Far be it from me to suggest that William of Orange needs any such artificial additions to his legitimate glory. They are mentioned merely to account for and excuse the fact that an impartial review of his career and character needs to be commenced with what might otherwise seem words of captious disparagement. It is absolutely necessary to strip off the draperies of partisanship in order to see the real man beneath; but that truly heroic figure can well afford it.
William of Orange, I maintain then, is not to be regarded as altogether that "patriot king," that "sovereign of the people," which it has pleased his Whig devotees to discover in him, still less as that sort of anticipatory and prophetic political philosopher for which he passes in the legend of some Whig constitutionalists. No doubt he had a distinct popular fibre in his nature. The great-grandson of his great-grandfather can hardly have been wanting in sympathy with popular aspirations, or in belief in the might and virtue of popular forces. But such sentiments have been the birthright of many a man whose instincts were the very reverse of democratic; and there is no reason to think that William either foresaw or would have relished that growth of the democratic element in English government to which he inevitably contributed so powerful a stimulus. He was not, it must be remembered, a democrat even in his own country; on the contrary, his strongest impulses were essentially of aristocratic origin. It was not his Protestant enthusiasm, though this was ardent enough, nor his love of his country and his hatred of foreign dictation, though these passions were strong and sincere enough, which were the dominant influences in moulding his youthful character. It was pride of ancestry, the memory of William the Silent, resentment at the fallen fortunes of his house, and resolution to restore them. These it was which first inspired him with an ambition essentially personal in its character, and it was not till this ambition had been gratified by his elevation to higher dignities even than his forefathers, that the other impulses of birth or training can be said to have begun to sway him at all. And until that ambition was gratified he was not only capable of all the virtues of the ambitious, but an adept in their vices also. He was but sixteen when he taught his mother the wisdom of disarming the suspicion of the Pensionary De Witt by pretended cordiality, and earned the criticism of the shrewd French envoy d'Estrades that he was "a great dissembler, and omitted nothing to gain his ends." So, too, one can hardly doubt that it was ambition rather than zeal for liberty and Protestantism that first inspired him with that design of intervention in England, which must have just taken shape in his mind shortly after the return of Dykvelt from his mission of 1687. His succession, or rather his wife's succession, was safe enough if Mary of Modena bore no male issue to James. But she might and did bear such issue, in a child whose claims could only be set aside by a revolution; and even had no heir apparent been born to the throne, the position of William accepting the English crown conjointly with his wife in his capacity as liberator of the English people would be something very different from that of a king-consort, which was all he could otherwise have hoped to be. It is surely not unjust to a man of William's antecedents to believe that from the hour that he learned the strength of his party in England, down to the hour when he was presented with the crown in the banqueting chamber at Whitehall, he had eyes for little else than the great European future which would open before him as King of England; and that any hesitations he may have shown in accepting the sovereignty were as purely politic as those of Cæsar at the Lupercal.
As regards his attitude towards English political institutions in general, and the voluntary element in his share in developing them, the Whig legend appears to me more purely mythical still. At no time in his life did William show the slightest personal predilection for or even faith in parliamentary institutions, still less in party government. He looked upon the English Parliament as a clumsy and irritating instrument, blunt at one part, dangerously double-edged at another, which he was nevertheless bound to work with and make the best of. That he was the first to try the system of a party ministry and party government is, as I have essayed to show, a fact of little significance. He tried it as he tried other means of managing the apparently otherwise unmanageable, as he had at first tried dividing offices of State among the leading men of both parties, and as he had tried and continued to try the method of corruption for the rank and file. As to any preference of one English party to another there is no trace of such a feeling in his mind. From the moral point of view, I imagine, he regarded most of the leaders of both parties with an equal, and, it may be, with an equally just, contempt; but with his intellectual appreciations he never allowed his moral judgment to interfere. He used the unscrupulous Tory Marlborough and the unscrupulous Whig Sunderland with an impartial indifference to their political profligacy. He made trial, in fact, of all English public men and of all political expedients to serve his European ends, which were sometimes but not always English ends also; and thus it was that though he experimentalised with the strict party system in order to secure a Parliament which would support the war energetically in 1695, yet in the next Parliament, his immediate object being gained, he showed no disposition to prosecute that experiment on abstract political grounds. It is impossible to represent a ruler of this kind, however wise and moderate, as consciously training our parliamentary institutions upon the peculiar lines of growth which they subsequently followed.
Yet after all these deductions there remains to William, both as a European statesman and as a benefactor to our country, an ample margin of renown. Of his moral and mental stature as a man it is scarcely necessary to speak. It must be patent to all but the dullest prejudices of our day as it was to all but the fiercest passions of his own. It is the highest praise of his high qualities to say that our impression of them easily survives the reaction from idolatry, and that after we have thrown aside the magnifying-glass of Whiggism the objects which it was used to exaggerate still fill the eye. If William had not all the virtues which belong to the patriot and philosopher, he had all that go to the making of the hero. Even Macaulay, who has over painted both his king-craft and his statesmanship, has not laid on the colours of his heroism with too bold a hand. Sagacious as he undoubtedly was in counsel, dexterous as he was in the management of men, keen as was his outlook on European politics, and resourceful as he was in meeting its exigencies, it is possible to contend that his Whig eulogist has credited him with far more than the keenness and sagacity, the dexterity and resource, which he possessed. But such eulogy does not, for it could not, materially exaggerate his great features as a man—his patience of delay and disappointment, his fortitude under disaster, his imperturbable composure in moments of crisis, his lofty magnanimity, which from its high place seemed literally to overlook rather than to forgive injuries, his haughty courage, which thought it equal shame to glance aside at the lurking assassin and to turn away from the open foe. His character was stern, forbidding, unamiable, contemptuously generous, as little fitted to attract love as it was assured of commanding respect; but it bears in every lineament the unmistakable stamp of greatness. And his achievements were as great as his character. His record as a ruler pure and simple, as a mere expert in the art of governing, has never been surpassed, perhaps never equalled, in history. The showy administrative exploits of a Napoleon with vast armies at his back, and the pen of a despotism in his hand, appear to me to sink into insignificance when compared with those of this ruler of four nations—a constitutional sovereign in England and Scotland, the chief of a republic in Holland, and a military autocrat, governing by the sword alone, in Ireland,—who for eleven years successfully directed the affairs of these alien and often mutually hostile communities, and who throughout all that time held in one hand the threads of a vast network of European diplomacy, and in the other the sword which kept the most formidable of European monarchs at bay. Nor should we omit from the comparison that he did all this under moral restraints and physical disadvantages to which Napoleon was a total stranger, impeded by obligations to law, municipal and international, which Napoleon set cynically at defiance, and distressed throughout his life by bodily ailments which never troubled the Corsican's iron frame.
Nor in what has been written in criticism of the Whig legend would I for a moment be suspected of undervaluing the debt which Englishmen owe to William of Orange. It is not necessary to exalt him into a divinely inspired progenitor of the British Constitution in order to recognise fully the greatness of the services which he rendered to it. He was not "Father of the Constitution" in the sense in which the poet is the father of his poem, or the philosopher of his theory; but assuredly he was so in the sense in which we say that a child has found a "second father" in an upright guardian, who, while not, it may be, comprehending his character, or in sympathy with his spirit, or foreseeing his future, has yet been his vigilant protector through the perils of childhood, and has accounted for his patrimony to the uttermost farthing. That William stood in this relation to our modern English polity throughout his too short reign, and that he loyally discharged its obligations, is indisputable. The virtues which enabled him to do so were mainly three, which are essential to all good and faithful guardianship, whether of children or constitutions—the virtues of good sense, self-restraint, and honesty. And the greatest of these three is honesty. William's practical wisdom always told him the moment when to yield in a struggle with his Parliament; and when that moment arrived his naturally passionate temper never failed to answer to the rein. But even at those moments there would often have been an evil alternative open to him, from which the fundamental integrity of his nature always turned aside. He scrupled not to use all the arts of political "management" which were sanctioned by the lax morality of his day; he exerted his prerogative freely to gain his ends; but he knew that the compact between him and his people was that in the last resort the will of the people should prevail, and this compact he never attempted either to violate or to evade. Here he was as emphatically a Rè Galantuomo, a "King Honest-man," as was Victor Emmanuel himself.
"Hos ante effigies majorum pone tuorum,
Præcedant ipsas illi, te consule, virgas."
Rulers who have earned this name may justly rank it, if only for its rarity, above every other title of honour—even though, themselves the creators or regenerators of nations, they can look back upon the splendid achievements of the Counts of Nassau, or the long ancestral glories of the House of Savoy.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] That Louis intended it to mean this is pretty obvious from his remark about the effacement of the Pyrenees.
[24] The nature of the impediment lives for history in the Jacobite toast which so grimly reflects the brutal passions of the time—"To the little gentleman in black velvet that works underground."