"Well, doctor, what do you think of predestination now?"
CHAPTER XVI
NEWS FROM ENGLAND
The weeks that followed, so full of great events, passions, movements, and suspenses in Britain, passed with an almost uneventful calm in The Hague, where the Princess, round whose rights half the turmoil had arisen, and the wives of many eminent men engaged in, or affected by, the rapid changing of events, waited for the packets that brought the English letters, and lived in between their coming in a kind of retired anxiety supported by prayers and saddened by tears.
The Elector of Brandenburg and his wife came on a visit to Mary, and she entertained them as best she might with her heart aching with other thoughts. They went, and she was alone again and free to go to and from her chapel and wait for her letters and wonder and dread the future through the cold winter days in the quiet town, which seemed, as she was, to be waiting with suspended breath.
The progress of affairs in England came brokenly and from various sources, letters arrived slowly, at irregular intervals, delayed by ice-blocked rivers, storms at sea, detained messengers. At first the news was of the Prince's progress to Exeter and the cold reception of that city, the long delay of his friends to join him, the mere wondering apathy of the country-people, who made no movement one way or another, save to make a spectacle of the passing of this foreign army and to petition the Prince that he would, when he could, remove the hearth tax.
The next news was that when the Prince was near resolved to return home the spirited English gentry began to rise in his favour, the Lord Wharton and the Lord Colchester marched from Oxford to join him, and my Lord Lovelace broke through the militia, and though arrested once and taken to Gloucester, yet forced out of prison, and with the help of some young gentlemen who had taken up arms for the Prince, drove all the Papists out of that city, and so joined His Highness at Exeter; soon after the Lord Delamere came from Nottingham and took Chester, which, under a Papist, Lord Molineux, held out for the King, and my Lord Danby rose up in the North, and with other persons of quality seized on the city of York and turned out the Papists and clapt up the Mayor, while Colonel Copley, with the aid of some seamen, seized Hull and the powder magazine, and the Earl of Bath took Plymouth from the Earl of Huntingdon and declared for the Prince, as did all the seaport towns in Cornwall.
At which, the news ran, the King went to join his army at Salisbury, having sent the Prince of Wales to Portsmouth, but afterwards returned to Windsor upon an alarm of the approach of M. de Schomberg, and so to London, where he found his favourite, Lord Churchill, his son-in-law, Prince George, and his daughter, Anne, had fled to the Prince of Orange, attended by the suspended Bishop of London, who had signed the invitation to His Highness. Then followed news of the skirmish at Wincanton, where some of the Prince's guards under Lieutenant Campbell were put to the rout by the King's men, commanded by that gallant Irishman, Patrick Sarsfield; soon the fleet, growing cold in the service of His Majesty, sent up an address for a free parliament and the army deserted by the regiment.
Now the King took out of the Tower Sir Bevil Skelton, late ambassador to Versailles, cast there for the move he had concerted with M. D'Avaux, which if truly followed had saved the King, as he now came to say, and so made Sir Bevil governor of the Tower and Master of the Keys of the Kingdom.
After which he went to Hungerford in great despair of mind, where, advised by the Queen and the Jesuits, he sent overtures to the Prince, offering to defer all grievances to the calling of a free parliament, the writs for which the Lord Chancellor Jefferies had already been bid to issue.