1689-1690
Invasion of Ireland--Campaign of 1689--Parliamentary strife
--The conduct of the war--The Oates Case--The Succession Bill
--Attempts to pass an Indemnity Bill--Rancour of the Whigs--
Their factious opposition to William's Irish plans--
Dissolution of Parliament.
An address from Parliament praying the sovereign to declare war against
a foreign state is far from a common incident in our history; and even
in this instance the initiative then taken by the Commons was one of
form rather than of fact. The descent of James upon Ireland, under the
convoy of a French fleet of fifteen sail of the line, and accompanied by
a force of 2500 French soldiers, amounted to an act of war on the part
of France, if ever such an act was committed by one nation upon another;
and it was not till more than a month after the perpetration of this
outrage that the address referred to in the last chapter was presented
to the King. James landed at Kinsale on the 12th of March; the address
to the King is dated, as has been said, on the 19th of April. England,
moreover, was not the first of the coalition of Powers which the patient
diplomacy of William had formed against Louis to take action against the
common enemy. The declaration of the German Diet had appeared in
February, and that of the States-General in March.
On the 24th of March James entered Dublin, which, in common with all the
other cities of the three southern provinces of Ireland, had declared
for his cause; but after only three weeks' stay in the capital it was
decided, against the advice of his chief French counsellor, d'Avaux, who
with the Lord Deputy Tyrconnel, and the Irish Catholic party in general,
were for keeping him among the Celtic population of the island, that he
should go northward and take command of the royal army in Ulster. He
accordingly set out on the 14th of April, and after some further
hesitations caused by conflicting reports as to the results of a
skirmish between the Protestants and a body of his own men at Strabane,
arrived a few days later among his troops, who were quartered a few
miles south of Londonderry, a city which, with Inniskillen, had formed
the rallying point for the Protestant minority when the outbreak of the
Revolution, awakening the hopes of the Catholic population, appeared to
threaten the "English garrison" with a repetition of the horrors of
1641. Here it had been fully expected by James's more sanguine
counsellors that he would be, if not loyally, at any rate submissively
received. The appearance of their lawful sovereign before their walls
would at any rate, it was thought, confirm the wavering allegiance of
the military under the command of the Governor, Colonel Lundy. As a
matter of fact, it only served to arouse a spirit of determined
resistance in the townsmen, to unite the soldiery in the same cause, and
to precipitate the flight of the Jacobite governor. James and his
retinue, on approaching the gate, were fired on from the nearest
bastion; a subsequent demand for surrender was contemptuously rejected,
and after a few days' delay before the town its rejected sovereign set
off in chagrin and disappointment to return to Dublin, leaving
Londonderry to prepare for that heroic defence of three months against
the combined forces of war, disease, and famine, which has made her name
famous among the cities of the world. James's first act on his return to
the capital was to summon a Parliament, and a Parliament, of a sort,
responded to the summons. That is to say, out of a hundred temporal
peers then in Ireland, fourteen, of whom ten were Catholics, obeyed the
summons, while the fidelity at any rate of the faithful Commons was
guaranteed by the fact that only six out of the total number of two
hundred and fifty were Protestants. Having assembled, they promptly
proceeded to attest this virtue by the wholesale confiscation of the
lands of Protestants, and the proscription of their heads. Ulster,
however, was still unreduced, and while that was so, denunciatory and
spoliatory decrees might well turn out to be mere waste paper. The
dashing Inniskilleners--the cavalry, so to speak, of that Protestant
army in which Londonderry played the part of the immovable square of
infantry--had actually meditated, though they never carried out, an
attempt to relieve their beleaguered sister city, and at Newtown Butler
they were able to render signal service to their cause by the defeat of
General Macarthy and 6000 Irish. By the end of July Londonderry had been
relieved; early in August Marshal Schomberg, then one of the most
renowned of European generals, landed at Carrickfergus with 16,000 men,
and it became evident even to the most hopeful of James's adherents
that the northern province was lost to him irretrievably.
William meanwhile still remained in London busied with the task, at once
delicate and laborious, of administering the government of a distrustful
and almost unfriendly people through the agency of two bitterly divided
factions. The parliamentary session had become more prolific of quarrels
and more barren of counsel as it proceeded. The two Houses and the two
parties had agreed with little difficulty to do justice to some of the
admitted victims of the oppression practised under the last two
sovereigns. The attainders of Sidney, Russell, and others were reversed
without recorded dissent, but the case of Oates gave rise to acute
conflict between the Lords and Commons--a conflict in which, though the
conduct of the former assembly was undoubtedly arbitrary, the temper,
or, at any rate, the motives of the latter appear by no means worthy of
the unqualified praise bestowed upon them by the great Whig historian.
Undoubtedly the Peers were without justification in refusing to reverse
a sentence which the judges had solemnly pronounced illegal; but it is
ridiculous to represent the Commons, as a body of judicially minded
legislators, doing violence to their natural sentiments in their
determination to obtain justice for Oates. Such a theory is at once
refuted by the fact that, after his release under royal pardon, his
personal adherents in the Commons proved numerous enough to disgrace
their party and their country by procuring a pension of three hundred a
year for perhaps the most infamous wretch who ever disgraced human
nature. The dispute is of importance because it has been suggested that
to the bitterness of feeling engendered by it was due the subsequent
quarrel between the two Houses over the succession clauses in the Bill
of Rights. At the end of this famous enactment--the statutory
affirmation of the claims formulated by the Convention in the
Declaration of Right--it had been proposed at William's suggestion that
to the several enumerated reversions of the British Crown a further
remainder should be added. In the Declaration, as will be remembered,
the crown was settled, after the death of the King or Queen, upon the
survivor, and after the death of such survivor upon the heirs of Mary,
failing whom upon Anne and her heirs, failing whom upon the issue of
William by any other wife than Mary. It appearing by no means
improbable, having regard to the fact that the King and Queen were
childless, and that Anne had repeatedly failed to rear the children to
whom she had given birth, that there might be a failure of all the named
reversioners, and that the otherwise legal right of some Catholic prince
might thereupon come into conflict with the statutory exclusion of
Catholic sovereigns, William proposed to entail the crown after the last
mentioned limitation upon an undoubted Protestant, Sophia of Hanover,
granddaughter of James I., and her issue, being Protestants. That the
proposal was a well-conceived one is evidenced by the fact that it was
actually adopted by Parliament in the succeeding reign; but though the
Lords to whom it was submitted by Burnet accepted it unanimously, the
Commons would have none of it. The irritation left by the Oates quarrel
may in part have accounted for this, but Macaulay attributes too
childish a temper to the Lower House in implying as he does that
ill-humour is the sole explanation of their resistance. They in fact
alleged several grounds of objection of unequal weight, but of which one
at least has every appearance of _bona fides_, viz. that the mentioning
of the House of Hanover would give an opportunity to foreigners of
intermeddling too far in the affairs of the nation. But whatever the
excuse, we can readily imagine that William regarded the action of the
Commons as purely factious, and although the birth at this juncture of
another son and heir to the Princess Anne deprived the succession
dispute of its urgency, the cool-headed Dutchman can hardly but have
been impressed with the keenness of that political strife which could
keep the two branches of the legislature asunder when the cost of their
dissension was the postponement of the greatest statutory assertion of
their liberties since Magna Charta. For as a consequence of the
irreconcilable dispute on the succession clause, the Bill of Rights had
of course to be dropped; and between this date and the 20th of August,
when Parliament was prorogued, the breach between William and the Whigs
was still further widened by the rancour with which they pursued their
political enemies, and resisted the attempts of the King to procure a
statutory amnesty for past political offences. Impartiality was easier
of course for him than them, but William's natural affinities of mind
and politics cannot but have been rather with the Whigs than the Tories,
and the steadiness of purpose with which he persisted in his patriotic
though hopeless attempt at combining representatives of both political
parties in his councils is, upon any view of the matter, highly
honourable to him. It was the Whigs who from the first made the
experiment hopeless, and who finally determined its failure. We owe them
the English Constitution, but we owe them also, at any rate in the rigid
inflexible shape which it has since assumed, that _genius vultu
mutabilis albus et ater_, the English party-system.
Parliament met again after a two months' recess on the 19th of October,
and seemed at first disposed to act with somewhat more of unity in
support of the Executive. They unanimously affirmed their determination
to assist the King in the reconquest of Ireland, and in a vigorous
prosecution of the war with France, for which purposes they voted an
extraordinary supply of two millions, a portion of which it was at first
proposed, on principles which the enactors of the Bill of Rights (passed
this session without William's suggested amendment) had inherited in a
slightly modified form from the signatory of Magna Charta, to raise by a
special tax upon Jews. Supplies voted, however, disunion recommenced.
The Whigs had come back from their short holiday more bloodthirsty than
ever. Beginning with a legitimate cause of complaint against the
administration in respect of the mismanagement of the war in Ireland,
where the whole organisation of the commissariat seems to have been
almost of a Crimean inefficiency, they easily converted this just
grievance into a general protest against the presence of Tories in the
Government. An attempt was made to induce William to say by whose advice
he had employed Henry Shales, the knavish Commissary-General, to whom
the scandal was mainly if not wholly due--the object of course being to
found an accusation against some one or other of the Tory officials to
whom Shales's retention in his post was assumed to be due. It would
have been enough for William to reply that he found the man Commissary
on his accession, and simply continued him in office. He refused to
gratify the malicious curiosity of the address presented to him on the
subject, though he assented very readily to another for the appointment
of a commission to examine into the state of affairs in Ireland.
The Tories were next destined to cross the sorely-troubled king by the
resistance which they offered to him on a delicate question connected
with the provision for his sister-in-law. On the vote of the Civil List,
and the question arising under it as to the establishment of the
Princess Anne, it had been originally proposed by William that he
himself should undertake this charge out of his own revenues; but
through the instrumentality of the Churchills a strong party was formed
among the Tories to insist upon Anne having a settlement independent of
the Crown. Seventy thousand a year was the (for those days) extravagant
sum which they demanded, and which proved too much even for an indulgent
House of Commons to grant. The vote was reduced to £50,000, and though
William's dislike to the idea of a parliamentary settlement upon his
sister-in-law induced him to raise his own original offer of £30,000 to
£50,000 Anne still held out, and a yearly income of the amount last
mentioned was accordingly secured to her for life by Act of Parliament.
In none of the parts played by the various actors in this little
political drama (the sequel to which was the permanent estrangement of
the Queen and King from the Princess) is it easy to discern the
promptings of any public principle, or indeed of any decorously
avowable motive whatever. The Tories would seem to have been wholly
swayed either by party and ecclesiastical prepossessions, or by personal
interests of a lower kind--either by sentimental sympathy with a High
Churchwoman, or by a practical eye to the Marlborough gold. As to
William it was eminently natural that he should wish to retain at least
_one_ string of this puppet of the Churchills in his own hands; as
natural as that the Churchills themselves should wish to deprive him of
it, and that the puppet herself should respond to the vigorous pulling
of the strings which they already held. Neither of the two latter
parties would probably have cared to allege any public motive for their
behaviour in the transaction. It is to be presumed, however, that
William would have done so if he could; and it is at least noteworthy
that the only objection which he seems to have taken to Anne's
parliamentary settlement affords no logical support to his own
alternative proposal. That Anne should have her income settled on her
for life, while his was only voted to him annually, was doubtless a just
ground of complaint; but the proper redress of the anomaly would have
been to subject his sister-in-law's income like his own to the annual
revision of the House of Commons. The fact that the King was dependent
upon Parliament could be no reason for making the Princess dependent not
upon Parliament, but upon the King.
Meanwhile the session wore on, and William's cherished project of an Act
of Indemnity was no nearer realisation. He had earnestly recommended it
to Parliament in the Speech from the Throne, but nothing was further
from the hearts of the dominant party in the Commons than the idea of
amnesty. They seemed bent on assuring themselves the tranquil exit of
Marshal Narvaez, who died in peace with all mankind by dint of leaving
himself no enemies to forgive. An Indemnity Bill was for form's sake
brought in at the beginning of November, but no progress was made with
it. Proscription took the place of purgation. Lords Salisbury and
Peterborough, Sir Edward Hales, and others, were marked out for
impeachment and summoned according to their status to the bar of one or
the other House. The Lords appointed a committee to inquire into the
judicial murders of Russell and Sidney, and Sir Dudley North and Lord
Halifax were cited before this body to answer for their shares, real or
alleged, in these dark transactions. John Hampden, a grandson of the
greater John, was conspicuous for the violence of his hostility to the
official Tories, and by his instrumentality a committee was appointed to
prepare an address to the King to remove the authors of the late
failures and to appoint "unsuspected persons" to the management of
affairs. The address, however, presented by Hampden was sharply
criticised for the violence of its language, and the House of Commons
ultimately laid it aside. So plainly, indeed, was the Whig party now
losing ground in that House, and so grave had become their apprehensions
of declining popularity in the country, that with a view of at least
recovering their position at the polling-booths they resolved upon one
of the boldest and most unscrupulous strokes of party tactics which our
history records. Into a Bill then before the House for restoring the
charters to these corporations which had surrendered them to the Crown,
they introduced a clause excluding from municipal office all persons who
had been implicated in the surrenders of such charters--or, in other
words, all Tories, thus designing to fill the municipalities with Whig
office-bearers and to secure the control of the elections to the Whig
party. Smuggled into the Bill in a House half depleted of its members by
the approach of Christmas, it needed a vigorous whip of the Tories to
procure the rejection of this clause by a narrow majority; and William's
disgust at this manoeuvre was further intensified by the attachment to
his much-desired Indemnity Bill of a bill of pains and penalties against
political delinquents. So acute at this moment became his chagrin and
disappointment at the condition of English politics that he was strongly
tempted to wash his hands of the whole distasteful and thankless
business, and he was with difficulty prevailed upon by his ministers to
abandon his design of bidding adieu to the country which he had come to
deliver and retiring to his native land. Dissuaded from this, he
resolved that he would at least reduce Ireland to submission if he had
failed to compose the quarrels of his Parliament; and he let it be known
that he was about to quit the capital for the headquarters of his army
in Ulster. But against this, too, the Whigs vehemently protested. An
address deprecatory of the project was said to be preparing; and
William, his patience exhausted by this last sally of faction,
determined to appeal to the good sense and patriotism of the country.
Accordingly, on the 27th of January, after having in a speech from the
throne announced his resolve to go to Ireland in person, "and with the
blessing of God Almighty endeavour to reduce that kingdom, that it may
no longer be a charge to this," the King, to the high satisfaction of
the Tories and the proportional discomfiture of the Whigs, proceeded to
prorogue Parliament with a view to its early dissolution.