The result of her deliberations was a determination to influence the Princess to surrender what she could scarcely deem her rights, in favour of William and Mary, during their separate lives; but with precedence to her, and to her children, to any issue which William might have by a second marriage, in case of the death of his Queen. And it might have been inferred that, for this important decision, the gratitude of the King and Queen would have been effectually secured to Lord and Lady Churchill, who had both shared in the good office. But such was not the result.
This obstacle to the settlement of the crown being removed, the Prince and Princess of Orange were declared King and Queen, in accordance with the votes severally of both Houses of Parliament, upon a motion of Lord Danby. The populace, who remembered how the crown had tottered on James’s head at the coronation, and who recalled the pleasantry of Henry Sidney, keeper of the robes, who kept it from falling off, remarking, as he replaced it, “This is not the first time that our family has supported the crown,”[[147]] were now startled by the circumstance, that the day of the proclamation of William and Mary was also that of the accession of the unfortunate James; and the assembled crowds pointed at the statue of the unhappy monarch, with its face turned to the river, and its back to the palace, in bitter and sarcastic allusion.[[148]]
This event, which took place on the 6th of February, 1689, was, in six days afterwards, succeeded by the arrival of Queen Mary in London. Her singular, and, to a sensitive mind, truly painful situation, raised many conjectures with respect to her probable conduct. But whether, as it is asserted by some, she was warned by William to control her emotions, for his sake, upon her first appearance as a sovereign, the deposer and successor of her father; or whether her extraordinary levity proceeded from the heartlessness of a common-place character, it is difficult to decide. Political feuds may, indeed, sufficiently, though not satisfactorily, account for hardness of heart, and an oblivion of the dearest ties; and Mary’s pliant mind, and warped, but not unaffectionate temper, had been long worked upon, during a series of intrigues, of which her father was the object, and her husband the first agitator.
Whatever was the nature of her feelings, the cold and light deportment which she manifested on her entrance into her palace at Whitehall, the last refuge of her deposed and deserted father, gave considerable offence. Mary, it was thought, might have remembered, with compassion, the unfortunate, and, as far as grave offences were concerned, the innocent Queen, her stepmother, Mary of Modena, who had last inhabited the very apartments into which she was now herself conducted. She might have bestowed one passing serious thought upon that unhappy fugitive, who only two months previously, had left that house privately, with her infant son, the Prince of Wales, then five months old, carried by his nurse; one faithful friend, the Count de Lauzun, the sole companion of her flight. From this palace she had crossed the Thames, in the darkness of night, unsheltered, in an open boat, the wind, and rain, and swell of the river, conspiring to detain and terrify her, and to add to the gloom of her situation. On this palace, standing for shelter under the walls of an old church in Lambeth, had the wretched Queen fixed her eyes, streaming with tears, and searching, with fruitless tenderness, for the flitting shadow of her husband across the lighted window; whilst, starting at every sound which came from that direction, the desolate mother sometimes suspended her anxious gaze, to look upon her sleeping infant,[[149]] unconscious of her miseries, unconscious of the hope deferred, the disappointment, the perplexities which awaited him in his future career, as the penalty to be paid for royal birth.
But if Mary, disliking her stepmother, of whom, indeed, she knew but little, and regarding her as a bigot whose pernicious influence drove James, in the opinion of the Princess Anne, into greater outrages upon justice than he would otherwise have inflicted; if Mary, thus prejudiced, gave not one reflection to her stepmother, nor doubted the reality of her imputed brother’s relationship, she might yet have bestowed some few natural tears upon the fate of her father. Many there were who could have told her, had her heart yearned for such or for any intelligence, how James, when his Queen and his son were gone, shuddered at the solitude of his palace; how, in every look from others, he read danger and dark design; how he dreaded alike kindness or distance; and when informed by Lord Halifax (who, to induce him to leave England, deceived him) that William meditated his death, he broke out into the bitter exclamation, “that small was the distance between the prisons of princes and their graves”: a saying which he quoted of his father, and which now appeared to his affrighted mind prophetic of his own destiny. The indecision, the confusion of mind, the helplessness of her father, might rise to Mary’s mind, as she entered the hall whence he had been accustomed to issue. The feebleness of majesty without power might occur to her; the hapless King ordering out guards, no longer his, to fight the Prince, and affecting to summon a council which would no longer meet at his command, might have induced some reflections on her own account. But Mary, unmoved, entered the palace, passed through those rooms which scarcely two months before had been opened, the day after James’s flight, to receive his expected levee, and walked unconcerned towards her bedchamber, and into the suite of apartments prepared for her. It was, on this occasion, the duty of Lady Churchill to attend her Majesty, and her account of the Queen’s conduct is too lively, has too much an air of truth, to be omitted.
“I was one of those,” says the Duchess, “who had the honour to wait upon her (the Queen) to her own apartment. She ran about, looking into every closet and conveniency, and turning up the quilts upon the bed, as people do when they come into an inn, and with no other sort of concern in her appearance but such as they express; a behaviour which, though at that time I was extremely caressed by her, I thought very strange and unbecoming. For whatever necessity there was for deposing King James, he was still her father, who had been so lately driven from that chamber, and from that bed; and if she felt no tenderness, I thought she should at least have looked grave, or even pensively sad, at so melancholy a reverse of his fortune. But I kept these thoughts in my own breast, not imparting them even to my mistress, to whom I could say anything with all the freedom imaginable.”[[150]]
Two days after the arrival of Mary, both Houses of Parliament went in state to bestow the crown upon her husband and on her. The King, having accepted the gift for himself, and for his consort, was proclaimed with Mary, King and Queen, “in the very hall of that palace,” says Dalrymple, “from which the father had been driven; and at the gate of which her grandfather had, by some of those who now placed the crown on her head, and by the fathers of others, been brought to the block.”[[151]] On the following day Lord Churchill was sworn a member of the privy council, and a lord of the bedchamber; and two days before the coronation he was created Earl of Marlborough,—a title which he was supposed to have taken in consequence of a connexion on his mother’s side with the family of Ley, Earls of Marlborough, extinct ten years previously. But this famous designation did neither augur unbroken prosperity to the receiver, nor insure to the donor, King William, the devoted fidelity of Marlborough; and the reign upon which we are now entering may be considered to have been, in most respects, a season of anxiety to the spirits, and of depression to the affairs, of Lord Marlborough, and of her who participated in every emotion of his heart.
CHAPTER V.
State of the British Court—Character of William.
The English court now presented a strange and gloomy contrast to those seasons of reckless dissipation which had characterised it in the two preceding reigns.