FOOTNOTE:
Their names were Ken of Bath and Wells, White of Peterborough, Lloyd of St. Asaph, Trelawney of Bristol, Lake of Chichester, and Turner of Ely.
CHAPTER XXXI.
WILLIAM AND MARY.
1688-1702.
James II. had believed that by absconding to France he would plunge England into anarchy, and leave no constituted power behind him. With a childish worship of forms, he flung the Great Seal into the Thames as he fled, that no state document might be issued in due shape. His slow and pedantic mind conceived that the nation would be nonplussed by the loss of king and seal at once!
The Convention.
But Englishmen can always show a wise disregard for formulae when it is necessary. Though there was no king to summon a Parliament, yet a "Convention" at once met on the invitation of William of Orange. It consisted of the peers, and a lower House formed of all surviving members of the Commons who had sat under Charles II., together with the Aldermen and Common Councillors of London.
William and Mary to be joint sovereigns.
This body, though not a regularly constituted meeting of the two Houses, proceeded to deal at once with the question of the succession. There were three alternatives open—to make the Princess Mary queen in her father's room, or to crown both her and her husband William, or to declare them merely regents in the absence of the exiled king. The last alternative commended itself to many of the Tories, who still held strong theories about the divine right of kings, and were loath to surrender them by consenting to a deposition. But when the proposal was broached to William of Orange, he answered that he would never consent to be the mere locum tenens of his father-in-law. He would leave England if nothing more than the power of regent were granted him. It was then proposed that the Princess Mary should be queen regnant; but this too the prince refused—he would not become his wife's servant and minister. When the Tories showed signs of insisting on this project, William began to make preparations for returning to Holland. This brought the Convention to reason; they knew that they could not get on for a moment without the prince's guiding hand. Accordingly they were constrained to take the third course, and to offer the crown to William and Mary, as joint sovereigns with equal rights. No one spoke a word for Mary's infant brother, the Prince of Wales: not only was he over-seas in France, but most men believed him to be no true son of James II.
The Declaration of Rights.
Before the throne was formally offered to William and Mary, the Convention proceeded to draw up the famous Declaration of Rights. This document contained a list of the main principles of the constitution which had been violated by James II., with a statement that they were ancient and undoubted rights of the English people. It stigmatised the powers claimed by the late king to dispense with or suspend laws as illegal usurpations. It stated that every subject had a right to petition the king, and should not be molested for so doing—an allusion to the case of the seven bishops. It stipulated for the frequent summoning of Parliaments, and for free speech and debate within the two Houses. The raising and maintenance of a standing army without the permission of Parliament was declared illegal. In a clause recalling the most famous paragraph of Magna Carta, it was stated that all levying of taxes or loans without the consent of the representatives of the nation was illegal. The Declaration then proceeded to provide for the succession: William and Mary, or the survivor of them, were first to rule; then any children who might be born to them. If Mary died childless, the Princess Anne and her issue were to inherit her sister's rights. Finally, any member of the royal house professing Romanism, or even marrying a Romanist, was to forfeit all claim to the crown. The Declaration was afterwards confirmed and made permanent as the "Bill of Rights."
William and Mary swore to observe the Declaration, and were proclaimed on February 13, 1689, after an interregnum which had lasted two months since the flight of James II. to France.
Character of William.
The new king and queen were not a well-matched pair, though, owing to Mary's amiable and tactful temper, they agreed better than might have been expected. The queen was lively, kind-hearted, and genial, well loved by all who knew her. William was a morose and unsociable invalid, who only recovered his spirits when he left the court for the camp. In spite of his wretched health, he was a keen soldier, and had the reputation of being one of the best, if also one of the most unlucky, generals of his time. His talent chiefly showed itself in repairing the consequences of his defeats, which he did so cleverly that his conquerors seldom drew any advantage from their success. In private life William was cold, suspicious, and reticent. He reserved his confidence for his Dutch friends, openly saying that the English, who had betrayed their natural king, could not be expected to be true to a foreigner. He knew that he was a political necessity for them, and nothing more. Hence he neither loved them nor expected them to love him.
William and Lewis XIV.
William had expelled his father-in-law, not from a disinterested wish to put down his tyranny, nor merely from zeal against Romanism, but because he wished to see England drawn into the great European alliance against France, which it was his life's work to build up. He had spent all the days of his youth in opposing the ambition of the bigoted Lewis XIV., and all his thoughts were directed towards the construction of a league of states strong enough to keep the French from the Rhine. For Lewis was set on annexing the Spanish Netherlands, the Palatinate, and the duchy of Lorraine, so as to bring his frontier up to the great river. He had already made several steps towards securing his end, by seizing Alsace, the Franche Comté, and part of Flanders. If William had not hindered him, he would probably have accomplished his whole desire. But the Prince of Orange had induced the old enemies Spain and Holland to combine, and had enlisted the Emperor Leopold of Austria in his league. With the aid of England he thought that Lewis could be crushed beyond a doubt.
War with France declared.
On the 13th of May, 1689, William had his wish, for England declared war on Lewis. It was already made inevitable by the conduct of the French monarch, who had not only received the fugitive James, but had lent him men and money to aid him in recovering his lost realms.
But William was not to be able to divert the strength of England into the continental war quite so soon as he had expected. He was forced to fight for his new crown for nearly two years, before he was able to turn off again to lead the armies of the coalition against Lewis.
English opposition.—The Non-jurors.
The proclamation of William and Mary proved the beginning of new troubles both in England, Scotland, and Ireland. In England things were not serious: a certain portion of the Tory party declined to accept William as king, though they had been ready to take him as regent. For refusing to take the oath of allegiance to him, Archbishop Sancroft—the hero of the trial of the seven bishops—four other prelates, and four hundred clergy had been removed from their preferments. Some Tory laymen of scrupulous conscience gave up their offices. But these "Non-jurors," as they were called, made no open resistance, though many of them began to correspond secretly with the exiled king.
Scotland.—Career of Claverhouse.
In Scotland, the crisis was far more serious. Both Charles II. and James II. had governed that realm with an iron hand. They had placed the rule of the land in the hands of the Scottish Episcopalians, who formed a very small minority of the nation. The Covenanters had been sternly repressed, and their ineffective rising, ending in the fight of Bothwell Brig, had been put down with the most rigorous harshness. [46] When James was overturned, the persecuted Presbyterians rose in high wrath, and swept all his friends out of office. They followed the example of the English in offering the crown to William and Mary, and began to revenge their late oppression by very harsh treatment of their former rulers, the Scottish Episcopalians. But James II. had a following in Scotland; though not a very large one, it had an exceedingly able man at its head—John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, who had commanded the royal forces in the realm for the last ten years. Dundee succeeded in rousing a number of the Highland chiefs to take arms for James II., not so much because they loved the king as because they hated the great clan of the Campbells, now, as always, the mainstay of the Covenanting interest north of Clyde and Forth. The new government collected an army under General Mackay, and sent it against Dundee. But the Jacobite leader retired before it till Mackay's men had pushed up the long and narrow pass of Killiecrankie. When the Lowland troops were just emerging from the northern end of the pass, Dundee fell on from an ambush. The wild rush of his Highlanders swept away the leading battalions, [47] and Mackay's entire force fled in disgraceful rout back to Dunkeld. The Jacobite general, however, fell in the moment of victory, and when his strong and able hand was removed, the rebel clans dropped asunder, and ceased to endanger the stability of William's throne (June 17, 1689). The insurrection, however, continued to linger on in the remoter recesses of the Highlands for two years more.
Ireland.—Tyrconnel and the Catholic army.
In Ireland the struggle was far longer and more bitter than in Scotland. In that country the old quarrel between the natives and the English settlers broke out under the new form of loyalty to James or William. In the time of Charles II., the old Irish or Anglo-Irish proprietors had been restored to about one-third of the lands from which they had been evicted by the Cromwellian settlement of 1652. They hoped, now that they had a king of their own faith, to recover the remaining two-thirds from the English planters. From the moment of his accession, James had done his best for the Irish Romanists. He had decreed the revocation of Cromwell's settlement, he had filled all places of trust and emolument with natives, and had raised an Irish army in which no Protestant was admitted to serve either as soldier or officer. His Lord-Deputy was Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel, a violent and unscrupulous man, who was prepared to go even further than his master in the direction of suppressing Protestantism.
When the news of the landing of William of Orange at Torbay reached Ireland, the Lord-Deputy kept faith with James, and began arming the whole nation in his cause, till he is said to have had nearly 100,000 undisciplined levies under his orders. At the same time he summoned all Protestants in Ireland to give up their arms. The English settlers saw that the predominance of Tyrconnel and his hordes meant danger to themselves, and promptly fled by sea, or took refuge in the few towns where the Protestants had a majority, leaving their houses and property to be plundered by the Lord-Deputy's "rapparees." In Ulster, where they mustered most strongly, they shut themselves up in the towns of Derry and Enniskillen, proclaimed William and Mary as king and queen, and sent to implore instant aid from England.
James II. in Dublin.
In March, 1689, James II. landed in Ireland, convoyed by a French fleet, and bringing a body of French officers, 10,000 stand of arms, and a treasure of £112,000 pounds, all given him by Lewis XIV. He found himself master of the whole country except Derry and Enniskillen, and promptly ordered the siege of these places to begin. He summoned a Parliament to meet in Dublin, and there undid, so far as words and acts could do, all the doings of the English in Ireland for the last two centuries. The Irish peers and commons voted the resumption by the old native houses of all the lands confiscated by Elizabeth, James I., and Cromwell. They made Romanism the established religion of the land, and declared Ireland completely independent of the English Parliament. All this was natural and excusable enough; but a bloodthirsty act of attainder followed, condemning to death as traitors no less than 2500 Protestant peers, gentry, and clergy, who had either declared for William, or at least refused to join James.
Siege of Derry and Enniskillen.
This made the civil war an affair of life and death, since the Protestants of Derry and Enniskillen dared not surrender when they knew they would be treated as convicted traitors. Hence it came that both places held out with desperate resolution, though help was long in coming from England. Derry held out unsuccoured for 105 days (April to August, 1689) till it was relieved by a small fleet, which burst the boom that the Irish had thrown across Loch Foyle, and brought food to the starving garrison. The Protestants of Enniskillen saved themselves by an even more desperate exhibition of courage. Sallying out of their town, they beat the force that blockaded them at the battle of Newtown Butler (August 2, 1689), and drove them completely away.
In spite of these successes, the Ulstermen must have been crushed if the long-expected English army had not begun to cross the channel. But in October a force at last appeared in Down, under the Duke of Schomberg, a veteran French officer in the service of William. Schomberg had been expelled from the French army for refusing to become a Romanist, and devoted the last years of his life to a crusade against the bigoted Lewis XIV., who had driven him from home and office for religion's sake.
William lands in Ireland.
Through the winter of 1689, the Irish and English faced each other in Ulster without coming to a decisive engagement. But in the spring of 1690, William arrived in person with large reinforcements, and began to advance on Dublin with an army of 35,000 men.
James had done but little to strengthen his position during the eighteen months that Ireland had been in his hands. His army was still half trained and unpaid. He had caused untold distress to all classes by issuing a forced currency of copper crowns and shillings, which his creditors were compelled to accept or incur the charge of treason. His councillors, English and Irish, were quarrelling fiercely. His troops were unwisely dispersed, so that on the news of William's approach he found himself unable to concentrate them in time.
The Battle of the Boyne.
He gathered, however, some 30,000 men, of whom 6000 were French, and took up a strong position behind the river Boyne, to cover Dublin. In this position he was attacked by William, whose troops forded the river and charged up the opposite slope. The Irish cavalry fought well enough, but many regiments of their undisciplined infantry broke and fled after a few discharges. The wreck of the Jacobite army was only saved by the French auxiliaries, who stubbornly defended the pass of Duleek till the fugitives had got away (July 1, 1690).
Ireland subdued.—"The Pacification of Limerick."
James seemed panic-stricken by the result of the battle of the Boyne. Abandoning Dublin without firing a shot, he fled in craven haste and took ship for France. His deserted followers, however, made a long and gallant resistance in the West. William returned to England, leaving his army under the Dutch general Ginckel to subdue Connaught and Munster (September, 1690). The task proved harder than had been expected; Ginckel was unable to move till the next spring for want of food and transport. He forced the line of the Shannon by storming Athlone in June, 1691, but did not break the back of the Irish resistance till he had won the well-fought battle of Aughrim, scattered the army of Connaught, and slain its commander, the French marshal St. Ruth. Even after this decisive fight, Limerick held out for nearly three months. It surrendered on October 3, 1691, on terms which permitted the Irish army to take ship for France, and 11,000 men passed over-seas to serve Lewis XIV. At the same time, the representatives of William signed the "Pacification of Limerick," which granted an amnesty to all Irish who did not emigrate, and stipulated that they should be left unmolested in possession of the very limited civil and religious rights that they had enjoyed under Charles II.
The Protestant ascendency.
These terms were broken in a most faithless manner by the Irish Parliament, now entirely in the hands of the victorious Protestant minority, only a few years after they had been signed (1697). By a new penal code that body prohibited Romanists from practising as lawyers, physicians, or schoolmasters, took away from them the right of sitting in Parliament, made marriages of Protestants and Romanists illegal, banished all monks and all clergy except registered parish priests from the realm, and prohibited any Romanist from possessing arms. But their worst device was a cruel scheme for promoting conversions, by a law which gave any son of a Romanist who abjured his religion, the right to succeed to all his father's property, to the exclusion of his unconverted brothers and sisters. Under this harsh code the Irish groaned for a whole century, but they had been so crushed by William's blows that they never rose in rebellion again till 1798.
The whole of Ireland was subdued ere the spring of 1692 began. A month later occurred the cruel deed which marked the final end of the revolt in the Scottish Highlands. The wrecks of Dundee's followers had been scattered at the skirmish of Cromdale in 1690. But a few chiefs still refused their submission. William proclaimed that there should be an amnesty for all who surrendered before January 1, 1692. This opportunity was taken by all the Highlanders, save Macdonald of Glencoe, a petty chief of 200 families in Argyleshire. He made his submission a few days later than the appointed time. Lord Stair, the Secretary of State for Scotland, prevailed upon William to give him leave to make an example of Macdonald and his tribe. A regiment was sent to Glencoe, and courteously received by the chief, who thought his tardy submission had brought him impunity. But, obeying their orders, the soldiery fell at midnight upon their unsuspecting hosts, shot Macdonald and all the men they could catch, and drove the survivors out of their valley. This cold-blooded outrage was sanctioned by William, but only because he had been carefully kept in ignorance of the fact that Macdonald had submitted a few days after the appointed date.
The French war.—Tory disaffection.
While the Irish war had been in progress, important events had been taking place nearer home. The war on the continent had proved indecisive, though if either party had a slight advantage, it was the French. Even at sea the fleets of Lewis at first gained some successes, mainly owing to the culpable slackness of the English admiral, Lord Torrington. His negligence—treachery would perhaps be the more appropriate word—was only a symptom of a very widespread spirit of disloyalty among the Tory party. Many persons had not got out of the Revolution the private advantages for which they had hoped. William III. had endeavoured to hold an equal balance between the English parties, but could not wholly conceal his suspicions of the Tories and his private preference for the Whigs. In consequence, some of those who had been foremost in expelling James II., now began to intrigue with him, and expressed a more or less real sympathy with his plans for recovering his crown. Among these traitors were the best sailor and the best soldier that England owned, Admiral Russell, who succeeded Torrington in command of the Channel fleet, and John Churchill—the Marlborough of later days—who had been appointed commander of the English troops whom William had taken to the continent. It is some palliation to their guilt that they neither of them actually did desert William in the moment of trial, but both were undoubtedly guilty of habitual correspondence with the enemy. Churchill even descended so far into the depths of baseness as to send secret intelligence of William's plans to the French—though, with characteristic duplicity, he sent them too late to be of any use.
The battle of La Hogue.
How much these secret protestations of loyalty to James meant, was shown in 1692 by the event of the battle of La Hogue. The French king had collected an army in Normandy to invade England, and ordered up his ships from Brest to convoy it, relying on the promise of Russell that he would bring over the Channel fleet. But when the squadron of De Tourville came in sight, the admiral promptly attacked it. Either the spirit of fighting had overcome him, or compunction for his treachery smote him at the last moment. At any rate, he fell briskly upon the French—whose squadron was much inferior in numbers—destroyed twelve ships, and completely scattered the rest. This victory gained Russell a very undeserved peerage, and saved England from all danger of a French invasion or a Jacobite rising (May 19, 1692).
The war in the Netherlands, 1692-1695.
Meanwhile the armies of Lewis XIV. and William were contending obstinately in the Netherlands, without any marked success on either side. William was opposed by a general as able as himself in Marshal Luxembourg, and met his usual ill luck in the field. He was defeated at two great pitched battles, Steenkerke (August, 1692), and Landen (July, 1693), yet after each engagement he made such a formidable front, that the enemy gained nothing by his victory, and hardly won a foot of ground in the Spanish Netherlands. At each of these fights the English troops were in the thick of the fray, and justified by their conduct the anxiety that William had always shown to have England on his side. Yet Churchill, their best general, was not leading them; he had been deservedly disgraced in 1692, when his intrigues with James II. were discovered. When at last the fortune of war began to turn in favour of the allies (mainly owing to the death of William's great opponent, Marshal Luxembourg), it was again the English troops who got the chief credit in the one great success of the king's military life—the storm of Namur. When that great fortress, whose lofty citadel, overhanging the Meuse, was the strongest place in Belgium, was taken by assault in the very face of a French army of 80,000 men, it was the English infantry, under Lord Cutts, who forced their way into the breaches and compelled Marshal Boufflers to surrender (August, 1695).
The treaty of Ryswick.
After the fall of Namur the war languished: the King of France saw his resources wasting away, and, in spite of all his efforts, had utterly failed to conquer the Netherlands, though his armies had been somewhat more successful in Italy and Spain. He finally consented to treat for peace, which, after long negotiations, was at last secured by the treaty of Ryswick (1697). This was the first occasion on which the ambitious and grasping king had to own defeat. Making terms with England, Holland, Spain, and Austria, he surrendered all that he had gained since 1678, with the single exception of the town of Strasburg. He was also compelled to recognize William as the lawful King of England, though he refused to expel James II. and his family from their asylum at St. Germains, where they had been dwelling since 1691.
English factions.
English domestic politics during the time of the struggle with Lewis XIV. had presented a shameful spectacle. It is difficult to say whether the Whigs or the Tories disgraced themselves the more, by their factious violence and treacherous intrigues. In all her history Britain has never known such a sordid gang of self-seeking, greedy, and demoralized statesmen, as the generation who had been reared in the evil times of Charles II. Danby, the corrupt old Tory minister of 1674; Sunderland, the renegade tool of James II.; the traitors Russell and Churchill, were typical men of the day. The party warfare of Whig and Tory was prosecuted by disgraceful personalities—impeachments for corruption, embezzlement, or treacherous correspondence with France; and, to the shame of England, the accusations were generally true. Even the unamiable William III. appears a comparatively dignified and sympathetic figure among these squalid intriguers. We cannot wonder that he disliked and distrusted Englishmen, when those with whom he had most to do were such a crew of sharpers and hypocrites. For eight years he contrived to combine Tories and Whigs in his ministry, an extraordinary testimony to his powers of management, and to his subjects' blind love of office. His own troubles were constant and galling; not only was he abused by both political parties for his moderation, but he was openly accused of favouritism and even of corruption. His very life was not safe: a conspiracy formed by some extreme Tories and Jacobites, headed by a member of Parliament named Sir John Fenwick, came to light in 1696, which was found to involve a plot to shoot the king as he was on his way to hunt in Richmond Park. When the conspirators were arrested and examined, evidence came to hand which proved that half the statesmen in England had been corresponding with James II., though it is true that no one of importance had been implicated in the actual assassination plot. It is no wonder that William grew yet more sour and cold as the years passed over his head. He had lost his bright and able wife, Queen Mary, on December 28, 1694, and after her death he felt himself more than ever a stranger in England. If only the political exigencies of his situation would have allowed it, he would have preferred to return to Holland for good.
Reform of the coinage—The Bank of England founded.
Only two successful political experiments emerged from the faction-ridden times of William III. The first was the reform of the coinage in 1695, when the clipped and worn money of the Tudors and Stuarts was honestly redeemed by the government for new and good pieces—in earlier days the state had always cheated the public on the occasion of a recoinage. The other was the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694. This excellent device was intended to give the nation a solid and solvent bank, provided with a government guarantee, that should be above the dangers of fraud and ill luck which render private banks dangerous to the investor. At the same time, in return for the grant of the government guarantee, the new Bank of England contracted to lend the state money, and took over the management of the National Debt, then a small matter of a very few millions.
The Spanish Succession.
The peace which followed the treaty of Ryswick lasted for four uneasy years only. The old war had hardly ceased before a new trouble began to appear on the horizon. This was the vexed question of the Spanish Succession. The reigning king of Spain, Charles II. was a hypochondriacal invalid. His next of kin was his eldest sister, Maria Theresa, who had wedded Lewis XIV.; her son, the Dauphin, would have been the natural heir to Spain, if his mother had not executed on her marriage a deed of renunciation of her rights of succession. After the Dauphin, the nearest relative of Charles II. was his younger sister Margaret, the wife of the Emperor Leopold I.; but the rights of this princess and her daughter, Maria Antonia, were also barred by a renunciation, made when she married the Emperor. Next in the family came Leopold himself, as the son of an aunt of Charles II., who had made no such engagement at her espousals. The question turned on the validity of the renunciations made by the two infantas. Lewis XIV. said that his wife's agreement was worthless, because no one can sign away the rights of their heirs. Yet the document had been solemnly sanctioned by the Cortes, the Spanish Parliament. The Emperor stood out for the validity of the document, and urged, not the claims of his Bavarian daughter, who had also been the victim of her mother's renunciation, but his own right as grandson of Philip III.
| Philip III., 1598-1621. | |||||||||||||
| Philip IV., 1621-1665. | Maria = Ferdinand III., Emperor | ||||||||||||
| Charles II., 1665-1700. | Maria Theresa = Lewis XIV. of France. | Margaret = Leopold, Emperor = Eleanor of Neuburg. | |||||||||||
| Lewis the Dauphin. | Maximilian of Bavaria = Maria Antonia. | ||||||||||||
| Lewis, Duke of Burgundy. | Philip, Duke of Anjou. | Joseph of Bavaria, died 1699. | Joseph I, Emperor. | Charles, Archduke. | |||||||||
The real difficulty of the situation lay in the fact that all Europe viewed with dismay the union of Spain and France, and was very little better pleased at the idea of the union of Spain and the Empire. The Spanish dominions were still so broad and so wealthy, that they would throw out the balance of power in Europe, if they were united to any other large state. For Charles II. reigned not only over Spain, but in Belgium, in Milan, Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia, and over the rich Spanish colonies in Mexico, the West Indies, South America, and the Malay Archipelago.
The first Partition Treaty.
While Charles II. was slowly sinking into his grave, all his heirs were busily engaged in discussing the changes that must follow his decease. Both Lewis and the Emperor saw that it would be unwise to claim Spain for themselves, therefore the French king named his youngest grandson, Philip, Duke of Anjou, as his representative, while the Austrian passed on his personal claims to his younger son, the Archduke Charles. They then arrived at an agreement that neither Philip nor Charles should have Spain itself, but that each should have compensation for resigning his full claim—the archduke was to take Milan, Duke Philip Naples and Sicily. Meanwhile Spain, Belgium, and the Indies were to go to the young Prince of Bavaria, the one claimant who was unobjectionable to all Europe; a secret treaty to this effect was signed, and carefully kept from the knowledge of the Spaniards, to whom it would have been very offensive, as taking away their obvious right to choose their own king. England and Holland, however, were both made consenting parties to the treaty, of which William III. fully approved.
The second Partition Treaty.
But in 1699 the young Prince of Bavaria died, leaving no brother or sister to succeed to his claim. The whole matter of the succession was again thrown into confusion. But after long negotiation, Lewis XIV. agreed to permit the Archduke Charles to become King of Spain, if he were himself bought off with Naples, Sicily, and Milan.
Last will and death of Charles II.
But this compromise was never to come into operation. The news of it got abroad and reached Spain. Both Charles II. and his people were much enraged at seeing their empire parcelled out by foreigners without their own consent. Rousing himself on his very death-bed, the king solemnly declared Philip of Anjou his heir in the whole of the Spanish possessions, and expired immediately after (1700).
Philip of Anjou King of Spain.
The temptation to accept the legacy of King Charles, and to claim Spain and the Indies for his grandson, was too much for Lewis XIV. In spite of the elaborate engagements with the Emperor Leopold to which he had plighted his faith, he resolved to snatch at the prize. If Spain, Belgium, and half Italy fell into his grandson's hands, he thought that the house of Bourbon must give the law to the whole of Europe. Accordingly, the Duke of Anjou was allowed to accept the Spanish throne when the Cortes offered it to him, and was proclaimed king as Philip V.
William's war policy opposed by the Tories.
This was bound to lead to war. Austria could not brook the breach of faith, Holland and the minor German states could not tolerate the idea of seeing the Spanish Netherlands falling into the hands of a French prince. But if unaided by England, it was doubtful if the powers of Central Europe could face the united force of France and Spain. It was now all-important to know whether England would join them. William III. was eager to renew his old crusade against French aggression, but the English Parliament and people were far less certain of their purpose. The Tories, who were now dominant in Parliament, had of late been carping at every act of the king; they had cut down his revenue, forced him to reduce the standing army to 7000 men, and confiscated many estates in Ireland, which had been granted to his friends, Dutch and English. While William was dreaming of nothing but war, the Tory majority in the Lower House were solely intent on the impeachment of the Whig ministers who had been in office in 1696-1700, and on regulating the succession to the crown after William's death.
The Act of Settlement.
The important act which settled this question had become necessary on the death of William's nephew, the little Duke of Gloucester, the only surviving son of the Princess Anne. He was the sole near relative of the king who was not a Romanist, and, lest the crown should lapse back to James II. and his heirs, some new measures had to be taken. Accordingly the Parliament, Tory though it was, voted that the next Protestant heir should succeed on the death of William and his sister-in-law, the Princess Anne. This heir was a granddaughter of James I., the aged Electress Sophia of Hanover, the child of Frederic of the Palatinate and his wife Elizabeth of England, whose fortunes had moved the world so deeply some eighty years back. Her brother's children were all Romanists, and she was therefore preferred to them in the Act of Settlement. The crown was ensured to her and her heirs, to the prejudice of some dozen persons who stood before her in the line of succession. [48]
The act also laid down two important constitutional doctrines. In future the judges were to hold office quamdiu se bene gesserint, not at the king's pleasure, and only to be removable for misconduct upon an address of both Houses of Parliament. No pardon granted by the sovereign was to stand in the way of an impeachment by the Commons; ministers, therefore, would not be able to plead that they were irresponsible because the king had pardoned them.
Lewis acknowledges the Old Pretender.
It is very doubtful if the English Parliament would have consented to join in an alliance against France, if Lewis XIV. had not at this moment indulged in an ill-timed act of bravado which seemed especially designed to cast contempt on the "Act of Settlement." In 1701, the exiled James II. died at St. Germains. Lewis at once saluted his heir, the prince born in 1688, as rightful King of England, and hailed him by the title of James III.
England declares for war with France.
The whole English nation was deeply excited and angered at this breach of the agreement in the treaty of Ryswick, by which Lewis had recognized William III. as legitimate ruler of Britain. Thus it became easy for the king to urge them into the breach with France and alliance with the Emperor, which it was his aim to bring about. The Whigs got a majority in the new Parliament, which met in the winter of 1701-2, and showed themselves enthusiastically ready for a war with France.
Death of William.
Just as his schemes were on the point of success, King William was suddenly removed from the scene. He broke his collar-bone while out hunting at Hampton Court, his enfeebled constitution could not stand the shock, and he expired in a few days (March 8, 1702). But he could die in peace. His work had not been wasted; England was committed to the new war, and the ambition of Lewis XIV. was to be effectually bridled by the great alliance which William left behind him. The lonely and morose invalid regretted but little his own release from an existence of pain and toil, when he saw that the great aim of his life had been achieved.