CHAPTER XI
Well-Meant but Imprudent Policy of King James—England Invites William of Orange to Assume the Throne
ALTHOUGH the final outcome of his policy was disastrous to Ireland, we feel justified in saying that James II meant well by all his subjects. He was a friend of religious equality—an idea hateful to the English and a large portion of the Scottish nation at that period. In Ireland, too, the Protestant minority resented it, because, to their minds, it meant Catholic ascendency and the restoration of stolen estates. But James went about his reforms so awkwardly, and imprudently, that he brought on himself almost immediately the all but unanimous ill-will of his English subjects. He dared to profess his Catholic faith openly—an unforgivable offence in England at that time. He sought to equalize the holding of office by the abolition of the Test Act, aimed against Catholics, so that English, Scotch, and Irish Catholics should have the same rights and privileges in that respect as their Protestant brethren. This, also, was an idea hateful to the English mind of the period. The king undertook to regulate the judiciary, the privy council, the army, the civil list—every public appointment—according to his own notions. This meant recognition of the Catholics and produced an uproar in England. He recalled Ormond from the viceroyalty of Ireland and sent Lord Clarendon to take his place. Finally, Clarendon resigned and Richard Talbot, who had been created Duke of Tyrconnel, was made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. This appointment alarmed the Irish Protestants, who, as usual, feared that the Catholics would get back their lands under a friendly executive, such as Tyrconnel—whose former exertions in regard to the Catholic claims were not forgotten—was well known to be. He was injudicious enough, at the outset, to dismiss many Protestant officers from the Irish military establishment and place Catholics in their positions. Although this was done by proportion, Protestant jealousy was aroused and the seeds of revolt were deeply planted.
In England, popular feeling against the king was at fever heat. His illegitimate Protestant nephew—putative son of Charles II—the Duke of Monmouth, who had been exiled, returned to England and organized a rebellion against him. This ill-starred movement culminated at Sedgemoor, in Somersetshire, in the summer of 1685. A battle was fought there between the unorganized English peasants, under “King Monmouth,” as they called him, and the royal army, under the Earl of Feversham. The rebels fought with commendable courage, but were badly commanded and suffered an overwhelming defeat. Monmouth escaped from the field, but was captured soon afterward, tried, found guilty, and beheaded on Tower Hill, of bloody memory, July 15, 1685. He had appealed in vain to James for mercy, and appealed in a manner so craven and undignified that he aroused the disgust of his stern uncle. But the blood of the vanquished did not cease to flow when Monmouth died. The “Bloody Assizes,” conducted by Jeffreys, the “great crimson toad,” as Dickens describes him, and four assistant judges, spread death and terror throughout the English districts recently in revolt. This period of English history bore a striking resemblance to the 1798 period in Ireland, when other “great crimson toads” hanged the hapless peasantry, and some of higher rank, by the hundred and thousand. All this butchery made James unpopular with a vast majority of the English people, but, as he had no male heir, the nation hesitated to rise against him, especially as Monmouth himself had been the aggressor. But James, while Duke of York, had married a young wife, the Princess Mary, sister of the Duke of Modena, who bore him a son—afterward called by the Hanoverian faction the Pretender—in June, 1688. This altered the whole aspect of affairs and a revolution became imminent immediately. Mary of Modena, although an intelligent and amiable woman, was of a haughty and somewhat punctilious disposition at times. This made her almost as unpopular with the English people as was her husband. Sir Walter Scott relates that, while Duchess of York, she accompanied her husband to Scotland, whither he went at the behest of his brother, King Charles. James got along very well with the Scotch, particularly the Highlanders, who adored him, and whose loyalty to his family remained unshaken until after Culloden. He invited an old Continental veteran, Sir Thomas Dalzell, to dine with him. The duchess had the bad taste to object to the company of a commoner. “Make yourself easy on that head, madam,” remarked Sir Thomas; “I have sat at a table where your father might have stood behind my chair!” He alluded to a dinner given him and others by the Emperor of Austria, who was the suzerain of the Duke of Modena. The latter, if called upon by the emperor, would have had to act in the capacity of an honorary waiter. All students of history are, doubtless, familiar with the romantic chivalry displayed by Edward the Black Prince, when he waited upon his captive, King John of France, whom he had vanquished at Poitiers. Mary of Modena was, we may be sure, not formed by nature to make friends for her husband, as the brave Margaret of Anjou did for the physically and mentally degenerate Plantagenet, Henry VI. Had Mary been a Margaret, William of Orange might never have occupied the throne of “the Three Kingdoms.” The climax of King James’s political imprudences—they can not, in the light of modern ideas of religious equality, be called errors—was reached when he issued his famous declaration against test oaths and penal laws, and decreed that it should be read from the altars of the Protestant, as well as the Catholic, churches throughout England. Six Protestant prelates, headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, made protest by petition and even visited the king in his bedchamber to dissuade him from his purpose. But he persisted, as was usual with him.
On the Sunday following the bishops’ call, out of 10,000 English clergymen only 200 complied with the royal decree. Of course we, Americans, who have equal laws for all creeds and classes, can not consistently condemn King James for advocating what we ourselves practice, but we can afford to lament the fatuity which led him to dare Protestant resentment by seeking to make Protestant pulpits the mediums of his radical policy. It was playing with fire. Had he stopped short at this point, James might have still held his crown, but, with incurable obstinacy, he insisted on prosecuting the recalcitrant bishops before the Court of King’s Bench, and they were finally committed by the Privy Council to the Tower of London. All England was now ablaze with fierce resentment. At the Tower the right reverend prisoners were treated more like royal personages than captives. The officers and soldiers of the army—excepting the Irish regiments raised by Tyrconnel for James, and sent to do garrison duty in England—openly drank to their speedy release. When they came to trial in the King’s Bench, the jury, after being out on the case all night, found the six prelates not guilty on the charge of censuring the king’s government and defying the king’s mandate, and they were immediately released amid popular acclamation.
The “loyal” Protestant majority had succeeded in placing the Catholic minority, their own fellow-countrymen, in a position of political nonentity, simply because they worshiped God according to their belief. Who could, then, have imagined that the England which refused equality in the holding of office to Catholic subjects would, about two hundred years later, have a Catholic for Lord Chief Justice and an Irish Catholic (Lord Russell of Killowen) at that? Five generations have done much toward a change of sentiment in England. But King James, we are told, on hearing the shouts of the people when the acquittal was announced, asked of Lord Feversham, who happened to be with him: “What do they shout for?” And Feversham replied, carelessly: “Oh, nothing—only the acquittal of the bishops!” “And you call that nothing?” cried the king. “So much the worse for them,” meaning the people. These latter were excited by the Protestant lords and gentry, who much feared a Catholic succession, now that the king had an heir-male to the throne. Both of his daughters—Mary, married to William, Prince of Orange, the king’s nephew, and Anne, who became the wife of the Prince of Denmark—were Protestants, their mother having brought them up in that belief. William, half a Stuart and half a Dutchman, brave, resolute, and wise withal, seemed to the English malcontents to be the “heaven-appointed” man to supplant his own uncle and father-in-law. William was nothing loth, and Mary, who was to share the throne with him, made no objection to this most unfilial proceeding. Neither did Anne, who, like the unnatural creature she was, fled from her father’s palace, guided and guarded by the Protestant Bishop of London, as soon as she heard of William’s almost unobstructed march on the capital. That personage had landed at Torbay, in Devonshire, on November 5—the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot of the days of James I—convoyed by an immense fleet, which carried to the shores of England a picked veteran army of 15,000 men. This army was commanded, under William, by the Marshal Duke of Schomberg, Count Solmes, General De Ginkel, and other officers of European renown. The principal plotters who invited William to seize the crown of England were the Earls of Danby, Shrewsbury, Devonshire, the Bishop of London, Lord Lumley, Admiral Russell, and Colonel Sidney. Just a little while before the coming of William, James took the alarm and attempted to make concessions to the Protestants. He also decreed the strengthening of the army, and the enlistment of Irish Catholics and Scotch Highlanders, most of whom had retained the old faith, was encouraged.
At the news of William’s arrival in Exeter, whither he had marched from Torbay, the English aristocracy became wildly excited and hastened to join his standard. The faculty of the University of Oxford sent him word that, if he needed money to carry out his enterprise, the plate of that institution would be melted down to furnish him with a revenue. An agreement of the nobility and gentry was drawn up and signed, and in it they promised to stand by William of Orange and each other, “in defence of the laws and liberties of the three kingdoms and the Protestant religion.” Thus, it will be noticed, Protestant interests was the cry of the majority in England, opposed to James, who, as we have said, aimed at equality of all creeds before the law, while in Ireland, where the old faith “prevailed mightily,” Catholic interests, or civil and religious liberty, became, also, the war-cry of the majority. In England the Catholic minority remained mostly supine during this period and until long afterward. In Scotland the Catholics and many Episcopalians rallied for James under the leadership of the implacable and brilliant Claverhouse, afterward created Viscount Dundee. They took the field for “James VII of Scotland,” as they called the exiled king, at the first tap of the war drum. The Catholic majority in Ireland naturally recognized in the unfortunate monarch a friend who offered them religious and political liberty, and so they resolved to place their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” at his disposal.
The Irish Catholics can not be justly blamed for their devotion to the cause of James, who, whatever his motives, was the first King of England who ever attempted to do them even ordinary justice. Tyrconnel, like Strafford in a preceding reign, although with a very different intention, began the organization of a formidable Irish army, which was designed to be composed of twenty regiments of horse, fifty of foot, and artillery in the usual proportion. There were men for the mere asking, but arms, ammunition, and equipments were sadly lacking. The weakest arm of the military branch of the public service was the artillery, and this continued to be the fact throughout all of the subsequent war. As William drew nearer to London, the bulk of the native English army, following the example of the highest officers—including Colonel John Churchill, afterward the great Duke of Marlborough—went over to him. This determined James to abandon his capital, yet his friends induced him to return for a period. But the still nearer approach of “the Deliverer,” as the English called William of Orange, again induced him to fly from London. He had previously provided for the safety of the queen and the infant heir to the now forfeited crown, who had taken refuge in France. The date of his final departure from Whitehall Palace was December 11. After not a few perilous adventures, he reached the court of his cousin, Louis XIV, at Versailles, on Christmas Day, 1688. He was most honorably and hospitably received, and Louis placed at his disposal the royal palace of St. Germain, in the neighborhood of Paris. When James heard of the desertion of his youngest daughter, Anne, to his enemies, the wretched parent, who has been called “the modern Lear,” exclaimed in the anguish of his soul: “God help me! My very children have deserted me!”