“His day of double victory and death,”
dawned, this time over Worcester, the scene of “the Crowning Mercy.” The same miracles of generalship were accomplished, the same tremendous victory was won at a ridiculously small expense—under two hundred men to conquer an entrenched army of fifteen thousand—and this was the end of the fighting at home.
But meanwhile there was fighting abroad, and, more than that, the fame of the great Oliver and his marvellous doings had been ringing from end to end of Europe. As Clarendon, the historian of the Royalists, candidly admits: “His greatness at home was but a shadow of the glory he had abroad.” The mastery of the seas was wrenched out of the hands of the Dutch by Blake, the sea-power of England was organised as its land-power was, and Britain rose at a bound from the degradation to which she had sunk under the first Stuart to the proud position of the first naval and military Power of the world, and the greatest ministers and monarchs in Europe, even the Pope himself, were forced to respect the prowess and cringe for the friendship of the Farmer of Huntingdon.
If, as has been aptly suggested, the great Oliver could have lived to an age which is now a normal one for statesmen, the disgraceful and ruinous interval occupied by the reigns of the second Charles and the second James might have been spared with all their infamy and national loss, and William of Orange might worthily have continued the work which Cromwell so well began. But the time was not yet, and so it was not to be. The great ideal of his life, a Protestant Alliance, was never realised. His last days were days of darkness and suffering, social, mental, and physical.
Once more the Day of Fate came round, and between three and four in the afternoon the watchers by his bedside heard him sigh deeply and heavily. Some say that he whispered: “My work is done!”—and then he died. This may be fact or fancy, but, be that as it may, no man had a better right to pass out of the mystery of the things that are into the mystery of the things that are to be with such words on his lips than Oliver Cromwell, General, Statesman, and King in everything but the empty name.
V
WILLIAM OF ORANGE,
OVERCOMER OF DIFFICULTIES
V
WILLIAM OF ORANGE
It is perhaps one of the most curious facts of our history that the Empire-Maker who, as it were, finally completed the work begun by his namesake William the Norman, should, like him, have been a foreigner, should have sprung from similar ancestry, and should have been his exact reverse in every mental and physical quality save one—an inflexible determination to do the work which he was appointed to do in spite of every conceivable kind of obstacle.