Cromwell died; jack-boots and spurs ceased to be evangelists; nasal psalmody went out of fashion; and the Church of England was restored. Was it strange that James should persuade himself that he could make the English people turn one more somerset? But he was not the man to do it, and his friends told him so. Louis XIV. warned him to be careful. The archbishop of Rheims suggested that a mass might not be worth three kingdoms. In the meantime the pope, Innocent the eleventh, was working in a curious subterranean way against him. Louis had insulted Innocent and imprisoned his nuncio; and the pope was ready to league himself even with protestants to put on the English throne a dynasty hostile to the French king.
England had but recently escaped from under the iron heel of the saints; and she dreaded their return to power as much as the pope’s. Consequently the Church of England which James’ grandfather (James I.) said was the only church for a gentleman, was once more the strongest ecclesiastical body in the land. If James had been a little tolerant and let the bishops alone he might at least have reëstablished Roman Catholicism as the religion of the Court; but he was a fanatic and must have the whole or nothing; and he got the latter.
The English, split up into different sects which hated each other with theological hatred, lost confidence in themselves. A foreign prince and a foreign army were called in as in the days of James’ worthless ancestor King John. William of Holland with an army of Dutchmen landed at Torbay the fifth of November 1688; and England once more suffered the humiliation of an invasion. It was at this juncture that Berwick arrived in England, and took command of the king’s household troops which his uncle Marlborough had abandoned. Nobody contributed more to the overthrow of James than John Churchill who owed him everything. He and his shrew of a wife Sarah had influence enough with Anne, James’ youngest daughter, and with her husband George of Denmark, to lead them too to desert their father and to go over to William and Mary.
Anne was a stupid girl and made a stupid queen; but her stupidity was but a mild form of that lesion in comparison with that which afflicted her husband. We have King Charles’ own testimony on that point. Supping one day with James, he said to him:—Brother James I have tried our nephew George drunk and I have tried him sober, and drunk or sober there is nothing in him. George had a stolid way of exclaiming Est-il possible! When James was told that his daughter and son-in-law had abandoned him: What, cried he, has Est-il possible gone too?
James was now reminded of the day when they cut his father’s head off,[1] and he thought it time to quit. He fled and William and Mary mounted the throne. They were not the next heirs: one little life stood between and one only—that of the infant son of James and of his second wife Mary Beatrice of Esté. But though, as Macaulay himself admits, no birth was ever better attested, all England was made to believe that the child was spurious. Even Mary and Anne gave countenance to that infamous story. That child was afterwards known as the Pretender or James III.
The revolution of 1688, which drove out James and put upon the throne William and Mary, was a long step forward in the history of English liberty; but the personal share in it of the daughters and sons-in-law of James, was not commendable. King Lear’s daughters were less unfilial than Mary and Anne. Goneril and Regan did not drive their old father out into the storm: it was his own high temper that did that: he was furious that they would not entertain his hundred knights. They, the daughters, wanted him to sit by the fireside and let the housemaid bring him his slippers. He insisted on traipsing through the house at the head of a hundred stalking fellows, tracking the mud over everything; and I leave it to any good housewife if the girls were not right.
But Mary and Anne and William drove the poor old king from his throne, from his home and from his country, and he died in exile.
Mary is Macaulay’s heroine, yet to make a point he cannot help relating her untimely glee, running from room to room in the palace of Whitehall, delighted to find herself the mistress of so fine a house from which she had just expelled her own father.
James fled to France, and Berwick went with him. Among other devoted friends who left their country and joined their fortunes to those of the banished king, was an Irish gentleman named MacMahon. From him was descended Marie Edmée Patrice Maurice MacMahon whilom president of the Republic of France.
A few years later Berwick accompanied his father in his expedition to Ireland which had remained faithful to him. That expedition came to grief, as you know, at the battle of the Boyne, in which Berwick took part. In another action during that campaign, he had two horses killed under him, and was himself wounded. He says in his memoirs, that that was the only wound he ever received; but he did receive one besides, and we shall see by and by why he never mentions it.