re-conquest of Ireland, with its massacres and bitter, pitiless
persecutions in revenge or punishment, as you will, for other massacres
which had gone before. It is a piteous story, and one of no great
credit to any one, but, to borrow the maxim of Strafford, the former
tyrant of Ireland, it was “thorough.” In nine months, with about
fifteen thousand men, the Dictator had stamped the Irish rebellion out
and made “the curse of Cromwell” a phrase that will dwell on Hibernian
lips for many a generation.
But no sooner was the Irish revolt drowned in blood and flame than
Prince Charles, afterwards Charles II. of infamous memory, took the
Oath to the Covenant, and the Scots rose to support him. Cromwell
crossed the Border on July 22, 1650.
As it happened, the Scottish general was Leslie, the old comrade who
had fought at his side at Marston Moor. For some weeks the Scots played
a waiting game, and Cromwell, with his men wearied and falling sick,
and with no other base than his ships on the coast, hurled texts and
biblical harangues at the enemy. In fact, as Mr. Harrison cleverly puts
it, “it was not so much a battle between two armies as between two
rival congregations in arms.”
Leslie and his preachers fired other texts back at him and kept out of
his way until the fatal 3rd of September came. By this time Cromwell
had only eleven thousand men capable of bearing arms, and they were in
no great state for fighting. Leslie had twenty-two or three thousand
Scots and all the advantage of the position, but the Fates had already
taken the matter into their own hands. On the afternoon of the 2nd,
Cromwell saw that the wary Scot, as some say, driven by the frantic
exhortation of the preachers, had forsaken his post of vantage. “The
Lord hath delivered them into our hands!” he cried, and straightway
began to set his battle in order.
The next morning, while it was yet moonlight, they came to blows.
In an hour or so it was all over. The Scots fled in utter panic and
confusion, “being made by the Lord of Hosts as stubble to our swords,”
to use Oliver’s own words. When the rout was at its height the sun
rose, scattering the morning mists. “Let God arise and His enemies be
scattered!” he shouted exultantly through the roar of the battle, and
then--how characteristic it was of the man!--he halted his army in the
very moment of triumph and sang the one hundred and seventeenth psalm,
beginning: “O praise the Lord all ye people, for His merciful kindness
is great towards us!” Then he unleashed his bloodhounds again, and the
rest was massacre.
[Illustration: HE HALTED HIS ARMY ... AND SANG THE HUNDRED AND
SEVENTEENTH PSALM.]
Another year passed in miscellaneous fighting and arguing, slaughter
and psalm-singing, and once more the sun of the 3rd of September,
Cromwell’s Day of Fate, or, as Byron puts it:
“His day of double victory and death,”
dawned, this time over Worcester, the scene of “the Crowning Mercy.”
The same miracles of generalship were accomplished, the same tremendous
victory was won at a ridiculously small expense--under two hundred men
to conquer an entrenched army of fifteen thousand--and this was the end
of the fighting at home.
But meanwhile there was fighting abroad, and, more than that, the fame
of the great Oliver and his marvellous doings had been ringing from
end to end of Europe. As Clarendon, the historian of the Royalists,
candidly admits: “His greatness at home was but a shadow of the glory
he had abroad.” The mastery of the seas was wrenched out of the hands
of the Dutch by Blake, the sea-power of England was organised as its
land-power was, and Britain rose at a bound from the degradation to
which she had sunk under the first Stuart to the proud position of the
first naval and military Power of the world, and the greatest ministers
and monarchs in Europe, even the Pope himself, were forced to respect
the prowess and cringe for the friendship of the Farmer of Huntingdon.
If, as has been aptly suggested, the great Oliver could have lived to
an age which is now a normal one for statesmen, the disgraceful and
ruinous interval occupied by the reigns of the second Charles and the
second James might have been spared with all their infamy and national
loss, and William of Orange might worthily have continued the work
which Cromwell so well began. But the time was not yet, and so it was
not to be. The great ideal of his life, a Protestant Alliance, was
never realised. His last days were days of darkness and suffering,
social, mental, and physical.
Once more the Day of Fate came round, and between three and four in
the afternoon the watchers by his bedside heard him sigh deeply and
heavily. Some say that he whispered: “My work is done!”--and then he
died. This may be fact or fancy, but, be that as it may, no man had a
better right to pass out of the mystery of the things that are into the
mystery of the things that are to be with such words on his lips than
Oliver Cromwell, General, Statesman, and King in everything but the
empty name.
V
_WILLIAM OF ORANGE_,
_OVERCOMER OF DIFFICULTIES_
V
WILLIAM OF ORANGE
It is perhaps one of the most curious facts of our history that the
Empire-Maker who, as it were, finally completed the work begun by his
namesake William the Norman, should, like him, have been a foreigner,
should have sprung from similar ancestry, and should have been his
exact reverse in every mental and physical quality save one--an
inflexible determination to do the work which he was appointed to do in
spite of every conceivable kind of obstacle.
It is noteworthy also that this man should have come from those same
Low Countries from whose shores our Saxon ancestors had first come
on their plundering forays to do their share of the work of making
the English people. The ancestry of the great-grandson of William
the Silent stretched far back, probably even into those remote and
turbulent times, and it is within the limits of possibility that some
stalwart ancestor of the ancient House of Nassau may himself have had
something to do in the early making of that Realm, over which, a
thousand years later, his descendant was to rule during one of the most
critical and perilous periods of its existence.
Be that, however, as it may, the central fact which stands out in the
story of William III. is this: Whatever his country or ancestry, he
was, so far as we have any means of judging, the one man in the world
just then who could have accomplished the difficult and, as it must
often have seemed even to him, almost impossible task which had to be
performed if the work of the other Empire-Makers who had gone before
him was not to be sadly marred, if not altogether undone.
William of Orange may perhaps be most truthfully described as an
overcomer of difficulties. Probably no other man ever had so many
difficulties to conquer as he had, and his triumph over them is one of
the finest examples of irresistible will-power and purely intellectual
force that all history has to show. Mentally he was a giant, and as
such he acquitted himself in what was undoubtedly a battle of giants
fighting for the spoils of Europe. Physically he was a miserable
weakling, shattered by disease, seldom free from bodily pain, and
foredoomed from his youth by an exhausting and incurable malady.
Yet even his sports and pastimes were those, not only of a healthy,
but even of a robust constitution. His pale, sickly, small-pox-pitted
face never flushed save under the stimulus of battle or the chase. He
fought his fight with Fate and won it by sheer intellectual strength,
yet none of the pleasures of intellect were his. He knew nothing of
science, little of literature, and less of art.
Apparently fitted by Nature only for the pursuits of the study, he
found his rare moments of real happiness when riding down a stag or a
boar in the forests of Windsor or the woods of Flanders, or, sword in
hand, leading his men wherever the battle was hottest or the danger the
greatest. A creature of contradictions, in short, determined to make
himself that which Nature had seemingly _not_ made him, and to do that
which he appeared least fitted to do.
No one possessing an intelligent grasp of the deplorable state of
affairs which obtained in England, and the threatening aspect of
matters on the Continent during the last decade but one of the
seventeenth century, would have guessed for a moment that this
“asthmatic skeleton,” as Macaulay somewhat roughly describes his
hero, was the man to turn England’s weakness into strength, and even
in defeat to grapple successfully with the colossal Power which was
threatening the liberties of Europe.
In England the weakness and baseness of the two last Stuart kings had
more than undone the work of the great Oliver. He had, as has been
shown, made England one of the first Powers in the world, strong at
home and respected and even courted abroad. Charles II. had sold his
country, or at any rate his own independence and what should have been
his royal honour, to France. He had, in fact, exhibited to the world
the disgraceful spectacle of an English king who was the pensioner of a
foreign monarch.
The for-ever infamous Treaty of Dover had brought the prestige of
England to its lowest ebb. For the first time in nearly seven hundred
years the Isle Inviolate had been seriously threatened with invasion,
and London, for the first time since it had been a city, had heard the
sound of hostile guns. Now this of itself, taking the whole history of
these islands into consideration, is a fact of absolutely unparalleled
infamy, and yet if such infamy could have been equalled, the brother
and successor of Charles II. would have done so. Indeed, from one point
of view it may be said that he excelled it.
The guns of William’s countrymen were heard in the Thames because
Charles II., having his brother James for Lord High Admiral, had so
scandalously wasted the funds which should have been devoted to the
maintenance of the Navy that no adequate defence was really possible;
but it was left for James II., the last and most contemptible, if not
in all respects the worst king of the royal and miserable House of
Stuart, to be the only British monarch who ever brought a foreign army
on to British soil for the purpose of coercing by force the will of
the British people. More than this, too, it must be remembered that
these foreign troops were Frenchmen supported by renegade English,
Irish, or Scotsmen who had deliberately deserted their own country to
serve under the standard of a man who was to the seventeenth century
what Phillip II. of Spain had been to the sixteenth.
So low, then, had Britain sunk in the scale of nations when William of
Orange made his entry upon the stage of British history. The fact which
made his entry possible is hardly of the sort that would commend itself
to people of a romantic turn of mind, although few romances have been
really more romantic than his own life-story.
He could never have become King of England, nor is it likely that he
could even have been asked to constitute himself the protector of
English liberties, had it not been for the fact that he was married
to the daughter of James II., and of this marriage Lord Macaulay
truly says: “His choice had been determined chiefly by political
considerations, nor did it seem likely that any strong affection would
grow up between a handsome girl of sixteen, well-disposed, indeed, and
naturally intelligent, but ignorant and simple, and a bridegroom who,
though he had not completed his twenty-eighth year, was in constitution
older than her father; whose manner was chilling, and whose head was
constantly occupied by public business or by field sports.”
His marriage was, in short, “a marriage of convenience,” and yet, in
defiance of all the rules that are supposed to govern the most intimate
of all human relationships, it was one of the best and, in the end,
most devoted unions that history has to record. It is hardly possible
to doubt that William of Orange married Mary Stuart because he saw
with that keenly penetrating foresight of his that such a union would
strengthen him in his life-long combat with the arch-enemy of his
faith, his family, and his nation; and this enemy was that same Louis
of France who had made Charles II. his pensioner, and was soon to make
James II. his dependent.
To quote Lord Macaulay again: “He saved England, it is true, but he
never loved her, and he never obtained her love.... Whatever patriotic
feeling he had was for Holland ... yet even his affection for the
land of his birth was subordinate to another feeling which early
became supreme in his soul, which mixed itself with all his passions
and compelled him to marvellous enterprises, which supported him
when sinking under mortification, pain, sickness, and sorrow ... and
continued to animate him even while the prayer for the departing was
read at his bedside.”
It was this hatred of France and her king which nerved him to do for
the liberties of Europe and Great Britain what Francis Drake had done
for England against Philip of Spain, and in the doing of this he won
the conspicuous glory of forcing the paymaster of the two English
sovereigns whom he succeeded, to make peace with him on equal terms;
and this, too, although he lost more battles than he won, and had to
surrender more strong cities than he took.
It is comparatively easy for a conqueror to take triumph out of
victory, but it is a higher quality which patiently endures defeat and
confronts disaster, and by sheer genius wins triumph in the end. This
is what William of Orange did, and it is from this fact that he derives
his title to be ranked among the Makers of that Empire to whose throne
he came as an alien, and whose honour he restored and upheld, as one
might say, in spite of herself.
So far as England is concerned, the male line of Stuart came in with
a fool and went out with a coward. One does not even care to imagine
what would have happened if James II. had remained on the throne; or if
William of Orange, with his hereditary and deep-rooted hatred of Louis
XIV. and his policy, had not come to take his most miserably-vacated
place in the nick of time.
The sentimentality which makes such a fuss about loyalty to persons as
distinguished from loyalty to country, and the lawyer-quibbles which
occupied men’s minds in the dispute as to whether James II. was King
_de facto_ or _de jure_, or both, of the country from which he had run
away like an absconding debtor, may be dismissed, just as Harold the
Saxon’s claims had been some six hundred years before. It is merely a
question of the Fit and the Unfit, and James was Unfit.
James Stuart deserted his post as ruler of these realms because he
found himself assailed by difficulties which the most ordinary ability
ought to have overcome. William assumed the same position in the face
of difficulties which only the highest qualities of kingcraft and
statesmanship could have enabled him to successfully grapple with. In
a word, James possessed no ideal that qualified him to be a king, much
less an Empire-Maker. William _did_ possess such an ideal, and that is
the only reason why he became King of England, _vice_ James Stuart,
absconded.
Next, perhaps, to Henry VII., William was the most business-like
sovereign who has occupied the British throne. With him all men
and things, all beliefs and sentiments, were subordinated to the
achievement of the one great end--the curbing of the power of France,
and consequently the furtherance of political and theological liberty
in Europe. He was, in fact, only incidentally an Empire-Maker, although
without him and without the broad and firm basis of popular liberty and
national strength which he laid down, as it were, in the doing of his
greater work, the building up of the Imperial fabric would undoubtedly
have been long delayed and seriously impeded.
He got himself made King of Great Britain and Ireland, not because he
wanted to occupy the throne, but because from that eminence he would be
able to look the Grand Monarch more equally in the face.
We get a luminous insight into the character of the man in his reply to
the Convention or conference of the two Houses of Parliament which had
proposed that his wife as actual and lawful heir to the throne which
her father had forsaken, should occupy it as queen, and that he should
reign by her authority as a sort of Royal Executive.
“My lords and gentlemen,” he said, “no man can esteem a woman more than
I do the Princess, but I am so made that I cannot think of holding
anything by apron-strings, nor can I think it reasonable to have any
share in the government unless it be put in my own person, and that for
the term of my life. If you think fit to settle it otherwise I will
not oppose you, but will go back to Holland and meddle no more in your
affairs.”
That was the kind of man William of Orange was. He had come to be a
king, and a king he would be or nothing. And so king he was, and it
was not very long before he was to show how well his self-confidence
was justified. He had scarcely seated himself on the throne before the
Parliament, recognising the fact that his work was something other than
merely filling James’s place, deliberately suggested that he should
resume as King of England the hostilities which he had begun against
Louis as Stadtholder of the Netherlands, and he on his part showed how
ready he was to take up the task by exclaiming, in one of his rare
bursts of exultation, after reading the address:
“This is the first day of my reign!”
This address, however, welcome as it was, was somewhat belated. For
more than a month before it was presented, Louis, under the pretence of
helping the runaway, whom for his own purposes he affected to believe
still lawful King of England, had committed the gravest of all acts of
war, and James had crowned the disgrace of his flight by the infamy of
heading an invasion of British territory by foreign mercenaries. On the
12th of March, 1689, he landed at Kinsale as enemy and invader of his
own country, convoyed by fifteen French men-of-war, and supported by
2,500 French troops.
The story of this Irish war needs no re-telling here, save in so far
as it brings out the contrast between William and James as the Fit and
the Unfit for the doing of that work which had just then got to be done
if England was not to sink back to the degrading position of a French
dependency, and if the way of future progress and Imperial expansion
was to be left open. William no sooner saw that the scene of the fight
for constitutional liberty and religious freedom had shifted for the
time being from the Low Countries to Ireland than he sent Marshal
Schomberg, who was then one of the most skilful soldiers in Europe,
with an army of sixteen thousand men to the scene of action.
Meanwhile the heroically stubborn resistance which has won immortal
fame for the men of Londonderry had proved, not only to James and his
foreign mercenaries, but to Louis himself and all Europe, that the
struggle which was just then renewed was no mere war of dynasties,
and that something very much greater than the mere question as to who
should be king of England had got to be decided before the trouble was
over.
James in Ireland and Louis in France stood for the already discredited
and exploded doctrine of the divine right of kings to rule as they
pleased because they were the sons of their fathers; for the dark
tyranny of Rome, now almost equally discredited; and for the domination
of Europe by the French autocracy. In Holland and England and Germany
William and his allies stood for the very reverse of all this, so that
it was not only the destinies of the United Kingdom, but those of the
greater part of the civilised world that had to be decided, and it was
by procuring through mingled victory and defeat, confronted by powerful
enemies abroad and by conspiracy and threatened assassination at home,
that the worthy descendant of William the Silent proved his real right
divine as king of these realms and champion of those principles of
which the British Empire of to-day is the concrete expression.
It was really on the shores of an insignificant Irish stream that
William fought and won the battle of European liberty. But before he
did this he had another battle to fight, as it were, in front of his
newly-given throne.
His reign, unhappily, saw the commencement of that system of government
which an intelligent Chinese Minister to the Court of St. James’ once
described as “the election of one party to do the business of the
nation, and of another to stop them doing it.” In other words, it was
William’s fate, among all his other difficulties, to have to contend
with the bitter and usually dishonest strife of Parliamentary parties,
and so keen did this strife become after the foreign enemy had actually
landed on British soil, that he was even then on the point of throwing
up the whole business in disgust, and going back to Holland to fight
his battles out there.
What would have happened if he had done so is anything but a pleasant
subject for speculation. Happily, at the eleventh hour he refused to
acknowledge himself beaten. Sick of the strife of words and longing for
the reality of deeds, he announced his intention to place himself at
the head of the English forces in Ireland, “and with the blessing of
God Almighty endeavour to reduce that kingdom that it may no longer be
a charge to this.”
In this we may see more than the expression of a pious hope. As
statesman and soldier William had seen that Ireland was the back-door
of Great Britain, and that so long as it remained open so long would
the whole kingdom be vulnerable to foreign invasion, and so he went to
close it.
It was a strange position for any man to be placed in. He was going
to fight for everything that he held dear. He knew that if he lost in
Ireland he must lose also in England and the Netherlands, but he was
also going to fight against the father of the woman whom he had now
come to love so dearly that her death, when it happened, came nearer to
wrecking his imperial intellect than all the other trials and troubles
of his laborious and almost joyless life. He had no feeling of personal
enmity against James as he had against Louis, and it was duty, and duty
alone, which took him to the Irish war. Almost the last words that he
said to his wife concerning the enemy whom he was about to meet on the
battlefield were:
“God send that no harm may come to him!”
Mr. Traill has thus tersely summed up the condition of affairs at this
moment: “Ireland in the hands of a hostile army, the shores of England
threatened by a hostile fleet, a dangerous conspiracy only detected on
the eve of success, a formidable insurrection imminent in the country
he was leaving behind him....”
And yet, gloomy as the outlook seemed, his spirits rose as they ever
did when he saw the moment for doing instead of talking draw near,
and Bishop Burnett tells us that he said to him on the eve of his
departure: “As for me, but for one thing I should enjoy the prospect
of being on horseback and under canvas again, for I am sure that I am
fitter to direct a campaign than to manage your Houses of Lords and
Commons.”
These words were well worthy of the man who, not many days later,
quietly sat down to breakfast in the open air beside Boyne Water,
within full sight of the enemy and within easy range of their guns.
Breakfast over, he mounted his horse and was promptly fired at. The
first shot from two field-pieces which had been trained on him and his
staff killed a man and two horses. The second grazed his shoulder and
made him reel in his saddle.
“There was no need for any bullet to come nearer than that!” was his
remark on the occurrence. Certainly not many bullets have ever come
nearer to changing the history of Britain, and therefore of the British
Empire, than that one.
[Illustration: MADE HIM REEL IN HIS SADDLE.]
After the wound had been dressed, instead of taking the rest which
a good many strong men would have taken, this consumptive and
asthmatic invalid re-mounted his horse and remained until nightfall
in the saddle, making his dispositions for the battle of the morrow,
and attending to every detail himself. His prudent uncle and
father-in-law, apparently bent on fulfilling William’s pious wish, was
meanwhile taking very good care to keep himself out of harm’s way.
[Illustration: “MEN OF ENNISKILLEN, WHAT WILL YOU DO FOR ME?” HE CRIED.]
The battle itself, which, as every one knows, was fought on the 1st of
July, brought out with startling clearness the contrast between the
man who was king in his own right and the man who called himself king
because his name was James Stuart.