Yet the day of rest had not come. The reign of William III. was to remain constantly troublesome, disputed, stormy. The reasons of this were various and complicated. In the first place stood his birth; he was a Dutchman in heart as in race, a stranger in his tastes as in his manners to England, which never forgot the fact. Both free and Protestant, the two countries were nevertheless separated by wide divergencies. In England the Whigs and Tories divided among them the upper classes; the tendencies toward republicanism existed in the dark among a certain number of dissenters; the Anglican Church, the Presbyterians, the Catholics, were royalists by taste as by principle. In Holland, on the other hand, the mercantile patriciate remained nearly everywhere zealously attached to the republican form; the partisans of the stadtholdership of the house of Orange were counted in the army and among the great property-holders: and part of the provinces of Guelders and Friesland was equally devoted to it.
Brought up in Holland in the midst of parties which he understood and whose springs he had moved for a long time, sympathizing with the very persons there who hereditarily opposed his family and his policy, William III. found himself in England as much a stranger as he was generally considered. Cold and reserved, like a man surrounded by enemies or critics, he only had confidence in the Dutch; he lavished his personal favors on Dutchmen alone; he only opened his heart and unbent his countenance for Dutchmen. This marked preference for his native land and this eagerness to flee from the soil of his new country so soon as the summer could bring him back to Holland, were a constant reproach and source of weakness to the King of England. In Holland alone he breathed at ease; there, alone he freely spread the wings of his grand policy, more European than English, difficult to be imported by a foreign prince into a new kingdom still entirely peopled for him with secret or open enemies.
For a long time England had remained isolated from the combinations of continental politics; lowered in her own eyes and those of Europe, she had submitted, under Charles III. and James II., to the yoke of France, against which William III. proudly stood erect, demanding from England, as from Holland, the last sacrifices to sustain the cause of European independence. It was not without disquiet and a certain insular jealousy that the English saw themselves drawn into all the political complications on the continent; they had given themselves to William of Orange, but they preserved towards him a secret distrust, silently nursed by the persistent distrust of the Church of England. William was a Protestant; but, a Calvinist by conviction, accustomed to the widest toleration in his own country, which had become the refuge of all persons suffering persecution, he found himself in England confronted by the Anglican Church, which was divided in regard to him, and had partially remained faithful to the fugitive monarch he had dethroned; obliged to struggle at once against the anti-Catholic spirit which had carried him to the throne and against the intolerance towards dissenters, which was contrary to all his principles. Dutchman, European statesman, tolerant Calvinist, he met throughout England distrust and impediments which all the success of the revolution of 1688 could not dispel, and which the personal superiority of the new king never wholly succeeded in repressing.
The Church silent and sombre, the army sad and humiliated, parties keenly exasperated—such was the domestic situation of William on the morrow of his triumph, when the uprising of Ireland menaced the peace of the kingdom, and the whole government still remained to be organized. Responsible and concordant ministers did not exist then: William called around him counsellors from different sides—Whigs, Tories, trimmers; Danby, Nottingham, Halifax, Shrewsbury, Herbert, Mordaunt. Disagreements were not slow to display themselves. The Tories had alone exercised power for some years. They were more experienced and skilful in public affairs than the Whigs; the latter were for the most part sincerely devoted to the new government, jealous and suspicious toward their adversaries, who had now become their colleagues. Traps and intrigues, sometimes violent scenes, succeeded one another without intermission, fettering and retarding the march of the government, sapping the popularity of the King, to whom all parties appealed, and who tried in vain to calm them all. An attack of John Hampden on Halifax appeared so violent that somebody cried in the House of Commons: "This is called a speech: it is a libel!"
William was weary of parliamentary struggles and eager to return to the camp life, which he always preferred to politics, when he pronounced, on the 27th of January, 1690, the dissolution of Parliament. The state of his affairs in Ireland imperatively demanded his presence.
Fleeing from England and the dangers which there threatened, as he thought, his liberty and life, King James had found in France, at the court of Louis XIV., the most generous and splendid hospitality. Lodged by the king at the castle of Saint-Germain, and in every respect treated as a sovereign and equal, James II. had asked and obtained from his royal host the aid which he needed not only to exist in France, but to undertake the conquest of rebellious and Protestant England by means of Ireland, which remained Catholic and true. Civil war had already broken out in this little kingdom; the cession by James of all the civil power to the Catholics and indigenous inhabitants disquieted knots of Protestants, scattered as colonists over certain districts. The small town of Kenmore, the cities of Enniskillen and Londonderry, were filled with refugees of their religion and race, driven by the tyranny exercised upon them to that refuge which the Scotch Presbyterians had lately founded in Ulster. Tyrconnel had tried in vain to maintain an appearance of order; the Irish population, whose passions had been long aroused, would not yield to his influence. Ireland was in flames, when James II. landed at Kinsale on the 12th of March, 1689. He had embarked at Brest, accompanied by a small body of French officers under the orders of the Count de Rosen. With him Louis XIV. had sent Count d'Avaux, charged with the diplomatic part of the expedition, and with plans to be tried among the English malcontents. From the start, this clever politician, familiar with complicated continental intrigues, foresaw the trouble that the fallen monarch, whose cause he was to plead, would occasion him. "It will not be an easy thing to keep any secret with the King of England," wrote Count d'Avaux to Louis XIV.; "he has told before the sailors of the St. Michel, what he ought to have reserved for his most confidential friends. Another thing which will give us trouble is his irresolution, for he often changes his mind and does not always settle on the best course. He frequently dwells upon little things, on which he employs his whole time, and passes lightly over most essential matters. Moreover he listens to everybody, and one has to spend as much time in removing the impressions which bad advice has produced on him, as in inspiring him with correct ones." "All the troops Tyrconnel had been able to raise, were occupied with the Protestant rising in Ulster," says King James in his Memoirs; "the Catholics of the country had no arms, while the Protestants had an abundance, and the best horses in the kingdom; there were only eight small field-pieces in condition to accompany the army; no provisions or ammunition in the magazine, little powder or balls, no money in the chest, and all the officers gone to England."
To this gloomy picture of the condition of his forces in Ireland, James might have added the embarrassments about to be caused by an intractable Parliament, and the pretensions, as immoderate as they were absurd, of partisans, who thought they had a right to lay down the law for the sovereign they persisted in serving. The indigenous Irish claimed the entire independence of their country, threatening, if James refused it, to appeal to France, and place themselves thenceforth under her protection. The English exiles who accompanied the king, despising Ireland and the Irish, only aspired to reseat their sovereign on the throne of England.
"My Lord Melford is neither a good Frenchman nor a good Irishman," said Count d'Avaux; "he only thinks of England." Despite a proclamation of toleration by James, there was a general understanding to re-establish the absolute supremacy of Catholicism in Ireland; the act of establishment of Charles II. was repealed; the lands of Catholics, lately confiscated to the benefit of Protestants, returned to their original owners; one law of proscription embraced all the fugitive or refugee Protestants in the northern counties; the endowments of the Anglican Church were taken from it. The fanatics triumphed; the King was anxious and disgusted. He estimated better than his advisers, the strength of Protestantism, even in Ireland; he glanced at the effect of his measures in England. After long hesitation, which still followed him after starting and made him turn back for a moment, James set out to besiege the town of Londonderry in person.
The place was small, badly fortified, and encumbered with refugees, who had brought no provisions there. Its governor, Lundy, proved a traitor to the garrison and citizens. Before flying pusillanimously, he attempted several times to betray them to the enemy. The religious and patriotic zeal of the inhabitants triumphed over all obstacles. An Anglican clergyman, George Walker, and Major Henry Baker, had taken command of the troops in the town by the natural and legitimate ascendancy of their characters. Determined to accept no capitulation, they were braving the repeated attacks of the Irish army, as well as the cruel assaults of famine, when Lord Strabane was instructed to offer the inhabitants the royal pardon. "The people of Londonderry have done nothing that requires a pardon," replied Major Murray; "they recognize no other sovereigns but King William and Queen Mary. Your lordship might not find yourself safe, if you stayed here much longer, or if you repeated the same offers; allow me to accompany you outside our lines."
King James II. returned to Dublin. The town held out a hundred and five days, in spite of the cruelties of the Count de Rosen, who had roused the indignation of James himself, when, on the 30th of July, upon receipt of a formal order from London, Colonel Kirke, lately dispatched from England to the aid of Londonderry, made a last effort to force the barricade constructed by the enemy across the river. "If we don't deliver the brave citizens of Londonderry, the whole world will rise against us," cried Birch, in the House of Commons. "A barricade! well, let it be forced! Shall we let our brothers perish almost before our eyes?" The barricade was forced, and the population of Derry, decimated, dying, but still indomitable, at last saw the vessels, which brought the aid so long expected, advance majestically by the narrow channel which alone the drought had left navigable. Thanksgivings and cries of joy were still echoing in the town, when a line of flames already indicated the retreat of the Jacobite army. The siege of Londonderry was raised.