James was at Hounslow when the news of the verdict reached him, and as he rode from the camp he heard a great shout behind him. "What is that?" he asked. "It is nothing," was the reply; "only the soldiers are glad that the Bishops are acquitted!" "Do you call that nothing?" grumbled the king. The shout told him that he stood utterly alone in his realm. The peerage, the gentry, the bishops, the clergy, the universities, every lawyer, every trader, every farmer, stood aloof from him. And now his very soldiers forsook him. The most devoted Catholics pressed him to give way. But to give way was to reverse every act he had done since his accession and to change the whole nature of his government. All show of legal rule had disappeared. Sheriffs, mayors, magistrates, appointed by the Crown in defiance of a parliamentary statute, were no real officers in the eye of the law. Even if the Houses were summoned members returned by officers such as these could form no legal Parliament. Hardly a Minister of the Crown or a Privy Councillor exercised any lawful authority. James had brought things to such a pass that the restoration of legal government meant the absolute reversal of every act he had done. But he was in no mood to reverse his acts. His temper was only spurred to a more dogged obstinacy by danger and remonstrance. "I will lose all," he said to the Spanish ambassador who counselled moderation; "I will lose all or win all." He broke up the camp at Hounslow and dispersed its troops in distant cantonments. He dismissed the two judges who had favoured the acquittal of the Bishops. He ordered the chancellor of each diocese to report the names of the clergy who had not read the Declaration of Indulgence. But his will broke fruitlessly against a sullen resistance which met him on every side. Not a chancellor made a return to the Commissioners, and the Commissioners were cowed into inaction by the temper of the nation. When the judges who had displayed their servility to the Crown went on circuit the gentry refused to meet them. A yet fiercer irritation was kindled by the king's resolve to supply the place of the English troops whose temper proved unserviceable for his purposes by drafts from the Catholic army which Tyrconnell had raised in Ireland. Even the Roman Catholic peers at the Council-table protested against this measure; and six officers in a single regiment laid down their commissions rather than enrol the Irish recruits among their men. The ballad of "Lillibullero," a scurrilous attack on the Irish recruits, was sung from one end of England to the other.
The Invitation.
Wide however as the disaffection undoubtedly was the position of James seemed fairly secure. He counted on the aid of France. His army, whatever signs of discontent it might show, was still a formidable force of twenty thousand men. Scotland, disheartened by the failure of Argyle's rising, could give no such help as it gave to the Long Parliament. Ireland on the other hand was ready to throw a Catholic army in the king's support on the western coast. It was doubtful too if in England itself disaffection would turn into actual revolt. The Bloody Assize had left its terror on the Whigs. The Tories and Churchmen, angered as they were, were still hampered by their horror of rebellion and their doctrine of non-resistance. Above all the eyes of the nation rested on William and Mary. James was past middle age, and a few years must bring a Protestant successor and restore the reign of law. But in the midst of the struggle with the Church it was announced that the Queen was again with child. The news was received with general unbelief, for five years had passed since the last pregnancy of Mary of Modena, and the unbelief passed into a general expectation of some imposture as men watched the joy of the Catholics and their confident prophecies that the child would be a boy. But, truth or imposture, it was plain that the appearance of a Prince of Wales must bring on a crisis. If the child turned out a boy, and as was certain was brought up a Catholic, the highest Tory had to resolve at last whether the tyranny under which England lay should go on for ever. The hesitation of the country was at an end. Danby, loyal above all to the Church and firm in his hatred of subservience to France, answered for the Tories. Compton answered for the High Churchmen, goaded at last into rebellion by the Declaration of Indulgence. The Earl of Devonshire, the Lord Cavendish of the Exclusion struggle, answered for the Nonconformists, who were satisfied with William's promise to procure them toleration, as well as for the general body of the Whigs. The announcement of the boy's birth on the 10th of June was followed ten days after by a formal invitation to William to intervene in arms for the restoration of English liberty and the protection of the Protestant religion. The invitation was signed by Danby, Devonshire, and Compton, the representatives of the great parties whose long fight was hushed at last by a common danger, by two recent converts from the Catholic faith, the Earl of Shrewsbury and Lord Lumley, by Edward the cousin of Lord Russell, and by Henry the brother of Algernon Sidney. It was carried to the Hague by Herbert, the most popular of English seamen, who had been deprived of his command for a refusal to vote against the Test.
James and France.
The Invitation called on the Prince of Orange to land with an army strong enough to justify those who signed it in rising in arms. An outbreak of revolt was in fact inevitable, and either its success or defeat must be equally fatal to William should he refuse to put himself at its head. If the rebels were victorious, their resentment at his desertion of their cause in the hour of need would make Mary's succession impossible and probably bring about the establishment of a Commonwealth. On the other hand the victory of the king would not only ruin English freedom and English Protestantism, but fling the whole weight of England in the contest for the liberties of Europe which was now about to open into the scale of France. From the opening of 1688 the signs of a mutual understanding between the English Court and the French had been unmistakeable. James had declared himself on the side of Lewis in the negotiations with the Empire which followed on the Treaty of Augsburg. He had backed Sweden in its threats of war against the Dutch. At the instigation of France he had recalled the English and Scotch troops in the service of the States. He had received supplies from Lewis to send an English fleet to the coast of Holland; and was at this moment supporting at Rome the French side in the quarrel over the Electorate of Cologne, a quarrel which rendered war inevitable. It was certain therefore that success at home would secure James's aid to France in the struggle abroad.
William's Acceptance.
It was this above all which decided the action of the Prince, for the ruling passion in William's heart was the longing to free Europe from the supremacy of France. It was this too which made his enterprise possible, for nothing but a sense of their own danger would have forced his opponents in Holland itself to assent to his expedition. Their assent however once gained, William strained all his resources as Admiral and Captain-General to gather a fleet and a sufficient force under pretext of defence against the English fleet which now appeared in the Channel, while Brandenburg promised to supply the place of the Dutch forces during their absence in England by lending the States nine thousand men. As soon as the news of these preparations reached England noble after noble made his way to the Hague. The Earl of Shrewsbury brought £2000 towards the expenses of the expedition. Edward Russell, the representative of the Whig Earl of Bedford, was followed by the representatives of great Tory houses, by the sons of the Marquis of Winchester, of Lord Danby, of Lord Peterborough, and by Lord Macclesfield, a well-known High Churchman. At home the Earls of Danby and Devonshire prepared silently with Lord Lumley for a rising in the North. In spite of the profound secrecy with which all was conducted, the keen instinct of Sunderland, who had stooped to purchase continuance in office at the price of a secret apostasy to Catholicism, detected the preparations of William; and the sense that his master's ruin was at hand encouraged him to tell every secret of James on the promise of a pardon for the crimes to which he had lent himself. James alone remained stubborn and insensate as of old. He had no fear of a revolt unaided by the Prince of Orange, and he believed that the threat of a French attack on Holland itself would render William's departure impossible. At the opening of September indeed Lewis declared himself aware of the meaning of the Dutch armaments and warned the States that he should look on an attack upon James as a war upon himself.
James gives way.
Fortunately for William so open an announcement of the union between England and France suited ill with the plans of James. He still looked forward to the coming Parliament, and the knowledge of a league with France was certain to make any Parliament reluctant to admit Catholics to a share in political life. James therefore roughly disavowed the act of Lewis, and William was able to continue his preparations. But even had no such disavowal come the threat of Lewis would have remained an empty one. In spite of the counsel of Louvois he looked on an invasion of Holland as likely to serve English interests rather than French and resolved to open the war by a campaign on the Rhine. In September his troops marched eastward, and the Dutch at once felt themselves secure. The States-General gave their public sanction to William's project, and the armament he had prepared gathered rapidly in the Scheldt. The news of war and of the diversion of the French forces to Germany no sooner reached England than the king passed from obstinacy to panic. By drafts from Scotland and Ireland he had mustered forty thousand men, but the temper of the troops robbed him of all trust in them. Help from France was now out of the question. There was nothing for it but to fall back, as Sunderland had for some time been advising him to fall back, on the older policy of a union with the Tory party and the party of the Church; and to win assent for his plans from the coming Parliament by an abandonment of his recent acts. But the haste and completeness with which James reversed his whole course forbade any belief in his sincerity. He personally appealed for support to the Bishops. He dissolved the Ecclesiastical Commission. He replaced the magistrates he had driven from office. He restored their franchises to the towns. The Chancellor carried back the Charter of London in state into the City. The Bishop of Winchester was sent to replace the expelled Fellows of Magdalen. Catholic chapels and Jesuit schools were ordered to be closed.
William's Landing.