This is not a very plausible theory; nor does one well see why Macaulay should describe that proviso of a right to re-election—which was afterwards adopted, and which is an essential feature of our still subsisting Act of Anne—as depriving the Bill of nine-tenths of its power both for good and for evil. Surely both King and Parliament might have been credited with knowing their own business a little better than that. It seems reasonable rather to ask ourselves whether the amendment was such as to militate in any serious degree against the legislative object of the Commons, or in any similar degree to disarm the objections which William entertained to the measure. If it did neither of these things, there was nothing paradoxical either in the Commons accepting or the King pronouncing his veto upon the Place Bill; and it seems to me to be clear that the amendment did neither of these things in fact. No doubt it was desirable, from the point of view of the majority, that office-holders should cease to sit in Parliament and become incapacitated for re-election; and this on the abstract and general ground that such persons were not sufficiently independent to be able to discharge the functions of legislators with advantage to the country. So far, then, as the general principle relating to office-holders was concerned, the amendment was opposed to the real wishes of the Commons, and had no reason therefore to provoke the hostility of the King. But there was a specific ground on which the House had cause to dislike office-holders, and a specific class of appointments to which this ground applied; and the Bill, even as modified by the Lords' proviso, would have limited the royal influence in respect of these appointments to an extent quite sufficient to account both for the Commons adopting the amendment of the Upper House, and for the King refusing his assent to the Bill. It would obviously have dealt a heavy, though not, of course, a final, blow to the employment of the patronage of the Crown for the purpose of "managing" the Legislature. It would have made it a far more difficult thing for the Court or the Government to maintain their majority in the House of Commons by what would now be called a corrupt use of its patronage, but what was then regarded, or getting to be regarded—at any rate by the party in power,—as one of the legitimate arts of rule. For whenever the Sovereign or his Ministers endeavoured to convert a hostile into a friendly vote by the bestowal of office upon its possessor, he or they would always have to reckon with the possibility that the constituents of the bought member might not care to have their interests sold along with their parliamentary representative. They might, and on a question which strongly moved them they very probably would, have expressed their disapproval of his conduct by refusing to re-elect him; in which case the Government would, of course, have found themselves at the end of the transaction with one piece of patronage the less, but not with one vote the more. In a word, the Place Bill, as amended by the Lords, though it would have left untouched the power of the Crown to bring office-holders into Parliament, would materially have impaired its power of turning members of Parliament into office-holders; and apparently it was only because Macaulay viewed the Bill too exclusively in its relation to the former power, and took no account of its bearing on the latter, that he could have regarded it as a measure in which William had no real concern, and which he only vetoed through some vague dislike of it as affecting his prerogative he hardly knew how. So far from this, it seems to me that his objection may well have been a very definite one, and that he perfectly understood, and was not at all disposed to undervalue, the particular exercise of his prerogative which it threatened. For whatever may have been his original or even his persistent repugnance to the acts of parliamentary management by means of parliamentary corruption, he had probably come by this time to regard it as among the inevitable if disagreeable necessities of royal and ministerial policy under the English system of party government.
The close of this session witnessed the virtual completion of the work of ministerial reconstruction on a purely Whig basis. Shrewsbury, who had been offered the Secretaryship of State left vacant by the retirement of Nottingham, after some months of hesitation accepted the office. Trenchard, the other Secretary of State, was also a member of the Whig party. The rising Whig financier, Charles Montague, who had during this session devised and carried out the legislative measure for the establishment of the Bank of England, was for this service elevated to the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Keeper of the Seal was the Whig Somers. The Whig Russell was First Lord of the Admiralty. All the important offices of the State were now in fact in the hands of the Whig party, and William, now fairly embarked upon the experiment recommended by Sunderland, made one last concession to his old policy of balancing one party against the other by a liberal distribution of honours among the displaced Tories.
The military and naval operations of 1694 were marked by none of these successes which catch the public eye, but the year was really one of more moment to the history of the struggle with Louis than at first sight appears. Mismanagement and treachery brought disaster on the expedition against Brest, and the disgrace was certainly not redeemed by the subsequent bombardment and destruction of Dieppe and Havre. But the despatch of Russell's fleet to the Mediterranean yielded solid gains which more than compensated for our losses in the Channel. Russell relieved Barcelona, blockaded Toulon, brought the hostile Italian States to reason, and compelled them, for the first time, to acknowledge William's titles, reanimated the Duke of Savoy, who had begun to think of a separate peace with France, and, indeed, practically brought the Mediterranean under English maritime control. As a consequence, our commerce, which had been declining ever since the Revolution, began rapidly to revive.
The land campaign, though equally undistinguished by any striking triumph, was no less fruitful in matter for solid satisfaction. An attempt of William to carry the war into the enemy's country was foiled, it is true, by the skill of Luxembourg, who repulsed the advance of the Elector of Bavaria upon French Flanders, and this check was, of course, more important on one side than William's capture of the inconsiderable fortress of Huy was on the other. But in Spain, where Russell's appearance before Barcelona had compelled De Noailles to retreat; on the Rhine, where the Prince of Baden drove back Delorges, and established himself for the summer in Alsace; and in Piedmont, where, in spite of the vacillations of the Duke of Savoy, the French gained no material advantage—the course of events, particularly as contrasted with those of the three previous years, gave ample justification for the words with which William met his Parliament on the 9th of November. "With respect," he said, "to the war by land, I think I may say that this year has put a stop to the progress of the French arms." Loyal addresses were returned, and supplies to the amount of five millions were readily voted; but, along with the Supply Bill, the Triennial Bill was again introduced. It was probably intimated to Parliament, through some of the private channels of communication with the Court, that William was not prepared to veto it a second time. The Bill was brought in on the first day of the session, and, together with a Bill settling the Customs on the Crown, received the royal assent on the 22d of December. November of 1696 was fixed as the limit of the life of the existing Parliament. The Place Bill, vetoed by the King in the previous session, was again introduced, and with exactly the same results as had followed the second attempt to pass the Triennial Bill. This measure, it will be remembered, after failing to obtain the royal assent in the session of 1692-3, was defeated in the Commons in 1693-4, and so also it happened with the Place Bill. The inference which I think suggests itself in both cases is that the exercise of the royal veto, though unpopular with the country, was not by any means equally so with the House of Commons; that there were many Tories who were not particularly keen on purging Parliament of office-holders, and not a few Whigs whose zeal for the limitation of its constitutional life was somewhat lukewarm; and that both Whigs and Tories of this order were not sorry to be able to evade their party obligations to vote for these measures by pleading their unwillingness to force the King's hand, and perhaps provoke a constitutional crisis.
The day on which William gave his assent to the Triennial Bill was to him a day of grave anxiety; and a year fairly prosperous abroad and peaceful at home was to bring him ere its close the heaviest calamity of his life. The illness of the Queen, who had been for two or three days confined to her bed, was on the evening of the 21st of December recognised by her physician as smallpox. A week afterwards, at one in the morning of the 28th of December, she died. William's grief at her loss was uncontrollable, and to all but those, and they were few, who had penetrated the stoicism beneath which he was accustomed to conceal deep feelings, it must have been a strange and moving sight. He remained for days at her bedside scarcely taking food or sleep. He broke out in the presence of Burnet into passionate outcries upon his agony at the thought of losing her, and into fervent praises of her love and virtues. "He cried out," says the Bishop, "that there was no hope, and that from being the happiest he was now going to be the miserablest creature on earth. He said that during the whole course of their marriage he had never known one single fault in her; there was a worth in her which nobody knew besides himself.... The King's affection was greater than those who knew him best thought his temper capable of; he went beyond all bounds in it; during her sickness he was in an agony that amazed us all, fainting often and breaking out into most violent lamentations; when she died his spirits sank so low that there was great reason to apprehend that he was following her; for some weeks after he was so little master of himself that he was not capable of minding business or of seeing company."
The depth of this affection, moreover, was not disproportioned, as is sometimes the case in examples of conjugal devotion, to the worthiness of the object. Even Evelyn, who was shocked as a Tory and legitimate king's-man by the levity of Mary's behaviour (for which, however, an explanation has been suggested) on her arrival at Whitehall after James's flight, affirms of her that "she was such an admirable woman, abating for taking the crown without a due apology, as does, if possible, outdo the renowned Queen Elizabeth." The comparison, extravagant as it may appear at first sight, is not without some justification in the spirited behaviour of Mary on the great national crisis which occurred during her husband's absence in the Irish campaign. It would be absurd of course to credit Mary with Elizabeth's gifts of statecraft, or with her intellectual capacity in general, but in courage and composure in the presence of danger she was no unworthy successor of that great queen. In William's passionate declarations of his debt to her there was no extravagance at all. To him she had been the most affectionate, dutiful, and forbearing of wives, and if her influence over him fell short of retaining his marital constancy, she endeared herself more closely to him on the side of the purer emotions by her magnanimous forgiveness of his errors. It cannot but soften the harsher outlines of our conception of William, and help to supply that human and homely element which is too much wanting in his character, to know that he was capable both of inspiring and reciprocating so true an affection as this.