1699-1700
Death of the Electoral Prince of Bavaria--Renewed negotiations
--Second Partition Treaty--The Irish forfeitures--The
Resumption Bill--Will and death of the King of Spain.
The political event on which William had founded hopes of re-opening the
army question has been indirectly referred to in the last chapter. This
event, as has been said, was one which might reasonably have been
thought likely to dispose the English Parliament to a more liberal view
of the military necessities of the country by bringing once more into
prominence a European danger which diplomacy had been hitherto believed
to have averted. In the early days of 1699 the Electoral Prince of
Bavaria--the youthful heir-designate of the Spanish monarchy--took his
departure from a troubled world whose confusions were to be formidably
increased by his quitting it. The English Parliament, as we have seen,
refused to allow the Prince's death to modify their policy. But William
could not afford to overlook it; for it, of course, reopened at once the
whole question which had been closed by the First Partition Treaty, and
rendered it necessary to nominate a new successor to the Spanish
kingdom and its possessions in the New World. Louis XIV. was the first
to move in the matter. He instructed De Tallard to sound William as to a
new Treaty, and, after one or two candidates had been mentioned and
rejected, it was finally agreed between the French and English
sovereigns that the Archduke Charles, the son of the Emperor Leopold,
should be the future King of Spain and the Indies, and that the
Milanese, which had been allotted to him under the First Treaty, should
go to Louis, by whom it was to be bartered for Lorraine. The arrangement
was complete in all respects except that of having received the sanction
of the Emperor by the summer or early autumn of 1699; but the rumour of
it caused a violent outbreak of indignation in Spain. The Marquis of
Canales, Spanish Ambassador at the English Court, was instructed to
protest, which he did in terms so insolently imperious that William, on
being informed at Loo of the language used by him, at once directed that
the Marquis's passports should be handed to him, and at the same time
recalled our own ambassador at Madrid. By whose means the provisions of
the new Treaty were communicated to the Spanish Court and people is not
certainly known; but considering that one of the parties to whom it had
been submitted rejected it (for the Emperor at the eleventh hour refused
to sign), and, moreover, that another party--the French king--had never,
in all probability, sincerely assented to it, there is no need for much
speculation on this point. Leopold had known and obvious motives for
disclosing it to the unhappy Charles, and Louis is more than suspected
of having private motives for doing so. But whichever of the two was the
medium of communication, Louis was indisputably the gainer. The news
aroused a powerful anti-Austrian feeling in the minds of the Spanish
people, of which the French King, who was far better served at the Court
of Madrid than the Emperor, was not slow to take advantage. From the
autumn of 1699 till the 1st of November 1700, when the few and miserable
days of Charles II. came to an end, the agents of France worked
persistently, and in the end successfully, to overcome the Austrian
leanings of the dying monarch, and to convince him that on grounds of
patriotism, no less than of legal and moral obligation, he was bound to
devise his dominions to his lawful French heir, and away from the Prince
to whom Louis had solemnly agreed with William that they should pass.
The final consummation of these intrigues, however, was still a year
distant, and meanwhile an incident of extreme interest, and at the time
of exceeding gravity, in English politics, has to be recorded. On the
19th of November Parliament met again, and in a mood which boded ill for
the relations between the sovereign and the third estate of his realm.
The session began with one of the numerous abortive attacks made upon
Somers in the course of his distinguished career, and an equally
unsuccessful attempt was made to procure the disgrace of that perpetual
bugbear of the Tories, Bishop Burnet. But these were merely in the
nature of preliminary skirmishes; it was not long before hostilities
were opened upon William and his Ministers in a more serious way. It
will be remembered that at the close of the last session the Commons
tacked to the Land Tax Bill a clause appointing seven commissioners to
inquire into the Irish forfeitures, and that the Lords, after some
demur to the manner in which the proposal was being forced upon them,
passed the measure. The report of these commissioners, who had been
pursuing their inquiries in Ireland during the recess, was now ready,
and early in the session it was presented to Parliament, signed by four
of the commissioners, the other three dissenting. Disfigured by many
exaggerations and some wilful misstatements, this important document
contained, nevertheless, an amount of discreditable truth sufficient not
only to excite considerable popular feeling against William at the time,
but to inflict some permanent injury on his historical reputation.
The four commissioners reported that all the lands in the several
counties in Ireland belonging to the forfeited persons amounted, as far
as they could reckon, to 1,060,762 acres, worth £211,623 per annum, and
computed therefrom to be of the capital value of £2,685,138. That some
of these lands had been restored to the old proprietors by virtue of the
Articles of Limerick and Galway, or by his Majesty's favour through
reversal of outlawries, and royal pardons obtained chiefly by
gratifications to such persons as had abused his Majesty's royal bounty
and compassion; and that besides these restitutions, which they thought
to be corruptly procured, there were seventy-six grants and "custodians"
under the Great Seal of Ireland, of which they made a recital--as, for
instance, to the Lord Romney, three grants now in being, containing
49,517 acres; to the Earl of Albemarle, in two grants, 106,633 acres in
possession and reversion; to William Bentinck, Esq., Lord Woodstock
(Portland's eldest son), 135,820 acres of land; to the Earl of Athlone
in two grants, 26,480 acres; to the Earl of Galway one grant of 36,148
acres, etc. That the estates so mentioned did not indeed yield so much
to the grantees as they were valued at, because as most of them had
abused his Majesty on the real value of their estates, so their agents
had imposed upon them, and had either sold or let the greatest part of
these lands at an undervalue; but that after all deductions and
allowances there yet remained £1,699,343: 14s. which they laid before
the Commons as the gross value of the estates forfeited since the 13th
day of February 1689, and not restored. The commissioners went on, in
excess, as it should seem, of their attributions,[20] to report that
William had conferred the forfeited Irish estates of the late King
James, estimated at 95,649 acres, worth £25,998 a year, on his mistress,
the Countess of Orkney. Excluding this item, however, the value of the
restorations and royal grants against which the commissioners reported
amounted, it will be seen, to close upon a million sterling.
It is very probable, indeed it may be said to be certain, that the total
value of these forfeitures was grossly exaggerated by the commissioners;
it is possible that it was to some extent wilfully exaggerated for party
purposes. The lands forfeited in Ireland during the Revolution may have
been worth "nearer half a million sterling than two millions and a
half." It does not seem to me, however, that this is a point of the
importance which Macaulay seems to attach to it. Even if it could be
shown that the proportion of the royal grants to the total forfeitures
was unduly magnified through an over-estimate of the value of the
former, I cannot see that it would affect the merits of the case. The
real gist of the charge against William in respect of these
grants--assuming, that is to say, that he was justified in making them
at all without the sanction of Parliament--is to be sought not in a
comparison of the royal benefactions with the amount of the property at
his disposal, but in an examination of their proportions _inter se_.
Even if it be shown that he distributed property of the value not of a
million sterling, but of only a fifth of that sum, it remains equally
true in either case, that more than one-tenth of his bounty went to a
single favourite who had little or no public services to show for them,
and very nearly an eighth to a young man whose only claim upon him was
that of being an able and faithful servant's eldest son. The grants to
Albemarle and Woodstock are impossible to defend, and the latter almost
impossible to explain. William had already loaded Portland with
benefits, and to the vast estates he had bestowed upon him in England
his eldest son would, in the natural course of events, succeed. On what
ground, either of justice or even of sentiment, it could have been
thought well to enrich the expectant heir of so much English landed
property with 135,820 acres of forfeited Irish land is a mystery which
has never been satisfactorily explained. As to the grant to Albemarle,
it was of even worse example. Woodstock was at least the son of a
counsellor to whom William owed much, and whom he might conceivably
have regarded himself as rewarding in the person of his heir; but what
had Keppel, a mere favourite, a young courtier with no other
recommendations but his youth, his good looks, and his complaisance, a
personality too closely recalling that of a "minion" of Henri Trois, and
which in the Jacobite libels, not wisely to be thus supplied with
colourable pretexts for their calumnies, was openly so described--what,
one cannot but ask, had Keppel done to deserve a grant of 106,633 acres
of the forfeited Irish land? Compare these two largesses, Woodstock's
and Albemarle's, with those bestowed on Lord Romney, an ex-Secretary of
State, and one of the leaders of the movement which brought William to
England; on Lord Athlone, the stout Dutch soldier who, as General
Ginkel, had given and taken many a hard knock in his master's service;
on Lord Galway, that gallant Marquis de Ruvigny who had turned the flank
of the Irish on the bloody day of Aghrim. Albemarle's, the smaller of
the two, is more than twice that of Romney, nearly thrice that of
Galway, more than four times that of Athlone. It was impossible for
William to contend in the face of this evidence that he had simply been
using the forfeited lands of Irish rebels to reward those public
servants who had done most by valour in the field, or wisdom in the
council-chamber, to establish firmly on the throne of England, the
Prince chosen by the nation; and that therefore he was merely
anticipating the national reward which would have been conferred upon
them, and virtually drawing upon one national fund in relief of
prospective charges upon another. He could not even contend, as we have
seen, that this was the _main_ use to which he had put the forfeitures;
for though wisdom and valour had come in for a share of the spoils,
their share was lamentably smaller than that which was won by mere arts
of courtiership. There is, in short, no denying the fact that while
William applied a part of this property to strictly public objects, or,
in other words, to objects to which, but for such application of it, the
public would have to contribute in another shape, he devoted far too
large a portion of it to purposes of purely private benefaction, for
which he would otherwise have had to resort to drafts upon his Civil
List.[21]
But even this does not exhaust all the disagreeable elements in the
transaction. Had the Irish forfeitures been simply in the nature of
property "within the order and disposition" of the sovereign, and
impressed with only a constructive trust for the benefit of the nation,
the King's dealings with it would have been open to grave reprehension.
As a matter of fact, however, the property in question was the subject
not of a mere constructive trust, but of an express recognition on
William's part of its fiduciary character, and of a distinct promise
that Parliament, as representing the _cestui que trust_, should have an
opportunity of deciding on the proper mode of its application. On the
5th of January 1691 the King had closed the short autumn with a speech,
in which he assured the Houses that he would not "make any grant of the
forfeited lands in England and Ireland till there be another opportunity
of settling that matter in Parliament, in such manner as shall be
thought most expedient." This undertaking had reference to a Bill which
had actually passed the Commons for applying the Irish forfeitures, and
which only failed to become law because William, who was due at the
Congress then about to meet at the Hague, was compelled to prorogue
Parliament before the Lords had had time to consider the measure. It is
vain to contend that this promise was fulfilled, because several
"opportunities" were given to Parliament to deal with the question--in
the sense that several sessions were allowed to pass without Parliament
moving in the matter--before William himself proceeded to grant away the
forfeited lands. William was not entitled, under the circumstances, to
infer any surrender of parliamentary control over the forfeitures from
mere parliamentary inaction. Such an inference would in any case have
been a somewhat questionable one; but this was a case in which the
wishes of one branch of the Legislature had already been recorded in the
form of a distinct legislative project. The King knew, in short, that
the Commons desired to make Irish rebellion as far as possible pay for
its own suppression; he knew that they looked to the value of the
rebels' lands to afford partial relief to the English tax-payer from the
heavy imposts to which he was being subjected; and when, knowing this,
he proceeded to grant away large tracts of these lands, thus affected to
the national service, at his own will and pleasure, and in many cases to
persons whom the nation would never have consented to endow so
munificently out of its own pocket, he was unquestionably dealing with
his Parliament and people after a fashion which, in the case of a
private individual standing in analogous relation to other parties,
would be severely condemned. If he intended to ignore his promise of
January 1691 altogether, his grants were mere high-handed usurpations of
right; if he relied upon the mere "allowance of opportunities" in the
manner above mentioned as being a fulfilment of that promise, then he
was guilty of something which can only be described in modern
phraseology as sharp practice.
Undoubtedly the House of Commons might have proceeded with more
moderation than they displayed, but the majority in that House felt that
they had a good, and what was still better, a popular case against the
King and his advisers; they knew that the country was sore with the
weight of taxation, and jealous of the amount of royal favour bestowed
upon foreigners; and they felt that they might rely upon the combined
force of these two sentiments to support them in extreme measures.
Having gained their first triumph in the committal to the Tower of Sir
Richard Levinge, one of the dissentient commissioners who had charged
his colleagues with speaking disrespectfully of the sovereign in
connection with these benefactions, they introduced the famous
Resumption Bill, a measure by which all the royal grants were
invalidated, and the whole of the alienated property resumed to the use
of the State. In the Bill sent up to the Lords from the Lower House in
1690 it had been proposed to reserve a third part of the forfeitures to
the King, and William was not without hopes that this reservation, which
would just about have covered his grants to Woodstock, Albemarle, and
the three other peers whose names have been mentioned above, would be
renewed. The imperious majority, however, refused to hear of any such
modification of their demands. They rejected a clause moved by Ministers
for reserving at least some portion of the forfeitures to the King; and
they carried resolutions to the effect that "the advising, procuring,
and passing of the grants in Ireland had been the occasion of
contracting great debts, and laying heavy burdens upon the people; that
the said grants reflected highly upon the King's honour; and that the
officers and instruments concerned in procuring and passing them had
highly failed in the performance of their duty." These resolutions were
presented to William at Kensington by the Speaker and leaders of the
Opposition. William replied that he had thought himself bound to reward
out of the forfeited property those who had served him well, and
especially those who had borne a principal part in the reduction of
Ireland. The war, he said, had undoubtedly left behind it a heavy debt,
and he should be glad to see that debt reduced by just and effectual
means.
The answer, though undoubtedly weak enough, seems scarcely open to one
of the criticisms which Macaulay pronounces upon it[22]. It would have
been not so much injudicious as absurd on William's part to "hint" that
the Irish forfeitures "could not justly be applied to the discharge of
the public debts." His meaning could only have been that it would not be
just to the grantees to resume their property in order to apply it to
public uses. It would appear, however, that the House of Commons
understood his words in the wider and less defensible sense. The
Resumption Bill was pushed vigorously through the House of Commons, and
in order to paralyze the expected resistance of the Lords, the expedient
of tacking was again resorted to. The Bill was tacked to a Land Tax Bill
for raising two shillings in the pound for the service of the next year,
and then sent to the Upper House. It passed its second reading by a
considerable majority, but in committee and on the third reading several
amendments were carried. It is highly significant, however, that though
William was known to be very solicitous to obtain the confirmation of at
least some of his Irish grants, and though the majority in the Lords in
favour of the amendment may be supposed desirous of doing all that they
reasonably could to gratify him, the Bill as regards his dealings with
the Irish forfeitures was left untouched. The majority contented
themselves with modifying certain arbitrary and inequitable provisions
whereby the Lower House had sought to usurp jurisdiction over property
which had never come to the Crown by forfeiture at all, and to grant
estates and sums of money of their own authority, and without the
constitutional intermediation of the Crown, to certain favoured
individuals. Thus amended, the Bill was sent back to the Lower House,
where it met of course with the very reception which the expedient of
tacking was designed, in the event of its coming back with amendments,
to secure for it. Parties had been much divided as to the policy of
tacking the Resumption Bill to a money Bill; but as to the duty of
resisting an attempt on the part of the Lords to amend a Bill sent up to
them in this fashion parties were united. The amendments were rejected
_nemine dissentiente_, and at the conference which followed the Lords
were informed by the managers of the Commons that the point of
constitutional practice was too well settled to be arguable, and that
the Bill was left in their hands along with the responsibility of all
the serious consequences which must follow its rejection. The Lords
nevertheless for a time stood firm; they resolved by a majority of
thirteen to adhere to their amendments, and on the following day the
Bill was, on a second conference, returned once more to the Commons, by
whom it was once more sent back to the Lords, with an intimation that
the determination of the Lower House was unalterable. This was on the
10th of May, and the whole of that day and night the greatest public
excitement prevailed. The deadlock between the two Houses had reached
such a point that if both refused to give way, and the supplies were
consequently lost, a complete dislocation of the national business,
accompanied in all probability by dangerous popular disturbance, would
have assuredly followed.
From this peril the country was saved at the critical moment by the good
sense and magnanimity of William. His behaviour was the more creditable
to him because not only was he eager, as has been said, for the
rejection of the Resumption Bill, but he had taken so active a part in
the attempt to bring about that result that surrender must necessarily
subject him to additional humiliation. There can be no doubt from the
account given by Burnet, whose own painful perplexity between the claims
of courtiership and patriotism increases the value of his testimony on
the subject, that William had tried hard to procure the defeat of the
measure. "The King," says the Bishop, "seemed resolved to venture on all
the ill consequences that might follow the losing this Bill, though
these would probably have been fatal. As far as we can judge either
another session of that Parliament or a new one would have banished the
favourites and begun the Bill anew with the addition of obliging the
grantees to refund all the mesne profits. Many in the Lords, that in all
other things were very firm to the King, were for passing the Bill,
notwithstanding the King's earnestness for it, since they apprehended
the ill consequences that were like to follow if it was lost." On the
5th of April he told Portland that if the Bill was not stopped in the
Upper House he should count all lost; and on the same day he declared
that he was resolved not to pass the Bill, and that the only question
was whether he should prorogue the Parliament on that day or on the
following Monday. On or before the 10th of April he had reflected more
maturely on the situation, and with that intuitive recognition of when
to give way, which only strong rulers ever seem to exhibit, and which
the masterful Elizabeth had displayed before him, he saw that the time
had arrived to yield. He took steps to have it conveyed to his adherents
in the Upper House that he desired the Bill to pass; and on the sitting
of the following day, May 11, the Lords withdrew their amendments and
accepted the Bill in its original form. Thus passed away a most perilous
crisis, and William, by the fine temper and moral courage with which he
thus submitted to perhaps the most galling rebuke ever inflicted upon a
monarch by a legislative assembly, must be admitted to have gone far to
atone for the serious error of his previous action. He was, however, and
not unnaturally, of opinion that he had done enough in the cause of the
peace, and the next day, in order to prevent the presentation to him of
an address from the Commons, praying that no person not a native, except
Prince George of Denmark, should be admitted to his Majesty's Councils
in England or Ireland, he came down and prorogued Parliament without a
speech.
The whole of the year 1700 was destined to abound in fresh troubles for
this sorely-tried and now fast waning life. No sooner had the English
Parliament separated than the Scotch Parliament met; and their first
business was to espouse the cause of their foolish and unlucky
countrymen who had taken part in the famous "Darien expedition," and
were now under detention by the Spanish Government at Carthagena. The
notable scheme in which these men had thus lost their liberty, and so
many thousands of other Scotchmen their property, was originated by an
adventurer of the name of Paterson, and depended for its success on the
double assumption that the territorial owners of the country on which
they proposed to found a trading station for the avowed purpose of
diverting trade from these owners' hands into their own would respect
their occupancy, and that the burning heat and malarious climate of an
equatorial region would spare their lives. Neither of these assumptions
had been realised. The sun and the swamps had thinned the number of the
settlers to a handful, and this remnant had been besieged, forced to
capitulate, and expelled from the isthmus by the forces of Spain.
William promised, in reply to an address from the Edinburgh legislators,
to demand the release of the Carthagena prisoners; but when the Scotch
Parliament proceeded to pass a resolution affirming that the colony in
Darien was a legal and rightful settlement, and that the Parliament
would maintain and support the same, the King thought it high time to
put a check on their proceedings. This he endeavoured to do through the
royal commissioner by means of repeated adjournments carried to such an
extent as to cause riots in Edinburgh, and at last, by dint of
conciliatory replies to their resolutions, and possibly by
gratifications of a more substantial kind, succeeded not only in
pacifying his northern subjects on this matter, but in bringing them,
before the close of the session at the end of the year, into a state of
such loyal complaisance that, unlike their English brethren, the Scotch
legislators voted for keeping on foot the whole of the land forces that
existed in the kingdom when the session began.
The time was now fast approaching when William's military policy was to
be justified by events. Throughout the whole of this year the struggle
of rival Powers over the fast decaying body of the unhappy Charles had
gone spiritedly forward at the Court of Madrid. The combatants, however,
were unequally matched. On the side of France were enlisted the services
of Cardinal Portocarrero, who soon succeeded in removing the King's
confessor--an Austrian instrument--and substituting another in the
French interests. The terrors of religion were then brought to bear upon
the wretched sovereign in a strength sufficient to overcome his natural
leanings in the matter of the disposition of his crown and kingdom
towards his own Austrian flesh and blood. They persuaded the unhappy
imbecile that he had been bewitched through Austrian agency; they
persuaded the populace of Madrid that the partisans of Austria had
brought about a famine. Having at last succeeded in utterly discrediting
the rival party, and working upon the superstition of Charles until he
believed that if he ousted his Bourbon heir from the succession he would
be inevitably damned, the French faction finally induced him to sign a
will appointing Philip, Duke of Anjou, universal successor to the
Spanish monarchy. A month afterwards this miserable slave of the priest
and the plotter at last obtained his manumission. He died on the 1st of
November 1700, and William then learnt for the first time that the
months of laborious negotiations spent on the successive framing of two
carefully-drawn treaties had been completely thrown away. For a brief
space of time, indeed, he remained in doubt whether Louis really
intended to play him false, but before the middle of the month of
November all uncertainty was at an end. Louis threw over the Partition
Treaty and adopted the will. The Duke of Anjou was despatched into Spain
with the historic exclamation touching the effacement of the
Pyrenees--mountains certainly not in this instance removed by
"faith,"--and William had the intolerable chagrin of discovering not
only that he had been befooled, but that his English subjects had no
sympathy with him or animosity against the royal swindler who had
tricked him. "The blindness of the people here," he writes sadly to the
Pensionary Heinsius, "is incredible. For though the affair is not
public, yet it was no sooner said that the King of Spain's will was in
favour of the Duke of Anjou, than it was the general opinion that it was
better for England that France should accept the will than fulfil the
Treaty of Partition."
FOOTNOTES:
[20] It was justly contended by the dissentient commissioners that these
lands had passed to William by his father-in-law's abdication in 1688,
and did not therefore come properly within the purview of an inquiry
limited to forfeitures occurring since February 13, 1689. The majority
of the commission insisted, however, paradoxically enough, that James's
Irish estates were only forfeited on, and by, his invasion of Ireland in
March of the latter year.
[21] The grants to Lady Orkney, of which so much was made by the country
party at the time, raised a totally different question on another level,
so to speak, of political morality. These grants were made out of
William's inheritance from his predecessor; and though Macaulay is no
doubt abstractedly right in arguing that William should have pensioned
his mistress out of economies effected in his Civil List than by
alienating his hereditary revenue, the remark is from the practical
point of view somewhat of an anachronism. In our day, when the lands of
the Crown are formally vested in commissioners by the sovereign in
consideration of his Civil List at the commencement of each reign, the
quasi-national character of this property is fixed and emphasised. But
no sovereign before William's time had regarded it in this light, or
recognised any implied restraint upon alienation; and William, with
Charles II.'s grants to his numerous mistresses before his eyes, may
well be excused for thinking his gift to Lady Orkney not only
justifiable but laudably moderate.
[22] The context of the passage, "The Commons murmured, etc., 'His
Majesty tells us,' they said, 'that the debts fall to us, and the
forfeitures to him'" (_Hist. Eng._ v. 271), appears clearly to show that
Macaulay supposed William to be speaking of the whole of the forfeitures
as not justly applicable to the public debt. His own previous words will
just admit (though not in strict grammar) of the construction that the
King was referring only to the "one-fifth part of these estates" which
had passed to deserving grantees; but if this is to be its construction,
Macaulay's favourite boast that he had written no sentence capable of
being misunderstood would have to be abandoned.