most cruel wound ever inflicted on the national pride of

one of the proudest of nations. The crown so won would never be worn

in peace or security: The hatred with which the High Commission and the

Jesuits were regarded would give place to the more intense hatred which

would be inspired by the alien conquerors; and many, who had hitherto

contemplated the power of France with dread and loathing, would say

that, if a foreign yoke must be borne, there was less ignominy in

submitting to France than in submitting to Holland.

These considerations might well have made William uneasy; even if all

the military means of the United Provinces had been at his absolute

disposal. But in truth it seemed very doubtful whether he would be able

to obtain the assistance of a single battalion. Of all the difficulties

with which he had to struggle, the greatest, though little noticed

by English historians, arose from the constitution of the Batavian

republic. No great society has ever existed during a long course of

years under a polity so inconvenient. The States General could not make

war or peace, could not conclude any alliance or levy any tax, without

the consent of the States of every province. The States of a province

could not give such consent without the consent of every municipality

which had a share in the representation. Every municipality was, in

some sense, a sovereign state, and, as such, claimed the right of

communicating directly with foreign ambassadors, and of concerting with

them the means of defeating schemes on which other municipalities

were intent. In some town councils the party which had, during several

generations, regarded the influence of the Stadtholders with jealousy

had great power. At the head of this party were the magistrates of the

noble city of Amsterdam, which was then at the height of prosperity.

They had, ever since the peace of Nimeguen, kept up a friendly

correspondence with Lewis through the instrumentality of his able and

active envoy the Count of Avaux. Propositions brought forward by the

Stadtholder as indispensable to the security of the commonwealth,

sanctioned by all the provinces except Holland, and sanctioned by

seventeen of the eighteen town councils of Holland, had repeatedly been

negatived by the single voice of Amsterdam. The only constitutional

remedy in such cases was that deputies from the cities which were agreed

should pay a visit to the city which dissented, for the purpose of

expostulation. The number of deputies was unlimited: they might continue

to expostulate as long as they thought fit; and meanwhile all their

expenses were defrayed by the obstinate community which refused to yield

to their arguments. This absurd mode of coercion had once been tried

with success on the little town of Gorkum, but was not likely to produce

much effect on the mighty and opulent Amsterdam, renowned throughout

the world for its haven bristling with innumerable masts, its canals

bordered by stately mansions, its gorgeous hall of state, walled,

roofed, and floored with polished marble, its warehouses filled with

the most costly productions of Ceylon and Surinam, and its Exchange

resounding with the endless hubbub of all the languages spoken by

civilised men. [426]

The disputes between the majority which supported the Stadtholder and

the minority headed by the magistrates of Amsterdam had repeatedly run

so high that bloodshed had seemed to be inevitable. On one occasion the

Prince had attempted to bring the refractory deputies to punishment as

traitors. On another occasion the gates of Amsterdam had been barred

against him, and troops had been raised to defend the privileges of the

municipal council. That the rulers of this great city would ever consent

to an expedition offensive in the highest degree to Lewis whom they

courted, and likely to aggrandise the House of Orange which they

abhorred, was not likely. Yet, without their consent, such an expedition

could not legally be undertaken. To quell their opposition by main force

was a course from which, in different circumstances, the resolute and

daring Stadtholder would not have shrunk. But at that moment it was

most important that he should carefully avoid every act which could

be represented as tyrannical. He could not venture to violate the

fundamental laws of Holland at the very moment at which he was drawing

the sword against his father in law for violating the fundamental laws

of England. The violent subversion of one free constitution would have

been a strange prelude to the violent restoration of another. [427]

There was yet another difficulty which has been too little noticed by

English writers, but which was never for a moment absent from William's

mind. In the expedition which he meditated he could succeed only by

appealing to the Protestant feeling of England, and by stimulating

that feeling till it became, for a time, the dominant and almost the

exclusive sentiment of the nation. This would indeed have been a

very simple course, had the end of all his politics been to effect

a revolution in our island and to reign there. But he had in view

an ulterior end which could be attained only by the help of princes

sincerely attached to the Church of Rome. He was desirous to unite the

Empire, the Catholic King, and the Holy See, with England and Holland,

in a league against the French ascendency. It was therefore necessary

that, while striking the greatest blow ever struck in defence of

Protestantism, he should yet contrive not to lose the goodwill of

governments which regarded Protestantism as a deadly heresy.

Such were the complicated difficulties of this great undertaking.

Continental statesmen saw a part of those difficulties; British

statesmen another part. One capacious and powerful mind alone took them

all in at one view, and determined to surmount them all. It was no

easy thing to subvert the English government by means of a foreign army

without galling the national pride of Englishmen. It was no easy

thing to obtain from that Batavian faction which regarded France with

partiality, and the House of Orange with aversion, a decision in favour

of an expedition which would confound all the schemes of France, and

raise the House of Orange to the height of greatness. It was no easy

thing to lead enthusiastic Protestants on a crusade against Popery

with the good wishes of almost all Popish governments and of the Pope

himself. Yet all these things William effected. All his objects, even

those which appeared most incompatible with each other, he attained

completely and at once. The whole history of ancient and of modern times

records no other such triumph of statesmanship.

The task would indeed have been too arduous even for such a statesman

as the Prince of Orange, had not his chief adversaries been at this

time smitten with an infatuation such as by many men not prone to

superstition was ascribed to the special judgment of God. Not only was

the King of England, as he had ever been, stupid and perverse: but even

the counsel of the politic King of France was turned into foolishness.

Whatever wisdom and energy could do William did. Those obstacles

which no wisdom or energy could have overcome his enemies themselves

studiously removed.

On the great day on which the Bishops were acquitted, and on which the

invitation was despatched to the Hague, James returned from Hounslow

to Westminster in a gloomy and agitated mood. He made an effort that

afternoon to appear cheerful: [428] but the bonfires, the rockets, and

above all the waxen Popes who were blazing in every quarter of London,

were not likely to soothe him. Those who saw him on the morrow could

easily read in his face and demeanour the violent emotions which

agitated his mind. [429] During some days he appeared so unwilling to

talk about the trial that even Barillon could not venture to introduce

the subject. [430]

Soon it began to be clear that defeat and mortification had only

hardened the King's heart. The first words which he uttered when he

learned that the objects of his revenge had escaped him were, "So much

the worse for them." In a few days these words, which he, according

to his fashion, repeated many times, were fully explained. He blamed

himself; not for having prosecuted the Bishops, but for having

prosecuted them before a tribunal where questions of fact were decided

by juries, and where established principles of law could not be utterly

disregarded even by the most servile Judges. This error he determined to

repair. Not only the seven prelates who had signed the petition, but the

whole Anglican clergy, should have reason to curse the day on which they

had triumphed over their Sovereign. Within a fortnight after the

trial an order was made, enjoining all Chancellors of dioceses and all

Archdeacons to make a strict inquisition throughout their respective

jurisdictions, and to report to the High Commission, within five weeks,

the names of all such rectors, vicars, and curates as had omitted to

read the Declaration. [431] The King anticipated with delight the terror

with which the offenders would learn that they were to be cited before a

court which would give them no quarter. [432] The number of culprits was

little, if at all, short of ten thousand: and, after what had passed

at Magdalene College, every one of them might reasonably expect to be

interdicted from all his spiritual functions, ejected from his benefice,

declared incapable of holding any other preferment, and charged with the

costs of the proceedings which had reduced him to beggary.

Such was the persecution with which James, smarting from his great

defeat in Westminster Hall, resolved to harass the clergy. Meanwhile he

tried to show the lawyers, by a prompt and large distribution of rewards

and punishments, that strenuous and unblushing servility, even when

least successful, was a sure title to his favour, and that whoever,

after years of obsequiousness, ventured to deviate but for one moment

into courage and honesty was guilty of an unpardonable offence.

The violence and audacity which the apostate Williams had exhibited

throughout the trial of the Bishops had made him hateful to the whole

nation. [433] He was recompensed with a baronetcy. Holloway and Powell

had raised their character by declaring that, in their judgment, the

petition was no libel. They were dismissed from their situations. [434]

The fate of Wright seems to have been, during some time, in suspense.

He had indeed summed up against the Bishops: but he had suffered their

counsel to question the dispensing power. He had pronounced the petition

a libel: but he had carefully abstained from pronouncing the Declaration

legal; and, through the whole proceeding, his tone had been that of a

man who remembered that a day of reckoning might come. He had indeed

strong claims to indulgence: for it was hardly to be expected that any

human impudence would hold out without flagging through such a task in

the presence of such a bar and of such an auditory. The members of the

Jesuitical cabal, however, blamed his want of spirit; the Chancellor

pronounced him a beast; and it was generally believed that a new Chief

Justice would be appointed. [435] But no change was made. It would

indeed have been no easy matter to supply Wright's place. The many

lawyers who were far superior to him in parts and learning were, with

scarcely an exception, hostile to the designs of the government; and

the very few lawyers who surpassed him in turpitude and effrontery were,

with scarcely an exception, to be found only in the lowest ranks of

the profession, and would have been incompetent to conduct the ordinary

business of the Court of King's Bench. Williams, it is true, united all

the qualities which James required in a magistrate. But the services

of Williams were needed at the bar; and, had he been moved thence, the

crown would have been left without the help of any advocate even of the

third rate.

Nothing had amazed or mortified the King more than the enthusiasm which

the Dissenters had shown in the cause of the Bishops. Penn, who, though

he had himself sacrificed wealth and honours to his conscientious

scruples, seems to have imagined that nobody but himself had a

conscience, imputed the discontent of the Puritans to envy and

dissatisfied ambition. They had not had their share of the benefits

promised by the Declaration of Indulgence: none of them had been

admitted to any high and honourable post; and therefore it was not

strange that they were jealous of the Roman Catholics. Accordingly,

within a week after the great verdict had been pronounced in Westminster

Hall, Silas Titus, a noted Presbyterian, a vehement Exclusionist, and a

manager of Stafford's impeachment, was invited to occupy a seat in the

Privy Council. He was one of the persons on whom the opposition had most

confidently reckoned. But the honour now offered to him, and the hope

of obtaining a large sum due to him from the crown, overcame his virtue,

and, to the great disgust of all classes of Protestants, he was sworn

in. [436]

The vindictive designs of the King against the Church were not

accomplished. Almost all the Archdeacons and diocesan Chancellors

refused to furnish the information which was required. The day on which

it had been intended that the whole body of the priesthood should be

summoned to answer for the crime of disobedience arrived. The High

Commission met. It appeared that scarcely one ecclesiastical officer had

sent up a return. At the same time a paper of grave import was delivered

to the board. It came from Sprat, Bishop of Rochester. During two years,

supported by the hope of an Archbishopric, he had been content to bear

the reproach of persecuting that Church which he was bound by every

obligation of conscience and honour to defend. But his hope had been

disappointed. He saw that, unless he abjured his religion, he had

no chance of sitting on the metropolitan throne of York. He was too

goodnatured to find any pleasure in tyranny, and too discerning not

to see the signs of the coming retribution. He therefore determined to

resign his odious functions; and he communicated his determination to

his colleagues in a letter written, like all his prose compositions,

with great propriety and dignity of style. It was impossible, he said,

that he could longer continue to be a member of the Commission. He had

himself, in obedience to the royal command, read the Declaration: but

he could not presume to condemn thousands of pious and loyal divines who

had taken a different view of their duty; and, since it was resolved to

punish them for acting according to their conscience, he must declare

that he would rather suffer with them than be accessary to their

sufferings.

The Commissioners read and stood aghast. The very faults of their

colleague, the known laxity of his principles, the known meanness of

his spirit, made his defection peculiarly alarming. A government must

be indeed in danger when men like Sprat address it in the language of

Hampden. The tribunal, lately so insolent, became on a sudden strangely

tame. The ecclesiastical functionaries who had defied its authority were

not even reprimanded. It was not thought safe to hint any suspicion that

their disobedience had been intentional. They were merely enjoined to

have their reports ready in four months. The Commission then broke up in

confusion. It had received a death blow. [437]

While the High Commission shrank from a conflict with the Church, the

Church, conscious of its strength, and animated by a new enthusiasm,

invited, by a series of defiances, the attack of the High Commission.

Soon after the acquittal of the Bishops, the venerable Ormond, the most

illustrious of the Cavaliers of the great civil war, sank under his

infirmities. The intelligence of his death was conveyed with speed to

Oxford. Instantly the University, of which he had long been Chancellor,

met to name a successor. One party was for the eloquent and accomplished

Halifax, another for the grave and orthodox Nottingham. Some mentioned

the Earl of Abingdon, who resided near them, and had recently been

turned out of the lieutenancy of the county for refusing to join with

the King against the established religion. But the majority, consisting

of a hundred and eighty graduates, voted for the young Duke of Ormond,

grandson of their late head, and son of the gallant Ossory. The speed

with which they came to this resolution was caused by their apprehension

that, if there were a delay even of a day, the King would attempt to

force on them some chief who would betray their rights. The apprehension

was reasonable: for, only two hours after they had separated, came a

mandate from Whitehall requiring them to choose Jeffreys. Happily the

election of young Ormond was already complete and irrevocable. [438] A

few weeks later the infamous Timothy Hall, who had distinguished himself

among the clergy of London by reading the Declaration, was rewarded with

the Bishopric of Oxford, which had been vacant since the death of the

not less infamous Parker. Hall came down to his see: but the Canons of

his Cathedral refused to attend his installation: the University refused

to create him a Doctor: not a single one of the academic youth applied

to him for holy orders: no cap was touched to him and, in his palace, he

found himself alone. [439]

Soon afterwards a living which was in the gift of Magdalene College,

Oxford, became vacant. Hough and his ejected brethren assembled and

presented a clerk; and the Bishop of Gloucester, in whose diocese the

living lay, instituted their presentee without hesitation. [440]

The gentry were not less refractory than the clergy. The assizes of

that summer wore all over the country an aspect never before known. The

Judges, before they set out on their circuits, had been summoned into

the King's presence, and had been directed by him to impress on the

grand jurors and magistrates, throughout the kingdom, the duty of

electing such members of Parliament as would support his policy. They

obeyed his commands, harangued vehemently against the clergy, reviled

the seven Bishops, called the memorable petition a factious libel,

criticized with great asperity Sancroft's style, which was indeed open

to criticism, and pronounced that his Grace ought to be whipped by

Doctor Busby for writing bad English. But the only effect of these

indecent declamations was to increase the public discontent. All the

marks of public respect which had usually been shown to the judicial

office and to the royal commission were withdrawn. The old custom

was that men of good birth and estate should ride in the train of the

Sheriff when he escorted the Judges to the county town: but such a

procession could now with difficulty be formed in any part of the

kingdom. The successors of Powell and Holloway, in particular, were

treated with marked indignity. The Oxford circuit had been allotted to

them; and they had expected to be greeted in every shire by a cavalcade

of the loyal gentry. But as they approached Wallingford, where they were

to open their commission for Berkshire, the Sheriff alone came forth to

meet them. As they approached Oxford, the eminently loyal capital of an

eminently loyal province, they were again welcomed by the Sheriff alone.

[441]

The army was scarcely less disaffected than the clergy or the gentry.

The garrison of the Tower had drunk the health of the imprisoned

Bishops. The footguards stationed at Lambeth had, with every mark of

reverence, welcomed the Primate back to his palace. Nowhere had the

news of the acquittal been received with more clamorous delight than at

Hounslow Heath. In truth, the great force which the King had assembled

for the purpose of overawing his mutinous capital had become more

mutinous than the capital itself; and was more dreaded by the court than

by the citizens. Early in August, therefore, the camp was broken up,

and the troops were sent to quarters in different parts of the country.

[442]

James flattered himself that it would be easier to deal with separate

battalions than with many thousands of men collected in one mass. The

first experiment was tried on Lord Lichfield's regiment of infantry,

now called the Twelfth of the Line. That regiment was probably selected

because it had been raised, at the time of the Western insurrection, in

Staffordshire, a province where the Roman Catholics were more numerous

and powerful than in almost any other part of England. The men were

drawn up in the King's presence. Their major informed them that His

Majesty wished them to subscribe an engagement, binding them to assist

in carrying into effect his intentions concerning the test, and that all

who did not choose to comply must quit the service on the spot. To the

King's great astonishment, whole ranks instantly laid down their pikes

and muskets. Only two officers and a few privates, all Roman Catholics,

obeyed his command. He remained silent for a short time. Then he bade

the men take up their arms. "Another time," he said, with a gloomy look,

"I shall not do you the honour to consult you." [443]

It was plain that, if he determined to persist in his designs, he must

remodel his army. Yet materials for that purpose he could not find in

our island. The members of his Church, even in the districts where

they were most numerous, were a small minority of the people. Hatred of

Popery had spread through all classes of his Protestant subjects, and

had become the ruling passion even of ploughmen and artisans. But there

was another part of his dominions where a very different spirit animated

the great body of the population. There was no limit to the number of

Roman Catholic soldiers whom the good pay and quarters of England would

attract across St. George's Channel. Tyrconnel had been, during some

time, employed in forming out of the peasantry of his country a military

force on which his master might depend. Already Papists, of Celtic

blood and speech, composed almost the whole army of Ireland. Barillon

earnestly and repeatedly advised James to bring over that army for the

purpose of coercing the English. [444]

James wavered. He wished to be surrounded by troops on whom he could

rely: but he dreaded the explosion of national feeling which the

appearance of a great Irish force on English ground must produce.

At last, as usually happens when a weak man tries to avoid opposite

inconveniences, he took a course which united them all. He brought over

Irishmen, not indeed enough to hold down the single city of London, or

the single county of York, but more than enough to excite the alarm and

rage of the whole kingdom, from Northumberland to Cornwall. Battalion

after battalion, raised and trained by Tyrconnel, landed on the western

coast and moved towards the capital; and Irish recruits were imported

in considerable numbers, to fill up vacancies in the English regiments.

[445]

Of the many errors which James committed, none was more fatal than this.

Already he had alienated the hearts of his people by violating their

laws, confiscating their estates, and persecuting their religion. Of

those who had once been most zealous for monarchy, he had already made

many rebels in heart. Yet he might still, with some chance of success,

have appealed to the patriotic spirit of his subjects against

an invader. For they were a race insular in temper as well as in

geographical position. Their national antipathies were, indeed, in

that age, unreasonably and unamiably strong. Never had the English

been accustomed to the control of interference of any stranger. The

appearance of a foreign army on their soil might impel them to rally

even round a King whom they had no reason to love. William might perhaps

have been unable to overcome this difficulty; but James removed it. Not

even the arrival of a brigade of Lewis's musketeers would have excited

such resentment and shame as our ancestors felt when they saw armed

columns of Papists, just arrived from Dublin, moving in military

pomp along the high roads. No man of English blood then regarded the

aboriginal Irish as his countrymen. They did not belong to our branch of

the great human family. They were distinguished from us by more than one

moral and intellectual peculiarity, which the difference of situation

and of education, great as that difference was, did not seem altogether

to explain. They had an aspect of their own, a mother tongue of their

own. When they talked English their pronunciation was ludicrous; their

phraseology was grotesque, as is always the phraseology of those who

think in one language and express their thoughts in another. They were

therefore foreigners; and of all foreigners they were the most hated and

despised: the most hated, for they had, during five centuries, always

been our enemies; the most despised, for they were our vanquished,

enslaved, and despoiled enemies. The Englishman compared with pride his

own fields with the desolate bogs whence the Rapparees issued forth to

rob and murder, and his own dwelling with the hovels where the peasants

and the hogs of the Shannon wallowed in filth together. He was a member

of a society far inferior, indeed, in wealth and civilisation, to the

society in which we live, but still one of the wealthiest and most

highly civilised societies that the world had then seen: the Irish were

almost as rude as the savages of Labrador. He was a freeman: the Irish

were the hereditary serfs of his race. He worshipped God after a pure

and rational fashion: the Irish were sunk in idolatry and superstition.

He knew that great numbers of Irish had repeatedly fled before a small

English force, and that the whole Irish population had been held down

by a small English colony; and he very complacently inferred that he was

naturally a being of a higher order than the Irishman: for it is thus

that a dominant race always explains its ascendency and excuses its

tyranny. That in vivacity, humour, and eloquence, the Irish stand high

among the nations of the world is now universally acknowledged. That,

when well disciplined, they are excellent soldiers has been proved on a

hundred fields of battle. Yet it is certain that, a century and a half

ago, they were generally despised in our island as both a stupid and a

cowardly people. And these were the men who were to hold England down

by main force while her civil and ecclesiastical constitution was

destroyed. The blood of the whole nation boiled at the thought. To be

conquered by Frenchmen or by Spaniards would have seemed comparatively

a tolerable fate. With Frenchmen and Spaniards we had been accustomed

to treat on equal terms. We had sometimes envied their prosperity,

sometimes dreaded their power, sometimes congratulated ourselves on

their friendship. In spite of our unsocial pride, we admitted that they

were great nations, and that they could boast of men eminent in the

arts of war and peace. But to be subjugated by an inferior caste was a

degradation beyond all other degradation. The English felt as the white

inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans would feel if those towns were

occupied by negro garrisons. The real facts would have been sufficient

to excite uneasiness and indignation: but the real facts were lost

amidst a crowd of wild rumours which flew without ceasing from

coffeehouse to coffeehouse and from alebench to alebench, and became

more wonderful and terrible at every stage of the progress. The number

of the Irish troops who had landed on our shores might justly excite

serious apprehensions as to the King's ulterior designs; but it was

magnified tenfold by the public apprehensions. It may well be supposed

that the rude kerne of Connaught, placed, with arms in his hands, among

a foreign people whom he hated, and by whom he was hated in turn, was

guilty of some excesses. These excesses were exaggerated by report; and,

in addition to the outrages which the stranger had really committed, all

the offences of his English comrades were set down to his account. From

every corner of the kingdom a cry arose against the foreign barbarians

who forced themselves into private houses, seized horses and waggons,

extorted money and insulted women. These men, it was said, were the sons

of those who, forty-seven years before, had massacred Protestants by

tens of thousands. The history of the rebellion of 1641, a history

which, even when soberly related, might well move pity and horror,

and which had been frightfully distorted by national and religious

antipathies, was now the favourite topic of conversation. Hideous

stories of houses burned with all the inmates, of women and young

children butchered, of near relations compelled by torture to be the

murderers of each other, of corpses outraged and mutilated, were told

and heard with full belief and intense interest. Then it was added that

the dastardly savages who had by surprise committed all these cruelties

on an unsuspecting and defenceless colony had, as soon as Oliver came

among them on his great mission of vengeance, flung down their arms

in panic terror, and had sunk, without trying the chances of a single

pitched field, into that slavery which was their fit portion. Many

signs indicated that another great spoliation and slaughter of the Saxon

settlers was meditated by the Lord Lieutenant. Already thousands

of Protestant colonists, flying from the injustice and insolence

of Tyrconnel, had raised the indignation of the mother country by

describing all that they had suffered, and all that they had, with too

much reason, feared. How much the public mind had been excited by the

complaints of these fugitives had recently been shown in a manner not

to be mistaken. Tyrconnel had transmitted for the royal approbation the

heads of a bill repealing the law by which half the soil of Ireland was

held, and he had sent to Westminster, as his agents, two of his Roman

Catholic countrymen who had lately been raised to high judicial

office; Nugent, Chief Justice of the Irish Court of King's Bench, a

personification of all the vices and weaknesses which the English then

imagined to be characteristic of the Popish Celt, and Rice, a Baron of

the Irish Exchequer, who, in abilities and attainments, was perhaps the

foremost man of his race and religion. The object of the mission was

well known; and the two Judges could not venture to show themselves in

the streets. If ever they were recognised, the rabble shouted, "Room for

the Irish Ambassadors;" and their coach was escorted with mock solemnity

by a train of ushers and harbingers bearing sticks with potatoes stuck

on the points. [446]

So strong and general, indeed, was at that time the aversion of the

English to the Irish that the most distinguished Roman Catholics

partook of it. Powis and Bellasyse expressed, in coarse and acrimonious

language, even at the Council board, their antipathy to the aliens.

[447] Among English Protestants that antipathy was still stronger and

perhaps it was strongest in the army. Neither officers nor soldiers were

disposed to bear patiently the preference shown by their master to a

foreign and a subject race. The Duke of Berwick, who was Colonel of the

Eighth Regiment of the Line, then quartered at Portsmouth, gave orders

that thirty men just arrived from Ireland should be enlisted. The

English soldiers declared that they would not serve with these

intruders. John Beaumont, the Lieutenant Colonel, in his own name and in

the name of five of the Captains, protested to the Duke's face against

this insult to the English army and nation. "We raised the regiment,"

he said, "at our own charges to defend His Majesty's crown in a time

of danger. We had then no difficulty in procuring hundreds of English

recruits. We can easily keep every company up to its full complement

without admitting Irishmen. We therefore do not think it consistent with

our honour to have these strangers forced on us; and we beg that we may

either be permitted to command men of our own nation or to lay down our

commissions." Berwick sent to Windsor for directions. The King, greatly

exasperated, instantly despatched a troop of horse to Portsmouth with

orders to bring the six refractory officers before him. A council of

war sate on them. They refused to make any submission; and they were

sentenced to be cashiered, the highest punishment which a court martial

was then competent to inflict. The whole nation applauded the disgraced

officers; and the prevailing sentiment was stimulated by an unfounded

rumour that, while under arrest, they had been treated with cruelty.

[448]

Public feeling did not then manifest itself by those signs with which we

are familiar, by large meetings, and by vehement harangues. Nevertheless

it found a vent. Thomas Wharton, who, in the last Parliament, had

represented Buckinghamshire, and who was already conspicuous both as

a libertine and as a Whig, had written a satirical ballad on

the administration of Tyrconnel. In this little poem an Irishman

congratulates a brother Irishman, in a barbarous jargon, on the

approaching triumph of Popery and of the Milesian race. The Protestant

heir will be excluded. The Protestant officers will be broken. The Great

Charter and the praters who appeal to it will be hanged in one rope. The

good Talbot will shower commissions on his countrymen, and will cut the

throats of the English. These verses, which were in no respect above the

ordinary standard of street poetry, had for burden some gibberish which

was said to have been used as a watchword by the insurgents of Ulster in

1641. The verses and the tune caught the fancy of the nation. From one

end of England to the other all classes were constantly singing this

idle rhyme. It was especially the delight of the English army. More

than seventy years after the Revolution, a great writer delineated, with

exquisite skill, a veteran who had fought at the Boyne and at Namur. One

of the characteristics of the good old soldier is his trick of whistling

Lillibullero. [449]

Wharton afterwards boasted that he had sung a King out of three

kingdoms. But in truth the success of Lillibullero was the effect, and

not the cause, of that excited state of public feeling which produced

the Revolution.

While James was thus raising against himself all those national feelings

which, but for his own folly, might have saved his throne, Lewis was

in another way exerting himself not less effectually to facilitate the

enterprise which William meditated.

The party in Holland which was favourable to France was a minority, but

a minority strong enough, according to the constitution of the Batavian

federation, to prevent the Stadtholder from striking any great blow.

To keep that minority steady was an object to which, if the Court of

Versailles had been wise, every other object would at that conjuncture

have been postponed. Lewis however had, during some time, laboured,

as if of set purpose, to estrange his Dutch friends; and he at length,

though not without difficulty, succeeded in forcing them to become

his enemies at the precise moment at which their help would have been

invaluable to him.

There were two subjects on which the people of the United Provinces were

peculiarly sensitive, religion and trade; and both their religion and

their trade the French King assailed. The persecution of the Huguenots,

and the revocation of the edict of Nantes, had everywhere moved the

grief and indignation of Protestants. But in Holland these feelings were

stronger than in any other country; for many persons of Dutch birth,

confiding in the repeated and solemn declarations of Lewis that the

toleration granted by his grandfather should be maintained, had, for

commercial purposes, settled in France, and a large proportion of the

settlers had been naturalised there. Every post now brought to Holland

the tidings that these persons were treated with extreme rigour on

account of their religion. Dragoons, it was reported, were quartered on

one. Another had been held naked before a fire till he was half roasted.

All were forbidden, under the severest penalties, to celebrate the rites

of their religion, or to quit the country into which they had, under

false pretences, been decoyed. The partisans of the House of Orange

exclaimed against the cruelty and perfidy of the tyrant. The opposition

was abashed and dispirited. Even the town council of Amsterdam, though

strongly attached to the French interest and to the Arminian theology,

and though little inclined to find fault with Lewis or to sympathize

with the Calvinists whom he persecuted, could not venture to oppose

itself to the general sentiment; for in that great city there was

scarcely one wealthy merchant who had not some kinsman or friend

among the sufferers. Petitions numerously and respectably signed

were presented to the Burgomasters, imploring them to make strong

representations to Avaux. There were even suppliants who made their way

into the Stadthouse, flung themselves on their knees, described with

tears and sobs the lamentable condition of those whom they most loved,

and besought the intercession of the magistrates. The pulpits resounded

with invectives and lamentations. The press poured forth heartrending

narratives and stirring exhortations. Avaux saw the whole danger. He

reported to his court that even the well intentioned--for so he always

called the enemies of the House of Orange--either partook of the public

feeling or were overawed by it; and he suggested the policy of making

some concession to their wishes. The answers which he received from

Versailles were cold and acrimonious. Some Dutch families, indeed, which

had not been naturalised in France, were permitted to return to their

country. But to those natives of Holland who had obtained letters of

naturalisation Lewis refused all indulgence. No power on earth, he said,

should interfere between him and his subjects. These people had chosen

to become his subjects; and how he treated them was a matter with which

no neighbouring state had anything to do. The magistrates of Amsterdam

naturally resented the scornful ingratitude of the potentate whom they

had strenuously and unscrupulously served against the general sense of

their own countrymen. Soon followed another provocation which they felt

even more keenly. Lewis began to make war on their trade. He first

put forth an edict prohibiting the importation of herrings into his

dominions, Avaux hastened to inform his court that this step had excited

great alarm and indignation, that sixty thousand persons in the United

Provinces subsisted by the herring fishery, and that some strong measure

of retaliation would probably be adopted by the States. The answer which

he received was that the King was determined, not only to persist, but

also to increase the duties on many of those articles in which Holland

carried on a lucrative trade with France. The consequence of these

errors, errors committed in defiance of repeated warnings, and, as it

should seem, in the mere wantonness of selfwill, was that now, when the

voice of a single powerful member of the Batavian federation might have

averted an event fatal to all the politics of Lewis, no such voice was

raised. The Envoy, with all his skill, vainly endeavoured to rally

the party by the help of which he had, during several years, held

the Stadtholder in check. The arrogance and obstinacy of the master

counteracted all the efforts of the servant. At length Avaux was

compelled to send to Versailles the alarming tidings that no reliance

could be placed on Amsterdam, so long devoted to the French cause, that

some of the well intentioned were alarmed for their religion, and that

the few whose inclinations were unchanged could not venture to utter

what they thought. The fervid eloquence of preachers who declaimed

against the horrors of the French persecution, and the lamentations of

bankrupts who ascribed their ruin to the French decrees, had wrought

up the people to such a temper, that no citizen could declare himself

favourable to France without imminent risk of being flung into the

nearest canal. Men remembered that, only fifteen years before, the most

illustrious chief of the party adverse to the House of Orange had been

torn to pieces by an infuriated mob in the very precinct of the palace

of the States General. A similar fate might not improbably befall those

who should, at this crisis, be accused of serving the purposes of France

against their native land, and against the reformed religion. [450]

While Lewis was thus forcing his friends in Holland to become, or to

pretend to become, his enemies, he was labouring with not less success

to remove all the scruples which might have prevented the Roman Catholic

princes of the Continent from countenancing William's designs. A new

quarrel had arisen between the Court of Versailles and the Vatican, a

quarrel in which the injustice and insolence of the French King were

perhaps more offensively displayed than in any other transaction of his

reign.

It had long been the rule at Rome that no officer of justice or finance

could enter the dwelling inhabited by the minister who represented a

Catholic state. In process of time not only the dwelling, but a large

precinct round it, was held inviolable. It was a point of honour with

every Ambassador to extend as widely as possible the limits of the

region which was under his protection. At length half the city consisted

of privileged districts, within which the Papal government had no more

power than within the Louvre or the Escurial. Every asylum was thronged

with contraband traders, fraudulent bankrupts, thieves and assassins. In

every asylum were collected magazines of stolen or smuggled goods. From

every asylum ruffians sallied forth nightly to plunder and stab. In no

town of Christendom, consequently, was law so impotent and wickedness

so audacious as in the ancient capital of religion and civilisation. On

this subject Innocent felt as became a priest and a prince. He

declared that he would receive no Ambassador who insisted on a right so

destructive of order and morality. There was at first much murmuring;

but his resolution was so evidently just that all governments but

one speedily acquiesced. The Emperor, highest in rank among Christian

monarchs, the Spanish court, distinguished among all courts by

sensitiveness and pertinacity on points of etiquette, renounced the

odious privilege. Lewis alone was impracticable. What other sovereigns

might choose to do, he said, was nothing to him. He therefore sent a

mission to Rome, escorted by a great force of cavalry and infantry. The

Ambassador marched to his palace as a general marches in triumph through

a conquered town. The house was strongly guarded. Round the limits of

the protected district sentinels paced the rounds day and night, as on

the walls of a fortress. The Pope was unmoved. "They trust," he cried,

"in chariots and in horses; but we will remember the name of the Lord

our God." He betook him vigorously to his spiritual weapons, and laid

the region garrisoned by the French under an interdict. [451]

This dispute was at the height when another dispute arose, in which the

Germanic body was as deeply concerned as the Pope.

Cologne and the surrounding district were governed by an Archbishop, who

was an Elector of the Empire. The right of choosing this great prelate

belonged, under certain limitations, to the Chapter of the Cathedral.

The Archbishop was also Bishop of Liege, of Munster, and of Hildesheim.

His dominions were extensive, and included several strong fortresses,

which in the event of a campaign on the Rhine would be of the highest

importance. In time of war he could bring twenty thousand men into the

field. Lewis had spared no effort to gain so valuable an ally, and had

succeeded so well that Cologne had been almost separated from Germany,

and had become an outwork of France. Many ecclesiastics devoted to the

court of Versailles had been brought into the Chapter; and Cardinal

Furstemburg, a mere creature of that court, had been appointed

Coadjutor.

In the summer of the year 1688 the archbishopric became vacant.

Furstemburg was the candidate of the House of Bourbon. The enemies of

that house proposed the young Prince Clement of Bavaria. Furstemburg was

already a Bishop, and therefore could not be moved to another diocese

except by a special dispensation from the Pope, or by a postulation, in

which it was necessary that two thirds of the Chapter of Cologne should

join. The Pope would grant no dispensation to a creature of France. The

Emperor induced more than a third part of the Chapter to vote for the

Bavarian prince. Meanwhile, in the Chapters of Liege, Munster, and

Hildesheim, the majority was adverse to France. Lewis saw, with

indignation and alarm, that an extensive province which he had begun

to regard as a fief of his crown was about to become, not merely

independent of him, but hostile to him. In a paper written with great

acrimony he complained of the injustice with which France was on

all occasions treated by that See which ought to extend a parental

protection to every part of Christendom. Many signs indicated his fixed

resolution to support the pretensions of his candidate by arms against

the Pope and the Pope's confederates. [452]

Thus Lewis, by two opposite errors, raised against himself at once the

resentment of both the religious parties between which Western Europe

was divided. Having alienated one great section of Christendom by

persecuting the Huguenots, he alienated another by insulting the Holy

See. These faults he committed at a conjuncture at which no fault could

be committed with impunity, and under the eye of an opponent second in

vigilance, sagacity, and energy, to no statesman whose memory history

has preserved. William saw with stern delight his adversaries toiling

to clear away obstacle after obstacle from his path. While they raised

against themselves the enmity of all sects, he laboured to conciliate

all. The great design which he meditated, he with exquisite skill

presented to different governments in different lights; and it must be

added that, though those lights were different, none of them was false.

He called on the princes of Northern Germany to rally round him in

defence of the common cause of all reformed Churches. He set before

the two heads of the House of Austria the danger with which they were

threatened by French ambition, and the necessity of rescuing England

from vassalage and of uniting her to the European confederacy. [453] He

disclaimed, and with truth, all bigotry. The real enemy, he said, of

the British Roman Catholics was that shortsighted and headstrong monarch

who, when he might easily have obtained for them a legal toleration, had

trampled on law, liberty, property, in order to raise them to an odious

and precarious ascendency. If the misgovernment of James were suffered

to continue, it must produce, at no remote time, a popular outbreak,

which might be followed by a barbarous persecution of the Papists. The

Prince declared that to avert the horrors of such a persecution was one

of his chief objects. If he succeeded in his design, he would use the

power which he must then possess, as head of the Protestant interest, to

protect the members of the Church of Rome. Perhaps the passions excited

by the tyranny of James might make it impossible to efface the penal

laws from the statute book but those laws should be mitigated by a

lenient administration. No class would really gain more by the proposed

expedition than those peaceable and unambitious Roman Catholics who

merely wished to follow their callings and to worship their Maker

without molestation. The only losers would be the Tyrconnels, the

Dovers, the Albevilles, and the other political adventurers who, in

return for flattery and evil counsel, had obtained from their credulous

master governments, regiments, and embassies.

While William exerted himself to enlist on his side the sympathies both

of Protestants and of Roman Catholics, he exerted himself with not less

vigour and prudence to provide the military means which his undertaking

required. He could not make a descent on England without the sanction

of the United Provinces. If he asked for that sanction before his design

was ripe for execution, his intentions might possibly be thwarted by

the faction hostile to his house, and would certainly be divulged to the

whole world. He therefore determined to make his preparations with all

speed, and, when they were complete, to seize some favourable moment for

requesting the consent of the federation. It was observed by the agents

of France that he was more busy than they had ever known him. Not a day

passed on which he was not seen spurring from his villa to the Hague.

He was perpetually closeted with his most distinguished adherents.

Twenty-four ships of war were fitted out for sea in addition to the

ordinary force which the commonwealth maintained. There was, as it

chanced, an excellent pretence for making this addition to the marine:

for some Algerine corsairs had recently dared to show themselves in the

German Ocean. A camp was formed near Nimeguen. Many thousands of troops

were assembled there. In order to strengthen this army the garrisons

were withdrawn from the strongholds in Dutch Brabant. Even the renowned

fortress of Bergopzoom was left almost defenceless. Field pieces,

bombs, and tumbrels from all the magazines of the United Provinces were

collected at the head quarters. All the bakers of Rotterdam toiled day

and night to make biscuit. All the gunmakers of Utrecht were found too

few to execute the orders for pistols and muskets. All the saddlers

of Amsterdam were hard at work on harness and bolsters. Six thousand

sailors were added to the naval establishment. Seven thousand new

soldiers were raised. They could not, indeed, be formally enlisted

without the sanction of the federation: but they were well drilled, and

kept in such a state of discipline that they might without difficulty be

distributed into regiments within twenty-four hours after that sanction

should be obtained. These preparations required ready money: but William

had, by strict economy, laid up against a great emergency a treasure

amounting to about two hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling.

What more was wanting was supplied by the zeal of his partisans. Great

quantities of gold, not less, it was said, than a hundred thousand

guineas, came to him from England. The Huguenots, who had carried with

them into exile large quantities of the precious metals, were eager

to lend him all that they possessed; for they fondly hoped that, if he

succeeded, they should be restored to the country of their birth; and

they feared that, if he failed, they should scarcely be safe even in the

country of their adoption. [454]

Through the latter part of July and the whole of August the preparations

went on rapidly, yet too slowly for the vehement spirit of William.

Meanwhile the intercourse between England and Holland was active. The

ordinary modes of conveying intelligence and passengers were no longer

thought safe. A light bark of marvellous speed constantly ran backward

and forward between Schevening and the eastern coast of our island.

[455] By this vessel William received a succession of letters from

persons of high note in the Church, the state, and the army. Two of the

seven prelates who had signed the memorable petition, Lloyd, Bishop of

St. Asaph, and Trelawney, Bishop of Bristol, had, during their residence

in the tower, reconsidered the doctrine of nonresistance, and were

ready to welcome an armed deliverer. A brother of the Bishop of Bristol,

Colonel Charles Trelawney, who commanded one of the Tangier regiments,

now known as the Fourth of the Line, signified his readiness to draw his

sword for the Protestant religion. Similar assurances arrived from the

savage Kirke. Churchill, in a letter written with a certain elevation

of language, which was the sure mark that he was going to commit a

baseness, declared that he was determined to perform his duty to heaven

and to his country, and that he put his honour absolutely into the hands

of the Prince of Orange. William doubtless read these words with one of

those bitter and cynical smiles which gave his face its least pleasing

expression. It was not his business to take care of the honour of other

men; nor had the most rigid casuists pronounced it unlawful in a general

to invite, to use, and to reward the services of deserters whom he could

not but despise. [456]

Churchill's letter was brought by Sidney, whose situation in England

had become hazardous, and who, having taken many precautions to hide

his track, had passed over to Holland about the middle of August. [457]

About the same time Shrewsbury and Edward Russell crossed the German

Ocean in a boat which they had hired with great secrecy, and appeared at

the Hague. Shrewsbury brought with him twelve thousand pounds, which he

had raised by a mortgage on his estates, and which he lodged in the bank

of Amsterdam. [458] Devonshire, Danby, and Lumley remained in England,

where they undertook to rise in arms as soon as the Prince should set

foot on the island.

There is reason to believe that, at this conjuncture, William first

received assurances of support from a very different quarter. The

history of Sunderland's intrigues is covered with an obscurity which it

is not probable that any inquirer will ever succeed in penetrating:

but, though it is impossible to discover the whole truth, it is easy

to detect some palpable fictions. The Jacobites, for obvious reasons,

affirmed that the revolution of 1688 was the result of a plot concerted

long before. Sunderland they represented as the chief conspirator. He

had, they averred, in pursuance of his great design, incited his

too confiding master to dispense with statutes, to create an illegal

tribunal, to confiscate freehold property, and to send the fathers of

the Established Church to a prison. This romance rests on no evidence,

and, though it has been repeated down to our own time, seems hardly

to deserve confutation. No fact is more certain than that Sunderland

opposed some of the most imprudent steps which James took, and in

particular the prosecution of the Bishops, which really brought on the

decisive crisis. But, even if this fact were not established, there

would still remain one argument sufficient to decide the controversy.

What conceivable motive had Sunderland to wish for a revolution? Under

the existing system he was at the height of dignity and prosperity.

As President of the Council he took precedence of the whole temporal

peerage. As Principal Secretary of State he was the most active and

powerful member of the cabinet. He might look forward to a dukedom.

He had obtained the garter lately worn by the brilliant and versatile

Buckingham, who, having squandered away a princely fortune and a

vigorous intellect, had sunk into the grave deserted, contemned, and

broken-hearted. [459] Money, which Sunderland valued more than honours,

poured in upon him in such abundance that, with ordinary management, he

might hope to become, in a few years, one of the wealthiest subjects in

Europe. The direct emolument of his posts, though considerable, was a

very small part of what he received. From France alone he drew a regular

stipend of near six thousand pounds a year, besides large occasional

gratuities. He had bargained with Tyrconnel for five thousand a year, or

fifty thousand pounds down, from Ireland. What sums he made by selling

places, titles, and pardons, can only be conjectured, but must have been

enormous. James seemed to take a pleasure in loading with wealth one

whom he regarded as his own convert. All fines, all forfeitures went to

Sunderland. On every grant toll was paid to him. If any suitor ventured

to ask any favour directly from the King, the answer was, "Have you

spoken to my Lord President?" One bold man ventured to say that the Lord

President got all the money of the court. "Well," replied His Majesty

"he deserves it all." [460] We shall scarcely overrate the amount of the

minister's gains, if we put them at thirty thousand pounds a year: and

it must be remembered that fortunes of thirty thousand pounds a year

were in his time rarer than fortunes of a hundred thousand pounds a year

now are. It is probable that there was then not one peer of the realm

whose private income equalled Sunderland's official income.

What chance was there that, in a new order of things, a man so

deeply implicated in illegal and unpopular acts, a member of the High

Commission, a renegade whom the multitude, in places of general resort,

pursued with the cry of Popish dog, would be greater and richer? What

chance that he would even be able to escape condign punishment?

He had undoubtedly been long in the habit of looking forward to the time

when William and Mary might be, in the ordinary course of nature and

law, at the head of the English government, and had probably attempted

to make for himself an interest in their favour, by promises and

services which, if discovered, would not have raised his credit at

Whitehall. But it may with confidence be affirmed that he had no wish

to see them raised to power by a revolution, and that he did not at

all foresee such a revolution when, towards the close of June 1688, he

solemnly joined the communion of the Church of Rome.