It may help the reader to keep in memory the sequence of these English sovereigns if I tell him somewhat of their relationship. James II.—previously and longer known as that Duke of York, in honor of whom our metropolitan city (in those days conquered from the Dutch) was called New York—we know as only brother to Charles II., who died without legitimate children. This James was as bigoted and obstinate as Charles was profligate and suave. We think of him as having lost his throne in that revolution of 1688, by reason of his popish tendencies; but it is doubtful if Protestantism would have saved him, or made a better man of him. He had married—and it was a marriage he tried hard to abjure and escape from—a daughter of that Earl of Clarendon whose History of the Rebellion I named to you. There were two daughters by this marriage, Mary and Anne; both of them, through the influence of their Clarendon grandfather, brought up as Protestants. The elder of these, Mary, was a fine woman, tall, dignified, graceful, cultivated—as times went—whose greatest foible was a love for cards, at which she played for heavy stakes, and—often. Her sister Anne shared the same foible, and gave it cherishment all her life; but was not reckoned the equal of her elder sister; had none of her grace; was short, dumpy, overfond of good dinners, and with such limited culture as made her notelets (even when she came to be Queen) full of blunders that would put a school-mistress of our day into spasms. We shall meet her, and more pleasantly, again.
But Mary—heir next after James to the throne—had married William of Orange, who was a fighting Dutch general; keen, cool, selfish, brave, calculating, with an excellent head for business; cruel at times, unscrupulous, too, but a good Protestant. He was great-grandson to that famous William the Silent, whose story everyone has read, or should read, in the pages of Motley.
But how came he, a Dutchman, and speaking English brokenly, to share the British throne with Mary? There were two very excellent reasons: First, he was own cousin to Mary, his mother having been a daughter of Charles I.; and next, he had kingly notions of husbandship, and refused to go to England on any throne-seeking errand, which might involve hard fighting, without sharing to the full the sovereignty of his wife Mary.
So he did go as conqueror and king; there being most easy march to London; the political scene changing like the turn of a kaleidoscope; but there came fighting in Ireland, as at Londonderry and the battle of the Boyne; and a brooding unrest in Scotland, of which, whenever you come to read or study, you should mate your reading with that charming story of Old Mortality—one of the best of Scott’s. Its scene reaches over from the days of Charles II. to the early years of the Dutch King William, and sets before one more vividly than any history all those elements of unrest with which the new sovereign had to contend on his northern borders—the crazy fanaticism of fierce Cameronians—the sturdy, cantankerous zeal of Presbyterians—the workings of the old, hot, obstinate leaven of Prelacy, and the romantic, lingering loyalty to a Stuart king.
But William ended by having all his kingdom well in hand, and all his household too. There was strong affection between William and Mary; he relishing her discretion, her reserves, and her culture; and she loving enough to forget the harsh gauntleted hand which he put upon those who were nearest and dearest to him. He was more military than diplomatic, and I think believed in no Scripture more devoutly than in that which sets forth the mandate, “Wives, obey your husbands.”
The King was not a strong man physically, though a capital soldier; he was short, awkward, halting in movement, appearing best in the saddle and with battle flaming in his front; he had asthma, too, fearfully; was irritable—full of coughs and colds—building a new palace upon the flank of Hampton Court, to get outside of London smoke and fogs; setting out trees there, and digging ponds in Dutch style, which you may see now; building Kensington, too, which was then out of town, and planting and digging there—of which you may see results over the mouldy brick wall that still hems in that old abode of royalty. He carried his asthma, and dyspepsia, and smoking Dutch dragoons to both places. People thought surely that the Queen, so well made and blessed with wonderful appetite, would outlive him, and so give to the history of England a Mary II.; but she did not. An attack of small-pox, not combated in those days by vaccination, or even inoculation, carried her off on a short illness.
He grieved, as people thought so stern a master could not grieve; but rallied and built to the Queen’s memory that most magnificent of monuments, Greenwich Hospital, which shows its domes and its royal façade stretching along the river bank, to the myriad of strangers who every year sail up or down the Thames.
He made friends, too, with Princess Anne, the sister of the dead Queen, and now heir to the throne. This Princess Anne (afterward Queen Anne) was married to a prince of Denmark, only notable for doing nothing excellently well; and was mother of a young lad, called Duke of Gloucester, whom all England looked upon as their future king. And this little Duke, after Queen Mary’s death, came to be presented at court in a blue velvet costume, blazing all over with diamonds, of which one may get a good notion from Sir Godfrey Kneller’s painting of him, now in Hampton Court. But the velvet and the diamonds and best of care could not save the weakly, blue-eyed, fair-cheeked, precocious lad; his precocity was a fatal one, due to a big hydrocephalic head that bent him down and carried him to the grave while William was yet King.
The Princess mother was in despair; was herself feeble, too; small, heavy, dropsical, from all which she rallied, however, and at the death of William, which occurred by a fall from his horse in 1702, came to be that Queen Anne, who through no special virtues of her own, gave a name to a great epoch in English history, and in these latter days has given a name to very much architecture and furniture and crockery, which have as little to do with her as they have with our King Benjamin of Washington.