[19] He writes in a letter to Lord Galway, Jan. 27, 1699: "It is not possible to be more sensibly touched than I am at my not being able to do more for the poor refugee officers who have served me with so much zeal and fidelity. I am afraid the good God will punish the ingratitude of this nation. Assuredly on all sides my patience is put to the trial."
CHAPTER XIV
1699-1700
Death of the Electoral Prince of Bavaria—Renewed negotiations—Second Partition Treaty—The Irish forfeitures—The Resumption Bill—Will and death of the King of Spain.
The political event on which William had founded hopes of re-opening the army question has been indirectly referred to in the last chapter. This event, as has been said, was one which might reasonably have been thought likely to dispose the English Parliament to a more liberal view of the military necessities of the country by bringing once more into prominence a European danger which diplomacy had been hitherto believed to have averted. In the early days of 1699 the Electoral Prince of Bavaria—the youthful heir-designate of the Spanish monarchy—took his departure from a troubled world whose confusions were to be formidably increased by his quitting it. The English Parliament, as we have seen, refused to allow the Prince's death to modify their policy. But William could not afford to overlook it; for it, of course, reopened at once the whole question which had been closed by the First Partition Treaty, and rendered it necessary to nominate a new successor to the Spanish kingdom and its possessions in the New World. Louis XIV. was the first to move in the matter. He instructed De Tallard to sound William as to a new Treaty, and, after one or two candidates had been mentioned and rejected, it was finally agreed between the French and English sovereigns that the Archduke Charles, the son of the Emperor Leopold, should be the future King of Spain and the Indies, and that the Milanese, which had been allotted to him under the First Treaty, should go to Louis, by whom it was to be bartered for Lorraine. The arrangement was complete in all respects except that of having received the sanction of the Emperor by the summer or early autumn of 1699; but the rumour of it caused a violent outbreak of indignation in Spain. The Marquis of Canales, Spanish Ambassador at the English Court, was instructed to protest, which he did in terms so insolently imperious that William, on being informed at Loo of the language used by him, at once directed that the Marquis's passports should be handed to him, and at the same time recalled our own ambassador at Madrid. By whose means the provisions of the new Treaty were communicated to the Spanish Court and people is not certainly known; but considering that one of the parties to whom it had been submitted rejected it (for the Emperor at the eleventh hour refused to sign), and, moreover, that another party—the French king—had never, in all probability, sincerely assented to it, there is no need for much speculation on this point. Leopold had known and obvious motives for disclosing it to the unhappy Charles, and Louis is more than suspected of having private motives for doing so. But whichever of the two was the medium of communication, Louis was indisputably the gainer. The news aroused a powerful anti-Austrian feeling in the minds of the Spanish people, of which the French King, who was far better served at the Court of Madrid than the Emperor, was not slow to take advantage. From the autumn of 1699 till the 1st of November 1700, when the few and miserable days of Charles II. came to an end, the agents of France worked persistently, and in the end successfully, to overcome the Austrian leanings of the dying monarch, and to convince him that on grounds of patriotism, no less than of legal and moral obligation, he was bound to devise his dominions to his lawful French heir, and away from the Prince to whom Louis had solemnly agreed with William that they should pass.
The final consummation of these intrigues, however, was still a year distant, and meanwhile an incident of extreme interest, and at the time of exceeding gravity, in English politics, has to be recorded. On the 19th of November Parliament met again, and in a mood which boded ill for the relations between the sovereign and the third estate of his realm. The session began with one of the numerous abortive attacks made upon Somers in the course of his distinguished career, and an equally unsuccessful attempt was made to procure the disgrace of that perpetual bugbear of the Tories, Bishop Burnet. But these were merely in the nature of preliminary skirmishes; it was not long before hostilities were opened upon William and his Ministers in a more serious way. It will be remembered that at the close of the last session the Commons tacked to the Land Tax Bill a clause appointing seven commissioners to inquire into the Irish forfeitures, and that the Lords, after some demur to the manner in which the proposal was being forced upon them, passed the measure. The report of these commissioners, who had been pursuing their inquiries in Ireland during the recess, was now ready, and early in the session it was presented to Parliament, signed by four of the commissioners, the other three dissenting. Disfigured by many exaggerations and some wilful misstatements, this important document contained, nevertheless, an amount of discreditable truth sufficient not only to excite considerable popular feeling against William at the time, but to inflict some permanent injury on his historical reputation.
The four commissioners reported that all the lands in the several counties in Ireland belonging to the forfeited persons amounted, as far as they could reckon, to 1,060,762 acres, worth £211,623 per annum, and computed therefrom to be of the capital value of £2,685,138. That some of these lands had been restored to the old proprietors by virtue of the Articles of Limerick and Galway, or by his Majesty's favour through reversal of outlawries, and royal pardons obtained chiefly by gratifications to such persons as had abused his Majesty's royal bounty and compassion; and that besides these restitutions, which they thought to be corruptly procured, there were seventy-six grants and "custodians" under the Great Seal of Ireland, of which they made a recital—as, for instance, to the Lord Romney, three grants now in being, containing 49,517 acres; to the Earl of Albemarle, in two grants, 106,633 acres in possession and reversion; to William Bentinck, Esq., Lord Woodstock (Portland's eldest son), 135,820 acres of land; to the Earl of Athlone in two grants, 26,480 acres; to the Earl of Galway one grant of 36,148 acres, etc. That the estates so mentioned did not indeed yield so much to the grantees as they were valued at, because as most of them had abused his Majesty on the real value of their estates, so their agents had imposed upon them, and had either sold or let the greatest part of these lands at an undervalue; but that after all deductions and allowances there yet remained £1,699,343: 14s. which they laid before the Commons as the gross value of the estates forfeited since the 13th day of February 1689, and not restored. The commissioners went on, in excess, as it should seem, of their attributions,[20] to report that William had conferred the forfeited Irish estates of the late King James, estimated at 95,649 acres, worth £25,998 a year, on his mistress, the Countess of Orkney. Excluding this item, however, the value of the restorations and royal grants against which the commissioners reported amounted, it will be seen, to close upon a million sterling.
It is very probable, indeed it may be said to be certain, that the total value of these forfeitures was grossly exaggerated by the commissioners; it is possible that it was to some extent wilfully exaggerated for party purposes. The lands forfeited in Ireland during the Revolution may have been worth "nearer half a million sterling than two millions and a half." It does not seem to me, however, that this is a point of the importance which Macaulay seems to attach to it. Even if it could be shown that the proportion of the royal grants to the total forfeitures was unduly magnified through an over-estimate of the value of the former, I cannot see that it would affect the merits of the case. The real gist of the charge against William in respect of these grants—assuming, that is to say, that he was justified in making them at all without the sanction of Parliament—is to be sought not in a comparison of the royal benefactions with the amount of the property at his disposal, but in an examination of their proportions inter se. Even if it be shown that he distributed property of the value not of a million sterling, but of only a fifth of that sum, it remains equally true in either case, that more than one-tenth of his bounty went to a single favourite who had little or no public services to show for them, and very nearly an eighth to a young man whose only claim upon him was that of being an able and faithful servant's eldest son. The grants to Albemarle and Woodstock are impossible to defend, and the latter almost impossible to explain. William had already loaded Portland with benefits, and to the vast estates he had bestowed upon him in England his eldest son would, in the natural course of events, succeed. On what ground, either of justice or even of sentiment, it could have been thought well to enrich the expectant heir of so much English landed property with 135,820 acres of forfeited Irish land is a mystery which has never been satisfactorily explained. As to the grant to Albemarle, it was of even worse example. Woodstock was at least the son of a counsellor to whom William owed much, and whom he might conceivably have regarded himself as rewarding in the person of his heir; but what had Keppel, a mere favourite, a young courtier with no other recommendations but his youth, his good looks, and his complaisance, a personality too closely recalling that of a "minion" of Henri Trois, and which in the Jacobite libels, not wisely to be thus supplied with colourable pretexts for their calumnies, was openly so described—what, one cannot but ask, had Keppel done to deserve a grant of 106,633 acres of the forfeited Irish land? Compare these two largesses, Woodstock's and Albemarle's, with those bestowed on Lord Romney, an ex-Secretary of State, and one of the leaders of the movement which brought William to England; on Lord Athlone, the stout Dutch soldier who, as General Ginkel, had given and taken many a hard knock in his master's service; on Lord Galway, that gallant Marquis de Ruvigny who had turned the flank of the Irish on the bloody day of Aghrim. Albemarle's, the smaller of the two, is more than twice that of Romney, nearly thrice that of Galway, more than four times that of Athlone. It was impossible for William to contend in the face of this evidence that he had simply been using the forfeited lands of Irish rebels to reward those public servants who had done most by valour in the field, or wisdom in the council-chamber, to establish firmly on the throne of England, the Prince chosen by the nation; and that therefore he was merely anticipating the national reward which would have been conferred upon them, and virtually drawing upon one national fund in relief of prospective charges upon another. He could not even contend, as we have seen, that this was the main use to which he had put the forfeitures; for though wisdom and valour had come in for a share of the spoils, their share was lamentably smaller than that which was won by mere arts of courtiership. There is, in short, no denying the fact that while William applied a part of this property to strictly public objects, or, in other words, to objects to which, but for such application of it, the public would have to contribute in another shape, he devoted far too large a portion of it to purposes of purely private benefaction, for which he would otherwise have had to resort to drafts upon his Civil List.[21]