So there came assistance of French troops for James, a landing in Catholic Ireland, and a march, leading to the famous Battle of the Boyne, wherein, in 1690, James and his Catholics suffered a defeat, at the hands of William and his Protestants, which meant the end in England of the Stuarts, the Jacobite kings. That battle further meant the firm establishment as King of England, Scotland, and Ireland of this ruler of Holland who was married to Mary, the daughter of the last Jacobite king. It was his own father-in-law that William succeeded on the throne, and the father-in-law still lived.

He lived, and not only was made welcome at the Court of France, but also had many faithful to his cause in England. But William ruled wisely, and his hold on power grew steadily. The Dutch guards that he had brought with him from Holland gave offence to his English subjects. He had the sound sense to remove the offence and send the guards back to Holland. The very idea that the king should have what we call "a standing army" was still new and strange to Englishmen. They had been accustomed to armies raised for special wars, but not until rather lately to soldiers maintained under arms in time of peace. The idea of a foreign regiment in their midst was naturally not agreeable.

It was in the last year of the century that William sent back his Dutch guards, and surely gained, rather than lost, in security on the throne by doing so. He died three years later. His wife had died before him, and he was succeeded by yet another daughter of James II., "the good Queen Anne," wisest of the Stuart monarchs.

Settlement of America

All through the troubles of that last half-century Englishmen in increasing numbers sought refuge from them in America where land, fertile land, appeared to be unlimited for all who chose to take it and could keep it against the attacks of the Red Indians whom they drove out. Spain was predominant in Mexico and in South America, and in North America she claimed and insecurely held a land of indefinite boundaries which she called Florida. But it was a land of woods and prairies of unknown extent whither the Spanish conquerors did not go. The very name Florida has a Spanish sound; and in the same way Louisiana, with its capital city of New Orleans, tells the story of French settlement. It was farther north, however, along the shores of that great St. Lawrence estuary running up into Canada, that English and French fell, as we have seen already, to fighting for the new lands. From Virginia southwards, the settlement that Sir Walter Raleigh had so named in honour of his queen, nearly up to the St. Lawrence, were vast lands along the eastern sea-board which the English explored without meeting enemies other than the Indians.

From time to time there were hideous massacres of the white men; but the Indians were too poorly armed and generally too disunited to make serious opposition to the settlers. There was a settlement of the Dutch, at an early date, a little southward of the present New York; and farther south again a settlement of the Swedes; but both became incorporated in the larger numbers of the English.

Just as the name Florida speaks of Spain, and Louisiana of the Grand Monarque of France, so we find other States on the eastern sea-board with names that have a story to tell us of our own monarchs. For there are, besides Elizabeth's Virginia. Mary's Maryland, and the Carolinas of the Charleses; later, Georgia, of the Georges. The titles, however, do not indicate the dates of the settlement of the various States which bear them.

It is well to have the atlas open at the map of North America when we discuss these colonies. We shall see thereon a name Pennsylvania, which tells us of the pilgrims led out by the Quaker, Penn. Maryland, we should note, which is called after the Catholic queen, was resorted to largely by the Catholics. New England was the centre of Puritan migration. There was a religious reason, in the first instance, for many of the settlements in America. We have seen before how glad men were to be quit of those of an alien religion from their midst; and also how glad those aliens were to go. Montreal, on its first settlement, in 1542, was a Catholic establishment. The Jesuits were pressing out to the farthest West in this quarter of the globe, converting the Red Indians, as they also pressed eastward about the same time to India, China, and to Japan. But Montreal had to become a military and an industrial settlement too. All the early settlers, whatever interpretation they put on the Bible, had to carry the sword, as well as the Cross, with them. They had, in truth, scant semblance of right in their complaint that the Indians were always ready to turn and massacre them. Were they not expelling the Indians, who had done them no manner of harm, out of their own homes?

The French, in these early days, explored and claimed possession of an immense territory in North America. We may trace it all along both sides of the gulf and the river of St. Lawrence, and westward to the Great Lakes. Southward we may trace it along wide lands watered by the Ohio, and down the Mississippi until we come out at New Orleans. Mobile, at the river's mouth, was even earlier settled by the French.

All this, from the Great Lakes southward, lay westward and inland of the English settlement along the coast. But the limits of the territories claimed were not very clearly drawn; at first it was only by a fort here and there, and not by any continuous settlement, that possession of the vast lands was claimed and partially made good by the white men. The upper Mississippi was explored before the end of the century, and some settlement had been made of the Canadian north-west.