The Comic History of England

by Gilbert Abbott À Beckett

It would be most unprofitable to unravel the tangled thread of events that made up the complicated but most uninteresting annals of this worrying reign, which was distinguished by the multiplicity and the pettiness of the disputes between the prince and a portion of his people. The loggishness of the sovereign seemed to affect the whole nation with the loggerheads; and not only were parties arrayed against each other, but on some occasions the Lords and the Commons came into very serious collision. The disputes in which William was involved with foreign governments were exceedingly costly to his own country, but he finally, on the 7th of September, 1701, after having been a party to several treaties that had been either violated or "gone off," entered into a "second grand alliance" at the Hague, with various powers. By this arrangement all the parties were bound to provide men and money, which their people of course had to pay; and the emperor, who had made himself liable to furnish a contingency, was so excessively hard up, that he was compelled to borrow the money upon his quicksilver mines; but no silver, however quick, could keep pace with the rapidity with which the money was called for and got rid of.

We will now return for a few minutes to James the Second, who was in a very bad way at St. Germains, and was understood to have been dying all the summer. At length, on Friday, the 2nd of September, he was taken very bad indeed with a fainting fit, but got better, until another and another still succeeded; and the last fit was stronger than the first. On Tuesday, the 13th, Louis came to his bedside to say "How d'ye do?" but poor James was unable to answer the polite and obliging inquiry, for he was almost without consciousness. Louis kindly endeavoured to comfort his last moments by promising to protect his family, and treat the nominal Prince of Wales as actual King of England, but this recognition was not likely to do much good either to the dead or the living, as the only parties who were capable of giving it effect, namely, the English people, would have nothing whatever to do with it. Poor James, who was dosed with a great deal of medicine, and swallowed no end of James's powders, was now beyond the aid of medical skill, and he died on the 16th of September, 1701, at the age of sixty-seven. An attempt was made to pitchfork this very indifferent sovereign into the Roman Calendar as a first-rate saint; but there has never been any disposition among the English to award him the honours of martyrdom.

William was by no means the thing in his own health, when the news of the death of James was brought to him. A report was indeed spread that, like a bill at thirty days, he had only a month to run; but this rumour was circulated by the friends of Louis the Fourteenth, who fancied that if William was once out of the way, the grand monarque might be as potent in Europe as the bull of fabled lore was at his ease in the china shop. William had been in Holland, where he was really dangerously ill; but he contrived to get back to England, where he dissolved Parliament in November, 1701, and called a new one together, which met on the 31st of December, to see the old year out and the new year in, and for the despatch of business. The king made a long and rather an effective speech, which had been written expressly for the occasion by Lord Somers, and had a great effect in giving an impetus to the waning fidelity of the people towards the sovereign of their selection. They might, however, have exclaimed with the poet, that they "never loved a young—or old—gazelle," without the usual unhappy result; for just as they were getting to know William well, and love him—or at least to pretend to do so—he was attacked in such a manner as to make him "sure to die." He had been a great deal shaken by the severity of the winter; but it was hoped he would recover in the spring, which he probably might have done, but for an accident that befel him on the road between Kensington and Hammersmith. "A-hunting he would go, would go" in that savage suburb, whose wildness is remarkable to this day, and his horse coming to a block of stone, was unfortunate enough to find it a regular stumbling-block. William was thrown with some force, and experienced a fracture of the collar-bone, when, having been removed to Hampton Court, the medical men began to quarrel about the treatment of his majesty. They of course made no bones about setting the collar; but a dispute arose about the necessity for bleeding the king, and in the heat of the argument, the physicians all pulled at his pulse with such fury, that they unset the bone "while intending," says Burnet, "to make a dead set at one another." The doctors continuing fractious, the fracture got worse, and at length, on the 8th of March, 1702, the royal patient expired. He had reigned thirteen years and a half, and was in the fifty-second year of his age, when the fatal catastrophe happened.

The character of William will not add much to the reputation of British royalty in former days, when sovereigns were so bad that they would never have been allowed to pass current in times like these, in which there is a disposition to examine closely the weight and quality of the metal. He was by no means popular when alive, and bad characters do not, like old port, improve by keeping. The state of parties during his reign made him the centre in which a great deal of odium met, for he happened to form in his own person the embodiment, or rather the representative, of certain principles which were regarded with the utmost aversion by many.

The most valuable attribute of William, which has handed him down as an object of respect and even of enthusiasm in the minds of some, is the fact of the question of constitutional monarchy having been settled in the affirmative by his elevation to the throne of England. His case is certainly valuable as a precedent, but its greatest value consists in the probability that its existence will spare the country hereafter from the disagreeable necessity of being obliged to follow it. English sovereigns have learned the possibility of their being set aside like James the Second, and replaced by one who, like William the Third, owed his power to the will of the people. Such Revolutions as that of 1688, notwithstanding the glorious character that belongs to it, are better as beacons for rulers than as precedents for the people, since a change of dynasty, however constitutionally effected, must be at all times an unpleasant, not to say a deplorable process.

William the Third is entitled to the very highest admiration for having succeeded in holding firmly a position from which the slightest vacillation would have inevitably shaken him. His early stipulation for all the throne or none, and his repudiation of the right of his wife to interfere, though domestically harsh, was politically respectable. The constitution underwent during his reign some of the most substantial and valuable repairs that were ever bestowed upon it, either before or since, notwithstanding some very high-sounding nominal advantages that the country has in ancient and modern times experienced. It was in William's reign that the Commons took the purse-strings of the country tightly in hand, and the censorship of the Press was, during the same period, permitted to expire. The judges were secured in their places during good behaviour; and members of the Privy Council being compelled, by the Act of Settlement, to sign the measures they proposed, we obtained from William's reign the blessing of a responsible Cabinet. It is true that official heads fell more frequently before than since, but the great salubrity of the provision to which we allude is shown in the fact that it has secured the good conduct of ministers so effectually, as to have preserved their heads upon their shoulders. It is a curious truth that the National Debt increased marvellously during William's reign, and there would seem, therefore, to be some reason for the common assertion, that this tremendous liability is a mark of our national prosperity. It certainly proves our credit to be good, as a load of debt in the case of an individual would make it evident that his tradesmen had trusted him; but no one will contend that, on that account, he must be considered more prosperous.

It was the great increase of the Government expenses that had caused the augmentation of the National Debt, and afforded another illustration of the infallible principle, that nothing good can be had without liberally paying for. We might get a republic done for us no doubt at a hundredth part—or less—of the cost of our present excellent constitutional monarchy; but we do not think any reasonable person would feel very anxious to try the cheap and nasty experiment.

Some historians who have preceded us, fall into what we consider the error of eulogising William as if he had been the author of all the good that occurred in his reign, when the fact is that a great deal was accomplished, not alone without his agency, but actually in spite of him. When he came, or rather when he was called to the throne, the nation had profited by experience, and had become equally sensible to the dangers of democratic excess and of absolute monarchy. The tyranny of the Republic, no less than that of the Stuarts, had pointed out the safety of a middle course between the two sorts of despotism; and William, as a very middling person in every respect, was well adapted for the situation that appeared to be made for him. It was owing to no particular merit on his part that his reign was not arbitrary, for he sometimes tried his hardest to make it so; but the good sense of the nation, sharpened by the troubles it had lately passed through, preserved it against further victimisation at the hands of either kings or demagogues.

As the first really constitutional sovereign, William is, we repeat, entitled to our respect and admiration; but we must not forget that the people themselves made the mould to which, we will admit, he was exceedingly well adapted, for he was pliable enough to take the right impress, and sufficiently firm to give body and substance to the nation's beau ideal of a limited monarchy.

THE accession of Anne to the throne of her Anne-cestors, as Hume in a most humiliating attempt at humour hath it, was hailed with general satisfaction, for it usually happens that a new reign is welcomed on the old principle of "anything for a change," and most people expect that some good may come out of it. It will be remembered that Anne was originally a Miss Hyde, being the child of James by his first wife—the daughter of Old Hyde, afterwards Earl of Clarendon; and she had been married to the young man known among his familiar friends as "Georgey Porgey, Prince of Denmark."