1690-1691
Parliament of 1690--Tory majority--Settlement of the royal
income--Case of the Princess Anne--The "Act of Grace"--
Detection of Preston's conspiracy--William's departure
for Ireland--Battle of the Boyne--Battle of Beachy Head--
Marlborough's Irish campaign--Session of 1690.
The elections were contested with the utmost energy of party spirit.
Both Whigs and Tories strove their hardest for the victory, but the
policy of the King's appeal to the country was justified by the success
of the latter. A Tory majority was returned to the House of Commons, and
William felt that there was now at last a fair prospect of his
effectually mediating between factions. To have replaced a party to whom
he owed everything by a party who owed everything to him was undoubtedly
a great step towards the attainment of his ends. He had at least secured
a majority who could affect no right to dictate his policy, and had
reduced those who could and did advance this pretension to a minority.
His first act was to remodel his Ministry. Halifax resigned the Privy
Seal, which was placed in commission; Danby, who had been raised at the
distribution of honours accompanying the coronation to the Marquisate of
Caermarthen, became Lord President; Sir John Lowther, First Lord of the
Treasury--not then, as now, the chief office in the Administration.
Whigs and Tories were still mingled in the Government, but no longer in
the old proportions.
On the 20th of March the new Parliament met, and the King addressed it
in a speech in which he announced his intention of proceeding to Ireland
as soon as might be, and recommended to the prompt attention of the two
Houses the question of the settlement of the royal revenue and of the
enactment of an amnesty. In the former of these matters their action was
more conformable to sound constitutional principle than agreeable to the
King. In addition to the hereditary revenues which had passed with the
crown to William and Mary, the Commons would only agree to settle
absolutely upon the King and Queen about one third of the fiscal
revenues which had been assured to the last two sovereigns for the term
of their lives. That portion of the excise, estimated at £300,000, which
had been settled upon James II. for life, was now settled upon William
and Mary for their joint and separate lives. But, on the other hand, the
customs duties, amounting to £600,000, which had been settled for life
on Charles and James successively, were granted to the Crown for a term
of only four years. This restriction, in which Whigs and Tories
concurred, was not unnaturally displeasing to a sovereign who justly
valued himself on the ability, integrity, and thrift which made him, as
he conceived, at once the most efficient and the most trustworthy
steward of the national resources; but that he should have resented the
action of Parliament in this matter not merely as a limitation upon the
free play of his policy, but as a personal slight to himself,
instructively illustrates the very limited extent to which the
principles of the British Constitution, as we now know it, had
established themselves in the joint recognition of the sovereign and the
legislature. If there was one principle more inevitably implied in the
Revolution that William had headed than another, it was that no personal
claims of any individual sovereign could be allowed either to suspend or
in any degree to qualify the general rule of parliamentary control. Had
William contended, whether reasonably or unreasonably, that the
restraint placed on him by Parliament was more severe than needed to be
imposed upon _any_ sovereign, his position would have been a defensible
one; but his complaint, as Burnet testifies, was that the Commons were
showing an undue and ungenerous jealousy of their particular sovereign
for the time being. His claim to enjoy the same amount of freedom as his
predecessor had abused was founded simply on the fact that James was
James and that he was William; and that was obviously one of these
circumstances of which the administrators of a general rule, intended to
apply to any number of future Jameses and Williams, could not possibly
take into account. Had this general rule been recognised with anything
approaching to its acceptance in these days, it is impossible to suppose
that so clear and fair an intelligence as William's could have missed
its application to himself.
No doubt it may have caused him some irritation to observe with what
rapidity the coalition of Whigs and Tories, which had formed for the
purpose of limiting his independence, dissolved again when that work
was done. In a few weeks the two parties were as fiercely at odds as
ever upon a Whig Abjuration Bill, the main object of which, though in
one quite indefensible clause it went far beyond this, was to impose a
test which the official Tories could not swallow, and so to drive them
from office. It was not enough that a man should have sworn allegiance
to King William; he must also expressly abjure allegiance to King James.
Who knew but that he might have taken the former oath in some
non-natural sense or with some mental reservations? And though the
answer seemed obvious that he might take the latter in the same sense
and with the same reservations, the Bill was prosecuted to its rejection
in the House of Commons by a majority of thirty-three. An Abjuration
Bill of a somewhat less stringent kind was then introduced into the
House of Lords, the debate upon which William personally attended. He
had let it be known, however, that he was opposed to the former measure,
and it is probable that he had no great liking for the latter. Anyhow,
it underwent so much mutilation in committee that its authors did not
care to persevere with it.
The Tory majority, however, was soon after employed to an even more
useful purpose in the final accomplishment of William's policy of
pacification. Resolved that on this occasion the measure of indemnity
should not be defeated by delay, the King submitted it personally to the
Upper House in the form of an Act of Grace for political offences--a
proceeding which, according to constitutional practice, abridged its
deliberative stages in each House of Parliament to a single reading.
Introduced under such auspices, and assured of the support of a party
always dominant in the Upper House, and now possessing a majority in the
Lower, it passed without any opposition into law, and is undoubtedly
entitled to take its place among the most honourable and statesmanlike
acts of William's career. Its value as a political precedent was
scarcely capable of exaggeration even by Macaulay; and if he somewhat
inordinately applauds the enlightened clemency which it was as easy for
any brave and dispassionate foreigner to recommend as it was difficult
for English parties embittered by the mutual wrongs of a generation of
conflict to accept, it would be falling into the converse error to
insist on any serious qualification of the historian's praises.
William's great qualities were his own; they must at least divide the
credit of his high-minded and sagacious policy with the accident of his
antecedents in his own country and of his position in ours; nor would it
be gracious to attempt too nice an apportionment of the shares.
Impatience to proceed to Ireland had probably something to do with the
expeditious form of procedure adopted by the King in the case of the
Indemnity Act. On the 20th of May it became law. On the same day William
informed the Houses that his departure for the seat of war could be
delayed no longer; and after having given his assent to an Act
empowering the Queen to administer the government during his absence, he
prorogued Parliament until the 14th of July. Then, having appointed from
the list of Privy Councillors a small interior Council of Nine to advise
the Queen, and having delayed no longer than was necessary to place in
their hands the threads of a newly-discovered conspiracy,[12] William
took a tender farewell of his wife, and set forth on the strange errand
of defeating the army, if not destroying the life, of his wife's father.
"God send," he exclaimed, "that no harm may come to him." His anxiety on
this score for the Queen's sake was painful; but otherwise, though he
belonged to that order of brave men whose spirits are fortified rather
than exhilarated by danger, he was cheered by the approach of the hour
of action. 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, he could still say to Burnet--"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."
On the 14th of June he landed at Carrickfergus, and immediately set out
for Belfast to take over the command from Schomberg. All Ulster rose
with enthusiasm to receive him, and the soldiers, whom treachery and
incompetency had been sacrificing by the hundred to the ravages of
disease and privation, took heart once more. After ten days spent in
concentrating his forces at Loughbrickland, William started southward
at the head of 36,000 men. Two days after his nephew's landing James had
left Dublin to lead his troops to Dundalk with the view either of giving
battle at that point, or merely, as has been suggested, of eating up the
country between the capital and the invading army, so as to impede its
advance by difficulties of supply. But if the former were the original
object of the movement it was soon abandoned. When William's army
approached Dundalk James fell back upon Ardee; and the former still
pressing southwards, the latter still continued his retreat, until the
pursuer was brought to a halt on the morning of the 30th of June by the
halt of the pursued, and the English and Irish armies at last looked
each other in the face across the now historic waters of the Boyne.
Lauzun, who had succeeded De Rosen in the command of James's forces, was
a courtier rather than a general, but the position he had here taken up,
behind entrenchments and with a river in front, was strategically a
strong one--so strong indeed that the veteran Schomberg doubted his
master's wisdom in resolving upon an immediate attack. But William, as
he had told the Ulster men, had not come to Ireland to "let the grass
grow under his feet." He had the advantage in numbers; the advantage in
generalship; above all, the advantage in the quality of his troops, who,
if but few of them were as good as the trained French soldiers of his
adversary, were none of them so bad as the rapparee Irish levies who
formed the bulk of James's forces. The day passed in an exchange of
shots across the river, from one of which William had well-nigh lost his
life. Having sat down to breakfast somewhat close to the brink of the
Boyne, he attracted the attention of the Irish sentries on the opposite
shore. Two field-pieces were planted opposite to him, and, on his rising
and remounting his horse, were discharged at the group of which he was
the centre. The first shot killed a man and two horses at some distance
from him; the second, better aimed, struck the river bank and grazed the
King's shoulder in its ricochet, inflicting a slight flesh wound. His
staff thronged anxiously about him, but William, in his usual dry and
stoical fashion, relieved their fears. He was unharmed, he told them,
but "there was no need for any bullet to come nearer." His wound was
dressed, and he remained in the saddle till nightfall. At nine o'clock
he held a council of war, and, against the advice of Schomberg, declared
his determination of effecting a passage of the river on the following
day. Unable to dissuade his master from the rash project, as he deemed
it, the veteran general urged that at least a portion of the army should
be sent up the stream at midnight to Slane Bridge, and crossing it at
that point, should be in readiness either to assist them in the event of
their attack being unsuccessful, by a diversion in the rear of James's
army, or, in case the river should have been carried, to cut off the
retreat of the Irish by the pass of Duleek. This plan, which, if
adopted, would probably, as one of William's biographers points out,
have ended the campaign at a stroke, was rejected: why, does not very
clearly appear. The tactics were such as might have been thought likely
to commend themselves to William, and he could apparently have well
spared the men to execute them. It is said by the biographer above
referred to that the plan was opposed "by the Dutch generals"; but it
is not impossible that the objection may have really come from the King
himself, and have been founded not on strategical but on political
considerations. William, as we know, was especially solicitous about his
father-in-law's life, and not perhaps suspecting how well it would be
cared for by its owner, whom he must have remembered to have once been
brave, he may have rejected Schomberg's scheme for its very
completeness, and because he not unnaturally assumed that in cutting off
the retreat of James's army he would be cutting off the retreat of James
himself. The too complimentary assumption that the royal general would
be last rather than first in the flight had yet to be rebutted by
events. But whatever the reason, the Marshal's plan was rejected; he
retired, chagrined and hurt, from the council, and the last night of the
old soldier's life was spent, it is melancholy to think, in displeasure
with the master whom he had so long and faithfully served.
The morning of the 1st of July broke fair, and a little after sunrise
the English army advanced in three divisions to the attack. The right
under the younger Schomberg, assisted by the Earl of Portland and James
Douglas, was detailed for the same operation which the Marshal would
have had executed four hours earlier, and by a surprise. Having marched
a few miles up the river to Slane Bridge, and finding there but one
regiment of Irish dragoons, they easily beat them back, crossed the
bridge, and made good their footing on the southern bank of the Boyne.
Lauzun, apprehensive for his command of the pass of Duleek, had detached
the best of his troops--his own countrymen--to resist the further
advance of the English right; and the centre and left of William's army
were opposed at the lower fords by the Irish Catholics alone. Between
them and the Dutch Guards, the French Huguenots, the men of Londonderry
and Inniskillen, it was _impar congressus_ indeed.[13] Schomberg in
command of the centre took the water at the ford of Old Bridge. William
at the head of the left wing, consisting entirely of cavalry, made for a
more difficult and dangerous crossing lower down. At one point only does
the passage of the river appear to have been for more than a moment
doubtful. The Danes and Huguenots under Cambon and Caillemot were set
upon in the act of landing by the Irish cavalry under Richard Hamilton;
the former were driven back again into the water, and the latter,
unarmed with pikes, began to give ground. The conflict raged hotly for a
short space at the southern exit of the ford; Caillemot fell mortally
wounded; the whole brigade was wavering; when old Schomberg, who had
been watching the action from the northern bank, dashed impetuously into
the river. "_Allons, Messieurs!_" he cried to the Huguenots, as he
pointed to the French Catholics in James's ranks, "_voila vos
persécuteurs!_" As he uttered the words a small band of Irish horsemen
came galloping in upon the main body, the Huguenots, mistaking them for
friends, having allowed them to pass. In the confused melée which
followed the Marshal was surrounded; he received two sabre cuts on his
head, and a musket shot, said in one account to have been fired in a
fatal mistake "by one of his own men," laid him dead upon the ground.
The arrival of William, who had with difficulty forced his way across
through the strongly flowing tide, at once decided the doubtful
struggle. "Men of Inniskillen, what will you do for me?" was his
inspiriting question to the sorely pressed Protestants of Ulster; and
drawing his sword with an arm yet stiff from the wound of the previous
morning, he led his Dutch Guards and Inniskilleners against the still
unbroken Irish centre. Ulstermen and Hollanders vied with each other in
steadiness and valour; Schomberg's cavalry came opportunely to their
support; De Ginkell's horse effected as timely a diversion on the
enemy's left. Hamilton and his riders being thus driven back, the heart
of the defence was broken, and after one more brief stand at Plottin
Castle, where the Inniskilleners were temporarily checked and had again
to be rallied, and where Hamilton was wounded and made prisoner, the
defeat of the Irish army became a rout, and their retreat a flight.
James, who had watched the battle from the hill of Donore till it went
against him, had already hurried through the pass of Duleek, and was
making the best of his way to Dublin. His army, now a broken and
confused mass of fugitives, struggled after him through the defile. The
battle of the Boyne was won.
The victory, though not so immediately decisive as it might have been if
Schomberg's plan had been adopted, was practically fatal to the Jacobite
cause. Drogheda surrendered the next day. James, who had reached Dublin
on the evening of the battle, quitted it the day after for ever. On the
3d of July he reached Waterford, whence he embarked on board a French
frigate and sailed for Brest. Lauzun and Tyrconnel collected their
straggling forces as best they could, and, evacuating the Irish capital
immediately after James's flight, marched westward with the design of
reorganising resistance at such still remaining strongholds of the
deposed monarch as Limerick and Athlone.
William fixed his headquarters at Finglas, near Dublin, but enjoyed no
long period of unmixed satisfaction with his victory. The day before the
two armies closed upon the Boyne, the French fleet, under De Tourville,
had encountered what should have been the combined fleets of England and
the States off Beachy Head, but by the supineness or treachery of the
English Admiral the Dutch had been left to bear the brunt of the battle
alone. After hours of hard fighting they drew off with the worst of the
encounter, and Admiral Herbert, destroying some of the Dutch ships, and
taking the rest in tow, sailed up the Thames, leaving the enemy in
undisputed possession of the Channel. The news of this defeat, and of
the alarm for our unprotected coasts which it had occasioned in London,
reached William on the 27th of July at Carrick-on-Suir, where he was
encamped, after having reduced Waterford. He immediately hurried to
Dublin with the intention of embarking to England; but, reassured by
later advices informing him that the French attempt at a descent on the
Devonshire coast had proved a failure, he returned to headquarters, and
hastened to prosecute the campaign. The glory of the Boyne, however, was
destined to be somewhat dimmed before many weeks were past. At Limerick
the Celtic Irish showed, with the variability of their unstable race,
that they could fight bravely when "i' th' humour." Sarsfield, left in
command by the departure in disgust of Lauzun and Tyrconnel, approved
himself a leader of vigour and resource. He intercepted and destroyed
William's heavier battering-train before it could reach him. The
besieged of Limerick, fighting with a desperate courage, which even
their women imitated, beat back an assault of the English forces with
much bloodshed, and on the 30th of August, fearing the ravages of
disease with the approach of the autumnal rains, William raised the
siege of the city and returned to England. The campaign thus left
undecided was to be taken in hand by a greater commander than himself.
Landing in Ireland some three weeks later, the Earl of Marlborough gave
promise of his future military prowess in the remarkable speed and
success of his operations. In five weeks after leaving Portsmouth he had
taken Cork and Kinsale, and had not his fast sickening army constrained
his retirement, would probably have settled the whole Irish business out
of hand. He returned to London to receive from William, who, besides
being incapable of jealousy, was in the habit of underrating his own
generalship, the graceful compliment that "no officer living who has
seen so little service as my Lord Marlborough is so fit for great
commands."
On the 2d of November the King once more met his Parliament, and under
more favourable auspices than ever before during his reign. The imminent
dangers to which the nation had been exposed had brought about a
temporary truce between parties; the skill, energy, and valour with
which the King had borne his part in averting them had, moreover, united
them in a common sentiment of admiration and gratitude. Thanks were
voted both to William, and separately to Mary, who had indeed well
merited them by the spirit and vigour which she had displayed during the
critical days that followed the defeat of Beachy Head. Supplies of
unusual magnitude were voted with unusual readiness, and the short
session, marked only by an abortive bill for confiscating the property
of Jacobites, passed tranquilly away. On the 5th of January William
thanked the Houses for their supplies, and assuring them, in words on
which later events were to place an awkward commentary, that he would
not grant away any of the forfeited property in Ireland till they had
had an opportunity of declaring their wishes in that matter, he
adjourned Parliament, and on the following day he quitted London to
return for the first time in two years to his native country.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] The conspiracy known as Preston's--a plan of inviting the French
king to land troops in England, and offering to second his efforts by an
insurrection, and, if possible, the treacherous surrender of the whole
or a part of the British fleet. Clarendon and Dartmouth, with other more
or less eminent personages, were implicated in it, including, at least
as was suspected, the Quaker, William Penn. The conspirators were
betrayed by an accomplice, and some of them sent to the Tower. Lord
Preston, a Scotch peer, a ringleader of the conspiracy, was tried and
convicted for high treason, but subsequently pardoned.
[13] James's ungenerous reproaches of his defeated troops, and the many
French complaints quoted by Macaulay might not in themselves prove
conclusively that the Irish showed greater _natural_ cowardice, as
distinguished from mere military unsteadiness, than other undisciplined
levies. But the mere fact that with all their advantages of position,
commanding a river which their adversaries had to cross, they made, with
the exception of Hamilton's horse, so miserable an exhibition of
themselves, is a clear enough indication of personal deficiencies. It is
only fair to remember, however, that the generalship of James's army was
beneath contempt. To leave a bridge a few miles above their position
unprotected by artillery, and indeed with only a single regiment of
cavalry available for resisting its being crossed by a hostile army, is
surely the last word of tactical ineptitude.