GREAT EVENTS.
The great events which occurred in August, 1588, and November, 1688, are worthy of our remembrance and grateful acknowledgment before God, therefore we bring before our young readers, in a special way, the subjects of the Spanish Armada and the accession of William of Orange, which are of the greatest importance to all true Englishmen.
The following extracts, taken from an address, by Lord Robert Montagu, at a commemoration meeting at Leicester, will give our young readers an interesting and truthful account of the great historical facts referred to, in a very concise form.
He said there had been many commemoration meetings throughout the country, and why did they hold them? What were those meetings? Well, if he were asked that question, he should say that that meeting was a protest, and it was a commemoration. It was a protest against a conspiracy which had extended throughout the country, and had lasted a great number of years—a conspiracy to introduce one Romanizing practice after another into the worship of the Church of England, and endeavouring to assimilate, by all means possible, the Church of England to the Church of Rome. It was a protest against an attempt to reduce this country again, and bring it under the domination of Rome. It was a protest against the attempts that all Governments in recent years had had in hand, and made—no matter whether Liberal, Whig, or Conservative—to establish diplomatic relations with Rome. It was, lastly, a protest against an attempt, now a few centuries old, to ruin the backbone of Protestantism in Ireland—he meant the Protestant landlords, who were the chief friends of the union between England and Ireland. On all those points they protested.
But then that meeting was also a commemoration. Commemorations, it was true, might be good, or they might be bad. No one would ever think of merely commemorating bloodshed and slaughter, but they often commemorated the deeds of daring and prowess on the part of their ancestors, and they did so in the hope that others would follow their example. He knew not whether that kind of thing was good, because such commemorations tended to increase and foster national pride; but there was one kind of commemoration which was absolutely and naturally good—he meant the commemoration of the signal mercies which God had vouchsafed to the land. In doing so, they were merely taking the advice of King David, who, speaking of his own people, said, "They remembered not the mercy of the Lord, and so they provoked Him at the Red Sea." And so also the Apostle said, "We have received mercies, and therefore we faint not." Therefore, what he (the speaker) proposed to do that evening was to ask them to consider the mercies God had shown to this country—great and signal mercies—in the year 1588, in the year 1688, and in the year 1788; and, in doing so, he hoped he should be able to bring this thought into their minds—that, having received mercies, they should "faint not."
Now, first, with regard to 1588, the commemoration of the Spanish Armada—the invincible Armada, as it used to be called. They would remember, doubtless, from reading history, that King Philip of Spain was one of the most powerful monarchs that ever existed. The historian, Macaulay, had told them that on his empire the sun never set. King Philip counted upwards of one hundred millions of subjects, and he was by far the wealthiest sovereign that had existed since the days of Darius, and he was also a cruel and bloodthirsty sovereign. They knew how many thousands he killed in the Netherlands; how many poor Protestants he had slaughtered there. He had burnt at the stake every one he could in his dominions who dared to study the Bible.
Well, he it was whom the Pope commissioned to make a crusade against this country, to conquer it, and reduce it, so that it might again come under the domination of Rome. He was like Pharaoh of old; he had let the children of Israel go, and he repented himself of having done so, and sent an army to bring them back to the slavery of Egypt; and so the Pope, not having an army of his own, told Philip, who had the most powerful army and navy in the world, to pursue those English who had escaped from the tyranny of Rome and become Protestants, and to bring them back again under the domination of the Pope; and the Pope, in order to encourage the monarch, promised him certain indulgences and two hundred thousand golden crowns as payment at the beginning of the expedition, and the payment of another two hundred thousand golden crowns as soon as he set foot in England. And the Pope also, in order to make the task easier, set the Jesuits in this country to stir up disaffection in England and Scotland, and with the same object sent a special messenger to Ireland in order to cause a rebellion there, and so call off the forces of England.
Philip at once sent to the Duke of Parma, his governor in Belgium, instructions to prepare an army and fleet to co-operate with the Spanish force as soon as the Armada should arrive in the English Channel. The Armada consisted of 136 galleons, and forty smaller vessels, manned by twenty thousand marines; and there was also something else sent. What was that something else? The Chief Inquisitor, and 150 other inquisitors—Dominican monks—to act together, and to use every possible engine of torture, and in that way to convert the people of England to Rome. Besides these, Philip sent the very pick of his army, thirty-one thousand men and four thousand officers, over-land to Dunkerque to assist them in England as soon as he arrived. Here was the invincible Armada, and it was thought that such an Armada could not be withstood by that little puny England, for England was then but a small State, and had no colonies. The whole population of England then was not much larger than the population of London at the present time. Now, as for the Royal Navy, it consisted of twenty-eight ships; and how were they to cope with the 176 ships which composed the Spanish Armada? Why, it was impossible, unless the hand of God should come down to protect the Protestantism of England.
Well, on the 30th of July, the Armada appeared off Plymouth, and Drake and Frobisher, and Seymour and Hawkins, and Lord Howard, High Admiral of England—who was not a Catholic, whatever might be said to the contrary, but a Protestant—determined to oppose the Armada.
It was on Sunday, the 7th of August, that the Armada anchored in the roadstead of Dunkerque, and there waited for Parma's fleet. In the night, a light southerly wind sprung up, and eight ships were selected from the crowd of volunteer vessels that followed the fleet; their masts were smeared with pitch, and their hulls filled with powder and all kinds of explosive and combustible materials. These ships were set fire to, and sent down on to the Armada. What the Spaniards ought to have done, and what could have been very easily done, would have been to cut their cables and allowed the fire-ships to pass them; but the Spaniards seemed to have lost their presence of mind.
However, at length they cut their cables and ran into the North Sea; but the English followed them, and there was a tremendous battle. The Spanish ships were so full of soldiers and sailors that every English shot told ten-fold. Five thousand of the Spanish were killed and not one hundred English wounded. A hasty council of officers was held on the Duke Medina's ship as to whether they should return to their anchorage off Dunkerque, or go back to Spain by way of the Orkneys, and they determined, like craven cowards, to run round by the north of Scotland and Ireland, and so on to the coast of Spain, because they dared not face the English in the Straits of Dover. Admiral Seymour watched them. They could not all pursue the Armada. A small squadron only went, and when they came to the Firth of Forth, Seymour ran short of ammunition. Now what he wanted to show them was, that it was not Seymour that was protecting England, but the Almighty Himself. Seymour had no sooner put into harbour than a hurricane rose up, and subsequently the shores of Ireland were strewn with the bodies of the dead, and the wreckage of the galleons. Only a few reached Spain to give mournful tidings of the disaster, and then it was found that there was not a family in Spain that was not in mourning for the loss of relatives. As the Egyptians were overthrown in the Red Sea, so the Spaniards were overthrown in the North Sea; and it was God that did all. Queen Elizabeth and the English people knew that well, for Queen Elizabeth struck a medal in commemoration of the event, and the motto on the medal was, "God blew upon them with His winds, and scattered them." She took no credit to herself, no credit to her navy, no credit to the English people; for it was God who did it all. From that day the power of Spain had dwindled and waned, until Spain had sunk to a fifth-rate power, and nobody thought of Spain in the councils of Europe. But what was the case with little England, then with hardly any colonies? God said, "Thou hast been faithful in little things; be thou ruler over ten great cities"; and now we had ten great colonies.
And now they would pass away from that subject, and see what happened at the end of the next hundred years—in 1688. He must first remind them what was the state of things in 1687. There was then a Roman Catholic king upon the throne of England. He was not only a Roman Catholic, but was an avowed and sworn Jesuit—James II. There was then, also, a conspiracy all over England—favoured by some of the bishops and many of the clergy—to introduce the ritual of Rome into the English Church. There was then, as there is now, attempts to open up diplomatic relations between the throne and the Vatican. There was then an attempt to ruin the landlords of Ireland, so as to get rid of Protestantism, and separate Ireland from England. To whom did England look at that time for help? There was then no great Protestant Germany; but there was a small State, smaller than England—he meant Holland—but it was not similarly yoked. It was here that the hand of God first began to show itself in the year 1685. On account of the action of Louis XIV., who was the mainstay of Roman Catholicism in Europe, all the best soldiers, generals, and artisans in Paris left France and went to Holland. In England James II. gradually deposed Protestants and substituted Roman Catholics in all positions of importance and influence. The people, becoming alarmed, sought the aid of William, Prince of Orange, who had married a member of the English Royal family; and on the 1st of November, 1688, William sailed on his mission to this country. A strong wind was blowing, which took him gaily on his journey; and that wind not only sent him gaily on his mission, but prevented Lord Dartmouth, who was on the Thames, from getting out. God was determined to show that success had not been arrived at by man; and on November 6th, in a fog, William and his friends arrived at a distance beyond Torbay. When the fog lifted, and the sunshine beamed forth, William gaily sailed into Torbay. Then there were two days of calm weather, during which William landed his army and his stores, and James's forces could not attack, owing to the stillness of the wind. Still James might have struck a blow, as his troops had converged at Salisbury; but God struck fear into his heart. He dressed himself as a fisherman, got into a fishing-boat, and went to France. But our forefathers did not say to William, "Please take the crown and govern." They said, "We have certain rights; will you promise always to observe those rights? If so, you may sit upon the throne." And William promised that he would do so, and, as they knew, they had now the Act of Rights. One of the clauses of that Act was that, if the sovereign became a Roman Catholic, the throne should be instantly vacated. It was settled that no communion should be held with Rome; that was to say, that no diplomacy should exist between England and Rome. That Act was passed, and remained the same to this day. He would read them what Lord Macaulay said of the two events to which he referred:—
"The weather had indeed served the Protestant cause so well that some men (e.g., Bishop Burnet), of more piety than judgment, fully believed the ordinary laws of nature to have been suspended for the preservation of the liberty or religion of England. Exactly a hundred years before, they said, the Armada, invincible by man, had been scattered by the wrath of God. Civil freedom and divine truth were again in jeopardy; and again the obedient elements had fought for the good cause. The wind had blown strong from the east while the Prince wished to sail down the channel, had turned to the south when he wished to enter Torbay, had sunk to a calm during the disembarkation, and, as soon as the disembarkation was completed, had risen to a storm, and had met the pursuers in the face. Nor did men omit to remark that, by an extraordinary coincidence, the Prince had reached our shores on a day on which the Church of England commemorated, by prayers and thanksgiving, the wonderful escape of the Royal House, and of the three Estates, from the blackest plot ever designed by Papists."
Now they had seen God's mercy in 1588 and in 1688, and now let them turn to 1788. It was not so striking, he would allow, as the other events, but it was not less real. And why was it not so striking? In former days men knew very well what the Government did, as there was no secrecy about it. In these days nobody knew what were the views and the intentions of the Government. It was all done underhanded, secretly, and no one knew anything about it. They gathered a little from the newspapers and tried to put it together as well as they could; consequently, that system having been in vogue in 1788, they did not know exactly what took place.
In the year 1787, Charles Edward Catesby was a pretender to the throne, and the Pope was again anxious to bring England under him, and he made secret allies of all the Roman Catholics to put this Charles on the throne of England. A body was to land in Scotland, and £20,000 was to be given to the Highlanders to rise in rebellion. The French had an army ready, and they were to land on the south coast of England and march to London, so as to prevent the troops going forth to put down Edward.
In that same year the Prince Regent did that thing which, according to the Act of William, made him vacate the throne for ever. He married a Roman Catholic in 1787. Notwithstanding the fact that he tried to keep it a secret at first, it afterwards leaked out through the indiscretion of a member of the House of Commons. Pitt said at first that the Prince Regent had denied it stoutly; but there were those present in the Roman Catholic Church at the time he was married; and when it was proved, Pitt then said the Act of Parliament prevented any one of the Royal family being married without the consent of Parliament, and argued that the Prince was not married. He married a German princess, and put her away, and came to the throne as George IV.
Then came 1788, when God struck that Charles with death; and then an alliance was made between Protestant England and Russia to support each other against any Roman Catholic emperor. This was not so striking a display of God's mercy as was shown in the case of the Armada; but in them all they saw the hand of God. They saw great mercy in 1588, in 1688, and in 1788, for the protection of Protestantism; and what cared they whether in 1888 ministers should try to bring them under the domination of Rome? They knew that God was a tower of strength, and that they could rely on Him. Let them think and meditate on His mercies, and then they would not fail.