Louis XIV. had just done a deed which destroyed the last faint hopes of peace. King James II. was dying at St. Germain, and the king went to see him. The sick man opened his eyes for a moment when he was told that the king was there [Memoires de Dangeau, t. viii. p. 192], and closed them again immediately. The king told him that he had come to assure him that he might die in peace as regarded the Prince of Wales, and that he would recognize him as King of England, Ireland, and Scotland. All the English who were in the room fell upon their knees, and cried, “God save the king!” James II. expired a week later, on the 16th of September, 1701, saying to his son, as his last advice, “I am about to leave this world, which has been to me nothing but a sea of tempests and storms. The Omnipotent has thought right to visit me with great afflictions; serve Him with all your heart, and never place the crown of England in the balance with your eternal salvation.” James II. was justified in giving his son this supreme advice the solitary ray of greatness in his life and in his soul had proceeded from his religious faith, and his unwavering resolution to remain loyal to it at any price and at any risk.
“On returning to Marly,” says St. Simon, “the king told the whole court what he had just done. There was nothing but acclamations and praises. It was a fine field for them: but reflections, too, were not less prompt, if they were less public. The king still flattered himself that he would hinder Holland and England, the former of which was so completely dependent, from breaking with him in favor of the house of Austria; he relied upon that to terminate before long the war in Italy, as well as the whole affair of the succession in Spain and its vast dependencies, which the emperor could not dispute with his own forces only, or even with those of the empire. Nothing, therefore, could be more incompatible with this position, and with the solemn recognition he had given, at the peace of Ryswick, of the Prince of Orange as King of England. It was to hurt him personally in the most sensitive spot, all England with him and Holland into the bargain, without giving the Prince of Wales, by recognition, any solid support in his own case.”
William III. was at table in his castle of Dieren, in Holland, when he received this news. He did not utter a word, but he colored, crushed his hat over his head, and could not command his countenance. The Earl of Manchester, English ambassador, left Paris without taking leave of the king, otherwise than by this note to M. de Torcy:—
“Sir: The king my master, being informed that his Most Christian. Majesty has recognized another King of Great Britain, does not consider that his dignity and his service will permit him to any longer keep an ambassador at the court of the king your master, and he has sent me orders to withdraw at once, of which I do myself the honor to advertise you by this note.”
“All the English,” says Torcy, in his Memoires, “unanimously regard it as a mortal affront on the part of France, that she should pretend to arrogate to herself the right of giving them a king, to the prejudice of him whom they had themselves invited and recognized for many years past.”
Voltaire declares, in the Siecle de Louis XIV., that M. de Torcy attributed the recognition of the Prince of Wales by Louis XIV. to the influence of Madame de Maintenon, who was touched by the tears of the queen, Mary of Modena. “He had not,” he said, “inserted the fact in his Memoires, because he did not think it to his master’s honor that two women should have made him change a resolution to the contrary taken in his council.” Perhaps the deplorable state of William III.‘s health, and the inclination supposed to be felt by Princess Anne of Denmark to restore the Stuarts to the throne, since she herself had lost the Duke of Gloucester, the last survivor of her seventeen children, might have influenced the unfortunate resolution of Louis XIV. His kingly magnanimity and illusions might have bound him to support James II., dethroned and fugitive; but no obligation of that sort existed in the case of a prince who had left England at his nurse’s, breast, and who had grown up in exile. In the Athalie of Racine, Joad (Jehoiada) invokes upon the impious queen:
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“That spirit of infatuation and error The fatal avant-courier of the fall of kings.” |
The recognition of the Prince of Wales as King of England was, in the case of Louis XIV., the most indisputable token of that fatal blindness.