Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

He could never have become King of England, nor is it likely that he could even have been asked to constitute himself the protector of English liberties, had it not been for the fact that he was married to the daughter of James II., and of this marriage Lord Macaulay truly says: “His choice had been determined chiefly by political considerations, nor did it seem likely that any strong affection would grow up between a handsome girl of sixteen, well-disposed, indeed, and naturally intelligent, but ignorant and simple, and a bridegroom who, though he had not completed his twenty-eighth year, was in constitution older than her father; whose manner was chilling, and whose head was constantly occupied by public business or by field sports.”

His marriage was, in short, “a marriage of convenience,” and yet, in defiance of all the rules that are supposed to govern the most intimate of all human relationships, it was one of the best and, in the end, most devoted unions that history has to record. It is hardly possible to doubt that William of Orange married Mary Stuart because he saw with that keenly penetrating foresight of his that such a union would strengthen him in his life-long combat with the arch-enemy of his faith, his family, and his nation; and this enemy was that same Louis of France who had made Charles II. his pensioner, and was soon to make James II. his dependent.

To quote Lord Macaulay again: “He saved England, it is true, but he never loved her, and he never obtained her love.... Whatever patriotic feeling he had was for Holland ... yet even his affection for the land of his birth was subordinate to another feeling which early became supreme in his soul, which mixed itself with all his passions and compelled him to marvellous enterprises, which supported him when sinking under mortification, pain, sickness, and sorrow ... and continued to animate him even while the prayer for the departing was read at his bedside.”

It was this hatred of France and her king which nerved him to do for the liberties of Europe and Great Britain what Francis Drake had done for England against Philip of Spain, and in the doing of this he won the conspicuous glory of forcing the paymaster of the two English sovereigns whom he succeeded, to make peace with him on equal terms; and this, too, although he lost more battles than he won, and had to surrender more strong cities than he took.

It is comparatively easy for a conqueror to take triumph out of victory, but it is a higher quality which patiently endures defeat and confronts disaster, and by sheer genius wins triumph in the end. This is what William of Orange did, and it is from this fact that he derives his title to be ranked among the Makers of that Empire to whose throne he came as an alien, and whose honour he restored and upheld, as one might say, in spite of herself.

So far as England is concerned, the male line of Stuart came in with a fool and went out with a coward. One does not even care to imagine what would have happened if James II. had remained on the throne; or if William of Orange, with his hereditary and deep-rooted hatred of Louis XIV. and his policy, had not come to take his most miserably-vacated place in the nick of time.

The sentimentality which makes such a fuss about loyalty to persons as distinguished from loyalty to country, and the lawyer-quibbles which occupied men’s minds in the dispute as to whether James II. was King de facto or de jure, or both, of the country from which he had run away like an absconding debtor, may be dismissed, just as Harold the Saxon’s claims had been some six hundred years before. It is merely a question of the Fit and the Unfit, and James was Unfit.

James Stuart deserted his post as ruler of these realms because he found himself assailed by difficulties which the most ordinary ability ought to have overcome. William assumed the same position in the face of difficulties which only the highest qualities of kingcraft and statesmanship could have enabled him to successfully grapple with. In a word, James possessed no ideal that qualified him to be a king, much less an Empire-Maker. William did possess such an ideal, and that is the only reason why he became King of England, vice James Stuart, absconded.

Next, perhaps, to Henry VII., William was the most business-like sovereign who has occupied the British throne. With him all men and things, all beliefs and sentiments, were subordinated to the achievement of the one great end—the curbing of the power of France, and consequently the furtherance of political and theological liberty in Europe. He was, in fact, only incidentally an Empire-Maker, although without him and without the broad and firm basis of popular liberty and national strength which he laid down, as it were, in the doing of his greater work, the building up of the Imperial fabric would undoubtedly have been long delayed and seriously impeded.

He got himself made King of Great Britain and Ireland, not because he wanted to occupy the throne, but because from that eminence he would be able to look the Grand Monarch more equally in the face.