May find no room for a remaining doubt.—P. [293].
In these lines, and the following, where the poet, with indecent freedom, compares the suspicions entertained of a spurious birth to the devil's doubts concerning our Saviour's godhead, he alludes to those circumstances of publicity, which one would have supposed might have rendered the birth of the prince indisputable. It took place at ten o'clock in the morning; and eighteen privy counsellors, besides a number of ladies, were present at the delivery. But the party violence of the period was so extravagant, as to receive and circulate a variety of reports, inconsistent with each other, and agreeing only in the general conclusion, that the child was an imposition upon the nation. The reasoning of the Bishop of Salisbury, on this point, is admirably summed up by Smollet.
"On the 10th of June, 1688, the queen was suddenly seized with labour-pains, and delivered of a son, who was baptized by the name of James, and declared Prince of Wales. All the Catholics and friends of James were transported with the most extravagant joy at the birth of this child; while great part of the nation consoled themselves with the notion, that it was altogether supposititious. They carefully collected a variety of circumstances, upon which this conjecture was founded; and though they were inconsistent, contradictory, and inconclusive, the inference was so agreeable to the views and passions of the people, that it made an impression which, in all probability, will never be totally effaced. Dr Burnet, who seems to have been at uncommon pains to establish this belief, and to have consulted all the Whig nurses in England upon the subject, first pretends to demonstrate, that the queen was not with child; secondly, that she was with child, but miscarried; thirdly, that a child was brought into the queen's apartment in a warming-pan; fourthly, that there was no child at all in the room; fifthly, that the queen actually bore a child, but it died that same day; sixthly, that it had the fits, of which it died at Richmond; therefore, the Chevalier de St George must be the fruit of four different impostures."
Five months to discord and debate were given.—P. [295].
During the five months preceding the birth of the Chevalier de St George, James was wholly engaged by those feuds and dissensions which tended to render irreparable the breach between him and his subjects. The arbitrary attacks upon the privileges of Magdalen College, and of the Charter-House, fell nearly within this period. Above all, the petition of the seven bishops against reading the Declaration of Indulgence, their imprisonment, their memorable trial and acquittal, had all taken place since the month of April; and it is well known to what a state of violent opposition the nation had been urged by a train of arbitrary acts of violence, so imprudently commenced, and perversely insisted in. Dryden, like other men of sense, probably began to foresee the consequences of so violent and general irritation; and expresses himself in moderate and soothing language, both as to the past and future. Nothing is therefore dropt which can offend the church of England. Perhaps they may have been spared by the royal command; for it seems, as is hinted by a letter from Halifax to the Prince of Orange, that, not finding his expectations answered by the dissenters, whom he had so greatly favoured of late, James entertained thoughts of returning to his old friends, the High-churchmen; "but the truth is," his lordship adds, "the Papists have of late been so hard and fierce upon them, that the very species of those formerly mistaking men is destroyed; they have so broken that loom in pieces, that they cannot now set it up again to work upon it."—Dalrymple's Memoirs. Appendix to Book V.
——When the sudden blast,
The face of heaven, and our young sun, o'ercast,