i 3
109666
JAMES THE SECOND
THE SECOND
By
Hilaire Belloc
* Preserve tfie MLastery of the Sea 9
(James's instructions to his heir as King of England)
J. B. Lippincott Company
192,8
IKT
DEDICATED TO
R. B. CUNNINGHAME-GRAHAM
PREFACE
THIS essay is not a biography, still less a chronicle.
It is an attempt to portray a character of capital
interest to English and European History, of which our
academic historians give but a caricature. Were it either
a biography or a chronicle, a great mass of detail would
have been added, with which the book has no concern.
Were it a biography, it would have been essential to
describe all the main facts of the subject's life; were it
a chronicle, it would have had to include a conspectus of
the world contemporary with James at home and abroad
and to give the sequence of events in a regular and dated
order. Neither of. these tasks appears in the pages that
follow. Thus, /James was conspicuous and successful
as a British Aomiral in two great naval engagements
the most important of those fought by the fleet which
he had created, and the chief actions of the century.
I have given the story of one only, as typical of his
attitude in command. He was attacked and betrayed
by a good score of men in the small clique of great
fortunes all allied by marriage which destroyed the
ancient monarchy of the English. I have described
but two, as typical of their set, Shaftesbury and his
brother-in-law Sunderland. He presided over, and in
great part initiated, the making ~6f the" British Navy
his chief work. That in itself would be material for a
volume. I have given it but a chapter, and in that chapter
have emphasized but two main points: his new corps of
professional officers j his new idea of a National Fleet
independent of pressed merchant auxiliaries. But these
are sufficient to show his creative role iii the setting up of
that service. The characters and careers of his numerous
vii
PREFACE
mistresses would be essential to a life: I have concerned
myself only with the very difficult problem of his own
emotions in such amours, for that is the point of character.
I have thus deliberately selected, because it is surely
by such selection of special points in connexion with
his temperament, achievement and failures that he can
be best presented: and, I think, in no other way. But
that he should be presented truly is of the first value in
understanding England during and sincd his day. The
Revolution of 1688 completed the work of the Refor-
mation. From it dates the Modern Aristocratic England
which is nearly all the nineteenth century (and our own)
can conceive of as English. To know the man whose
failure produced that Revolution is a thing the nine-
teenth century (and our own) has hardly attempted. It
is high time the attempt should be made. I trust that
in doing so I have exaggerated neither his vice, nor
as is the temptation in face of our academic text-books
his virtues: neither his capacities, which were great
and remarkable, nor his deficiencies which were startlingly
pronounced and, combined with certain high moral quali-
ties, led to his ruin.
HILAIRE BELLOC
King's Land
Shipley
Horsham
CONTENTS
PREFACE Vil
I THE CHARACTER 13
II THE CIRCUMSTANCE 30
III THE FIRST EXILE 58
IV ADMIRALTY 8 1
V THE CONVERSION I08
VI THE CONFLICT 139
VII THE ORDEAL 175
VIII DERRY AND THE BOYNE 227
IX THE END 268
NOTE I ON THE NUMERICAL SITUATION OF
CATHOLICISM IN ENGLAND DURING THE
ATTEMPT AT TOLERATION UNDER JAMES II 28O
NOTE II CONSULTATION OF THE COUNTIES
AND BOROUGHS, LATE 1687 287
NOTE III ON THE BATTLE OF THE BOYNE 293
INDEX 295
FRONTISPIECE
PORTRAIT OF JAMES II, AS DUKE OF YORK
Reproduced from the painting by John Greenhill, in
the Dulwich College Picture Gallery, by kind per-
mission of the Governors.
JAMES THE SECOND
THE CHARACTER
Westport
TAMES n of England and Ireland, VII of Scotland, last
J legitimate king of the three kingdoms and maker of
-_, 5 the^gritih Navy, was born on Wednesday, the I2th
October, 1633, in St. James's Palace of Westminster.
His. mother, the Bourbon Princess, daughter of Henry IV
of France, when she heard it was a boy, ordered her choir
to sing the Magnificat. He died, very finely, an exile in
the palace of St. Germans, near Paris, on Friday, the i6th
September, 1701.
The interval, a life of sixty-eight years, was filled with
the strangest accidents that ever have befallen a man of
such standing. His early childhood was coloured by the
splendour of a court still apparently powerful and in all
externals glorious. Before he was 9 years old he was in
the camp of Edge Hill, the first battle of the rebellion*
which destroyed that external glory and apparent power.
At 13 he is a prisoner of the rebels: at 14 an exile, after
a flight for life so perilous and moving as to leave upon
him a permanent impress of adventure and of the sea..
At 15 he hears that his father, for whom he had estab-
lished a boy's worship increased by absence, has been
murdered.
Thenceforward, through all the formative years, he
suffered the increasing embarrassment and humiliations
of poverty and of those whose cause seems lost: yet it
is dear that under such pressure he was annealed. He
dignified his entry into young manhood by a vigorous <
profession of arms: he immediately and justly acquired
13
JAMES THE SECOND
a name for conspicuous courage, and (what is rarer in
a young officer from superiors grown old in war) aptitude
in action, quick and sane judgment upon a situation,
firmness and judgment in command.
In such a career the time which was made for soldiers
would have raised him quickly to eminence. He grows
mature in the practice of his trade and his career is open.
But, suddenly, in his twenty-seventh year the whole
scene changes. -He finds himself restored, his brother
upon the throne, and he, during the active middle of his
life, for twenty-five years, the next heir to the crown: the
centre of that close grapple between the strongly rising
power of the rich and the failing monarchy^His adver-
saries ~zndrth~Ting>s have f ortheir~dlief instrument a
widespread hatred of the Catholic Church, especially
among the greatest merchants of London and their train,
"fesuch a juncture he accepts Catholicism openly, risking
all. None the less, after political adventures not less
violent than those earlier physical ones of exile and battle,
he accedes upon his brother's death. The forces, now
nearly triumphant, which are determined upon the de-
struction of kingship, watch him opposed. A challenger
by nature, he accepts the challenge. He rules deter-
minedly and by authority: the King of these three king-
doms, independent, conspicuous in Europe.
-" But organized wealth and universal cunning are far
too strong for him. He is lied to on every side, a man
easily deceived 5 he is deserted in battle by his dependants
who owed him most gratitude, by his own children, by
all. His energy attempts the hopeless task of recovery.
It fails 5 and he passes a dozen years, the ageing remainder
of so tragic a life, in yet another impoverished exile,
illuminated by a religious doctrine long established in
better days and growing in intensity as he approaches
14
THE CHARACTER
death j and death he meets with a holiness and a renuncia-
tion that should exalt his memory.
What kind of man was it that passed through this
doubly repeated ordeal of splendour and poverty, of
power and dishonour? That had such courage, such energy,
such tenacity, such a misapprehension of the forces about
him and of the social scheme? That saw so clearly the
true proportion of things, never sacrificing the eternal
to the temporal, yet that saw men's baseness so little and
could never grasp its effect? That was so amative of
women, so excellent a leader in combat, so capable a
master of ships and yet raised no devotion in his kind
dying almost alone?
There is the question set to any who would examine that
strange life. Its answer is not easy. I will attempt it
Two qualities are the bases of James's character:
strength and limitation. From each proceeds a whole series
of attributes which appear in his every action as in his
voluminous writing. From his strength or in association
with it are discovered his prolonged physical vigour,
his courage, his sincerity, his tenacity, his industry: from
his limitation, his failure to comprehend his fellows, his
mis judgment of every situation, and his lack of diversity.
He had very little humour, no wit. He imputed to other
men his own emotions.. This all tend to doj but James
imputed them wholly and could conceive of no others. He
foresaw no probable consequence of one man's ambitions,
fears and appetites: still less the combination of such in
many and various men. He never shrank from an encoun-
ter, and so long as its elements were plain he grasped
them at once. But let them be tortuous or concealed, and
he missed them altogether.
On this last account a false judgment has often been
passed upon his intelligence. He has even been called dull
15
JAMES THE SECOND
a term quite inapplicable to one who organized closely
and exceptionally well, who followed at once a train of
reasoning, and who worked with rapidity and decision.
He was not dull 5 but he was cut off. His mind was
isolated, and to a whole group of appreciations impervious.
It was the lively who most condemned him in this, the
experienced in the comedy of this world who were most
impatient with him. What woman in that generation was
most vivacious, keen to feel all and transmit it? Madame
de Sevigne. And what was her conclusion passed, it is;
true, when the worst blows had fallen upon his facul-
ties? Bien du cowage, mats urn esprit commw?
Complexity did not bewilder him, rather he missed it.
altogether} slyness he despised as an evil thing, and there
he was right j but he neglected it as an element in public
men, and there he was immensely wrong. He could scheme
with things but not against schemers. He could make a
plan better than most men and would and did pursue it
with ^ more assiduity than anyj but to modify it with
occasion, to maintain a general direction through ceaseless
concession and recovery, to reach a goal by steering right
and left alternately, he could not. He did not know
that such an art existed. He thought in straight lines.
The convention of fiction and the stage associates
restriction and isolation in a man with a lack of generosity
and even a lack of valour: certainly with a lack of adven-
ture. Upon this f acile association of ideas was drawn the
caricature of James which did duty for his portrait in the
nineteenth century. But the convention is a convention
only. It is suitable for making up the simple puppet of a
play or the Hero or Villain of a novel. It has no relation
to real life. How many have we not known who were
circumscribed in judgment, defective in their handling of
inferiors, insistent out of season, yet at the same time
open-handed and always ready for a risk?
16
THE CHARACTER
It was so with this man. His generosity played some
part in his ruin; it played a constant and conspicuous part
in his common action. On the most critical occasion of
his reign when he was compelled to break with his brother-
in-law he added to the Treasury grants with which he
loaded that disappointed politician large monies of his
own. He gave the discomfited Hyde an income which
directly lessened his own sources of revenue, and he gave
it in a moment when every hundred helped to decide the
mortal struggle between kingship and plutocracy. He did
the same by Clarendon. He did the same by those who
had befriended him in the dereliction of his youth.
But the most touching examples of this virtue in a
mind so deprived of communion, are to be found in his
last exile, when he was harassed with a perpetual poverty
and yet took almost daily of his little to support those
whose loyalty had followed him.
An accompaniment of this generosity was a personal
indifference to money exceptional in any age, in that age
unique. If we had no record of James save in his pros-
perity, this disdain of avarice might only be inferred from
all the rest we know of him. As heir to the throne he
was amply endowed by the Crown; as a victorious admiral,
by Parliament, But both as king, in age, and in youth as
the young prince of a lost cause that is, in the two situa-
tions where best his attitude towards money may be
tested we have example after example. When he would
serve in the army as a boy he borrows on terms from a
chance lender just what is necessary for his equipment
and no more what he can and does easily repay. He will
not long remain under obligation to Turenne when that
great captain, in his admiration of dash and gallantry in
action, put his purse at the lad's disposal. Throughout
the period of the Commonwealth the young man was thus
hampered for money and in grievous need of it. But this
17
JAMES THE SECOND
embarrassment was not inevitable j it was largely of his
own choice; he refused a rich marriage because he thought
it an unworthy one. He refused the second offer of an
advance. Such an attitude towards money marks all his
unfortunate, harassed, soldierly youth in exile.
When, twenty-five years later, he became king, this
fine but perilous detachment reappeared under another
form: one which contributed to his fall. Money was
now a necessary instrument of reign. Had he overcome
his scruples in regard to it he could have strengthened
himself continuously. He refused. He claimed his own
as, for instance, in the arrears of his brother's payments
from Louis XIV but of further subsidy for himself he
would have none. Yet it might have saved him. It is
true that another strong motive here appeared, one which
always mastered him: his sense of dignity and honour:
yet another motive, his sense of kingship: yet another, his
pride in England. But had he put money first (as did all
his enemies without exception, as did indeed all the leaders
of that generation) he would have accepted his cousin's
aid. He refused it.
He might further have sold places, honours, policies.
He might have confiscated largely: heaven knows he had
excuse enough! He might have coined colonial concessions.
He might have raised great commercial loans. He did
none of these things, and in disdaining them he was,
perhaps, to blame. With a sufficiency of funds he could
have bribed most successfully the ardent defenders of
freedom and religion. They took whatever they could
get from whomever would provide, and what Louis did,
James could have done. It might have saved him.
Nor was this attitude towards money the f acile careless-
ness of a spendthrift. His instinct was all for provision
at the other end: by saving. He maintained the neces-
sary parade of a great court and was generous to his
18
THE CHARACTER
wife. But lie looked closely into expenditure. It went
with his zeal for work, his constant writing, hour by
hour, his long experience of accounts at the Admiralty:
above all it went with his grasp of detail. Yet saving
was not what his situation needed. He got no credit
for the increased sobriety of the court, the careful conduct
of all public affairs. Why should he? His opponents
were not prepared to give him praise for anything. They
were prepared to destroy him, and especially, first, to
lower him in the public mind. Against that form of attack
display and lavishness would have been a better policy.
Display and lavishness are also a consequence of the con-
tempt for gold but not of the sort that James felt.
The lack of discipline which makes a squanderer was
odious to him.
I have spoken of his courage. How often he gave
example of it in action is notorious. It was native to him
to do so. What needs more emphasis is his sense of adven-
ture. He had but rare occasions after his youth to indulge
it in arms, but it never left him. He was for ever trying
his chance, in battle, in policy. Risk attracted him and
excited his initiative. We shall see it in his first flight from
England, in his military service with France and Spain, in
the two famous sea battles where he commanded and
where it is less noticed in his second exile. Both in his
desperate attempt to recover Ireland against all odds,
and (still more) in the determined effort, against all
advice, to neglect Ireland for England as a road to the
recovery of his throne, he was always for the desperate
throw. There are many examples in history of a young
prince perpetually challenging. These are some few of an
old man preserving this fire into his last years. But rare or
absent are examples of what James did: returning to the
attack again, and yet again, after failure apparently deci-
sive, and in the very last years of life. It may have been
19
JAMES THE SECOND
attempting the impossible, and certainly his temperament
led him into that through its errors in judgment more
than through his valour. Yet valour also was required;
and he showed it plentifully; ill-calculated, out of place
as in his mere resistance to forces clearly his superiors;
but also well exercised and in its right posture as in his
admirable confrontation of abandonment and death.
One effect of his limitations was of a sort that to-day,
all would praise exaggeratedly: of a sort which in his
day seemed odd. He was filled with an intense Nation-
alism.
To a heart of wide and diverse sympathies such patriot-
ism would, among royalties, have been impossible. The
Kings and Princes were by definition we might say
of every blood in Europe. They were all cousins. Their
faint lines of demarcation lay along differences of
religion; not of race or provincial tradition which they
could not feel, nor of language which they used either
indifferently or in the common medium of French. The
Kings and Princes of the seventeenth century stood for
national divisions, were at the head of them, represented
them. But they had not, and could not have, the intense
and circumscribed feelings of local patroitism which were
already growing so strong in the middle classes and were
to become, a century later, a religion: the religion for
which lately so many millions have died. Nor is this
true only of the Royalties. It is true also, in a lesser
degree, of the Nobles. The great landed families of
Europe were also, in the seventeenth century, largely cos-
mopolitan, in speech, in culture, in experience: and their
example reacted upon the lesser squires below them,
though these, in France and England especially, were
already (and had been for two generations) more French
and English than European.
Yet James in such a world was not like those of the
20
THE CHARACTER
summits to which he belonged by birth and every experi-
ence. He was as national as the smallest gentleman.
His Englishry was intense in the eyes o contemporaries,
absurd. He made no effort to speak or spell French
correctly as did any of his nobility you might choose.
He was remarked for a strong English accent which he
did nothing to correct or excuse: which, were not the
man so sincere and un-theatrical, one might suspect of
being deliberately exaggerated. His pride lent added sub-
stance to this emotion of nationalism. He would be king,
as was his due, but King of England and, only because
King of England, King also of Scotland which he little
loved, of Ireland a country which even his religion did
not help him to understand and which he refused, as
long as he had the power, to relieve from the spoliation
of an English conquest. Before he was 20, serving on
the opposing side, he boasted to the foreigners among
whom he found himself of the English soldiers' prowess
on the Great Dune at Dunkirk. They were in the service
of the man who had murdered his dear father: they were
of the army that tyrannized over England and kept the
King, his brother, from his rightful throne. Yet, because
they were Englishmen it stirred his blood to see them
roaring up the steep sand and turning out the Spaniards
headlong. When, on the same occasion, he sees the Spanish
boats easily beaten off, he writes with a schoolboy enthusi-
asm of his countrymen's courage, though it was directed
against himself. A long lifetime later, when he was al-
ready old, near 60, he could not restrain himself from
exultation at the sight of British sailors boarding the
French ships below the Norman cliffs whence he was
watching the fight which condemned himself to final
defeat.
His father's blood was Scotch and Danish, his mother's
of Navarre and Italy, yet so he was: violently English
21
JAMES THE SECOND
and it was the isolation of his mind that helped him
so to be. Ideas, especially emotional ideas, took strong
gnarled root in him. He could not communicate them
to others. The entry to his mind from others was also
closed- The more did he cherish what ideas he held
within, and, among such ideas, England: not the abstrac-
tion but the thing itself: the people, the fleet, the charac-
ter, the tongue: and when so many turned against him
he could find no explanation save that, in some strange
way, they had been "poisoned."
James's character stands out the more vividly from its
contrast with that of his elder brother. They loved
each other, but there was constant friction between them
on account of that deep divergence.
Charles had despaired. James was incapable of de-
spair. Charles consoled the bitterness of dependence and
of a ruined monarchy with diversion, almost with debauch,
in which he could half forget that he was enchained by
the great fortunes of his masters. James knew not what
consolation meant. He did not need it 5 he did not seek
it 5 and as for the now final subservience of the Crown
to the rich, he misapprehended it altogether. He had
no conception of how low the last flicker of royalty had
fallen or of how high the wealthy families had risen.
He rejected that new and permanent reality in politics
as a passing irritant to be soon overcome by active and
firm opposition, when he should be king.
Charles- was impatient of intellectual concentration,
He was so by nature perhaps but also, and more, by habit,
because he was persuaded (quite rightly) that no amount
of application could win the battle: that the majesty of
English monarchy was already long lost: therefore, though
an active man, Charles thought it waste of effort to
work. James was industrious beyond all common measure.
He worked morning, noon and night. He planned,
22
THE CHARACTER
executed, wrote, went hither and thither superintending
his subordinates in whatever office he might hold, and
himself with his own eyes and hand taking the chief
part in its activities.
Charles had a very wide knowledge of men and there-
fore a complete contempt for them. James had no knowl-
edge of men, thought them all like himself, or else (very
rarely) crude villains. Most men nearly all intriguers
he trusted.
Charles was bored by adventures. James sought them.
To Charles hardship in life, cramped quarters aboard
ship, the chance lodging, the camp, were mighty dis-
agreeable: matters to undertake when it was necessary,
but otherwise to avoid. They suited James. He used them
continually. He returned to them with appetite. The end
before Charles which he achieved was to maintain the
name at least and the trappings of a king by dexterity
and the sacrifice of kingship. The end of James in
which he failed was to be king indeed: and he attempted
it by assault.
-- Charles, partly from that despair of his, partly from
weakness, most of all from his great object of holding
the name of king, let men whom he knew to be innocent
go to the scaffold, victims to the rich oligarchy of Russells
and Coopers and their hired mob: he signed the warrants
for the murder of such men as Stafford and Coleman
and even jested on it to save appearances. In James such
action is inconceivable.
Charles knew early that the Catholic Church is the
sole beacon in this night if beacon there be. But Charles
postponed his declaration of loyalty to the Faith till there
was nothing left to lose by it 5 he admitted his Lord and
his God not immediately at the touching of the wounds
but tardily when he himself had no more wounds to-
fear. James had disliked the Church, had rejected it,
JAMES THE SECOND
came to it late by a process of close reasoning. Having
once discovered that reality, he openly proclaimed his
adhesion to it under such conditions of sacrifice and peril
as weighed upon no other man of his time.
Charles, despising men, and enslaved to women only
by their looks and his weakness, praised or noticed all,
was open to all, avoided offence, studied to say things
that pleased and was glad to raise an air of ease about
him. Therefore when he died the baby face of one
mistress, the dolPs eyes of another, were confused with
tears and his insignificant neglected wife swooned with
grief. To James his fellow beings were but a furniture.
He knew them externally, not otherwise. He said not a
true word to please, let alone a false one. He studied
no mind. And therefore all his life he was alone and
only at the very end did, perhaps, his last little child
watch him with affection, and his wife, when he had gone,
grieve. Charles was a man who let loose the stirrup, was
spent and at large. James was a man trammelled, walled.
Had he enjoyed the sentiment of love, however briefly,
that, and perhaps that alone, would have unbound his
soul. His brother had had a touch of it, very early, with
the depraved Lucy Walters. He retained for her sake a
particular fondness for the wretched Monmouth in whom
he may have seen, in fugitive moments, some gesture or
glance of hers. But James we may be certain had no
such good fortune. He had strong passions, a man of
vigour who preserved his activity nearly to the end of his
life. He gratified them with women of his own kind, con-
temptuous of prettiness, almost indifferent to feature,
moved by power of mind and body in a mate, but quite
abnormally deprived of tenderness in- that relation.
Steeped in the idea of royalty, following the conception
of his day that royalty might be free from all restraint
in the matter of women, he lived at large to the hurt of
24
THE CHARACTER
his own soul and to the huge scandal of j]8jLQ. ;He was
never under a woman's control, yet he paid deference to
particular minds notably to that of his first wife for
the strength of their vision and for a certain faculty of
comradeship about them. But love he had not known and
never knew, even in the slight fashion which Charles
could remember, occasionally sought to find again in later
years, and never found. Love is perhaps an experience less
common in life than in print. At any rate, James missed
it: and, in the lack of it, something arid in his soul con-
tinued unrelieved to the end.
He felt deeply for his children j especially for Anne,
who betrayed him. Injiis dying years he would smile his
restrained smile when looking on the last, the little girl
born in the moment of his final defeat, and call her The
Solace.'
Other strong affections he had not. But he had most
powerful devotions, the strongest of which was to his
public duty as subaltern, as admiral, as head of a depart-
ment, as king. That was with him a passion, into which
entered and in which converged all his characteristics:
his pride, his sincerity, his nervousness, his sense of
inevitable loneliness. His duty as king to rulej his duty
to master too powerful nobles whom it was his to govern;
his duty to maintain the integrity and independence of
the England which had been 'entrusted to him, neither
serving a French nor a Dutch interest and keeping her
crown undiminished; his duty to preserve the laws intact,
never to punish unjustly, never to force a conscience,
never to interfere with the course of justice 5 his duty
to leave even his most immediate and pressing personal
interests which might be of life and death to the com-
mon processes of the National Courts and their
machinery: above everything, to break the unconstitu-
tional and unjust denial of it by lawyers and prelates;
25
JAMES THE SECOND
his duty to grant toleration to all in the distracted religious
chaos of his time these were his obsessing ideals. All
such men hare this clutch on their task to be done. The
chivalric name for it was 'devoir,' and the modern is
'doing one's job.' The simple violent appetite for it in
tenacious men does not change with the word. It produces
in all ages and places an inflexible attitude, and thus
destroys those devoted to it.
This rigidity in Duty was seen, pushed to a very high
degree, in the matter of the Faith. As a young man he
had held fast to the Establishment. The father whom
he worshipped had died for it. The very fact that his
Catholic mother pestered him with her religious demands,
enhanced his determination. It was the Duty of an
English Prince to hold communion with the English
Church. It was a Duty also to the Family in which he
had so deep a pride, and thus we shall see that when
Henrietta Maria made a similar attempt upon his younger
brother, the Duke of Gloucester, he vehemently defended
the boy from that attack, and insisted, successfully, upon
his resisting it. There was here no calculation, no policy,
nor even any discussion of principle. He was filled with
a conviction of duty to an Institution the Church of
England not to a Creed.
He was in the thirties before the conception of Religion
as a body of doctrine, a fully revealed truth, occurred to
him. It worked within him unaided, apparently, by any
external influence save that of one very insufficient book *
written agamst the conclusion to which he was led.
The thing has happened before. The Catholic Church
appeals at once when it is seen, and it may be first dis-
covered in any one of a thousand ways: from a hostile
1 That of Peter Heylin, a man of his father's generation and promoted
in the Church by Charles I. He was sub-dean of Westminster and died
in 1662. Of his many books the one in question is that upon the Reforma-
tion, written in support of the Church of England.
26
THE CHARACTER
book as much as from a friendly one. Possibly his first
wife, Anne Hyde, whose vigorous intellect had come to
the same end, influenced his last determination in the
matter; for the example of her decision always affected
him. He concluded the Catholic Church to be the sole
authoritative voice on earth, and thenceforward his in-
tegrity, his immovable resolve, are the most remarkable
political features of his age. He passed, before his recon-
ciliation with the Church was completed, through one
phase which is very common, and not only excusable
but, until a full experience of the religion is obtained,
almost inevitable. He asked whether a man might not
believe and profess and yet, for good motives of policy,
conceal his faith from others and leave it a private and
secret affair acting as we do when we know that what
we love must be odious to our companions. He was told
the doctrine of the Church in the matter that the Faith
cannot be so treated, but, once accepted, must be pro-
claimed. He immediately obeyed and from that moment
to his death he kept unswerving to the strict path, during
the years when it led him first to* peril and conflict, then
to disgrace and loss of his dearest occupation, then to the
destruction of his inheritance and of his son's, then to
exile and a dereliction ending only in death.
Through all these successive trials he not only stood
firm against surrender but on no single occasion con-
templated the least compromise or by a word would
modify the impression made. It is like a rod of steel
running through thirty years.
With such unswerving moral strength was allied that
abnormal limitation in him of political judgment. The
wisdom of Machiavelli, the essential truth that a prince
is powerful in proportion to his ability in choosing his
servants, was never better shown. James chose them ill.
He could not divine their betrayals, he missed their mo-
27
JAMES THE SECOND
tives, he judged their talents wrongly and still more
wrongly their loyalty. He allowed the wretched Sunder-
land to put Petre into the Privy Council as his buffer.
He was duped into that grave blunder not by weakness
but by its very opposite, by determination coupled with
an extreme ignorance of men and of their baseness.
He thought that an order was sufficient that the agent
would be but an instrument to obey. He thought so of
Churchill, of all who held commissions from him, of his
magistrates. He was blind to the plot laid against him in
the matter of the Seven Bishops. He believed those
Bishops, later, in the very crisis of his fate, when they
protested their devotion three of them in active treason
at the time! He even believed Compton of London, the
ringleader of the conspiracy. But the chief, the cardinal
errors on which all the rest turned were these: first, his
conception that the love of Justice was a common appetite
upon which a ruler can rely in his subordinates: secondly,
his conception that gratitude affects the mass of men,
even the rich.
For the rest every betrayal and falsehood bewildered
him. Each came with a new shock. He learnt from none,
He could not believe that his officers would desert him.
He could not believe that his daughters would abandon
him, usurp his throne. He actually accepted the solemn
word of William of Orange! His enemies at least, those
of posterity find something ridiculous in such naivete.
He should have known better. The trusting man is a fool.
But something deeper appears in all this than matter for
scorn. A dupe may be noble.
There you may see the character upon which the tragedy
fell and upon which the world surrounding it was to
work what it did.
His tall figure, his firm, advancing step, his large
28
THE CHARACTER
determined features, his quick eye, all proclaimed his
energy and will: his sensitive mouth that sad reserve
which nature, not its own choice, imposed upon this
uncompanioned and uncompanionable soul. A man of
this kind would, under most conditions, have carried out
his life and its intentions. He would have conducted
commerce, led troops or fulfilled high duties in a civil
service without sympathy but with success. He would
have achieved.
He was condemned (under such drawbacks) to con-
tend as Heir and then as King with Circumstance which
necessarily overpowered him: with an inherited opposi-
tion of which none could have done more than postpone
the effects, but of which he accelerated the victory. He
went under at once, where another would also have suc-
cumbed at last, under the pressure of that Circumstance,
of the world around him as three lifetimes of England
had made it.
What was that Circumstance? What was the nature
of the opposition which destroyed the kings? I will ex-
amine it before turning to the episodes which explain
James's life, because it is only after a first grasping of the
way in which English kingship had been undermined that
we can understand its fall.
II
THE CIRCUMSTANCE
*nr*HE character I have described was set a certain task,
JL For twenty-five years as heir apparent and chief
figure of Council and Parliament, for four years as king,
James had set before him the task of restoring the Royal
power and through it imposing toleration upon a realm
torn by religious quarrel. The structure of society rendered
that task impossible.
The Social System in and with which James was com-
pelled to work from 1660 to 1688, had become, in the
course of a couple of lifetimes, finally and permanently
governed no longer by the king, but by the rich. It was
organized under their control and functioned through
their individual power as magistrates, their now confirmed
power in the great corporations the Lawyers, the Church,
the Universities, the city of London, the two Houses of
Parliament. A Ruling Class had come into being: a prod-
uct of the Reformation in this land. The Crown had long
been ruined. Its lands had been filched from it steadily,
since the death of Henry VIII, by the great lords and
squires. Its income had disappeared. Its remnant of ap-
parent authority depended upon the wealthy class from
whom alone it could look for revenue voted grudgingly
in Parliament and who were rapidly subjecting the
Populace and destroying the support a Populace can give
to its Kings. Yet James's object, on which he pondered
as heir, which he would bring into effect when he should
reign, was to restore Popular Monarchy, or, as he would
have said, to insist on its rights and duties j especially its
duty of protecting minorities and enforcing justice. He
30
THE CIRCUMSTANCE
regarded these ancient rights as still existing in their full
vigour, and the corresponding duties therefore capable of
being performed.
It was an illusion. Popular Monarchy was fallen long
ago and could not be revived. In his attempt to revive
it James was dealing with material quite intractable. He
wholly failed.
His failure was due to the fact that of Popular Mon-
archy, the bare ash remained: the thin and crumbling
shell. It had begun to fail a century since. It was sunk
into its last agony before James was born. Its power was
dead while he was yet a child.
In his failure the supplanting power which he en-
countered was Parliament, the organ of the wealth which
now governed.
That newly organized power of the wealthy, already
supplanting the Crown, was further able to use against
James the now widespread hostility to the Catholic
Church, of which he was an unmoved adherent. Tolera-
tion to include the various dissenting sects he might have
achieved. Toleration for Catholics he could not.
We have, therefore, in judging the Circumstance under
which James II acted, already as heir but especially later,
as King, to seize these three factors.
(1) The main one: the passing of Popular Monarchy
and the causes of its having been thus supplanted by an
organized oligarchy of wealthy men.
(2) The nature of the Parliament which was the in-
strument of these wealthy men in their attack on the
Crown.
(3) The position of Catholicism in England between
1660 and 1688.
M
Popular Monarchy had been from time immemorial,
until the upheaval of the Reformation, the natural gov-
JAMES THE SECOND
ernment of the English and indeed of most Christian
peoples.
From the remote Dark Ages, from the Roman mon-
archy itself, right down to the Reformation the King
Stood for all men. He was the natural protector of the
weak against the strong, the curber of the rich, and above
all the maintainer of custom which was law. It was his
to check the encroachment of powerful men upon the
customary rights which maintained the mass of the people
secure. His courts ascertained custom by local inquiry,
enforced it, and, where it had been violated, restored it.
He was the jealous guardian of public property which,
in those times, formed a very large part of the total
resources of society. The King had possession (in general,
and subject to some local exceptions) of minerals. His was
the control of navigable waterways and chief roads, with
their tolls. He, personally and directly, governed. He
levied war and made peace. He summoned those occa-
sional groups of private ships, for transport or for fight-
ing on the sea, which might be necessary for the island in
a foreign war. (No royal navy existed till the last years
of the Middle Ages, and even then the proportion of
'King's Ships' was very small. The chief work was done,
right up till Charles's establishment of Ship money, by
merchant or even large fishing vessels ordered for special
temporary service by royal authority.) The King also
bestowed all major posts in the State. He had always
occasionally consulted the Peers some fifty laymen and
rather more abbots and bishops and, in the last, of the
Middle Ages, had dealt frequently with 'Parliaments'
great councils occasionally and fitfully summoned to
register important legislation, to support or incorporate
a new reign, but especially to provide special and abnormal
revenue in some crisis.
More important as a power of government than the
32
THE CIRCUMSTANCE
Peers and (of course) indefinitely more powerful than
the occasional and formal 'Parliament' was the King's
Council a small body assembled round one table. When
the King was a minor it at once assumed control. Orders
from the King in that private session were of particular
force. It had prestige of the highest order, and by its
small size and the continual conversation between its
members it had, in spite of their rivalries, homogeneity.
The essential thing to remember with regard to this
Council, is that it was essentially the Kings. It had no
existence save by the King's will: the group of relatives
whom he naturally communicated with and of some other
few whose judgment he trusted or whose affection he
relied on. It was his council, and the idea that he must call
to it men whom he either did not trust or who were per-
sonally distasteful to him, or who persisted in opposing
his will, would have seemed not only monstrous to the
King himself, but quite as monstrous to any of his subjects.
The Judges under the old popular monarchy were no
more than the King's agents: appointed by him, and re-
movable (a rare necessity) by him: it was theirs to declare
Custom, and particularly to watch and punish sedition,
and a judge would, of course, be dismissed who used this
power in opposition to the King.
When we add that to the King reverted sequestrated
estates and land without heirsj that the King alone could
warrant death or reprieve j that all administration and
its officers, the local administrators, the coinage, the mo-
nopolies of gunpowder, artillery, the Press, were in his
hands, and that all normal revenue sufficient for public
purposes was drawn from his own lands and dues, you
may see what a mighty thing kingship had for so long
meant to the English when the Reformation began to
destroy it.
This great office of English kingship was hereditary.
33
JAMES THE SECOND
It belonged of right to the blood royal, to descendants
of the King's body; first ta males in order of seniority,
then to females. A king was king through blood and
in no other fashion, and right of blood in kingship meant
what it meant in private estates. It was a personal in-
heritance.
^Because the King was the mystical embodiment of the
whole community an old sacramental form was kept up
of appealing at a coronation for the approval of those
present} but of election there was no conception, still less
of making a king by power of the rich men in Parlia-
ment. It was not a mechanical office 'created.' It was
of God. It was in the nature of things.
I have used in connexion with it the words 'mystical'
and 'sacramental. 5 They are vividly accurate. They
exactly connote the attitude of the English mind towards
the King of England while kingship yet was. The King
was consecrated. His coronation was not a festival, still
less a political function, least of all an appointment, or
installation. It was an act of communion with that Divine
Authority which sustains the world. He was anointed
King. And on his anointment there passed into him the
whole nation with which afterwards he was to be identi-
fied. He became one with them: not only their spokesman
or head or even father, but their very selves.
This conception of Popular Kingship has disappeared
in England. But those who cannot imagine it or, because
they have not experienced it, neglect its force in the past,
are ignorant of their own blood. Their ancestral past is
to them a foreign country.
It may be asked why a description of this sort is needed
in connexion with James II and the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury, when all the force of this ancient idea had disap-
peared and when realities wholly contradicted it. I have
already said that James's effort to restore or (as he
34
THE CIRCUMSTANCE
regarded it) enforce the rights of a king were at issue
with the whole structure of his time, even though that
effort was directed to the establishment or continued
support of something very much less than the old king-
ship. Why then bring that dead thing before the reader?
Because, though the thing had been stricken since 1540
and was, by 1660, long dead, its form remained. It is
nearly always so with institutions at their decline and
disappearance. Their form survives and even deceives,
like a sort of very active ghost, long after their substance
has dissolved into air. So the Senatorial power in Imperial
Rome under the real power of the Commander-in-Chief ,
the Emperor. So our Parliamentarians to-day under the
real rule of finance. The old titles are still used, the words
and phrases are as vigorous as ever, even the functions are
carried on their mechanism at least as before. But the
motive power has changed and proceeds from a new centre.
So it was with the age-long Popular Monarchy of
England. More than a century before the Restoration
of Charles II it had itself introduced that by which it
sickened. In that century 1560 to 1660 it died. What
killed it?
To answer this question we must appredate the essential
point that the Popular Monarchy did not tax.
It was endowed. The King received as of right and
custom, as his own, a certain (very large) income mainly
from land and dues on which he supported all public
work as well as his private household.
That was the original, the normal, idea of public
revenue under Popular Monarchy. The King had a huge
private income and out of that must 'live of his own.'
Out of that he must not only clothe and feed his Court
and raise and repair the buildings he lived in, but also
anything else he chose to erect and endow, an abbey or
35
JAMES THE SECOND
school, his fortifications, his hired troops, his public
services and all that belonged to his office.
But to this system there could not but arise exceptions,
and they increased as Society developed. Often in war
always when war was on a large scale sometimes for
other unusual necessities, the King had to get an extra
amount: something beyond his regular income. He had
to be 'helped' as the phrase went, to have an 'aid.'
But these sudden strainings on private men's resources,
however infrequent, were tolerable only as exceptional
demands, in supplement of the regular royal income,
which remained the normal support of public expense.
At the Reformation say from 1540 onwards two
changes appeared which ruined the old system and with
it the independence and therefore the power of the King.
The first, and least important, was the beginning of a
great and continuous fall in the purchasing power of
money. The second, and far the greatest of overwhelm-
ing effect in the story of England was the loot of
religious wealth by the gentry: that is, by the well-to-do
class which made up Parliament, Lords and Commons.
The change in the value of money could have been met
by corresponding changes in the rents and dues of the
King. Tide Crown, remaining strong, could have reckoned
its rents and profits in terms of the prices, as did foreign
monarchs and as every private landlord and merchant
did. What prevented the English Crown from doing this
was the new power of the gentry: the power of their new
wealth based on their sudden acquirement of ecclesiastical
property.
The Crown had raised up against itself, by its own
act in confiscating Church wealth, a formidable rival the
gentry. The loot of religion began with the seizure of
the lesser monasteries, in 1536, by King Henry VIII.
Then came all the monastic land (1540), its treasures,
36
THE CIRCUMSTANCE
buildings, stocks, the plate and jewels of the altar and
of shrines, chantries, hospitals, schools, guilds, large slices
out of episcopal endowments, sees left empty and even
the fabric of churches (for instance: the cloisters of St.
Paul's seized by Somerset). All this torrent of wealth was
deflected from the King's treasury to the pockets of the
old landed gentry and of a crowd of new adventurers
at the Court. Henry VIII, who let loose the avalanche,
profited nothing. Partly from weakness, partly from
riotous expenditure, partly from the need of support
(every single county member of the Reformation Parlia-
ment shared in the spoil), partly because the real revenue
sank alarmingly decade by decade and necessitated forced
sales, the great mass of the stolen property went to the
landlords old and new, and their allies and connexions,
the wealthier merchants especially of London.
The worst of the rush was over in a dozen years; but
the process went on in the shape of big bites out of
ecclesiastical endowments during all the Tudor time to
the end of the sixteenth century.
As a parallel effect the Royal Domain began to dis-
appear. Small landlords and great continually and^ cease-
lessly encroached upon the Forests, turning public into
private land for their enrichment. 1 Royal manors were
exchanged to disadvantage or bought on scandalous terms
of purchase 2 or given away.
Meanwhile, with the new gold pouring in from Spanish
America all over Europe the purchasing value of money
1 It was one main cause of Charles I's fall that he tried desperately to
check the abuse. One of the counts against him is that he inquired strictly
into the thefts of Forest land and made the culprits pay. Cromwell,' for
instance once the King was got rid of filled his pockets with the "con-
veyance" of Hyde Park. Luckily for London, Charles II made the bene-
ficiaries disgorge j Lambert, his successor in command, got the royal dower
lands.
2 A common one is 10 (nominal) years' purchase. The market rate
was 20.
37
JAMES THE SECOND
went down and down. When Henry VIII was seizing
Westminster Abbey, Glastonbury and the rest, half an
ounce o gold was a year's subsistence for a labourer.
When Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham a
hundred years later three ounces would hardly purchase
the same necessaries. To-day some eighteen ounces would
be needed. But while the cost to the King's government
of labour, materials, provisions, ships, buildings, was thus
being multiplied by six between the Reformation and
Charles I, the old revenue was being received in the old
fixed customary terms and at the same time its sources
in land were being rapidly filched away by the gentry.
By the time of the Restoration, in 1660, the Crown
was utterly ruined. What had once been exceptional
irregular doles, agreed to by Parliament to supplement
the much larger permanent and fixed annual revenue of
the King, had become a regular necessary supply. The
'King's own' could not supply one-fifth at the utmost,
soon not one-tenth, even in time of peace, of the expense
of public services.
Meanwhile a powerful political effect accompanied this
economic one. The new wealth of the gentry had made
them overwhelmingly great against the poor shadow of
kingship. It had also made them greater than they had
been against the mass of Englishmen. There was still
a peasantry, but it was a peasantry impoverished and it
did not grow. Above it a considerable class of sub-
stantial small owners survived perhaps a fifth of the
agricultural population (then the bulk of the people).
But the squires quite overshadowed them, and in the
gradual ascent to the very large territorial f ortunes each
superior rank had a disproportionate power over that
below it. The King of the seventeenth century could
not here in England, as he could elsewhere, appeal to
38
THE CIRCUMSTANCE
the populace against the rich; for by the rich the populace
was already controlled.
Kingship then, in 1660, was no more 5 its resources
had disappeared. Its mechanical functions remained and
their exercise might deceive one wearing the crown into
believing himself strong. He himself still named all
ministers, chose his own councillors, appointed to every
executive office, declared policy, commissioned all com-
manders of all forces, and their offices, chose magistrates
and judges, made peace and war. But to work the
machine, to provide for its activity, he depended on the
subsidies allowed him by the new .olig^chy, already soon
to become the ruling aristocracy of England and to make
an end of all but the simulacrum of Monarchy.
On this account the King of that pitiful 'restoration'
was far from what the .poorer mass of Englishmen still
believed him to be: their monarch and protector, and
master of their more immediate masters. The gentry took
away his right to collect dues from them, and put in its
place a tax levied on the mass of Englishmen during their
good pleasure. They confiscated to their own advantage
further masses of peasant land and the King could not
prevent them. He had rather become the dependant in
action of a few great men, to whom he had always to
give way in main matters of legislation, and complete sub-
servience to whom, even in foreign policy, he only escaped
by perpetually manoeuvring, by' playing one millionaire
against another and subtly working on the special base-
ness of each; one's avarice, another's spite, another's terror
of exposure, another's vices. To such ignominy had the
last fragment of Kingship fallen. Yet only at such a price
could even that fragment be maintained by Charles II
and because Charles's brother James would not pay that
price, or knew not how to arrange it, he fell.
Now the overt instrument whereby the dominant
39
JAMES THE SECOND
wealthy class controlled the King was Parliament. It be-
hoves us next, in discovering what world that was against
which James, Duke of York, and later King, struggled in
vain, to try and answer the question: What was Parlia-
ment in that mid-lifetime of his, 1660-1688 the day of
his action, the space between his twenty-seventh and his
fifty-fifth year?
M
We talk, and talk rightly, throughout the English
seventeenth century, of <A conflict between King and
Parliament.' It is a conflict in which Parliament is con-
stantly in the ascendant and the Crown rapidly falling.
The process is continuous. First there is the growing
mutter of this thing, 'Parliament,' against the Crown
before the end of Elizabeth's reign. The voice becomes
much louder under James I. Parliament begins to assume
a place at the King's side, and on a capital occasion the
Petition of Right in 1628 it imposes its will upon his son
Charles I. It takes the whole stage. The King is already
so frightened that he dare not summon it. He attempts
for many years to suppress it. When at last he is com-
pelled to let it out of its lair it presses him back, yielding,
from one position to another, orders him to put to death
Strafford, his most loyal defender against its aggressions,
then makes war on himself, captures him, and kills him.
By that time, 1649 twenty-one years after its first
open victory in the Petition of Right Parliament is
clearly become the chief instrument in the realm for
affirming the power of propertied men over their former
master the King, and, after the confusion of eleven years'
military government, its power reappears stronger than
ever.
Throughout the reigns of the murdered man's two
children, Charles and James, it fills the first place in r
40
THE CIRCUMSTANCE
English affairs. Parliament though still doubtfully leav-
ing the mere machinery of government in the King's hands
is used by the new power of wealth to control that
machinery and, the King. Charles II, for years cannot
move without the leave and support of its chief members.
He admits their right. He submits. Yet even so they re-
main ready to strike. For a very few years Charles con-
trived at the end to act freely without the incubus of
Parliament. The system could not have lasted. James for
a much briefer period attempted so to act and wholly
failed. Parliament was master.
Such had been the growth of Parliament as a lever
wherewith to overset the national government common
to all, and substitute for it the government of money.
But what was it? Parliament, in terms of flesh and
blood, meant (mainly) the great landowners ^and the
wealthy commercial families of the towns with whom they
were intermarried, and with whom they formed that
plutocratic class which was ousting the Crown $ but it
meant more than that, otherwise we should not talk of
that class as* 'using Parliament' for its own en4s, or of
Parliament's being the 'instrument' of that class. A body
of men do not use themselves as an instrument. They use
something other. The victory of Parliament over the
Crown meant on its largest lines the real victory of a
growing plutocracy (soon to be an aristocracy) over that
popular monarchy which truly represented the whole
people of England: but Parliament was not identical
with the plutocracy.
Parliament consisted in two assemblies, one^called the
House of Lords, the other the House of Commons.
(The names and forms survive.)
The House of Lords was a growing body of some 80
to 140 men, nearly all of them immensely wealthy, but
also of good lineage. Hardly any but had, by this time,
41
JAMES THE SECOND
three generations of large landownership behind him;
and large ownership of land meant a considerable popula-
tion of dependants, of tenants, and their labourers, small
subservient freeholders, servants and patronized writers,
clergymen and managers. The House of Lords was the
gentry in the most powerful expression of that class. With
these laymen sat the two archbishops and the bishops
twenty-six in number.
The House of Lords was the more important by far
of the two houses because it was far the wealthier; further,
it was of a size permitting corporate action, not unwieldy,
there were close connexions by marriage within this cor-
poration, and its members had great power in the country-
sides over the market towns and the smaller landowners.
From the House of Lords were taken nearly all those
who entered the King's Council. The royal princes sat
there, legitimate and illegitimate. It was the chamber
where the King's throne was (and still is but empty),
where he read his addresses and in which he himself
appeared, following debates.
The House of Commons had, however, a power of its
own, long claimed by custom, which turned on this: that
in it alone could subsidies in aid of the Crown be normally
originated and discussed. The Lords could negative such
proposals. They could not as a rule mould or decide
them.
Solemn laws, to be of permanent effect, had (by this
time) to be agreed upon by both houses and the Crown.
The proposals for them could originate in either house.
A decision for or against such proposals was arrived at in
either house by an absolute majority of those present and
had so been arrived at for a long time past. Further, the
Houses of Parliament had gradually arrogated to them-
selves the powers of courts of justice, and the Commons
42
THE CIRCUMSTANCE
S&Wssstt -* -*-* *-
^
s~
chant . bodKS of the towns, then Parliament uTder C
and James would have been identical with that
ft^Mtsss
C6ntur y~ that is ' f ^ng as it heH Sal
Now the House of Commons prior to :688 was more
ate " practice ' but not wh ^y "
o : was
in ^ at ^^ e " practice ' but not wh ^y "
m practice} and m theory not at all so. It was in this
of theory that Rvalue resided as a tool for fShi
e a '
..,~iT w 6W ,, micni OI ji n g lancl j^ f or cut _
the old monarchy. For the House of Commons
43
JAMES THE SECOND
was, in theory, representative o something. It was not
representative of the People of England, but it could
pretend to be representative of a certain fraction of the
People of England} and hence it was always possible for
those who used it to speak (with their tongues in their
cheeks) of the 'people,' the 'Country/ and for more
sincere men to claim, with justice, that its decisions had a
considerable and socially important body of opinion be-
hind them.
It was formed of two elements closely fused, (a)
Gentlemen called 'Knights of the Shire' (they were for
much the most part landed men, though sometimes rich
lawyers) sent up from the villages and countrysides, two
for each county; (b} Gentlemen, merchants, occasionally
lawyers, called 'Burgesses' and sent up from a great
number of towns and villages large and small called
'Boroughs.' These 'Boroughs' were originally an arbi-
trary list of towns decided by the Crown at its discretion:
at first on common-sense lines distinguishing the market
town from the village} later, under the Tudors, with a
good deal of 'packing' keeping back one small place and
putting in another to suit the Government. But the prin-
cipal towns were always included. By the time of the
Stuarts this list had crystallized, and though some places
in it were dwindled to hamlets or less they continued to
send Burgesses, while villages grown into small towns sent
none.
The counties were about 50 in number and sent 80
members. The boroughs averaged 200 in number, sending
some 400 members: the average number of members vot-
ing in a division varied from 250 to over 300.
'Election' to Parliament, in our modern sense of that
word, was rare at the Restoration, but became commoner
at its close. But even when there were opposing candidates
the number of those who could or would come to the
44
THE CIRCUMSTANCE
county centre to vote was small. But what did give the
gentry who were nominated (or nominated themselves)
for the counties some sort of moral support was the
theoretical right of any one owing land to the value of
2 a year to vote. Many of those below the gentry were
prosperous and felt the effects of taxation.
The number of these yeomen at the beginning of the
seventeenth century was large. It is probable that before
the Civil War a fourth or more of rural England was in
this class, if we count in the poorer owners. Later they
were less being eaten up by the gentry, and probably
in James's reign not a seventh. The other three-fourths
of rural Englishmen, labourers and those who leased land,
did not count.
As to the towns, there was an inextricable confusion,
and it is impossible to present any general scheme. The
greater number of Boroughs (some of them were now not
even hamlets, and a great number were but large villages)
returned to Parliament two members chosen by mayor
or corporation or by a couple of bailiffs sitting in a pub
for that purpose, or (in practice) by the local rich land-
owner. There were many and large exceptions. In some
towns even men who had no freehold in the place and
were only leaseholders could vote (when, at the very end
of the seventeenth century, voting became general) 5 but
in general the Burgesses, like the county members, were
simply important local people. It is not quite true to say
that the members of Commons appointed themselves,
though many did so} but it is true to say that they were
essentially a corporation of rich men, the 'taiP as it were
of the Lords, who held the really great fortunes of
5,000, 10,000 , and in one exception case even
20,000 a year. 1
1 The purchasing value of money in 1 660 was about six times what
it is to-day. The real wealth of the country per head was a good deal
45
JAMES THE SECOND
The average income of Members of the House of
Commons under Charles II was vaguely guessed (by
Temple a man of sound judgment) as being roughly
about 300 a year, say 2,000 a year in purchasing value
to-day and far more in social value.
Such was Parliament. It was not the 'nation* or c the
people.' It was a group of rich men, led by the very rich
but in touch with a much larger number say one-fifth
gradually lessening to one-seventh of the nation, includ-
ing all property owners: of whom a certain fraction actu-
ally voted. 2 It was, of course, no numerical reflection of
the English people. Only a small minority of these could
have anything to do with it, and only a small fraction of
that minority did actually have anything to do with it.
Four-fifths of its membership sat for boroughs. For
Agricultural England the vast majority of the people
sat less than a fifth of the House of Commons. A parlia-
mentary majority had no connexion with a popular
majority.
For a proper appreciation of the time it is essential to
remember that the bulk of men were not thinking in terms
of abstract political theory, but of concrete realities. They
saw on the one side a kingship centuries old, of which
the tradition was still lively in their minds; they saw on
the other a gathering of squires, lawyers and merchants
who had already largely usurped, who were trying wholly
to usurp, the place of that kingship. When popular ballads
ridiculed the 'Parliament 3 as 'Five Hundred Bangs,'
they represented the way in which the average man, count-
less than it is now, and the population only just over an eighth of what
it is now. So the social value of an income of, say, 10,000 a year was
far more than the same to-day multiplied by 6. It was not what 60,000
is to-day in England, it was more like (in social scale), what 150,000
or 200,000 is to-day.
2 For instance, in 1685 in the large and populous county of Essex some
3,000 odd voted say a twelfth or fifteenth of the adult men.
46
THE CIRCUMSTANCE
ing in all, rich and poor, enthusiast and indifferent, looked
at the affair. It was a struggle between the kind of gov-
ernment his fathers had always reverenced as legitimate
and a new kind of government with certainly no better
right. Only that new upstart kind of government could
speak for the religious mood of the majority at a time -
when the King himself and very many educated men
were contemptuous of that mood, at a time when James,
Duke of York, the man who was brother and heir to the
King, had declared his abandonment of that mood, and
his adhesion to its opponent.
Towards the end of the long struggle, those really
affected by the successes of the Parliament were much
fewer than they had been at the beginning. The victorious
rebellion of 1688 was the triumph of a small but very
wealthy privileged class which had already begun to
destroy the yeomen, and was soon to exclude from govern-
ment all outside its own body.
That small wealthy class had won the battle against
the king because it had been able to use Parliament as its
instrument, and because Parliament could pretend to some
warped and distorted connexion with the most important
minority of the nation the taxpayers.
But it could not have won by relying on Parliament
alone. Parliament was too manif estly a selfish, restricted
body to be safe in a frontal attack on the national crown.
It won by calling in a widely diffused force, one discovered
in all classes of the community, intense in less than a third
at most, but present in some degree through at least three-
quarters of the nation: dislike and dread of the Catholic
Church.
This was the agent which the Supplanters of Mon-
archy found ready to hand and used for their purpose, and
we must see how the Catholic Church stood in that Eng-
47
JAMES THE SECOND
land of 1660-88 if we are to understand why the throne
fell as early and as suddenly as it did,
ENGLISH CATHOLICISM
What was the position of Catholicism in England dur-
ing the reigns of the last Stuarts between 1660 and
1688?
That is the -fundamental question which must be
accurately answered if we are to understand the fortunes
of James II.
The answer will still appear paradoxical to many, and
to some fantastic. For the old official history is, though
demonstrably false, still strong 5 it is still compulsorily
imposed in the State schools 5 it is still taken for granted
in every Public School and University, in the universal
test of examinations, in the Press, in fiction, in everything.
Catholicism in the England of the Restoration and
during all those nearly thirty years between the Restora-
tion and the Revolution, held a position which may be
defined as follows:
( I ) It was numerically strong. Its professed adherents
were perhaps a seventh, certainly an eighth of the nation,
while those who in varying degrees sympathized with
or were at least not hostile to that important minority
cannot have come to less than as much again: perhaps
to more.
I leave to a note at the end of this volume the dis-
cussion of this truth. The details would interrupt the
reader if I were to print them here. It is enough to say
that every applicable test leads us to such an estimate.
The proportion of the great families (which means
also the proportion of the little worlds they governed,
and of their class in general) } the proportion of Catholic
THE CIRCUMSTANCE
officers, not a score of years earlier, in Charles's armies;
the proportion of Catholics noted in the question to
Magistrates (1687); the very large number of Catholics
who leave London in 1678" rather than make even a tem-
porary concealment of their religion all these converging
evidences point to the same figure: from an eighth to a
seventh of the population.
(2) Catholicism in England between 1660 and 1688
was a force upon the up-grade, though the slope was not
a steep one. There was a tendency, especially throughout
the governing class, to veer towards the Catholic side of
things, and in many individual instances to accept the
Faith openly.
(3) When Charles II was 21 and his brother James
1 8, all old people could remember an England in which
a Catholic habit of mind was still the national tradition
and mood of the England for which Shakespeare wrote
his plays as essentially Catholic in all their tone in
what they took for granted of man, his nature and his
faith as, say, Tennyson's poems are Protestant.
(4) Catholicism was thought even stronger than it
was. The turning-point had been the date of the Gun-
powder Plot, 1605. After that the anti-Catholic body in
England grew rapidly. But we must remember that men's
conceptions of society lie in the past; the middle-aged men
of 1660, though Catholicism in England had been weaken-
ing very rapidly indeed during the preceding half -cen-
tury, thought of it as more powerful than it really was in
that year.
(5) The anti-Catholic feeling was of many shades.
The national tone as a whole had become anti-Catholic
long before the Restoration of 1660. It was already
clearly anti-Catholic before 1625. But the degree in
which such moods affect different layers of a society differ
greatly. Save in moments of excitement there is a large
49
JAMES THE SECOND
section which is almost indifferent, though potentially
material for any sudden enthusiasm in their keener neigh-
bours. There is another section not indifferent, but much
more concerned with daily life than any ideal. Only a few
will anywhere devote themselves over considerable periods
of time to the active defence of what is the general mental
tone of a much larger number.
There is a section overlapping this last, and larger
than this last, which feels very strongly upon the matter
and forms a sort of reserve, as it were, which can be
mobilized in the cause before there has been time to
recruit the mass of the national material.
So it was with the England of the Restoration in 1680
and even of James IPs reign, 1685-8. The nation was
anti-Catholic j a very large minority of the nation was
pronouncedly anti-Catholic j a large minority, a third
according to contemporary evidence, felt strongly enough
to resist actively any movement towards Catholicism, and
within this minority was to be found a smaller but still
very large group which made their antagonism to the
Faith the chief business of their lives.
(6) The organized wealth of the country, the cor-
porations of the governing class, at a moment when wealth
had become the test of governing power, at a moment
when the great landlords were, eating up the yeomen, at
a moment when the body of gentry was replacing the
Crown as the source of government, was definitely, offi-
cially, permanently and with extreme tenacity, anti-
Catholic.
This last point is really the determining one. The
official Church, the Legal Corporations, the Universities,
the Town Councils, the Gentry in local government, what
was left of the London Guilds, were not only, like the
mass of Englishmen, now in the anti-Catholic tradition,
50
THE CIRCUMSTANCE
but were anti-Catholic in essence. The origins of their
new power all lay in the Reformation.
That, stated in general terms, seems to me the position
between 1660 and 1688.
But to appreciate the matter rightly we must look at
it from many other points of view. Catholicism was
stronger than its mere numbers might imply from the
fact that England had just been relieved of an exceedingly
unpopular Puritan despotism. The hatred of Puritanism
which filled most men led many to a lenient judgment
of what Puritans chiefly foamed against, though they
none the less believed it to be an irrational superstition.
Another social force, making in the same direction, was
the type of literature, the type of architecture, the type
of painting, which informed the time. The spirit of all
this proceeded in the main from the Catholic culture of
Europe. The effect of such things is both subtle and in-
direct, but it must be noted, for it is strong.
On the other hand, something much stronger was
making against Catholicism, and that was jealousy of the
power of France. That growing power struck every eyej
while the corresponding decline of Spain was not yet
grasped. Not only does the populace everywhere hate the
foreigner nearest to hand, nor was there only the con-
trast between Englishmen and Frenchmen, which had
developed rapidly since the Reformation there was also
the spectacle in France of a powerful popular monarchy,
the very contradiction of that aristocratic plutocracy which
was already the main character of the English State. By
every instinct, whether conscious in the form of direct
policy or only as a vague political mood, the English gen-
try dreaded the example of the completed kingship across
the Channel. Its triumph in the general civilization of
Europe would have been the destruction of their power,
their wealth, and, in fairness we must add, of their con-
JAMES THE SECOND
victionsj for they had by this time (most of them) already
persuaded themselves of what their descendants have
taken for granted for more than two hundred years, that
their rule over the mass of their poorer fellow country-
men is in the nature of things; something the negation
of which is unnatural and indecent.
In a very different fashion, of great weight also, was
the spectacle of Ireland, Ireland, it must be remembered,
was not yet ruined, though the process of ruining it had
begun. In population it was nothing like equal to Great
Britain, but it was probably at least a third (some said
rather over a quarter). Its shipping was still very con-
siderable, as was its commerce 5 and though the Irish had
been dispossessed of their land by a spoliation which has
no parallel in history, the Irish people in the mass were
Catholics. The falling away of the Irish social leaders
from Catholicism, though already considerable, was not
so universal as it was to become a lifetime and two life-
times later.
These forces combined made the opposition to Cath-
olicism a very strong, permanent and almost unchange-
able thing. The most that the old religion could have
done would have been to keep its position, with perhaps
some considerable increase of its numbers especially among
the educated, but not to have converted the mass of
Englishmen.
Supposing by an impossible hypothesis that the defeat
of James II had not taken place (a man fighting organized
wealth is always defeated), England would presumably
have been down to our own time a nation possessed of
a large Catholic minority, as is Holland 5 that minority
entering into the professions, the universities, the army,
but never determining the general spirit of the nation.
It might have had a considerable effect upon English
52
THE CIRCUMSTANCE
literature. It would, at any rate, have been a great and
permanent feature in the nation.
As it was, the Revolution produced an astonishing
change^ Immediately after it the considerable Catholic
body diminishes with startling rapidity. The children
forget their fathers' religion or abandon it. All the doubt-
ful or weak give up the struggle. By the time the genera-
tion of 1688 was dead, by the years which opened the
second half of the eighteenth century (when the last
Stuart effort failed), the numerial position of Catholics
in England had sunk to nothingness. They were barely
one in a hundred of the population and their weight
was far less than even such paltry numbers would sug-
gest. They appeared as rarities and in their social spirit
had largely merged into the Protestant world around
them.
It was not so in the critical years of the Restoration.
To-day the Catholic is, to most Englishmen, something
alien and the member of an insignificant body. Then he
represented a most powerful national tradition not long
overcome, very tenacious in all memories, as is our tradi-
tion of the old rural England of the early nineteenth
century. Any close acquaintance with the mid-seventeenth
century in England convinces the student both of the
presence of Catholidsm on all sides and of the ease with
which men passed from one group to the other. Lord
Carlisle, Cromwell's adherent, had been a Catholic. Fau-
conberg, Cromwell's own son-in-law, had been a Catholic.
John Milton's brother was a Catholic all his life. Lord
Bristol and a dozen of his sort became Catholic when it was
least easy. I shall have occasion later in these pages to show
how widely the Catholic Church was working on at least
the educated England of this time. I will here conclude
with only two examples but they are typical.
Take the case of Sir John Coventry. It is most illuxni-
53
JAMES THE SECOND
nating. Here was a man typical o the class which made up
Parliament; a squire by birth, Member for Evesham,
returned (by his family) to the Long Parliament thirty
years before Charles IPs return, serving as a Cavalier
(wherefore, after five years of membership, the Long
Parliament expelled him), given honours at Charles's,
accession, and yet acting soon after in opposition to the
King. He was fond of the bottle, and had wit. He was
also brave in the field and in private quarrel. He could
not resist the chance of making a very gross and insulting
jest against Charles l during the debate upon Playhouses.
Perhaps he was drunk when he made it. At any rate, Mon-
mouth and sundry others of the young bloods waylaid
him and slit his nose for it but he had it sewn up so
well that it hardly showed. Here is a man representative
of all manner of things in his time and of the class which
supplanted the monarchy: a man loving the rapier-play
and the cavalry swordmanship of the seventeenth century:
a boon companion and a challenger to arms: put into
Parliament as a matter of course by his relations because
they were the important family in his district. Does it
not make you understand the nature of the time to learn
that such a man after such adventures, for and against
the Crown, following such professions of arms and poli-
tics, and apparently a fairly typical example of his class
in the nation, left an ardent will recommending his soul
to the prayers of Our Lady; asking to be buried in the
Queen's Catholic Chapel in Somerset House; bequeath-
ing the greater part of his wealth to the Jesuits at St.
Omer? Of course the governing class and their lawyers
would not allow the will to stand. But does not the inci-
dent throw light upon what masses of men there were
1 He accused the King of those unnatural vices to which all Charles's
character was alien, but of which opinion accused the Prince of Orange,
his nephew, and his cousin, the brother of Louis XIV.
54
THE CIRCUMSTANCE
at that moment who had, in James's own famous words,
'still their religion to choose 3 ? And does it not show
how strong the old religious tradition could still prove
itself?
My other example, which is most illuminating, shall be
that of the Duchess of York herself, Anne Hyde, James's
first wife. The reader will later hear some appreciation
of her position and character, the part she played, her
representative quality: by which I mean that she was not
an eccentric but one typical of her class. She was a woman
far better known for her judgment than for her wit.
She directed her husband's opinion; she influenced that
of others; she was a great person at Court; she was
presumably the future Queen; it was not in her to do
anything which in the eyes of her surrounders at Court,
in general Society, or before the Nation, would have
seemed extravagant.
Well, Anne Hyde became Catholic. She did so deliber-
ately, and evidently after long thought. She made no
concealment of it; she prepared a document which no
one can read without being convinced of its sincerity.
Those who might pretend that she was under the influence
of her husband, know as little of her husband as they do
of herself. He would be moved by her far more than
she by him, strong character though he was. His respect
for her decisions was profound. He abided by them; what
is more, I think it nearly certain that at the moment of
her reception James had himself not yet been received.
There is more in her case than this; for it helps one
also to understand how a believing, deep and pondering
mind then acted while yet within the Anglican com-
munion, and this in its turn helps one to understand what
the spirit of the Anglican communion or much of it
was in that day, and why the general fear of its possible
reunion with Rome had some grounds.
55
JAMES THE SECOND
This woman communicated; not frequently, but once
a month. Before every communion she went to confession,
having for Confessor and director, as her rank demanded,
a member of the Anglican hierarchy, the Bishop of Wor-
cester. She received what she believed to be Canonical
absolution from his lips. Until she had so made Auricular
Confession and obtained Sacramental absolution, she
would not receive the Eucharist the Body of the Lord,
as she believed it to be. The great movement which has
recently taken place in modern England may make a
story of this kind acceptable enough, but the point for the
reader to -grasp is, that in the mid-seventeenth century
such an attitude was neither combative nor extreme, nor
even, properly speaking, exceptional. It took place within
the general machinery of the Church of England, and
seemed to those who adopted it, and indeed to those who
heard of it, no affectation, still less any innovation.
The whole thing is a sharp example; a revelation to
modern eyes of what the time was and why the gulf
between the Established Church and the Dissenting bodies
was then so deep. By all this I do not mean, of course,
that Anne Hyde's practice was an average thing, or one
that would be found in most of her rank. But though
she was Clarendon's daughter, coming of the general run
of well-to-do Anglkan squires and lawyers, her manner
in religion did not connote any violent contrast with her
surroundings.
It was then the strength of Catholicism at that date
a strength to-day almost forgotten in England a strength
moral and numerical which explains both the sudden
outbursts of violence against it and renders comprehensible
what otherwise makes wild nonsense: the acute fear of
that which our popular historians, reading the present into
the ^past, represent as being, in these days, but an in-
significant handful of Englishmen quite different from
56
THE CIRCUMSTANCE
their kind. On the contrary, the Catholics of England
under Charles and James formed a most powerful group,
and they still represented, in their compact spiritual
stronghold, the most ancient tradition of England: the
ancestral religion which had been so slowly and painfully
rooted out from the stubborn soil wjiere it was native,
and the universal presence of which was as near a memory
to the contemporaries of Charles and James as the days
of the Regency are to ourselves.
It was this strength of Catholicism in numbers here, in
the general European culture of the day abroad, in its
manifest attraction for the better educated and governing
classes, which aroused against its toleration that public
resentment upon which the cynical and godless clique
arrayed against the last kings of England played with
such fatal success.
Ill
THE FIRST EXILE
WE CAN judge by his actions, as from his great mass
of letters and other writings, what James Stuart
was: what manner of man we should have found if we
had met and spoken with him. But to discover how he
came to be this we must particularly note, as with any
other man, the formative years.
There is that internal which directs the form 6f a man.
It escapes us. It is the cause of the individual. But there
is also, striking like a die upon material more or less
plastic, the powerful external influence of experience
during the years of transition: the teens. What inward
forces inherited, warped, developed out of sight, pro-
duced his excellencies and defects, strength and limita-
tions, we shall never discover 5 but we can follow a period
of tossed and shaken youth not undergone by any other
man called in later life not only to govern, but to attempt,
as duty commanded him, an impossible task.
Remarking the sincere directness of his intentions,
always and everywhere, his firmness and venturesome
courage, remarking also that odd insufficiency which cut
him off from his fellow men, that lack of sympathy which
both led him to misunderstand their plots and to lose their
devotion, we perceive the whole to be connected with a set
of youthful accidents, so unusual, so rapidly contrasted
in episodes of good and evil fortune, while yet his mind
and body were growing to maturity, as would, in the
case of another man, have made him something romantic
in history for ever.
58
THE FIRST EXILE
When the great rebellion against his father's hered-
itary government broke out, he was a child of 9j too
young to have any conception of the world. When the
dreadful news of his father's murder reached Paris he
was advanced in his sixteenth year. All in between, which
is for most boys the story of regular lessons, of games,
with a routine of discipline the most fixed and secure
part of their lives, at school or at home was with him an
amazing sequence of rumour, battle, defeat, peril of im-
prisonment and death, escape in disguise, great receptions
abroad, exile again, abandonment, sharp poverty. The
succeeding years, when he passed from boyhood into
manhood, were a perpetual employment in arms and
successive vivid experiences of battle where his conspicu-
ous valour was tested and loudly praised. All the while
he was an abandoned Prince with a ruined cause and a
future like night before- him until suddenly, within a
few weeks, all changes and he is the brother and heir of
a restored king.
What an education and hardening! He profited by
it 5 but he only half profited by it. It strengthened a
character already strong, but it did not develop that char-
acter. One may say that such experiences tempered and
hardened the outer armour of the man, but by so doing
separated him from his fellows even more than his natural
temper would have done. Adversity, made him more in-
tense within; but all this diversity of experience of good
and evil, of travel, of courts and camps, poor lodgings
and palaces, taught him nothing of mankind.
The first thing to remark in the man so f ormed^ is
that intense nationalism upon which I have already in-
sisted in my introductory sketch of his character. I there
said how strange it was to find this in any royalty, and
especially in him, who was the product of a marriage
between Scotch-Danish blood and French and Italian.
59
JAMES THE SECOND
Like all royalties he met men of every region and rank.
He was surrounded in boyhood by every Western lan-
guage, and (as one might think) by every Western in-
fluence. He should have turned out, like all royalties,
cosmopolitan. Instead of that he was an intense English-
man. Nationalism was his permanent inspiration.
I mean by this word Nationalism what to-day is some-
times rather wrongly called patriotism: not only devotion
to one's own country but an ineradicable contempt for all
that is not of one's own country: a referring of everything
foreign to one's own national habit. This intense national-
ism which clung to him during the whole of his life arose
in part, as I have said, and largely, from that note of isola-
tion which was native to the man. His moods turned
inwards. But so far as the externals of life affected him
during the formative years it was due, I think, very,
largely to his exile j to his having to meet common Nether-
lands and Frenchmen and Spaniards not as inferiors but
as close companions: as men often playing the superior to
him, while he nourished in his own heart memories of a
royal childhood in England.
Examples of this distilled Englishry in James II you
will find scattered all up and down his life, to the very
last moments of it. No ship could be a good ship unless
it was an English ship. The English courage in battle is
for him a unique thing, necessarily and quite obviously
superior to the courage of lesser breeds. It is noteworthy
that with a French mother and in the highest cosmopolitan
surroundings of a court he Henry IV's grandson! dis-
dained what was then universal to his class, whether in
Holland, Germany or England: the effort to attain French
culture and speech. He boasted, as I have said, an insular
accent, and when a certain hesitation in his delivery made
him, in the eyes of the Frenchmen, ridiculous, he was
60
THE FIRST EXILE
quite indifferent. Their amusement seemed to him but
the folly of an inferior race.
There is a point in connexion with James's Nationalism
which, to many modern readers who only know the man
through our official historians will sound novel indeed,
but which is very evident on reading his own writings.
James's religion was English. It was English in him to be
intensely Protestant, and, after his conversion to Catholic-
ism, to be so rigid and absorbed in his new convictions.
Here I am dealing with a thing very difficult to describe
in words, just as one cannot describe a colour or the tone
of an instrument. But there is something quite unmistak-.
able in the way an Englishman takes his religion, whether
that religion be Atheism or Calvinism or anything else.
He clings to it and he worries about it. And that 'English
way of taking religion' you will find in James most strik-
ingly, just as you will find in him the awkwardness, the
self-centred isolation of the soul, the lack of expansive-
ness, and (to introduce a nobler word) the pride which
supports in any English tourist to-day his self-respect, but
makes him the butt of more gregarious nations. When
Victor Hugo said of England, 'It is an island: and every
Englishman is an island,' he spoke with vision. James
was an island.
Let me return to another source of that first strong
Protestantism of his: the worship of his father's memory.
It was laudable; it also contained, of course, a great deal
of illusion.
That father, while the boy was still a child, goes off to
great wars. He is seen by the growing lad at rare intervals
as a military figure at the head of an army. He has come
from this siege, from that battle. A close intimacy, which
might have bred a special affection, could not have nour-
ished hero-worship j but of such close intimacy James had
none. I know of few things more pathetic in history than
61
JAMES THE SECOND
the single restrained sentence which he wrote down at the
end of a long life telling how his father, when leaving
Oxford after the ruin of his cause, 'had intended to take
the Duke of York with him, but upon consideration
decided to leave him within the town.' Lord! How that
handsome little fellow of 13 must have wished to ride out
with his father and to have shared Charles's high fortune
to the end!
From the moment of his father's leaving, James goes
through adventures which must be known in some detail
if we are to comprehend the character on which their
memory had so deep an effect.
There is the boy, shut up with the Royalist garrison
in Oxford, until the town surrenders to the Parliamen-
tarians on old midsummer's day 1646. He comes for
the first time into direct contact with the rich men who
had destroyed his father's power. He notes their varied
demeanour. There is an absence, in too many, of due
respect; the Commander-in-Chief, Fairfax, does not kiss
his hand. Then he hears the harsh voice of Cromwell and
sees that large, booted man kneeling before him, kissing
his hand, and paying him an especial deference. For
Cromwell was still intriguing for the support of royalty
against his rivals till the right moment should come to
destroy the king and his family.
Thenceforward the boy is a prisoner. He so remains
for months a new experience of evil, lasting from his
thirteenth to his fifteenth year. And all that while his
father's image stands bright in his mind.
Now for what did the image stand? Charles's devotion
was to the Church of England, It will be remembered
how he withstood that wife of his for all her unquiet
energy and in spite of his devotion to her, when it came
to the matter of the Catholic faith; how he restricted
her services in that communion; how jealously he watched
62
THE FIRST EXILE
to prevent her giving any handle to those who com-
plained that the English Crown was not sufficiently
opposed to Rome. Can any one forget how, as he rode
north to raise his standard, he caused two priests to be
disembowelled (or plain hanged I forget which) as a
sort of confirmation of his resistance to the pretensions
of their creed? In the last moments of his life Charles
protested (and it was with the utmost sincerity) that he
died, not only for the English people and that also
was true but for the rights of the Church of England.
She has recently repaid him by striking his name off her
calendar.
There came in to reinforce this Protestantism of the
young James his natural reaction against the fussiness
of his mother. When Henrietta Maria was working
to make Gloucester, his younger brother, a Papist, we
have seen how he objected and interfered with all his
might. He felt himself a sort of guardian to the boy's
national traditions and his mother to be taking advantage
of their orphanage. He was successful. The Cadet died
young, but soundly saved from Rome. When serving
as a soldier abroad James's lack of sympathy with his
Catholic fellow officers is apparent enough, especially in
the case of the Spaniards. His natural sympathy with the
Huguenot French officers is equally apparent.
Once more I must introduce what may seem a fantastic
point to the modern reader, but it is a true one. The
strong Protestantism of James left some tincture in his
mind after he had accepted the Catholic faith 5 it appeared
especially towards the end of his life. Here I must steer
carefully lest I give a false impression. He was not Jan-
senist and no gentleman of that high sort could ever
be Puritan. But there are phrases in his voluminous re-
markable notes upon religion which lean towards all that
side of things the excess of which is Jansenism among the
63
JAMES THE SECOND
cultured, and Puritanism among the rest. He has not
the gaiety of the Faith: and indeed no gaiety. He had not
the tenderness of it. I can recall no devotion of his to-
wards the Mother of God.
Now from this strong Protestantism and strong Eng-
lishry of the growing lad under his rapidly changing sur-
roundings, turn to that combative love of adventure which
marked his whole life. This also was formed during his
early years of exile, of peril, of poverty.
Take first the adventure of his escape.
After Oxford he was still left with Sir George Ratcliffe
by the generosity or inertness of Fairfax. He was taken
to London his mother interfering as usual, plying him
with dangerous correspondence from abroad. He was
lodged in St. James's, and there Lord Northumberland,
the Percy, governed him and was his gaoler. In the ac-
count he himself has given he testifies to the courtesy and
good breeding of the man. Indeed James is always just
to opponents and even oppressors. It is one of the things
which distinguishes him most clearly from his enemies
even in his last disasters. They lie and exaggerate impu-
dently wherever he is concerned: but his own words are
downright and his pledges kept. He owed this generosity
in part to ignorance of knaves. It would seem as though
to know too much of men were to know too much of evil.
Though thus a prisoner (and he fell ill of an ague,
which we would call influenza, in the late winter of
1646-7) he was allowed to see his father at Henley for
a moment, in June of the latter year. He never saw him
again.
We must remember that at this moment he was not
14 years old, yet he was already beginning his continual
attempts at escape. A letter of his in cypher being inter-
cepted (the Bishop of Salisbury's wife was his confidant
in the matter) he was bullied by a committee of parlia-
THE FIRST EXILE
mentarians. They threatened him with the Tower, and
that sooner or later would have meant the loss of his life.
Even under their bullyings he refused to betray those
who had helped him. But there is in connexion with these
attempts to escape from St. James's Palace one most char-
acteristic incident. He gave a solemn promise to these
parliamentarians that he would not communicate with the
Queen his mother. Another letter came from her. He
refused to receive it. This refusal caused the first of their
many quarrels. But he said at the time, and repeated it
years later, that his honour forbade his breaking his
promise. James always had that fine sense of morals. He
knew by a right instinct when it is legitimate to lie, and
when it is illegitimate. He would not betray his accom-
plices 5 but he would not betray, either, his solemnly
pledged word.
We have a contemporary drawing of St. James's Palace,
where he was kept confined. The little domestic brick
building stands with fields and a park on either side: an
oak paling runs up north from it towards Piccadilly Lane.
The high roof of the Abbey, the lower one of West-
minster Hall, show above the trees half a mile away.
There is no house visible between; and stretching from
the little palace eastwards towards what is now Trafalgar
Square are a couple of gardens with their fruit trees.
The episode of his final evasion merits a detailed ac-
count; for among a dozen other characteristics of the
already ripening character it exemplifies that careful
method, that attention to detail, which (divorced from
judgment) became in him, a lifetime later, ^ when he had
grown elderly, excessive. He had made his two efforts
to get away, and had been discovered in each. Now, how-
ever, in the early spring of 1648, his chance was to come.
What did he do?
For a fortnight before the date agreed upon he started
65
JAMES THE SECOND
games of hide and seek with his little sister and brother.
There is a curiously boyish boast, written down years after-
wards, in which he tells how cleverly he hid himself so
that they would be seeking him half an hour, and how
he would give himself up at last because they could never
have found him. When the right day came, the 20th
April, 1648 (he was then, as I have said, in his fifteenth
year), after dusk, at seven o'clock the gardener of the
Close (called 'Spring Gardens,' at the very end of the
palace walks towards the east, the end which gave upon
Charing Cross) was sent for and asked for the keys of
the door ; he was told that they were needed because the
Prince would go hunting the next day at a very early hour.
The gardener gave him one of his keys. It is presumable
that, like the mass of the common people, all his sympa-
thies were with the Crown, for he must have known that
the boy was a prisoner.
James waited until nine o'clock on that dark, moon-
less night; unlocked the door, somewhere near the place
where the lane we still call Spring Garden stands by
the old offices of the London County Council he found
outside Colonel Dampfield, who was awaiting him. This
companion put a bandage across his face with a shield over
the whole of one eye, and part of the forehead, and nose,
as though he had to deal with some one who had suffered
an accident. Thus disguised, Dampfield led him to a
carriage which a certain Mr. Trip had been ordered to
bring up for delivery of the Prince. They went quickly
to one of the public stairs upon the river shore hard at
hand perhaps those of Whitehall and drifted down
the half ebb-tide (it would seem till near ten) to a house
near London Bridge. There James was dressed in petti-
coats as a girl, took another boat with Dampfield, and fol-
lowed the last of the tide on to Greenwich.
This second embarkation was on something with sails,
66
THE FIRS.T EXILE
for we know that on approaching Greenwich the Master
refused to go farther, saying that as the wind was rising
and blowing up-river, it would be better to anchor than to
beat slowly down with the chance of meeting the midnight
flood against them before they had made much headway.
But the fugitives could not afford to wait. Their lives
were at stake Dampfield's certainly and at once 5 ulti-
mately the Duke's. That was why it had behoved those
who cared for the lad's life to see that he should escape
overseas. The fact that Charles I alone of the Royal
Family was later murdered must not blind us to the
danger which every male member of that family ran.
For we must consider the motive. Charles I was put to
death upon the main motive that his survival endangered
the heads of the chief rebels particularly Cromwell's.
Now it endangered no less the heads of his male descend-
ants. Of his little daughter one cannot say the same thing;
but with the young man the heir, already of age to take
the throne, and with James his brother, then within a few
years of the same age, it was another matter. Because it
did not happen, people now cannot imagine the murder
of the sons after that of the father. But the people of the
day could imagine it well enough, and they were right.
Cromwell saw clearly. He was a 'realist,' as the German
phrase goes; and whatever he saw needed to be done to his
own advantage, that he did. . . .
The real reason the Master of the barge refused to go
farther down the river was that he had watched his pas-
sengers and had discovered their secret; he had seen
through a crack the young lad take off the Order of the
Garter which he wore, perceived the incongruity of the
ornament upon a girl, made certain that it was some young
man of great importance, and suddenly guessed that no
lad of such an age would have the Garter save the Duke
of York.
67
JAMES THE SECOND
He smiled, therefore, when Dampfield begged him to
drop farther down-river, urging the peril to this young
lady who had most important business to attend to in
Holland. The worthy man could only say that he had
never heard of young ladies who were Knights of the
Garter. Upon this James, boy as he was, boldly risked the
throw. He told that bargee that he was Prince of England,
Charles's son. He assured him that if he were succoured
he would see that the bargee should later be very well
rewarded. But there was no need to bribe. Here again the
loyalty of the common people served him. Monarchy, of
course, was still taken for granted by all the mass of Eng-
lishmen, and by this same Thames bargee amongst the
rest.
He got them to Gravesend before meeting the flood,
pulled in the sweeps with which apparently they were
helping to make against the wind, shortened sail, and
shot through the gap in the boom which had been thrown
across the river without being noticed by the watch on
shore.
It was the most perilous moment of the flight: but it
was passed. James went ashore at Tilbury, found a Dutch
vessel of some seventy tons which had been provided for
him, and which lay there at anchor, and so went on board.
There were still anxious hours to pass: the next ebb
did not run till between six and seven o'clock when it
had long been broad daylight. But no one hindered them,
and they had the luck of a new wind which blew from the
west. By the next dawn they were off Flushing, bumped
twice on the bar (running in false alarm from a vessel
taken for a Parliament frigate), reached Middleburg and
so The Hague where James was received by his sister
the Princess of Orange and was safe.
Such things as these happening to a boy before he is
15 powerfully impress the mind; and much more was to
68
THE FIRST EXILE
follow. After he had seen his sister the Princess of Orange
and his brother Charles, his mother called him into
France. On the way he stopped at the Abbey of St.
Armande, halted because the civil disturbances in France
were not yet settled, and it was while he lay there (from
early in January 1649 to the 8th February) that, un-
known to him, his father was being done to death in
London.
He got to Paris on February the I3th. It was not till
the 1 4th or ijth that he heard of what had happened
a fortnight before: that Charles the King had been mur-
dered. It is characteristic of him that in his detailed
memories of the time he refuses to describe what passed
in his mind.
The formal side of his character becomes apparent
immediately, even so early in life. His father, Charles I,
had been put to death by the rebels? Well, then, his
brother Charles was now Charles the Second, and his
king. Therefore when his brother Charles asks him to
come back to Brussels in the next year, he obeys as a
subject, though his mother the Queen violently protests.
He was in Brussels by the I3th October, 1650. His
sister's husband, the Prince of Orange, died not long after
his arrival, and three days later, on the I4th November,
was born that posthumous child William Henry called in
English history William III ; the man who later was to be
a figurehead for those who betrayed James himself and
broke the line of English kings.
His sister would not receive him because of their
mother's protests at his departure. Further, he was in
great poverty. It was not till January of the next year
that she accepted him at her court, at The Hague, and
only then because Henrietta Maria relented. His brother
the King gives another order he is to go back to Paris;
he does so.
JAMES THE SECOND
He was now nearly a young man; he was in his eight-
eenth year. Embarrassed for money, as were his brother
and his mother too (though she was the aunt of the French
King), their position was yet such that some great match
might have been made for him, and there was proposed
one of the greatest of heiresses from over the left}
but James considered his rank, and the French govern-
ment, that is, the Cardinal, forbade it. Immediately after
came the crash of the Battle of Worcester, and the royal
cause in England seemed lost for good and all.
James felt his increasing poverty. He felt little else.
Of the rights of his blood he could no more doubt than
he could doubt his own name. I think it true to say that
he did not appreciate what an effect Worcester had upon
the mind of Mazarin and the young French king, his own
cousin. After Worcester every one made up their minds
that the Stuart cause was lost; but James's mind remained
as it did throughout his life, lonely and fixed deep in its
own ideas. His brother was King of England. He was
himself brother and heir presumptive to the Crown of
England. Whether he were poor or rich, whether battles
were lost or won, made no difference. Though still under
19, he desires to play the part of his rank, he insists upon
active service. He will enter the French army. He must
have the least sum necessary for his accoutrement, 300
pistoles. He troubles not his family or any equal. He seeks
the sum in the way of business from a man who makes it
his business to lend. He tells us in a sort of aside that he
borrowed those 300 pistoles 'from a Gascon.' He gives
us the Gascon's name: Gautier.
Thence onwards for six years the most vivid six years
of a man's life he loses himself in the profession of
arms. He adored it. He was born for it. When, after the
Restoration, his position and the lack of expeditions or a
sufficient force forbade him a military post, he took the
70
THE FIRST EXILE
next best thing he could find and commanded at sea and
there found his chief talent. That accident which warps
all human record, a great or simple, has hidden from pos-
terity the trade native to James Stuart. He was made to
be a soldier or sailor; a commander in battle. That was
what suited him; that was what he understood. He had
not the capacities of a general-in-chief . He would not have
attained them; but he was born for the service and admir-
ably fitted to command a unit in the field, though hardly
an army.
During these six young years of his, from his nineteenth
to his twenty-fourth year, when he was riding out day
after day at the head of his troop, later of his regiment,
he discovers everywhere not only the active mind of a man
who is suited to command, but an intellectual interest in
the affair of arms which distinguishes a special sort of
soldier from his fellows. There in the French service
among the officers, and especially the Huguenot officers
with whom he consorted and whom he understood, he
lived the life which he would have wished to live, I sup-
pose, for ever. And that new experience was yet another
force moulding him.
For one thing, it gave him an opportunity for showing
his courage, and that courage was conspicuous. Conde
said of him later, in his Memoirs of past years, that^in
the matter of courage in a man, he desired to see nothing
better than the Duke of York.' The great Turenne, his
Huguenot General, praised him not only for that, a minor
quality (alas!) in the individual soldier, but also for his
'eye,' his quick knowledge of what to do. And by the way,
the great Turenne insisted on lending the embarrassed
Stuart, so heavily under the weather, another 300 pistoles,
as had the Gascon.
James's fighting spirit appeared in his whole life, from
the encounter when he drew his sword as a boy in the
JAMES THE SECOND
Low Countries upon an envoy o Cromwell's responsible
for his father's death, to the moment when, more than
forty years later, he mustered the force in Normandy for
a last effort at recovering his crown. That spirit had full
play during these years of service in the French army
at war.
There is a certain quality in courage which leads a man
who possesses it to tell the story of action in a direct and
true fashion, without reticence, and especially without that
damnable apology for talking of himself which marks the
vain man. James's descriptions of his service show that
quality.
He kept a diary during all this time, so that we have a
mass of detail on it, and when he himself did anything
remarkable or was in any remarkable situation, he put
it down.
For instance, at the siege of Mousson in 1653, when
he was just 20, he tells how a shot hit three barrels of gun-
powder close by him and his fellow officers (they had
gone up to the front trenches) and how those three barrels
did not explode} and what would have happened if they
had. (One thing that would not have happened was the
Revolution.) He tells us casually how a spent bullet hit
him on the foot; c the toe of his boot. 3 He tells us how
(two years later, in the summer of '55) he lived during
the siege of St. Ghislain in a little hut within musket-shot
of the walls, while his brother officers were far back
beyond or at extreme cannon range. This he does not
quote as an example of courage, so much as an amusing
trick j 'for' says he 'the enemy did not believe the hut to
be inhabited} so the Duke saw everything from close at
hand.'
There is no doubt that this youthful experience of his
in the French army coloured his whole life. He was fond
of the officers his colleagues, he took on the impress of
72
THE FIRST EXILE
what was then and for long after the best o all trades,
at that moment in life when men are most permanently
influenced. This, I think, accounts for his odd, alien,
friendship towards the French, which he kept up all his
life. But it never obscured in him that schoolboy certi-
tude in what seemed to him the natural, inevitable,
supremacy of British blood.
With the end of 1655 there comes an episode which
may justly be quoted as a test of the young man's develop-
ing character, and of the way in which it was tending.
He was told that an alliance with Cromwell (his
father's murderer) was essential to French policy. Crom-
well had what was then the best army in Europe veteran,
well paid, highly disciplined, excellent in every way. He
put it up to auction, as it were, between France and Spain.
And Mazarin, conducting French affairs, explained to the
young man that if the Government of the French King
did not capture Cromwell's alliance, it would go to Spain
and turn the whole war. James's comment was, ^Mazarin
serves his master well'} he, James, had no right to
complain.
In the treaty with Cromwell, all that the ephemeral
despot of England insisted on was that James, if he must
remain in the French service, should not fight in Flanders.
His reason was obvious. James in Flanders might have
been a rallying point at any moment for English deser-
tion. The average Englishman was for the Crown. The
Puritan despotism was increasingly unpopular. Indeed,
later on, after the battle in front of Dunkirk, Reynolds,
who commanded that very fine body of Cromwellian
troops which drove the Spaniards from the Dunes, desired
an interview with the Duke of York, and in this inter-
view made it clear that his heart was with the royal cause,
as were the hearts of all such Englishmen. Of what profit
to them was the Parliamentary set and Cromwell?
73
JAMES THE SECOND
James was set aside to work with the French armies in
Italy. But his brother, permanently exiled by the new
alliance between Cromwell and the French, ordered him to
leave the service, and it is characteristic of him that he
obeyed.
It was a miserable period, this period of James's young
manhood, his twenty-third and twenty-fourth years, just
before the Restoration.
He was being badgered to get rid of his friends. The
wretched, exiled, out-at-elbows crew which was not a
court, split up into factions. The Duke of York was asked
to sacrifice those intimate servitors who were most devoted
to him; and the trade he followed, the trade of arms,
which he had begun to love so well, and to enjoy, and in
which he had shown so great intelligence, seemed closed
to him.
In 1657 he got leave from his brother, now that he
could no longer serve with the French, to serve with the
Spaniards. He did so with distinction, and his account of
what happened in the Battle of the Dunes in front of
Dunkirk is the best we possess. You cannot read the writ-
ing of the man without seeing how well he understood
field operations. But the Spanish service did not suit him.
He complains of its formality, and in that moment of
the great decline in Spain of its kck of perception in
war. It is from him that we have the story of how when
he, the young man of 24, saw the opportunity of cutting
off a big convoy of the enemy's, he was refused leave be-
cause Don Juan, the Commander, had given no orders.
When he asked that orders should be sought, he was told
that Don Juan could not be disturbed; he was having a
siesta under a hedge, during the advance of the army in
the summer heat.
There are touches in all that description of the Battle
of the Dunes which are delightful. One where he praises
74
THE FIRST EXILE
the courage of his little brother, the Duke of Gloucester.
Another where he tells how he was certain that the Anglo-
French army was about to advance (on June the I4th,
1658); that he alone of the officers had gone out to the
line of sentries and seen to the preparations. How Don
Juan would not believe him. And then (most character-
istic) his impetuous comment: 'would the enemy have
come out in full battalia, with their guns before their
horse, to push in outposts?'
There is also in his account that lapidary phrase of the
Conde to young Gloucester, confirming his brother's sound
eye and judgment in saying that a general action would
ensue. For Conde said to Gloucester, c Have you ever seen
a battle?'
'No,' said the boy.
'Well,' said the other grimly, 'in half an hour you will
see one. 3
But best of all (to return to the note I have struck
so often) is the English heart of James. He finds himself
with certain troops, English indeed, but exiled like him-
self, pitted against English regimentsj they now appeared
on those sand-hills so recently in our own time drenched
with English blood. The English regiments opposed to
him were those coming under the orders of the man who
had killed his father. The English ships standing off the
shore were cannonading his own forces. Yet in all he
writes, his heart is with the other side.
When Cromwell's regiments in their red coats charge
the big sand-hill with a roar and turn the Spaniards off it,
he writes of them with an enthusiasm that might make you
think he was engaged in their own ranks. He himself
leads his mounted men against the position and is beaten
back. He makes you feel that it was the courage of those
English troops which forbade his success. And when he
tells the story of the Spanish boats going out to attack
75
JAMES THE SECOND
the English ships, and turning tail at the first shots, his
pride is in England and with the English sailor. ^
That is how the man was formed: in exile, worried by a
fussing mother, reacting against that fuss strongly^ so as
to detest her religion, proud of his Protestant training,
devoted to his Protestant father's memory, passionate for
the England from which he had been exiled, unable to
think highly of anything not English, but friends with,
and keeping as a permanent memory, his French com-
panions in arms: of the Spanish contemptuous.
There comes a last act. Those who understand Eng-
land know by the late autumn of 1659 ^at the Restora-
tion is afoot. Foreigners will not believe it. His brother
Charles, who was in Spain negotiating, was not even
allowed to pass through the French territory on his way
back, so little did any one at the French Court believe
that what was coming, was coming. James in disguise at
Boulogne (the last of these innumerable adventures and
how exciting!) only just escaped from capture at the
hands of the Governor of the town and his garrison
because they had to prevent anything being done by the
English Pretenders, and believed, even at this late hour,
that the monarchy in England was ruined for ever.
Yet the Restoration was immediately at hand and it
was at this moment that the young man, as yet tardy in
such affairs, was caught by Anne Hyde.
James was' 26 years old. He was not easily accessible.
In spite of his military reputation he had not had the
love of women. Perhaps he had not that of Anne Hyde;
but to be approached at all was a novelty and she ap-
proached him. She was 22 yet she was older than he,
and really knew the world, which, to the end of his life,
he did not understand. He was there, lonely, in the half-
court of his sister the widowed Princess of Orange with
her little sharp-eyed, stunted, wizened boy, his nephew,
THE FIRST EXILE
William, at her side a boy then still innocent and even
timid, but peevish. Anne made o James her companion
and. more. The opportunity was flagrant. She was the
Princess's maid of honour: a stuff of which Queens had
been made.
She was the daughter of that Edward Hyde whom
history knows as Lord Clarendon. A lawyer born of the
landed gentry but of no great family, he served Charles
I consistently though half-hearted in his cause feeling,
like most of his rank, that the gentry had a right to with-
stand the Crown. He had been Charles's chief minister
and advisor, had accompanied his sons into exile and was
sincere in his horror at his master's murder. A podgy,
self-satisfied man (it is to his credit that he knew good
cooking), he should by rights of his face have been
short} he was, against all the rules with such a face, of
at least medium stature. He felt himself in a half-
paternal relationship to the exiles. He wrote admirably 5
on which account his famous History of the Great Rebel-
lion has misled posterity not through its numerous errors
of fact nor through its military incapacity, but by the fact
that his service of the King makes it pass for a fair state-
ment of the legitimate cause whereas, in truth, his heart
perpetually hankered after his kin, the squires and lawyers,
the upper-class in revolt and conquering the Crown. He
had married the wealthy daughter of the too ^ wealthy
Aylesbury, mathematician and master of the Mint. She
had borne him, among other children, this daughter Anne
in 1637.
Anne Hyde was dark, she was ugly, she was vivacious,
she was intelligent. She had will. She had also what is
rarer, and not often an. accompaniment of these: judg-
ment. Her large mouth uttered sense and her blobby
eyes f or they were bulging looked firmly and strongly
at mankind, comprehended it, and conveyed decisions.
77
JAMES THE SECOND
In all this she had nothing from her father save some
power of planning, but inherited perhaps from her mother,
perhaps from an earlier strain. Such was the woman
who, in the last days of impoverished exile, cast her net
over the young man James.
The moment was well chosen. On the I4th November,
1659, Monk at the head of the great Cromwellian army
(Cromwell dead a year and more) was preparing to march.
The order had gone out for a Parliament. On the 24th
November, the news of Monk's action already received
at The Hague, a document was dated and signed. It was
a promise of marriage between the Duke of York and
Anne Hyde, and it bore the hand of James Stuart.
They were not strangers. She had first seen him nearly
four years before when, reaching Paris with the Princess
of Orange, very early in 1656, she at 18 had met the lad
of 22 for a moment but his fortunes were still falling.
She had seen him again for a moment later in the same
year when her Court was visiting the Queen Mother,
Henrietta Maria. They met once more, the year after,
at Breda. But still the fortunes of the exiles fell and
there was nothing doing. Now> in her opinion, by No-
vember 1659, things had changed. The Court of France
did not foresee that imminent Restoration. James did
not foresee it. She foresaw it.
It is not to be believed that Clarendon was originally
a party to his daughter's move. It is certain that when
the thing was public in England (in the summer of 1660
after ^the return of the royal brothers in May) he filled
the air with his loud protestations, shouting shrilly that
he had rather see his daughter dead than so disgracing
the monarchy. It is equally certain that he perceived what
advantage might accrue to himself by this marriage and
also what peril By that time he knew her condition well
78
THE FIRST EXILE
enough. She had been with child since February 1660.
The Queen Mother stormed against the marriage with
even more than her customary vigour: raged and protested.
An heir to England married to a lawyer's daughter!
The (possibly) future Queen of England a lawyer's
daughter! A lawyer's daughter upon her throne!
Mazarin, more astute, calmed her, and himself made
no overt move. He did not want James to bear a grudge.
Yet it was perhaps he who saw to it that certain young
bloods should boast Anne to have been their mistress,
and so make her affianced husband hesitate. It was a
calumny, but an index of how Anne was regarded. James
did not hesitate for long. On the 3rd September, 1660,
he married her in the dead of night in her father's house.
On the 22nd October their first child was born.
It was a boy, called Duke of Cambridge, destined to
die within a year. What if he had lived, or any of his
younger brothers? But of eight children of that marriage
all died young save two: Mary, born on January the
i oth, 1662, Anne on February the i6th, 1664.. Both to
be Queens of England.
Before Christmas the Duchess was acknowledged. The
courtiers came to kiss hands as to royalty. She was accepted,
and at once she dominated. She filled her position with
ease, and all men rallied to the admission of it. She
acquired immediately the way of her new rank. She was
easily the equal of those born to it; and as the years
passed without a child to Charles, as she became more
fixedly the wife of the heir apparent, in a sort of minor
way she reigned.
Her husband had for her an increasing respect. He
followed her decisions j he was even led by them. His
infidelities she first condoned, then chafed under. But
her power over him never diminished, and she alone
could ever exercise such power. Had she lived she might
79
JAMES THE SECOND
have taught him, as King, how to meet the wiles and
hypocrisies of his opponents. But after eleven years of
intimacy, ten of wifehood, during which she had balanced
and, in effect, enlarged that rigid, sadly separated mind,
she died.
IV
ADMIRALTY
HAD James II shirked the burden of the Faith; had he
denied or concealed reality when he had discovered
it, he would be immensely famous in English history as
the creator of the Navy.
There is nothing which Englishmen for over two cen-
turies have more regarded as their peculiar pride and the
expression of their country than the Navy. Since the be-
ginning of the great change in wealth and numbers the
Navy has been their instrument of power and advance.
It has given them the markets of the East and the vast
expansion of their race overseas. For more than a century
from 1794 to 1914 it remained supreme, easily pro-
curing a complete immunity from foreign aggression (till
such aggression came at last to seem incredible) and free-
dom for action at will upon foreign nations. Between
Waterloo and the Boer War a very long lifetime of
eighty-four years it secured the preponderance of Eng-
land in Europe and the world.
For a man to stand at the origins of so mighty a thing
would be as permanent a title to fame as could be found
for him, nor would fame have been spared James II.
From what we know of legends in matters of the sea it
would certainly have been exaggerated. And yet it would
be difficult to exaggerate the effect of his combined indus-
try in naval affairs and passion for ships. It is from him
that dates the transition from an irregular to a regular,
from a spasmodic to a permanent Service. The regulations
81
JAMES THE SECOND
take from him their fixed form; he is at the origin of all
the chief traditions of the fleet.
Nor did this creative work of his come any too early.
The French and the Dutch services were senior and better
organized. They had behind them a greater revenue, and
if Parliament had succeeded (as it nearly did) in starving
the British Navy to death in its origins, the rivals of
England would have gained, in the race for naval suprem-
acy, a start which would never have been recovered. As
it was, and thanks to the Duke of York, a regular list of
ships, sufficient dockyards, a standing personnel came into
being and has since grown uninterruptedly.
If we mean by the British Navy any group of ships
under the orders of Government, for no matter how short
a period, no matter how summarily gathered, manned
and equipped, under no matter what ownership, then its
origins may be referred at random to Henry VII, Alfred
or Carausius: but if we mean a continuous body with un-
broken traditions, regularly manned by disciplined seamen,
professional, with a fixed corps of officers and of perma-
nent establishment, then that force dates from, and was
created by, the Duke of York, later James II of England
and VII of Scotland
He it is who made that instrument on which the strength
of modern England has since reposed.
. It was his father who had made the thing possible by
first insisting upon the complete central control of the
national arms. Charles I had had sharp and humiliating
experience early in his reign of what the old hotch-
potch fashion of mixing a few 'king's ships' with a num-
ber of hired or speculative private craft could produce. He
could not, with the Government embarrassed for money,
create a fleet wholly in its service. He still had to depend
largely on private craft. But he set out to form a nucleus
82
ADMIRALTY
of ships solely designed for fighting and transport, owned
and commanded by Government.
It should have been clear to any reasonable and patriotic
man that such a force was necessary, faced as England
was by the new and far superior maritime organization
of France under Richelieu, and with the growing power
of Holland. The Modern Fleet, regularly and perma-
nently organized for war, was arising among the rivals
of England who held the opposite coasts of the narrow
seas. There was an imperative necessity for England under
Charles I to meet that foreign effort.
But the rich merchants and squires whose organ of
action was the House of Commons, and of whom the
Reformation had made such increasingly formidable
opponents to the national monarchy, were pressing their
novel revolutionary claim to forbid revenue save what
they might allow, and on their own terms of power j and
this, in practice, had meant that they would pay as little
as possible. The revenue of the country, as provided by
them, fell shamefully low, and they hampered every
effort to increase it, preferring their pockets and ambition
to their country. To provide for the defence of England
they allowed far less than could be raised by the Dutch:
but a fraction of what poured into the treasury of the
King of France.
Charles I did his best. By the levy of a special fund
under writs of c Ship money' he did produce a fleet com-
parable at least to the foreigner's. He commissioned be-
tween forty and fifty ships five of them first-raters of
over a thousand tons and carrying between thein nearly
1,500 guns. But the effect could only be spasmodic. The
great demonstration of 1636 which for a moment gave
England the mastery of the narrow seas was ephemeral 5
regular financial supply was lacking; and on the eve of
the Civil War, in 1639, England could only look on while
83
JAMES THE SECOND
the Dutch with all the political weight of Richelieu's
France behind them destroyed the last Spanish fleet of
the North within a few miles of Dover.
Nevertheless it was the vessels and naval stores present
through Charles's patriotic policy which, though largely
out of use from lack of supply, formed the very instru-
ment of his defeat.
On the outbreak of the Parliamentary Rebellion in
1 642 the Two Houses controlled London and nearly all
the main seaports. They seized Portsmouth, they kept
Hull. Save for a short interval after Prince Regent's cap-
ture of Bristol the King was blocked from the sea by the
Parliament's capture of his own fleet of the fleet he
had built in spite of Parliament. They rigged, munitioned
and commissioned Charles's own ships against the King,
paying new and high wages to the seamen now hired to
man them. The best national work of the National Mon-
archy became the very instrument of its defeat. One of
the first actions of the Parliamentary commanders was to
fire, when the Queen had landed, upon the house from
which she barely escaped with her life. It was symbolic
of the naval power of the rebellion.
That same wealthy class which had been so reluctant
to give of their wealth for the country were now lavish
of their own and others to defend their domination. For
the better part of twenty years (1642-60) with one
interlude of mutiny a considerable naval force was kept
in being, rapidly acquiring cohesion and a professional
spirit. During the latter part of this interval under the
despotism called The Commonwealth the very large
resources in money which an absolute ruler can command
by force, and which Cromwell chiefly devoted to his armed
supremacy, maintained great strength at sea, and the
already long experience of naval warfare was confirmed.
But the British Navy was not yet in being. In the
84
ADMIRALTY
anarchy after Cromwell's death the ships effected nothing,
and not even so many years of war had created a tradition
or a continuous force still less a permanent body of
officers and men. The old conception still remained in
men's minds that ships were to be used only on occasions
of crisis; that the craft directly owned by Government
should, in such crises, be mixed with private vessels j that
in normal times the hulls should lie idle 5 that they were
to be rigged, munitioned and fitted out, and crews gath-
ered, haphazard and only on the threat of war*
What changed all that and began the new phase in
English history the phase of sea-power was the tak-
ing over of active work at the Admiralty by the Duke of
York immediately upon his brother's restoration to the
throne.
The Duke of York, who had of right been Lord High
Admiral of England since his youth, now at the age of 26
hoisted his flag at Schevenig in active command of a united
fleet. It was the 23rd of May, 1660, and from that date
begins his great work in the founding of the Navy.
The chief difficulty lack of money was (for the
moment) not pressing. It was only not pressing by the
accident of the occasion. Parliament, normally and per-
sistently opposed to furnishing a sufficient revenue, had
for the moment provided one. It did not indeed settle a
sufficient permanent revenue for the Government, as it
should have done but it did at least provide a nominal
revenue of twelve hundred thousand pounds, which
in practice might reach a million or less. The Restoration
House of Commons did this characteristically at the
expense of the mass of Englishmen and to the increase
of their own fortunes as great landowners. They abolished
the feudal dues of the Crown, they replaced and added
to them by an excise on articles of general consumption.
At any rate, a large sum was immediately available, and
85
JAMES THE SECOND
in the true tradition of the Stuart monarchy it was mainly
used to restore or create a navy. Two-thirds of the
whole financial power of the Crown was set aside for the
proper provisioning of the fleet and for the restoration of
the two great arsenals, that in the Thames and the other
at Portsmouth.
James's next step was one of capital importance: the
first in the establishment of a true national navy. It was
the creation of a permanent and professional body of naval
officers.
When the officers present in the ships at the Restora-
tion had been put through a necessary process of examina-
tion and selection to eliminate the disloyal & certain
proportion of the most competent and trustworthy were
given a guarantee of continuous employment whether in
peace or war, whether in a ship or on shore, by a system of
retaining fees which were, in effect, permanent minimum
salaries; these were increased on active service, but were
at all times sufficient to maintain their recipients. Thus was
originated by the Duke of York that corps of professional
sailors whom we now call the officers of the Royal Navy.
To this original act of foundation was soon added
another: recruitment. The Duke of York set up the Mid-
shipman: the lad who was to be trained from boyhood
to the sea, to grow up in the service and so to provide for
the constant maintainance of the corps of naval officers.
This second and very important step was taken as early
as the yth of May, 1661, less than a year after the Duke's
accession to his direction of the Admiralty.
The original title was not that of 'Midshipman*,
This was originally applied to certain petty officers, of
^rhich we may remark James's personal (and characteristic)
decision, that they could not be married and go perma-
nently ashore until they had completed seven full years
of sea-service. The young gentlemen who were now, in
86
ADMIRALTY
May 1 66 1, given places in each king's ship going out
were termed 'Vounteers' and later 'King's Letter Boys'.
They had, to begin with, the pay of a Midshipman, and
thus the old term 'Midshipman', formerly applied to
that non-commissioned rank whereto the lads' commis-
sions were affiliated, was gradually transferred, by custom,
to them alone.
The new ^system was not yet exclusive. A man could
get a commission from any origin, especially after sea-
service in a lower capacity. Nor had the 'King's Letter
Boy' a right to promotion. But he was there in his ship
with the special object of studying navigation, of rising
to be lieutenant and, in practice, of feeding the new or-
ganization with a regular supply of trained command. 1
At the same time a whole new administrative service
was set up by James which is the parent, in unbroken
succession, of the vast machine in operation to-day. At
the head of the financial side was the Treasurer of the
Navy; dependent for supplies, of course, upon the Ex-
chequer, but responsible to the Duke himself as Lord High
Admiral. Three other great officers, subordinate, were
the Comptroller, the Surveyor and the Clerk or as we
should say 'Secretary' each also directly responsible
to the Duke. Similar offices, or their predecessors, had
already existed at times in a less defined fashion. But the
full new organization with its host of subordinates was
the creation of the King's brother upon the Restoration,
and they served a force afloat which was greatly increased
in numbers, tonnage and efficiency from anything that
had been known before.
To all this was added (in this same first year of James's
active founding of a permanent tfleet) the 'Orders' and
'General Instructions' which are the parents of the
1 The first so to be received was young 1 Mr. Thomas Darcy. He is
the Adam of Midshipmen.
87
JAMES THE SECOND
'King's Regulations and Admiralty Instructions.' Here
again there had been previous rough models under the
Commonwealth, and some of James's orders copy these j
but his work as a whole is new. After its issue (in 44
articles of 'Instructions' and 10 'Orders') the old
chaos of separate rules and disciplinary regulations at the
caprice of transient fleet commanders in war, was finally
displaced by an official, united and national system.
That all this was done in so short a time was due to
that characteristic in James which all have noted, some
very foolishly ridiculed: his immense industry. He
worked, and he made others work} and that in a day
when work was not the fashion. For whole hours together
the pen was never out of his hand, and in the intervals he
was visiting the ships and docks, examining details, sug-
gesting reforms, calling for accounts, checking figures of
material.
In so brief an appreciation, let one example serve. It
will appeal, I think, to all men interested to-day in the
Service, for it is of permanent interest. The industry of
the Duke of York and his active application to everything
regarding his charge of the sea was particularly effective
in his memorandum on the size of Units.
It is a very old quarrel, of which our newspapers and
debates were full half a lifetime ago (I know not how
the matter stands now), whether at sea one should lean
to a majority in the number of gun platforms, that^ is
ships, or to a superiority of power in the individual ship,
It is clear one cannot have both. With a certain sum
to expend you may build fifty craft each of such and such
gun power, and so be able to act dispersed, or twenty-
five of double (in practice more than double) the gun
power in each, and so dominate the enemy when con-
centrated. I have no competence in the matter. It is to be
presumed, I suppose, that the problem varies with changes
88
ADMIRALTY
in armament, in methods of propulsion, and the rest.
But at any rate there can be no doubt that the Duke of
York thought ^clearly at a time when his contemporaries
were thinking in a more muddle-headed fashion or (most
of them) not thinking at all. He was for the large unit,
or at any rate for the unit equal in gun power to the
unit of his rivals, the French and Dutch.
Consider the conditions. The French fleet, largely the
creation of Richelieu, had been met and countered by
Charles Ps policy of ship money. But the financial diffi-
culty was always present. Even those thirty years earlier
Charles I could only raise the money necessary for the
navy by an exceptional and perilous effort 5 so powerful
had the propertied classes already become. Since then
those classes had won a great war against the Crown and
put the King to death. During the whole of that genera-
tion they continued to grow more and more powerful.
Their power depended on controlling and therefore
hampering government expenditure and as such ex-
penditure involved taxes on themselves, they were reluc-
tant to allow it. But reluctance in expenditure from any
cause tends to produce the small unit in a navy rather
than the large one. A given amount of money spent on
five large ships will provide more power at sea than the
same amount of money spent on eight smaller ones. But
the person who is gradually doling out the money by
bits is prompted to say, 'Surely now you have enough!
What? You need another ship? Well, let it be a small one!
What? You need yet another? Well, let it be a small one
again!' Parsimony always has these effects of interfering
with the quality and size of the individual unit. The result
of this reluctance in the propertied class to pay taxes,
coupled with its acquiring the control of tax levying, was
that, throughout the seventeenth century, and even well
on into the eighteenth, the English ship of 100 guns
JAMES THE SECOND
hardly counted as equal to the French ship of 80. The
unit was inferior. James insisted upon the righting of
this but he was overruled. Over and over again you thus
find his conclusions upon matters of the sea justified by
posterity.
It would be of the highest interest to possess and
analyse James's own judgment on the behaviour of the
craft which he commanded. He was obviously by nature
a man that should have followed the sea. He caught
the tradition of the great English sailors, and he loved
their element. He made himself expert in the matter of
design; knew a ship's behaviour, whether she was slow
in stays, sluggish or crank ; followed changes advised in
gear and rigging; saw the advantage and disadvantage
of that enormous freeboard (necessary, it was thought,
for the high-firing guns of his day) of the great beetling
poop of those times; of the too bluff bows: he knew
which craft sailed closest to the wind: he had his con-
clusions upon the advantages and disadvantages of heavy
draught; his appreciation of how this or that build be-
haved in a seaway and all the rest of it.
In his close concern for design in ship-building he had
the useful support of his brother. Charles II was strongly
interested in the art of naval design, and, for an amateur,
not unskilled in it. He and James were perhaps the two
men in the kingdom who most appreciated what a strong
navy meant to England and how necessary it was to furnish
one: not only by sufficient expenditure to secure quantity,
but by attention and intelligent application to secure
quality. Certainly there was no sign of any such feeling
among the great landlords who spent their lives in ham-
pering the Stuart government. Their descendants, when
they had succeeded in ruining the Crown and in making
England an Aristocracy, were more awake to the value
of sea power than any government in Europe. The grand-
90
ADMIRALTY
sons o the Territorials who cast down the last of the
English Monarchy were the statesmen who presided over,
and often who commanded, those fleets of the eighteenth
century which gave England the control of the seas. But
in the seventeenth century it was not so. In the seven-
teenth century it was the failing Crown (or the despot-
ism of Cromwell) which provided ships, crews and guns.
The organized wealth of England was for starving the
service to save its pockets, and on one famous occasion
their refusal of financial support allowed an enemy to
enter the Thames.
Among the effects of this perpetual struggle for pence,
of which the Government might not enforce payment
and which the chief taxpayers refused to provide, was a
grave hindrance to manning the fleet for war.
The main difficulty in getting crews together was the
pay. It was lowj it was not handed over till the end of
the yearj and it was precarious. It is interesting to note
that a common seaman working on the decks of a ship
bringing coal to London from the north was paid at the
end of his voyage at the rate of 2 a week, which is at
least 10 in our money. In those days seafaring was not
a trade. It is ridiculous to note that a man in the Royal
Navy got only one-sixth of this sum. Moreover, in your
average merchant ship the men had beer} on the King's
ships they were not denied it, but they were stinted of
it. It is true that the collier wages were exceptional, were
for short journeys, including frequent risk from war, were
hampered by a restricted labour market and yet financed
by a wealthy and high demand for their cargoes at the
port of delivery, the Capital. It is true, also, that their
very high wages included the man's provision during
the short time he was at sea, while the man in a king's
ship was fed. It is also true that the pay at the rate of 2
a week was often or usually for less than a month; the
91
JAMES THE SECOND
passage was a short one, and employment therefore
intermittent. Still, when all allowances are made, the
contrast is too great.
James could do nothing to better the pay. Funds were
lacking. He had therefore to contend with desertion and
even with the danger of delay in setting out a fleet, yet
so much labour in every other direction produced, within
five years of the Restoration, by far the best fleet England
had ever boasted, and it was the creation of one man's
tenacity, industry, intelligence and devotion to his de-
partment.
With that fleet, in personal command as High Admiral,
James gained for England the greatest naval victory she
had known within living memory, and, indeed, since the
Middle Ages. He was to fight at the head of an English
fleet once more 5 but it was at the end of his command,
when his enemies were already closing round him. In that
second battle also, against odds and with an incompetent
ally, he fought very well and had one ship dismasted
before he transferred his flag, another sunk. But in this
book, which is not a biography, still less a chronicle, but
an appreciation, it is sufficient to take the example of
1665. It shows that James was in command. It shows
how easily and deservedly he gained his popularity. It
shows by contrast how the one fact of his Conversion to
Catholicism changed all.
It was on Friday, June the ist, 1665, ^at James stood
out from his anchorage off Lowestoft, with eighty-eight
sail of the line and four fire-ships all told. The ist of
June is a day propitious to the British fleet. His wife,
who had been in his flagship (the Royal Charles) with her
maids, had landed. The Plague had already appeared in
London.
On that same day he pressed into the fleet the crews of
92
ADMIRALTY
many of the coaling vessels coming down from the north
towards the Thames. On that same day, Friday, the ist
of June, while the fleet still lay at anchor, James had had
information that the Dutch with 113 sail had been sighted
to the SSE. The wind was easterly and light. He beat
up against it, and came to anchor at the fall of darkness
in that shallow sea.
Here the reader should note something which was so
,obvious to our immediate ancestry that it hardly needed
telling, but which in this day of machinery is getting
more and more forgotten: the advantage of the weather-
gage.
A man-of-war and this is particularly true of the
heavier and deciding units could not sail close to the
wind. With the wind blowing at right angles to her course
she could sail finely: with the wind 2 points 22%
degrees farther forward (or a trifle more, say 25 degrees
of a circle) she could sail, but, closer, she had difficulty in
carrying on. A full-rigged craft of the day, such as, for
instance, James's own flagship, the Royal Charles^ might
carry on with the wind coming from less than a third
of the way from the beam to dead ahead 3 but it only
sailed easily with the wind about a quarter of that distance:
or, to put it in the terms of the trade, your first-class
man-of-war could sail within six points of the wind but
hardly five. For instance, supposing the wind was blowing
from the south j your man-of-war in those days could
sail east or west with speed 5 she could also sail a little
to the south of east or west, say rather less than a third
of the quarter-circle between east and south or between
west and south ; but if you brought her closer to the wind
than that, you could do nothing with herj and if you tried
to force her to go closer, you were likely to get into great
difficulties hung up, losing way, and not the master of
your movements until you let her go off and your sails
93
JAMES THE SECOND
filled again during which interval you were at the mercy
of any neighbouring opponent.
Under such conditions to have the wind abaft your
beam when you were facing an enemy was a first-rate
advantage j and that was called "having the weather-
gage."
Thus, suppose two lines of ships stretched out from
north to south, and facing each other, the one looking
westwards, the other looking eastwards, and suppose the
wind to be from the east; then the line which faced west-
ward had the wind behind it, that is, it had the weather-
gage, and its ships could manoeuvre at will. They could
bear down on their enemy or slant off to the right or to the
left with freedom. But their opponents could not work at
all until they had their bows pointing nearly north or
nearly south. They were hampered in the action of their
craft. They could not attack directly. They were, as con-
trasted with their enemies, like a man who can only fight
to the right or to the left of his body, while his opponent
can fight to the right, to the left, and also in front of
him. Over and above this the weather-gage gave its pos-
sessor the use of fire ships to drift down on the enemy
and set his ships alight.
Now the Dutch on this occasion had the weather-gage,
for they lay to the east facing westwards, while the
English lay to the west facing eastwards; and the slight
wind was, as I have said, easterly.
During the next day Saturday, the 2nd of June
the Duke of York was painfully working his ships east-
ward against the wind to approach the Dutch. But he
could not force the enemy to action because though the
wind began drawing towards the south (and therewith
freshened somewhat) it was still easterly and the Dutch
still had the weather-gage. So by nightfall of this Satur-
94
ADMIRALTY
day, the 2nd of June, the English fleet came to anchor
again in that shallow sea.
But during the night England had a stroke of luck.
The wind got west of south, and gave her ships the
weather-gage.
Hitherto the Dutch had declined action because Op-
dam, who commanded them, though superior in num-
bers, doubted the issue. But now, with the wind gone
round behind the English, he could not decline again
save, indeed, by putting on all sail and breaking away.
The politicians who were with him, and were his superiors,
compelled him to accept battle. De Witt especially in-
sisted, and he was probably right: the domestic situation in
Holland was such that even a lost battle hard fought
might be better than a retirement. Moreover, it is not
certain that the Dutch fleet could have escaped, for per-
haps (we are not certain of this) the average rate of
sailing on the English side, even before they had ham-
mered their enemy, was superior.
At any rate, the Dutch line accepted battle, and the
gunners opened just in the grey of the dawn, at half -past
three in the morning, on Sunday, the 3rd of June, 1665.
The two lines faced each other some thirty-five miles
south-south-east from Lowestoft in twenty fathom of
water. 1
The English line, lying roughly from north to south,
but a little west of north, headed northward 5 the Dutch,
also lying roughly from north to south but a little east
of south, headed southwards 5 the English ships having
the south-westerly wind on the port quarter, the Dutch
keeping as close as they could to the wind on the star-
1 It is curious that with such detailed accounts as we have of this action
it seems impossible to be certain, within many miles, of where it was en-
gaged. There is a version which places it much nearer the English coast
and more to the north. I have taken what seems to me the most probable
on the evidence of the number of hours sailed.
95
JAMES THE SECOND
board tack, that is, with the south-westerly wind coming
somewhat forward of the beam, but not so much as to
check their sailing. The three divisions of the British
lines were commanded, as to the leading one, or northern-
most, by Prince Rupert; the hinder was the Blue
Squadron, commanded by Sandwich; while in the centre
was the Duke, commanding the whole, and in particular
this middle or Red Squadron.
We must envisage the big battle as a thing covering
about ten miles of sea, the English fleet thus sailing
north at the rate of, say 3^ knots an hour (at the most),
and the Dutch passing it exchanged broadsides as they
sailed: and this first "round" covered something like one
and a half hours of time, or nearly two. The superiority
of the English fire had already begun to tell. 1
It was the object of the Dutch when the manoeuvre
was over to try and recover the weather-gage by passing
behind the English and getting to the west of them.
But they failed to do so: and within half an hour, it
being about six o'clock, the passage was "charged" as
contemporaries put it, having taken well over one and a
half hours, from just before four o'clock to later than
5.30. Both lines then went about, the English now
sailing southerly and the Dutch northerly, so that each
presented to its opponent the guns and sides which in the
last passage had been untouched by fire.
So they sailed, each past the other, cannonading at
short range; Sandwich of course now leading and
Rupert at the tail. A third of these manoeuvres followed,
1 It is curious to note that most historians of the battle, allowing- a rate
of sailing of some 3 J4 knots and the length of the line to be between 9 and
10 miles, think that the Dutch and English fleets took some three hours
to pass each other. They forget that, with the fleets sailing in opposite
directions, the time should be halved. The relative speed of passing was
not aJ^ knots but 7. There is here no necessity to read Einstein.
96
ADMIRALTY
the English sailing north, the Dutch south again, as at
the beginning, hours before.
It is clear that by this time the Dutch must have been
very heavily damaged, for their leading ships could not
come properly up to the wind, and began to fall away
to leeward. James with immediate decision ordered the
whole fleet to go about, that is, to turn south again and
run parallel with- the Dutch, so that they could hammer
the enemy indefinitely, not in passing them, but con-
tinuously and at close quarters. He put into the action
something of his own fighting spirit, going close in and
delivering his flagship's whole weight of fire. The can-
nonade was so well maintained that the Dutch could no
longer properly handle their ships and all their attempts
to go about failed.
The action had already been very costly to the English
side in its leading men: and there was one moment when
James, who had been under heavy fire all day long, was
in special peril. It was just after the order to go about
and run southerly parallel with the Dutch, each ship en-
gaging its opposite number. It so happened that of his
squadron, the. Red, all save two had dropped out to refit.
There was for the moment a heavily superior fire concen-
trated upon his flagship, the Royal Charles.
It was in this situation that a chain shot killed at one
blow Lord Falmouth, Lord Muskerry and the son of
Lord Burlington, who were standing close to the Duke.
Their blood covered and soaked the clothes of the Admiral
and a fragment of his friend's skull wounded him in
the hand.
The ships that had dropped out to refit recovered their
places, and it was somewhat later that James effected his
decisive blow. The Eendracht was opposite to him, and
there was apparent some confusion upon her decks, which
the intensity of the English fire had caused. He took
97
JAMES THE SECOND
advantage of it. He ordered fire no longer by broadsides
but gun by gun so that it was continuous. 1 The first and
second tiers had thus rolled out their thunder 5 fire had be-
gun from the third, next to the water. The first of its two
guns had been successively discharged $ the third made,
perhaps, a lucky shot into the magazine. At any rate, coin-
cident with its discharge, the Eendracht blew up, with all
her crew of 500 and Opdam himself amongst them.
This of course took place in the centre of the action.
The Dutch line was already disorganized. The fighting
was resolving itself into detached groups when, upon the
disaster to their admiral, the rest of the middle ships of
the Dutch line broke away and ran for it before the
wind. A big gap was thus made in their line. James
took immediate advantage of it and cut right through
with the south-west wind behind him. The manoeuvre
had some distant resemblance to what happened at Tra-
falgar.
With the enemy formation thus broken the English
took on ship for ship, rounding upon their enemies to left
and to right; and those enemies fought their way out
as best they could, running for the Dutch coast. The son
of the great van Tromp fought an admirable rearguard
action (as it would be called on land) to protect the
retirement of his colleagues.
The long June day ended in that light wind with
harbours not yet made, with the English fleet in pursuit,
the Dutch flying before them, and in that chase through
the night it is possible that the enemy might have been
destroyed. But there followed a strange incident.
The leading vessel of the chase on the British side
1 It took some three minutes to run in the piece, swab, reload, run out
again and fire: with this interval between the shots of each gun a full
broadside meant a corresponding- delay before the next could be delivered,
whereas a rolling 1 fire of individual guns one after another had upon a
shaken enemy quite a different effect. It could break his nerve.
98
ADMIRALTY
was of course the flagship, the Royal Charles, with James
on board. 1 The rest of the fleet was to follow the light
upon this vessel. The Master was one John Harman,
and he was on the quarter-deck when night fell. James
had been in the thick of the action all day long, exposing
. himself with splendid courage, and, as we have seen, with
friends killed at his side. He went below after at least
eighteen hours of active, highly concentrated and success-
ful command, and of ceaseless cannonade.
There came up from below one of his gentlemen,
called Brouncker or Bronkhard, with orders to John Har-
man that he should shorten sail, that is, lower topsails
and give up the chase. The weather required no such
precaution. Harman was astonished and asked for con-
firmation of the order. Brouncker went away for a short
space, returned and said he had orders again confirmed by
the Duke himself. Harman after some delay reluctantly
obeyed those orders. No vessel in the fleet might pass
the light of the leading flagship; all three squadrons
dropped a knot or two an hour; the Dutch made away
in the night and took refuge in the Texel.
There have been endless discussions upon this order
to shorten sail, most of them provoked by the hatred of
James on account of his later change in religion.
Common sense is enough to show that there was no
sort of reason why James should have given the order.
It would have been all to his advantage to have followed
up the victory and achieved a decision. On the other hand,
Brouncker or Bronkhard had a very good reason for not
carrying on, which was, that he was frightened. He had
shown terror during the action, and had no appetite for
more trouble in the night. We also know that he had
approached the Master, Harman, with suggestions for
the shortening of sail before saying that he had any
1 She was of 80 guns.
99
JAMES THE SECOND
orders from James, and that only after this did he assert,
that he had James's positive orders.
Now we have in these affairs to go by our knowledge
of how men are made. If there was one character in
James which went with his obstinacy, it was his straight-
forwardness. And when we couple that with the fact that
he had no motive for not following up, but every motive
for being still in touch with the enemy at daylight, we may
make fairly certain, I think, that the order did not proceed
from him; and he himself denies it.
The only apparent difficulty in the affair is why
Brouncker or Bronkhard was not punished. But that be-
comes explicable enough when we read the full narrative.
Brouncker or Bronkhard was a man with a good deal
of underhand influence. He was a gentleman by birth.
He was a member of that powerful rich clique called the
House of Commons. He was a coward, and he had been
through a most grueling day under conditions where he
could not run away without jumping overboard and
drowning. The short June night had fallen. The whole
day he had been suffering under a furious cannonade. He
had no particular desire that the experience should be
prolonged and that action should be renewed by the active
pursuit of a defeated enemy.
He was James's Gentleman of the Bedchamber. He had
seen his master down for that brief moment of rest. Then
came his opportunity.
He came up on deck again, with a pretended order
from the Duke that the Master of the Flagship should
shorten sail. This man, Harman, was naturally astonished
at such an order, and said it must be confirmed before he
would obey it. Brouncker then disappeared again as
though to return to James's cabin, to which, be it remem-
bered, he was the only man who had the right to approach.
But he did not go into the Admiral's cabin. He only went
100
ADMIRALTY
below to deceive those on deck into the belief that he had
seen his master. He came up again with pretended renewed
orders, and Harman reluctantly shortened sail.
Now before James had concluded that very brief and
necessary repose of his, that is, just before dawn of that
June morning (Monday, the 4th), whether because the
wind had died down or from whatever other reason, the
topsails were set up again} and when the Duke came up
on deck there was no shortening of sail apparent compared
with the time when he went away. He saw the Dutch
coast at hand they were now but a very few miles off
those low sands and the enemy had escaped. But James
had no idea that sail had been shortened in the night. He
thought the enemy had made good their escape during the
darkness.
Much later, when he came to know what had happened,
he moved at once for a court martial on Brouncker. But
and here is the rub! Brouncker formed part of that
powerful oligarchy the House of Commons, already the
master of the Crown. The Members of the House of
Commons took up, as they always do, the case of a corrupt
colleague and put up every delay against his examination
and punishment. First the dreadful business of the Plague,
then the Fire, intervened. While these delays were pro-
tracting, he was advised to go and hide himself in France,
which he did. Things dragged on. James's narrative con-
cludes by saying that after so many (and such! ) months,
after all this water had passed under the bridge, it would
have been morally impossible to revive a lengthy and
belated prosecution and he was undoubtedly right.
There is no one with a knowledge of Parliaments who
will not agree. The House of Commons had got its man
off. That same body which was responsible for the shame
of the Dutch in the Medway was responsible for the
101
JAMES THE SECOND
immunity of the fellow who had saved the Dutch fleet
from destruction two years before.
Such was the great naval battle of 1665, the victory
under James's command. It was never equalled in that
generation, nor approached, as proof of English dominion
single-handed at sea, till long after the youngest of those
who had fought in it was dead. When James was, im-
mediately after, ordered by his brother to give up active
service, the fleet was taken over by others. They fought
well but with no such effect.
It is essential to remember that this battle was not
only a greater success than that generation was to see
again, but also, as I have said, by far the greatest naval
victory ever yet won by an English fleet, unless we are
to call the gatherings of the Middle Ages national fleets
(for if we count thus, the Sluys was both much more
decisive and on a larger scale). It impressed the national
mind strongly. On this account it was of the highest
advantage to James himself. It was he who had made
this navy what it was; and here, now, in the first years
of its new character it had triumphed. For though the
victory missed being a decision (and we all know from
the last war how little the public understands the differ-
ence between a decisive battle and a victory), yet the
Dutchman, the national enemy of the day, had been
very heavily hit. He had lost 4 admirals, 7,000 killed,
maimed or prisoners, and 18 of his sail either captured
or burnt.
The English losses had been insignificant in compari-
son. One ship of 50 guns had been captured early in the
affair, but all the killed and wounded only amounted to
some 600. The losses in the leaders, however, was heavy.
I have already give those of Lord Falmouth, Lord Mus-
kerry, and Boyle (Lord Burlington's son). There also
102
ADMIRALTY
fell two of James's naval commanders trained to the
sea, Lawson and Sampson, and Lord Portland and Lord
Marlborough.
It was part of James's bad luck that this great success,
which had made him for the moment the darling of the
nation, and would have kept him permanently popular,
fell at a moment when London at least (which was the
director of England) was too disturbed to feel its full
effects. Already before James had sailed to victory the
Plague, starting in St. Giles's Parish in the last days of
May, had begun to do its work. When the Admiral and
his officers returned to land, the panic was beginning, and
some three weeks after the great battle in the North Sea
all who could afford it, or nearly all, were fleeing from
London. Monk was an honourable exception. He re-
mained at his post.
And here comes a passage which we who review it so
long after perceive to be most unfortunate for England:
though it must be admitted in favour of the men of the
time that there were strong reasons for their action. The
Duke of York, fresh from victory, with so high and so
deserved a reputation for courage and (what was more
important) of exceptional talent in marine warfare, was
withdrawn by superior authority from actual command
at sea.
It seems probable or certain that the King's order to
this effect was individual. If the suggestion had come
from James's enemies he would have told us, but in his
own account the decision is laid down wholly to his
brother. Charles feared further risk to the life of his heir.
We should remember how strongly the King must have
felt in such a matter at that particular moment. He was
by this time doubtful of any issue from his wife. If
James were killed there would come next in succession a
baby barely three years old and a girl at that. He knew
103
JAMES THE SECOND
on what a precarious tenure he (and his) alone could hold
the throne. He knew how much more powerful than the
King the wealthy class had become and how easily a
minority might destroy what little initiative the nominal
head of the country still possessed. He ardently desired
the recovery of some part at least of what had been torn
away from the English Crown and for such a recovery
a man was needed. He knew that in James he had a
man who delighted in personal risk and who fought with
gusto a 'thruster' as the young men of the Great War
called such a comrade. From a fresh action the news might
come that his brother had fallen. Further, James's pop-
ularity seemed now assured, and it was an important asset.
Later, when he had become Catholic and had so given his
powerful enemies their advantage, it was as essential to
attempt a renewal of that popular support. Therefore
in 1672 he was again allowed to command. Again he
showed the highest courage and the strongest determina-
tion. But it was too late.
Nevertheless, the recall was a disaster, immediate and
also at long range. Had James proceeded to further fight-
ing before the eyes of the country he might have become
its permanent idol. His conspicuous valour shone where
Englishmen have always most admired it, on the quarter-
deck. He had already become a hero in their eyes, this
young man in the strength of his thirty-second year.
Further renown would have set him on a public pedestal
from which he could not have been deposed. The common
folk, though inflammable on religion, had no part in the
political spite and rancour of their betters, the parlia-
mentary gentry, nor any direct burden of taxation to pay
for the fleet. They did not appreciate how far the fall of
kingship had gone, and against James as the hero
of the nation the intriguers at Westminster might have
failed even after his change of religion.
104
ADMIRALTY
For immediate consequence there was the possibility
of crippling once and for all the Dutch power at sea.
The Duke of York had defeated it and could defeat it
again. He earnestly craved the opportunity of inflicting
the final blow. It was denied him: Sandwich was put in
command, and all James could obtain was the melancholy
privilege of seeing the fleet off on its cruise from the Nore,
and the pursuance on land of his duties as Lord High
Admiral, overlooking and energizing that' Naval Ad-
ministration which was the great occupation of his life.
His popularity was already such that even the Parlia-
ment, when it met at Oxford during that plague year of
1665, had to vote him a hundred and twenty thousand
pounds and to connect the endowment openly with his
gallantry at sea; while the tradition of his success further
compelled them to provide over a million and a quarter
for the war.
As we shall see, such unusual generosity on the part
of these large taxpayers was of short life. For it was
but the next year that their lack of patriotism so crippled
the forces of the Nation and the Crown that all the main
ships had to be laid up, and that England suffered the dis-
grace of the Dutch in the Medway, burning and carrying
off her great men-of-war and threatening London itself.
The full story is a significant one for any man who
prefers history to official legend. The starving of the
revenue by Parliament with its double motive of avarice
and pretension to rule was a fixed political feature of the
whole seventeenth century in this country with which I
have dealt in its own place. But the examples of 1665 and
1667 are particularly flagrant and must be emphasized
and put in the clearest light if we are to understand the
shame of the time, and the indifference of the conspirators
to the honour of their country in their hunger to master
their king.
105
JAMES THE SECOND
There is one last note to be added to this story of the
great naval victory of '65. We know with what horror
the official historians of the nineteenth century talked of
a king's power to suspend laws. But when it comes to
suspension in causes which their readers would approve,
those historians slur over the facts.
Now one of the most important examples of the sus-
pensory power we have in the whole Stuart period, and
of its value, is the action of Charles II in preparing for
the Dutch war. The parliamentary organization of the
wealthy classes happened to be at the moment enthusiastic
for the war and even what was a rare thing with them
ready to vote money for it. But there was no provision of
men. The faulty pay was bad enough, as we have seen.
Apart from that, mere numbers were lacking. Handling
sailing craft is an expert business. You could not in those
days pick up any one at random, as we can now, to shovel
coal, pull a lever, or handle things on iron deck. And the
number of men trained to the sea, a small proportion
of the population, was absorbed by the merchant service.
When a fleet had to be got ready for war, men had to be
kidnapped, that is, taken by force and put aboard. It was
a practice which had grown immensely under the Puritan
regime, with its contempt for the poor, and had thus
become established. How, when they got aboard, they
were trained, one wonders!
Now, the necessity for trained seamen was so great that
Charles for the purposes of the war suspended the Navi-
gation Acts which forbade the employment of foreigners
in English boats; and helped in this way to secure a suffi-
ciency of English seamen for his crews. It has never
occurred to the solemn denunciators of the royal power
to attack this salutary action. They reserve their criticism
for the use of the same royal faculties in the relief of the
oppressed.
106
ADMIRALTY
It should be remarked in this connexion that the Scotch,
who still were a separate nation and of whom most still
thought themselves a hostile nation, would have nothing
to do with the necessities of England. They denied the
right of the English Navy to press men in Scotland (they
were obviously justified in this), and indeed many of
them served on enemy vessels. The Scotch seaman when
he was needy seems to have preferred the Dutch service,
because there at least he was regularly paid. There was no
king in Holland, and the rich men who governed that
country, after the model which was beginning to be im-
posed on England and later triumphed, saw to their public
revenue and expenditure accurately, as, to do them justice,
the wealthier classes in England also did when they had
thoroughly destroyed the power of the Crown. For though
in strong resistance to the popular monarchy they had been
grudging of contributions, yet when they were well in
the saddle they furnished fleets and armies lavishly
enough.
V
THE CONVERSION
nr*HE space of time between the accession of Charles II
JL and his death is twenty-five years (May i66o-Feb-
ruary 1685). In General History it is the Period of Louis
XIV, of French culture and even of French arms: the
rapid decline of Spain: the exhaustion of the Germans
from the Thirty Years' War of the preceding generation.
In the history of England it is the skilful, vigilant and un-
tiring effort of the King to maintain the last ruins of the
Monarchy. But in our understanding of his brother these
twenty-five years are of another order. They are the
period of his conversion to Catholicism and of the conse-
quent opportunity afforded to the enemies of the Mon-
archy. James's acceptation of the Faith after eleven years
of power made possible that fierce attack upon him, led
by the great landed fortunes, aided (in part) by an organ-
ized London mob at their disposal and mustered by men
in their pay; aided in a much less degree by some minority
of the nation at large. That attack just but only just
failed of its main object, which was to prevent James,
whose strong character threatened their supremacy, from
becoming King. James acceded in due course to the throne.
Once crowned, the full ordeal fell upon him, and, then
he failed in his turn through mishandling his problem.
All turns, then, on his conversion. This religious and
intellectual change in the character of one man, the man-
ner in which he met the furious assault which he knew
he would have to face and which he resisted without yield-
108
THE CONVERSION
ing a step for a dozen years, until he had triumphed over
it, are the history of the time.
The period is entered by James as a young man of 26.
He leaves it, a man of 51, advanced in middle age. It
covers the most active period of his life, and we note that
it is in the full manhood of the earlier part that he dis-
covers and at last accepts the Faith: his subsequent chal-
lenge and defence are the business of a mind grown un-
changeable and finally determined, the mind of later
years.
The two portions are nearly equally divided by the
approach of a date critical in most lives: the age of forty.
He is near forty when his conversion is generally known
in 1672, and the main struggle begins. The boundary be-
tween the two is the imposition of the Test Act by the
great landlords as a blow against the Crown in early 1673.
The Test Act was aimed at excluding Catholics in general
(not Nonconformists) from doing any public work as
officers or ministers or in any other capacity under the
Crown. But its main object was the exclusion of the Duke
of York from the Council and the Admiralty. There
were plenty of Catholics in such places during the ten
years following the Restoration. They occasioned no such
action. But the moment James himself was known to be
Catholic, -action was taken.
Until that date, 1673, James's chief public activity
remained at the Admiralty to which he was so devoted
and to the fleet which, in spite of the universal and
deliberate starving of it by the wealthy intriguers against
the throne, he maintained through situations almost des-
perate, and could still present, after a dozen years of such
shameful neglect by Parliament, a predominant instru-
ment of war. In the year before the Test Act the fleet is
maintaining with renewed vigour the power of England
by sea. James himself is again commanding in its flag-
109
JAMES THE SECOND
ship. He fights a last action in which, despite the incapacity
of an inferior French contingent, he stands up successfully
to the superior armament of Holland in the fiercest naval
battle of that generation.
The Test Act, coming immediately after, compelled
him to be silent on religion or to resign. Undoubtedly
the King his brother accepted the Act under the impres-
sion that James would give up the public profession of
Catholicism and keep his place. He did what perhaps no
other man of his station in Europe would have done: he
preferred Truth to power and he resigned: and from that
day the recurrent supremacy of England in the Narrow
Seas is ended for a generation.
The next twelve years present for his great energies
few public occasions. He is no longer at the head of the
department most vital to England. He can no longer see
to it that, subject to continual strains from lack of supply,
the fleet shall be supported. He has to stand by and ob-
serve its decline. He is not even regularly present, of
right, at his brother's side in the Council as heir ap-
parent. He has, once and again, for long months to absent
himself from England lest his presence should hamper
Charles in the perilous duel between the throne and its
more powerful subjects. It is proposed to exile him for
ever, to exclude him from the succession, to prefer to him
his own daughter, her alien husband or a bastard nephew j
and all because he is unflinching not only in his private
conviction on the only things that count any one may
be that but in his publication of them and open, chal-
lenging adherence. His steadfast attitude, his brother's
tardy and compromising but at last sufficient support
exhaust the enemy for a time and during the last three
years of the reign the heir is at peace.
The background to all this personal story of the man
is his brother's struggle to maintain the Crown or what
no
THE CONVERSION
was left of it. That struggle fills the national history
of the time, and though we are not principally concerned
with it here, we must understand it if we are also to un-
derstand the Duke of York during these years 5 foridien
his brother had married Catherine of Braganza, the Prin-
cess of Portugal, soon after his restoration, it became
more and more doubtful, as the years proceeded, that she
would bear him an heir. The Duke of York therefore
remained the presumptive heir. Had he been mediocre or
even pliant, still more had "he been as skilful in political
intrigue as he was intelligent and determined, he 'would
have been accepted as the chief man in the kingdom. But
he was otherwise. He was ill-suited to such a part. His
intelligence, which was strong, his energy and capacity for
work, which was exceptional, he could not direct either
towards finesse or towards appreciating the motives of
others. He did not 'even watch his opponents. He hardly
distinguished their characters, he overestimated their
morals, he heavily underestimated their power j and
(worst and most dangerous trait of all) he was unable to
make friends,
Not so Charles. Charles II carried on for these
twenty-five years, from his younger manhood to the ap-
proach of age and death, as skilful a contest as we can
watch in history. He looked into men's hearts an unpleas-
ing spectacle j he understood them; he could evolve strong
personal attachment in the most worthy.
Charles had to play upon a board of eight chequers,
as it were, divided into two sets of -four, and to consider
the perpetual combinations and recombinations of their
innumerable interactions.
To change the metaphor, he had to deal with two
groups of four forces, each of the eight changing per-
petually within, each having varied relations with the
in
JAMES THE SECOND
other seven, and all concerned, now as enemies, now as
supporters, with his own power.
These eight factors were: First, the foreign group: (a)
Holland, (?) France, (c) The beginnings of colonial ex-
pansion, (d) The general European situation on the
whole a situation gradually weakening France as the
twenty-five years drew to their close; Second, the domestic
group: (a) The Gentry (and their Parliament), especially
the score of very rich men who conducted all; () Lon-
don that is, the great merchants, their dependent popula-
tion and trade (which was expanding rapidly), the resi-
dence of Court, Government and Opposition. London
was also of exaggerated effect through the concentration
there in one place of immense numbers, a fifteenth of all
England; (c) The People, for whom his Royal Ancestry
had stood, for whom his father had died, who were with-
out organ of expression, but who were there, underneath
it all, and still had some latent force in them (they sup-
ported him in his years of rule without a parliament);
(d] The two bodies of dissent, Calvinist 1 and Catholic.
The former, the Nonconformist, was of the greater size
and, beneath the surface, of one culture with the main
body, at least, of the Established Church. The other, the
Catholic was considerable in actual numbers; as we have
seen, from one-seventh to one-eighth of the people. It was
also supported by the broad belt of those who, though not
risking a public profession, sympathized with Catholicism,
and a much broader belt which tolerated it. On the other
hand, these numerous Catholics surviving were already
half cowed by generations of fierce persecution and ruin.
Government had acted with intensity for a hundred years
to extirpate the traditional religion. Only the hardest core
1 The word is appropriate to British Nonconformity, though but one of
its numerous sects accepts the full Calvinist discipline. The spirit of the
whole is that proceeding from Geneva in the sixteenth century.
112
THE CONVERSION
had survived, to represent among Englishmen that which
had built up their country through a thousand years.;
Through this maze of conflicting and shifting forces
Charles manoeuvred with the ability of a master. Both
brothers were active in thought as in frame, but James
was incapable of complexity: Charles comprehended and
delighted in it. James had one main object, personal and
ideal. Charles also had but one, only it was practical and
very terrestrial, to maintain for English kingship what
little was left of its power: even (if that were possible
and in some measure he succeeded) to increase that power
somewhat: to defend its boundaries by some degree of ex-
pansion.
See with what art he works the intricate scheme! The
rich men, using Parliament as their instrument, hold him
apparently at their mercy. The income of the King was
gone. He could employ no men, build neither ship nor
barrack, buy neither stores nor guns, save by leave of the
merchants and squires. At his restoration they destroy
such permanent revenue as remained to the Crown and
replace it by a life revenue only, based upon taxes of which
they relieve their own landed class to levy them upon the
mass of the people. They are very careful to see that this
revenue shall be insufficient. Even its nominal sum would
not maintain the rapidly developing state, and that
nominal sum is never nearly reached in practice. The
yield of the taxes granted by Parliament is known to be
quite insufficient for the purposes of government.
Therefore the King will be bound to come to them
again and again for money, and they will only provide
it on terms of reducing step by step the small relic of
his authority.
But Charles has three cards to play against these rich
men opposed to him: Their fearsj The Customs Revenue}
Subsidy from an ally.
JAMES THE SECOND
The landed class do not want invasion; they fear the
unpopularity of defeat in war. Charles can therefore
occasionally not often, but occasionally frighten them
into providing temporarily for the armed forces; and on
such votes he can carry on for a while. That is what he
did early in the affair, to provide for the first Dutch war
in 1664: he did it again with consummate ability, quite
outflanking the intriguers, when he made them vote the
regiments and the crews of 1671.
With what difficulty this card could be played we know
from the disaster of 1667. The masters of Parliament
had thought to hold the King when, in the midst of the
Plague and the Great Fire, they withheld supply for the
fleet. Charles could find no substitute money in time, and
as a result the first-raters are laid up, the crews disbanded.
As an immediate second result the Dutch are masters of
the North Sea, enter the Thames and the Medway, de-
stroy the King's ships, sail to Gravesend and menace
London.
The expansion of the Customs the opponents of the
Crown had not foreseen. The grant for life to the King
was not intended to emancipate him but to provide him
with an insufficient dole. Without giving them a handle
to attack, without changing rates, Charles watched with
a smile the rapidly expanding trade and its fruits in
revenue. Before the end of his life it had floated him.
Subsidy from an ally was a more delicate matter, but
the King's political genius was never more conspicuous
than in his treatment of that resource and it saved the
throne in three moments of great peril.
Of the two main groups into which Europe was divided
France and her lesser supporters, on the one hand:
Spain, Holland, the House of Austria, on the other (in
perpetual changes this was the main division of the time)
one could pay a price: France. The other could not.
114
THE CONVERSION
There was money to be had by supporting the one policy
only, that of Louis } as later Austria had the money o
Pitt to attack Napoleon, as earlier Gustavus Adolphus
the money of Richelieu to attack the Empire.
But simply to side with the Bourbons in the European
field would be to weaken the English monarchy in two
ways: loss of power to turn the tide of European war,
and loss of a complete international independence.
It would destroy England's chief international asset,
which was that of acting, small as were her numbers, as
a balance and makeweight, capable of reinforcing either
side at will. England had not (thanks to Parliament) even
the revenue of Holland j she had hardly a third perhaps
not much more than a quarter the population of France,
or a third of Spain's. But she had aptitude for the sea,
and, in spite of lack of public funds and therefore of bad
irregular pay, an unequalled generation of sailors. She
had, thanks to the Duke of York, and in spite of Parlia-
ment, a fleet which, when spasmodically provided with
funds, could defeat an opponent. Her support to the one
group or the other was of a value greater than her grudged
revenue or population accounted for. This freedom to
act at will must be present, or the British Crown would
lose its chief instrument of action among its rivals of
Spain, France and the powerful wealthy, maritime Dutch
Republic the bank of Europe.
Again, mere permanent alliance with his cousin the
King of France would have meant for Charles, in the long
run, dependence. If Louis, with his vastly superior re-
venue, should come to think that the English Crown, lack-
ing his aid, would be delivered into the hands of its
opponents, he could exact from the Crown what terms he
pleased and make it subservient to his own ends. It was
essential to prevent this, and it was prevented by Charles's
JAMES THE SECOND
perpetually retaining and exercising the power to take up
a contrary policy: the policy of opposing France at will.
When Louis was allied with the Dutch for his effort
against Spain in Flanders during 1665, Charles took the
other side, and sent out his brother James to fight and
defeat them by sea. When he signed peace with the Dutch
it was the peace of Breda in '67 which was in effect a
challenge to Louis, just when Louis was beginning to
change his attitude and to abandon the Dutch.. The triple
alliance of England, Holland and Sweden in 1678 was a
flat defiance of Louis. Charles thus made his support of
France a thing anxiously desired and revocable, and when
he came to that secret arrangement with Louis called the
Treaty of Dover, it was with a temporary French ally far
more anxious to pay for his help than the King of England
was anxious to receive.
The same decisive play appears in 1677. The great
end of Louis at that moment was to prevent a Union be-
tween the houses of Stuart and Orange. He was wise.
He foresaw the ultimate result. Charles therefore (un-
fortunately for his country in the long run, but acting
intelligently for his diplomatic needs of the moment)
insisted precisely upon that marriage, and gave his niece
Mary, a Protestant, and not yet 16, to that deplorable
husband William in his twenty-seventh year. For the
King had already insisted on her being confirmed in the
Established Church, and, in spite of her mother's memory
and her father's violent protest, brought her up a Pro-
testant.
Watch carefully the succession of advances towards, and
withdrawals from, the support of Bourbon power between
1660 and 1685 and you will perceive throughout one
brain consistently at work; not the tortuous personal in-
trigues o the Temples and Halifaxes and Sunderlands,
not the doubtful double-faced services of a Digby, not the
116
THE CONVERSION
more loyal ones of a Clifford, but one mind behind it all
and that mind is the mind of Charles II. All is cal-
culated to obtain just so much as will save the Crown
from being eaten up by its domestic enemies while at once
making its alliance well worth purchasing; keeping open,
and using continually, the door to reversal of policy.
Throughout the independence of the English Monarchy
was secured from those who could threaten it from within
or from without. What is even more remarkable, secrecy
was preserved.
The crude statement 'Money has come from France'
would have been fatal in its effect on uninstructed opinion
in 1671 as would the statement The money comes from
Holland' have been fatal to William's invasion with a
foreign army subsidized by Holland seventeen years later.
In the one case as in the other secrecy was necessary and
was kept. But there was this difference. That the French
money of 1671 was mainly spent on a very necessary
National Navy which otherwise would have rotted, the
Dutch money of 1688 on the upkeep of alien troops sup-
porting a usurper who neither did nor desired to do any-
thing for the strengthening of England amongst the
nations. The French money of 1671 was acquired perma-
nently for English use; the Dutch money of 1688 had to
be repaid by the duped taxpayer of England who had the
additional pleasure of finding the very high interest with
which, all unknown to himself, he was charged. (It fell
in part on his tobacco.)
There is the same patient and successful handling of
the Corporation of London. A mob was managed in
the interest of those who would destroy the monarchy.
Shaf tesbury was in touch with it always, and the organ-
ized wealth of the great merchants was also wpon the
whole opposed to Charles, both because the limitation
of taxes was a strong motive with them and because the
117
JAMES THE SECOND
Corporation enjoyed great power. It was a factor of high
importance because the Franchise was wide there were
some 50,000 of the livery and because those who worked
the election could, as is the cant of mechanical representa-
tion, pretend to speak for the whole. And this great body
of London, Westminster, and their extensions, was a
concentrated mass of population wherein were caught the
palace, and the organs of government: a mass perhaps
at the end of Charles's reign a twelfth of all England, by
1700 a tenth.
Charles yields sufficiently to those rich men who control
London, plays upon its jealousy of Dutch trade, allows
it to work its frenzy out in the moments of popular mad-
ness nourished by Shaftesbury and his crew and then,
as the fish weakens, he begins to reel in. He knows that
the essential point of the opposition is not the mass of
liverymen (who were equally divided in party, and, for
the vast majority, apathetic), but the organized clique of
the Corporation. He uses a half-loyal mayor. He sees to
it that a poll is contested. He wins. And when the Charter
upon which the old oligarchy of wealth depended is with-
drawn, there is no popular weight behind the demand for
its renewal.
He, with more difficulty, kept alive the idea of religious
toleration: a policy solemnly promised before his restora-
tion, continually thwarted by the Parliament and yet never
allowed to disappear. He always gave way on it and al-
ways kept it in reserve; so that by the end of his reign
it was still lively and familiar.
He saw to the colonial effort of England, then just
developing; he acquired the Dutch 'corridor' of the Hud-
son Valley between New England and Maryland (New
York preserves his brother's name). It was not his fault
that the French alliance did not procure for the English
Crown more American territory at the expense of Spain
118
THE CONVERSION
for he had stipulated it should} but the French Crown,
considering rather its own opportunities in the new world,
did not keep its word.
Charles won his battle and died in the enjoyment pf
that precarious victory. But he did not win the campaign.
He had been compelled to use as his ministers the class
which was, of its nature, the enemy of Monarchy, the
great landed proprietors. They were a close body, whose
relationship is a study. Shaftesbury is Sunderland's
brother-in-law. Henry Sydney is Sunderland's uncle
(and the lover of Sunderland's wife). Halifax is Sunder-
land's first cousin and so on through a score of names.
Charles had no advantage over that set but to shuffle them
in turn as a man may shuffle the shares of connected com-
panies on a falling market: knowing that in the long run
he is bound to lose.
The Duke of York in the first dozen years, while he
was still an active power and before the declaration of his
conversion had driven him away, supported his brother}
but supported him awkwardly. Nevertheless, in the major
things he was permanently right and his brother Charles
wrong. For Charles had in view an ephemeral thing, and
even so struggled to preserve for a brief while what was
already doomed, but James had in view clear prindples
and struggled for political ideas which are not doomed
when their expression is defeated. Monarchy did not dis-
appear for ever.
Before examining the Duke of York's action between
1660 and 1673, we must consider the religious revolution
in him, on which all turned.
It is strange that we do not know the date upon which
he was received into the Church. He kept the point secret}
and it is an instance of his rigidity and self-control that
after these two and a half centuries, secret it remains. Did
we know it, the task of appreciating his actions and their
119
JAMES THE SECOND
motives between the Restoration and the Test Act 1660
to 1673 would be greatly eased. He had excellent reason
for such discretion. It would have damaged the dynasty
to let the thing come with a shock. Not that the later
excitements raised in London and fomented by the op-
ponents of the Crown should be confused with the spirit
of the nation, but that the great majority of the nation was
Protestant, and had so been increasingly for half a century,
and (what was more important) that the framework of
the nation, the corporate institutions round and upon
which ^ it gathered, were exclusively Protestant. A
Catholic heir was at the best an anomaly, at the worst an
offence: at the very worst he might even prove (as
Charles instinctively felt) a peril to the throne. It
was just and politic, therefore, that the news of James's
conversion should be delayed and broken, not rushed.
But there is another thing to remember. Reconcilia-
tion with the Catholic Church was not, in the England
of that day, the complete transition which it is now.
There had been no breach of continuity. The Catholic
body in the England of the Restoration was as close a part,
historically, of the English past as the French royalists
are to-day a part of the French past, or the Southerners
in the United States of the American. A Catholic in the
England of 1660-70 was but one who had preserved what
others had not so lately lost or abandoned. He was the
son of a man who had formed, in 1600-50, part of a
very large still resisting minority, the grandson of one who
had formed, in 1560-1600, part of a large majority
though dwindling at the end to but half the nation. The
London of the Restoration was full of men, themselves
elderly, who had heard from their fathers personal
memories of an England evenly divided on religion, as
we have heard from our elders personal memories of an
England divided, in the American War of Secession
120
THE CONVERSION
between Northern and Southern sympathies. The most
rabid Puritan, if he were past middle age, would in most
cases have had to admit that his grandfather was a
Catholic, or, in rare cases, might prove with pride that
the worthy man had stood fast among the little flock
persecuted by Mary Tudor.
Moreover, Catholicism was familiar as an international
tone in that Europe which was not divided, as ours has
come to be, into quite estranged nationalities. And this
was especially true of the very large and lively world of
the Court, where, since forty or fifty years, the Queen of
England had her Mass and its attendants, and where
foreign nobility and Irish perpetually came and went, and
where the literature, drama and manners of Catholic cul-
ture were a general experience.
For one that took the strong step of accepting the Faith,
there were a number in that world who had at one time or
another considered it, or at the least wondered. For each
that accepted the heavy burden, there was one at least who
came to the very verge of acceptance and turned back.
Nevertheless, a definite act was required at conversion.
The man or woman not born in the Church must^ on
a determined occasion, accept its authority and com-
municate with it if they were to call themselves of the
Faith. When that definite date fell for James Stuart we
do not know: perhaps later research or accident will dis-
cover it; but, provisionally, I should put it not earlier than
1671, and certainly not later than the end of 1672, that
is, in his thirty-eighth or thirty-ninth year.
Later than the end of 1672 it could not have been. The
Test Act was law on March the 29th, 1673, an< i James,
under its provisions, declared himself and gave up, with
a heavy heart, the chief occupation of his life: the ships.
But though James's reception into the Church cannot be
later than 1672, the reader may be surprised to read it
121
JAMES THE SECOND
just so late as 1671. I repeat, it is only a surmise, but I
will give my reasons for it.
James's first wife, Anne Hyde, had a strong influence
over him. She was perhaps the only human being who
ever impressed the hard material of his mind. Hers was
the initiative in that combination, and by her he would
largely be guided, not in a conviction but in judgment of
what was politic. Now the Duchess was received, as we
know, late in 1670. She dispassionately and soberly wrote
out her reasons for the step, and they remain to us. They
are individual and full of personal decision. They are
essential, because she was the mother at the time, of a
male heir to the throne. The boy was to die soon after
her, but that she could not know. That she and her hus-
band had long discussed the matter of religion there can
be no doubt. That his earlier intention moved her to in-
quiry is probable. That he had taken the momentous
step before her is not so.
Then there are the children. Any that survived were,
in their order, heirs to England. Many had been born
seven indeed and at the moment of their mother's
reception Mary and Anne, the later sovereigns, were
respectively over 8 and 6 years old. Yet they were baptized
and brought up as members of the Church of England.
It is true that this fitted in with the King's wishes, but
we hear of no protest, whereas, when in 1676, after the
critical date, Mary was to be confirmed in the Establish-
ment, it could only be done against her father's resistance
and at her royal uncle's express desire or rather order. 1
Lastly we know that he can hardly have been received
before he ceased to communicate in the Royal chapel.
For he specially asked as many another has whether
1 It was as one might expect Compton, Lord Northampton's brother,
who urged it most strongly; the leader of the plot against James in the
affair of the seven bishops. True, he was Bishop of London, but his
urgency was political.
122
THE CONVERSION
such formal acts were permitted by the discipline of the
Faith and had been told that they were not.
The contrary evidence is weak. Our official historians
call James and for that matter Charles himself
'secretly a Catholic,' long before. The use of the phrase
shows their ignorance of their subject. Charles and
James were both of high European culture and both knew
what the traditional religion of that culture was. Charles,
probably earlier than James, felt due sympathy with this
religion. James at some comparatively early period in his
life perhaps while still at Brussels before the Restora-
tion had been both impressed and repelled by it far
more than his brother. In that sense the phrase 'secretly
a Catholic' could be and was used by contemporaries. But
that had nothing to do in either case with the man's being
or not being a Catholic. One might as well call a man
'secretly a Member of Parliament' before he is duly
elected. Charles and James after him could be 'secretly
Catholics' with all the vigour in the world and in .no
way jeopardize the succession. We have all known people
(and they are numerous) who are attracted by the Catholic
Church and who often or even regularly follow her serv-
ices, and yet shirk the last and decisive act which may
alienate affection or lose income. No, Charles was not a
Catholic however much he may have admitted his duty
to his own conscience, till the 5th February, 1685 a few
hours before he died. And James was not a Catholic until
that same act had been performed by him. When?
Presumably it is but a presumption as late as 1671, at
least, and after March of that year: certainly before
March, I673- 1
On the process of his conversion we have more knowl-
1 He had so far advanced as to cease to take the Sacrament of the
Church of England in 1670, the year of his wife's conversion. But I
believe that to have been a preliminary approach, not an effect of the
thing done.
123
JAMES THE SECOND
edge. It came to that curiously isolated mind finally
after earlier experiences and impressions by reading the
book I have mentioned: Heylin's book opposing Catholic
claims. This same book he later introduced to his wife.
It was a process intellectual, not emotional. He was con-
vinced, not filled. His brother the King approached from
a very different and more sympathetic direction: from
scepticism an excellent entry. But James had been very
definitely Protestant and the curious will remark in his
noble writing upon religion a strong tinge of his earlier
position. His faith, at the end, though sound, was still
of the colour which, earlier in the century, had so power-
fully (and gloomily) affected the noblest minds: and
Pascal's.
Though he still avoided (apparently) formal recon-
ciliation with the Church, his sympathies were known;
presumptions therefore arose that he would be received,
and these sufficed to put a strong weapon in the hands
of those who watched with more or less conscious enmity
the dynasty, and a political necessity of whose rank it was
even in those who believed themselves most loyal
to undo the monarchy.
The fall and exile of James's father-in-law Clarendon,
in 1667, was due to many other and stronger causes
the failure of the Navy (for which he had no sort of
responsibility, it was all Parliament's), his too great
wealth, his extravagant Palace, 1 his contempt for others,
his best piece of foreign policy the sale of Dunkirk
above all his resistance to the revolutionary encroachments
of the House of Commons. But among the causes was" the
fact that he was father-in-law to the Duke of York.
He was known to approve of the Declaration of Indul-
1 It stood in the field on the top of St. James's Hill, along Piccadilly
Lane, where Albemarle Street (so called because the Duke of Albemarle
bought the house after Clarendon's fall) is now.
124
THE CONVERSION
gence for the relief of Dissenters and Catholics but it
was not his, it was the King's j and it was part of a strong
and constant policy of toleration to which the last Stuarts
consistently kept in spite of numerous set-backs from the
Established Church and from those who used the Parlia-
ment. The Kings believed it would give the country
unity.
For the rest James's personal feelings towards Cath-
olicism before his public profession of it little affected
his public action, though it gave opportunity to his
opponents.
His advice on things was commonly wise 5 his advice
on men and ideas otherwise. Thus when in the refusal
of Parliament to vote -supplies, the Navy was crippled,
he wisely insisted on the advisability of keeping the fleet
in being at any cost (Debt? Sale of lands? A moratorium?
He mentioned none of these: but where was money to
come from? There was as yet no fleet-money from
France). But he could not tell the Council where to find
the funds. He said (it was his special care) that if you
laid up the First-rates the Capital Ships and trusted
to smaller craft as mere protectors of commerce you would
find yourself in an equal expense at last for protecting the
coast.
On the thing he was right. We all know what happened.
The Parliament having failed to provide money, the
Dutch men-of-war entered the Thames at will. The
British dockyard men and sailors were mutinous for
arrears of pay. Many were present as deserters on the
enemy's decks and helped to capture, sink and burn the
British ships in the Medway. But on the means for getting
the lacking cash he was silent.
In the crisis of the Great Fire he showed, as did the
King, the greatest energy, but the populace who remem-
125
JAMES THE SECOND
bered it gratefully o Charles did not remember it of
James.
His attitude on the Treaty of Dover is the last impor-
tant point in his political action during this first phase
before the Test Act and his open avowal of his religion.
But before dealing with that affair of 1670, let me
digress on a transaction of 1669, which has proved of
capital interest to English and European history, and on
which James's attitude deserves particular attention. It
is the more important to deal with it here at some length
because it has been so strangely forgotten. I mean the
first Divorce Act,
Briefly the circumstances were these.
Lord de Roos had already obtained a separation from
his wife by the ecclesiastical authority of the Church of
England, that is, through the Church Courts. Late in the
year 1669 a Bill was brought up in Parliament to allow
him to marry again. The occasion is a landmark in the
story of our civilization. James strongly opposed the meas-
ure. His brother, the King, not so strongly but with some
determination, supported it.
We have both to remark the capital interest of the
occasion and the motives of the Duke of York in acting
as he did: for we are studying the character of a man, and
motive in action, not action alone, is the test of character.
The Roos Divorce Act is a strong example of the social
revolution through which Engknd was passing in the
seventeenth century, and its treatment by the Duke of
York a critical test of his character.
I have said that the occasion was one of capital interest
to the history of England and of Christendom. Let me be-
gin by explaining why this should be so.
Of the few and simple institutions upon which Chris-
tian civilization reposes, marriage is one, just as property
126
THE CONVERSION
is another, ^ the conception of civil authority a third, moral
responsibility with sanctions in a future life a fourth.
In our own day we have seen the whole of this structure
beginning to dissolve in whatever of modern life is sepa-
rated from the Catholic Church. Property is maintained,
though challenged; but is not maintained upon the
ground ^ of moral right it is maintained by arguments
of sophistry or of cynical avarice; and, indeed, the nega-
tion of property, great monopolies under the direction of
a few men, is applauded and is rapidly proceeding to a
completion under which the mass of men will cease to be
free. The sanction of moral authority through personal
immortality is doubted, and more neglected even than it
is doubted; it is also more and more widely denied. The
moral foundation of civil authority is in equal peril
challenged, or supported for the wrong reasons; so that
such authority is coming to mean for most men to-day no
more than organized force at the service of injustice.
Now marriage has gone the same road. Since the Refor-
mation, the f oundational institution of indissoluble Chris-
tian marriage, a sacramental conception, has (outside
Catholic society) gradually dissolved. There are still
countries in which the principle of terminable marriage
during the life of either contracting party is not known to
the law. But those countries are few and exceptional. In
France, after a hard struggle, the large and powerful anti-
Christian minority which has for so long governed that
country forced through the principle of divorce in our
own time. In every non-Catholic country divorce is the
rule and its practice is very rapidly increasing.
It is of the utmost interest to watch the curve along
which moves the degradation of any one of our old funda-
mental institutions. The dissolution of this institution of
marriage has, in England, progressed as follows:
Until the Reformation the principle of indissoluble
127
JAMES THE SECOND
marriage (so long as both parties to the marriage were
alive) was unquestioned. There are, indeed, modern his-
torians so muddle-headed or so insincere, that they con-
fuse, in good faith or for the purposes of deception, the
abuse of nullification with the idea of terminable marriage.
The two principles are utterly distinct, and result in
utterly different societies.
Before the Reformation, while our Western civilization
was still united, it was, of course, admitted that a sup-
posedly indissoluble marriage might turn out on examina-
tion to be no marriage at all. When it had so been dis-
covered by the properly constituted Courts, the marriage
was declared null and void. In other words, it was decided
that the marriage had never existed, and therefore the
parties were free to marry again.
In the corruption of the later Middle Ages, and de-
cline of morals in church officials, this obvious and just
principle was frequently and grossly abused. But we need
not find those scandals only in the corruption of the later
Middle Ages: they exist much more rarely in the
earlier and better part of that period and we have ex-
amples long after their end. But no matter what the
abuse of the principle, through legal machinery (as, for
instance, by letting an undefended suit go by default), no
matter how unjust or frivolous or numerous the occasions
of scandal, there is an impassable gulf between the prin-
ciple that marriage is an indissoluble sacrament and the
principle that marriage is a terminable contract.
If any man doubt so obvious a proposition obvious
not only in logic but in practice and in its effect upon 'so-
ciety let him consider the corresponding point of prop-
erty. We all know how in our own time two principles
stand opposed: the principle that property is of right,
and the principle (at any rate as regards property in
means of production and land) that it is not of right. The
128
THE CONVERSION
difference between the two opposing principles is the great
quarrel between our traditional society and Communism
to-day throughout the world.
Now there is any amount of corruption and abuse to-
day in the treatment of property by the Courts of Justice.
Big swindlers are confirmed in their ill-doing, small men
defrauded, little owners jockeyed out of their rightsj pol-
iticians take bribes unpunished by the Courts. They help
on monopolists and deliver into their hands the small
proprietor and the common citizen. Our whole treatment
of the business of property to-day is profoundly corrupt,
and it is the moral indignation this corruption has aroused
which lends its chief force to Communism. Nevertheless,
the gulf between the two opposing principles remains as
wide as ever: and for constituted authority once to admit
that property in itself was immoral would change the
whole aspect of our world. Wherever such a principle is
adopted Communism reigns and everything is changed.
So with marriage. Whatever abuse in the declarations
of nullity, and in whatever number such abuses, there is
a difference in quality between these and the admission
that either partner to a marriage can, while the other
partner is alive, marry again. The one principle declares
marriage a sacrament, the other declares marriage a term-
inable civil contract. To pass from one to the other is a
revolution.
It was this social and moral revolution far more im-
portant than the constitutional one, but an accompaniment
of it which began in England in the year 1669, and
which, with very slowly gathering effects, has come at
last to what we know to-day as increasingly prevalent:
what to-morrow will be universal.
There had, indeed, during the turmoil and chaos (at
white heat) of religious discussion in the sixteenth cen-
tury, appeared proposals for terminable marriage not
129
JAMES THE SECOND
only in England, but in other countries where the Re-
formers had the ascendant. 1
But such vargaries attach to a time of confusion 5 they
do not form precedents, though they are ominous symp-
toms of what is to come.
In this case of 1669 ^ matter was very different.
The thing was done solemnly, formally, and finally, by
an Act thoroughly debated, voted upon, acceded to and
deliberately set upon record for a specific purpose. It
was acted upon as a precedent. It is the parent of our
modern anarchy in marriage.
The. growth of the innovation was hesitant. One such
Act of Parliament upon the average in a decade is all you
can find until the great moral change following upon
the destruction of the Stuarts, and the entry of the
Hanoverian dynasty as a symbol of that change. After
1715 the thing multiplies tenfold. It is not once in a
decade, it is once a year upon the average, that some Act
of Parliament is then passed permitting a wealthy man or
woman to marry again, though the husband or wife is
still alive. For a lifetime this rate is continued. After
1775 it is no longer at a tenfold, but at a thirty fold rate.
At last, in 1857, we have the full principle admitted, and
divorce becomes a normal part of English law, pro-
nounced by an ordinary civil court, its social effect only
restricted by the cost of the proceedings. Since that date,
and especially in quite modern times, step after step has
been taken to make cheaper, easier, and more general the
1 We all know how Luther gave a permission to his German prince to
marry two wives at once, and before the end of Henry VIIPs reign, and
during that of Edward VI, the proposal of terminable marriage was
discussed in England. There was even one case of an irregular marriage
permitted by Act of Parliament in the case of Northampton. In the reign
of Elizabeth (in the Foljambe case, in 1576) the English Courts decided
definitely against terminable marriage. Laud himself had once married
parties of whom one still had a mate alive, but he regarded it as an
abominable thing and repented of it the whole of his life.
130
THE CONVERSION
practice of terminable marriage. We are to-day within
sight of its universal application.
The case of Lord de Roos was one of peculiar strength.
The man had been grossly injured. It was admitted that
the children ascribed to him were not his own. He had
obtained, as we shall see, from the ecclesiastical courts a
full separation. But the idea that he could marry again
was still shocking to the morals of his time so shocking
that it is not repeated for more than twenty years. 1
The Bill was actively debated in the Lords, and was
passed at last by a majority of only two voices. It would
not have passed at all if the bench of Bishops had acted
as a body. But two, or perhaps three, did not vote with
their colleagues, and the thing became law.
Now in this important crisis of our social history the
King himself was present in the House of Lords and
supported the novel contention. That is the first point to
note. Charles acted vigorously in favour of the Bill, and
it is mainly due to his action that the Bill passed. James
acted as vigorously against it, but of course with less effect.
His Catholic leanings were now public knowledge, and
such knowledge alone weakened his voice in debate he
had already some months before told his brother that he
intended to make sooner or later a profession of
Catholicism.
The obvious thing to say with regard to Charles's action
was, and is, that he supported this moral revolution in
order that he might put an end to the connexion between
himself and Catherine of Braganza, might marry again,
and have an heir.
I do not think that explanation will hold. In point of
fact, although the thing became law, Charles took no
advantage of it.
1 The Private Act for the dissolution of the marriage of the Duke of
Norfolk in 1692.
JAMES THE SECOND
It is more probable that he acted from that general
principle of yielding as far as possible to the revolutionary
spirit of the time and the morals of its richer men in
order to save his throne: that he so yielded is his chief
(or only) merit in the eyes of most historians, and his
gravest fault.
It is also probable that there was in his attitude an ele-
ment of opposition to his brother: whose certitude of in-
heritance, with its consequent eflFect in the Council, he
desired to moderate.
At any rate, he supported the Bill, and helped to get
it passed.
Now, why did James oppose?
He was at this moment actively engaged in religious
discussion and decision. He was talking these matters
of moral theology over with men who were experts
therein j we smile when we consider his dissolute life,
but he was none the less discussing them sincerely and
the proof of this lies in the great sacrifice he made imme-
diately after 5 his giving up of the Admiralty. I cannot
doubt that the known attitude of the Catholic Church in
such matters weighed with him very heavily.
Lastly, there is the obvious motive (which people who
know nothing of the Church regard as his only one) that
he was heir to the throne and that should Charles obtain
a divorce and get a son or a daughter to survive him,
James's own position would be lost.
I think it true to say, judging how the mixture of mo-
tives would work in this particular mind, that the latter
motive was the strongest. I do not believe it was the only
motive. He did not look far ahead, and to either side not
at all. He wore blinkers. But though he was over-intent
upon his legitimate authority, and never sufficiently supple
in the exercise of it, there was nothing in him of the
132
THE CONVERSION
ambitious schemer. Indeed, if there had been, he would
not have fallen as he did.
I think that the fact of James having for so long been
the heir apparent, and having come to regard himself as
permanently such, the fact of his having legitimate chil-
dren born to him, gave him a zeal in the matter which he
otherwise would not have shown. But I think that he was
supported strongly in his decision by an honest conviction
that the innovation of terminable marriage and its per-
manent appearance in English law was abominable.
I need hardly point out to any intelligent reader that
the exceptional looseness of both brothers in their relations
with women has nothing to do in either case with their
attitude upon this question of principle. As for those who
think that a sensual man, backed up in his sensuality by the
admitted and as it were consecrated looseness of royalties
in his day, has less right to decide upon moral principles
than the chaste man, I can only say that their confusion
of thought is such as hardly to merit the honour of
argument.
One excellent result followed upon this deplorable in-
novation of divorce through the action of the House of
Lords. Charles in his interest over the matter came down
personally to the House and presided over its debates.
Indeed, if we may believe Burnet (and when that ecclesi-
astic has no direct motive for lying one may hesitatingly
believe him) Lauderdale boasted that he had persuaded
Charles to act thus. But even if Lauderdale did say this,
I doubt his telling the truth. It is much more the kind of
thing that Charles would dp upon his own account.
He may have been present a little before this particu-
lar discussion came on, but it was certainly his interest in
that discussion which made him stay in the House of
Loj-ds and become habituated to it.
Now this was a first-rate piece of reaction, and if only
133
JAMES THE SECOND
it had been long maintained, might have done something
to prop up the English Crown. The King in Parliament
would have ceased to be an empty phrase. His presence
would not have saved the power of the English Crown:
that was past saving. It would not have restored the old
popular monarchy, whose decline had already provoked
the successful rebellion of the squires and merchants, and
had been clinched by the murder of a king. But the
physical presence of the monarch in Parliament during
debate might have put some brake on the rapidity of the
change, and left a strong memory of kingship to be
revived when peril demanded it.
Accident had kept the King from the House of Lords
for more than a century, that is, since the death of Henry
VIII in 1547. Edward VI died a child j Mary and Eliza-
beth were women; by the time James Ps accession that
foreigner (for so a Scotchman of his time was regarded)
inherited a tradition of absence. The monarch was, of
course, present as Head of the Council 3 but in the debates
of Parliament, that is, of the Lords, he took no part.
With Charles I it was the same.
As it was, the effect of Charles IPs presence among
the peers must not be exaggerated. He did not sit in state
upon a throne, as did the kings of old time: he began, in-
deed, by taking a chair upon the raised platform where
the throne stood, and thus sat apart; but later he saw no
harm in standing near the fire in the big room, and round
him, as he stood there, the peers would gather, coming
and going. He would talk with many of them individu-
ally, solicit their votes, present his own arguments. He
had no objection at all to people voting against him or
refusing to be persuaded by his suggestions. He acted
almost as an equal, and even complained of some who
were slow in approaching him that they were 'sullen'.
It was remarked that the slight stiffness in debate which
134
THE CONVERSION
followed upon his first appearance soon wore off, so that
at last he became almost one of themselves in these
familiar gatherings. Those who had by temperament a
suspicion of monarchy naturally deplored the new cus-
tom } they especially deplored the loss of dignity in the
peerage, remarking that the Lords no longer sat solemnly
in rank for their debates, but had turned with the King's
presence into a sort of drawing-room.
Some part of Charles's reason for acting thus was his
natural desire to lower the part played by the Duke of
York. Before the King came to the Lords, James had
all the prestige of royalty in their debates, and, unpopular
though he was becoming with the governing class, the
prestige of his royal blood still counted. Charles in going
down to the Lords in person turned James for the moment
into little more than one peer among his fellows. He thus
did his brother an ill turn, which perhaps he later re-
gretted if indeed he fully understood its effects.
Meanwhile there survives one charming and famous
sentence of his. He could not help, with his intelligence
and detachment and sense of humour, some delight in the
pompous absurdity of politicians in bulk, a sight which
is surely among the most comic of human affairs. He said,
*It was as good as a play.' He would have felt it still
more if he had but looked on it, himself apart} for it is
indeed an excellent pastime if it be not too prolonged}
and it is no wonder that this man, of whom we are justly
told that he found it difficult to fill up his time, took ad-
vantage of the puppet show. What fun it must have been
for him to listen to some self-sufficient fellow, too wealthy
and therefore too much honoured, airing his solemn inepti-
tude. ... Or to some man lacking power of expression,
and therefore also (if he were wealthy) respected, floun-
dering in speech like a stranded whale. The delights of
135
JAMES THE SECOND
the farce called parliamentary debate are (to the onlooker,
not the actors) innumerable.
There followed, in the next year, 1670, the Secret
Treaty of Dover, in which, by his strong action in promot-
ing the triple alliance, Charles brought Louis XIV to the
point of offering a subsidy, and so making possible for
a brief period the due armament of Great Britain which
Parliament refused. It promised, as against such sub-
sidy, action side by side with Louis and especially against
Holland but in policy also against Spain. It allowed for
an extension of English Colonial power by annexation to
England of lands in Spanish America. It provided an ad-
mirable weapon, though one of sadly brief effect, against
the subjection of the Crown to the privileged classes. It
was negotiated by Charles himself, but submitted to his
cabinet a group of five men drawn necessarily from that
very class. For the Kings of England in the seventeenth
century were like men compelled to hunt with wolves
instead of hounds.
Of these five one was honest and brave an astonish-
ing combination in that world Clifford. Another, Arling-
ton, loyal but timid. The three others were the invariably
infamous Buckingham, redeemed somewhat by folly;
Lauderdale, unprincipled but redeemed somewhat by a
healthy coarseness; and the gifted Ashley, redeemed by
no good quality of the soul, on the contrary, made viler
by the abuse of great faculties. They all agreed.
The Duke of York was kept out as much as possible
from this manoeuvre, and when his sister (who had
married Louis XIV's brother) came over to Dover to
settle it, he was somewhat contemptuously left behind on
the road. He saw things in black and white, he would
never sacrifice one principle to another. The acceptance
of a subsidy, though temporary, though necessary if the
136
THE CONVERSION
fleet were to exist, was odious to his honour. If you had
asked him what alternative he had why, he had none.
The Treaty of Dover contained before the mention
of the subsidy one strange half clause: the first. 1 It
provided that Charles should proclaim his conversion to
Catholicism, and that, if this should provoke a rebellion,
Louis should lend him troops. On to that is added the sub-
sidy. Who was the author of that clause, and why was
it inserted? Louis cannot have been its author with any
serious intention, for all his life he urged the Stuarts to
an opposite course and not to risk their throne. The
Duke of York was capable barely capable of suggest-
ing a thing so impolitic at such a time for he lacked
wholly the diplomatic sense, and weighed values ill but
the Duke of York would certainly never have been
allowed a say in the matter. Unless it were designed to
intimidate Charles later, it can only have been put in at
the suggestion of Charles himself.
But why? We shall never know. Perhaps he desired to
have written record of a solemn pledge in case, later (he
was but 40), the Catholic body should sufficiently in-
crease under toleration (he believed it a feasible and
fecund policy) to enable him to follow in age his inclina-
tion where it lay. It might mean civil war: for though the
bulk of the nation would still support their King, though
not of his creed, some might conspire. If so, he may have
proposed to reinforce his power. Perhaps it was a sister's
caprice. Perhaps (but most improbably) it was the trick I
have suggested, to bind him under threat of exposure.
There it stands, an unfulfilled, isolated fragment.
Only Clifford and Arlington were present at the sign-
ing of those few sterile lines.
With James's conversion and with the resignation of
1 Nominally the second. The first is but a preamble.
137
JAMES THE SECOND
his offices in 1673 the first phase in his public life as heir
to the throne comes to an end.
He still had a short respite. His wife, who, for all
his amours, had been a stand-by for him, died in the
spring of '71: calling to him in her awful suffering,
'Dukel Duke! It is a terrible thing to die!' In the next
year he commanded finely in his last battle by sea against
the Dutch and the last great fight of the reign. But the
war had made further subsidy imperative: the Parliament,
prorogued these two years past, was summoned to meet in
the spring of '73, and with that the new phase, the phase
of active struggle, in James's life began. Those hounding
the monarchy had turned him out of the Council and the
Admiralty. They now prepared to debar him from the
throne.
VI
THE CONFLICT
THE Duke of York's admitted conversion provoking
the passing of the Test Act changed the politics of
the time, and 1673 is the turning point in the history
of the 'Restoration.' From a subtle interplay of various
forces which Charles watched and controlled, the struggle
between Crown and magnates became more and more
of a true battle. This was because two of those forces
now emerged into open vigour and were constituted in
final form. One was a vivid anti-Catholic feeling, long
present in a large and active minority of the nation and
supported by a less active but murmuring dislike of
Catholicism on the part of many more: the other was a
definite and organized faction of which Ashley (Shaftes-
bury) from being largely its creator became the captain
and director aiming directly at destroying the surviving
parcel of Royal Power and of reducing the last shred
of its substance to a shade.
Those who used the feeling against Catholicism as an
instrument were themselves at once indifferent to doctrine
and contemptuously aware of the monstrous illusions
under which their dupes lay. The very rich men who
would substitute the power of their class for that of the
King had no creed. They had, for the most part, no con-
clusion on things unseen. For some the fate of man was a
matter of interesting speculations, for others not even
that. A few of the more dull followed by routine and in-
heritance ancient dogmas retained by the Establishment
(such as Immortality, or even the Incarnation) and were,
139
JAMES THE SECOND
to that extent, Christian. But few among them were of a
calibre to grasp the importance of dogma. Doctrine meant
nothing to them.
Yet their motives were not indifferent to Catholicism
though they were indifferent to doctrines. The main
body of the gentry, the lawyers, the wealthier merchants,
felt instinctively that the spirit of Catholicism, was a
popular spirit making for popular monarchy: that it
'would combat the idolatry of rules (upon which legal
and Parliamentary encroachment depended) $ and that it
made against oligarchy, particularly against oligarchy in
its plutocratic form.
Now oligarchy in its plutocratic form was the very
essence of the Revolution. The wealthy classes might
sincerely divide themselves into Tory and Whig, into
supporters of tradition in government and into opponents
thereof j but the class as a whole could not but, of its
nature, now that it had become so powerful, make for
its own aggrandisement at the expense of the mass of
Englishmen below it and of the Crown above. The
difference between its sections was only the difference
between those who saw the opportunity most clearly or
felt it most keenly (it was these who made the Revolu-
tion), and those who were more confused or more senti-
mental (it was these who made spasmodic demonstrations
of loyalty, who 'abhorred 5 the Exclusion Bill, who re-
joiced in James's suppression of rebels, and who, after
the success of the Dutch Invasion, continued to propose
expedients which might save the King's title, or at least
his son's). But the class as a whole could not but go
forward. This class provided every single minister with-
out exception, every officer of the armed forces, all the
magistracy. Into it were already digested sundry new-
comers from below. It had captured the Universities, it
directed and manned the Established Church. In Parlia-
140
THE CONFLICT
ment it was supreme. It held all the county seats, and if,
here and there, a man of humbler station crept in as
burgess for some small town, yet the great mass of the
borough corporations were either controlled by neighbour-
ing great families, or, as a matter of course, returned local
landed gentlemen, or sent to Westminster sundry of their
own wealthy class whose interests were identical with the
territorials.
The best proof of this essential oneness uniting all
that body is its economic action, not only in legal decisions
against the small man's property or the Crown's, but in
the positive laws which it passed in its own favour.
We have seen how the first action of the gentry in
this field was to relieve themselves of their old dues to
the Crown and to replace them by taxes falling on the
mass of the people. But they proceeded to a far more
drastic measure. The gentry in their aspect of a Parlia-
ment passed a law to which I have already briefly alluded,
the effect of which was to deprive of their lands the
smaller yeomen in great and increasing numbers.
The trick was played thus. It was enacted that all pos-
sessed of a freehold should be required to show tide
a demand apparently reasonable. If no title could be pre-
sented, the land would naturally be deemed to hold of the
manor. In plain English, the ignorant small owner's land
was taken from him by the squire. The presumption was
that negligence or fraud had permitted or attempted the
creation of a false freehold by the tenant, and that his
tenure was in reality no freehold at all. If it were, why
could he not show the deeds? The more important yeo-
men were provided with parchments or knew where to
seek for them. The smaller men, as might be imagined,
were in their thousands caught unprovided: loss^of docu-
ments in a great lapse of time, the negligence of ignorance
and poverty, transfers not recorded, left them without
141
JAMES THE SECOND
proofs. They were dispossessed and from owners became
payers of rent, insecure of their livelihoods. It was a
sweeping economic revolution, the successor of that which
had so swollen the landlords with the sequestrated clerical
wealth, the predecessor of that by which, in the next cen-
turies, the commons were enclosed wholesale and robbed
from the poor.
This upper class or its most active members had
now, with James's conversion, their opportunity. The
anti-Catholic card could be played as a trump. Things
could be forced to an issue, and the attack could hence-
forward use against the dynasty a concrete weapon, per-
manent, formidable, and clearly appreciable by the
populace.
The man who had the ability or genius to seize the
occasion and, for ten years, to conduct the furious assault
was the immensely wealthy Cooper, Lord Ashley, now
Earl of Shaftesbury: the man whom Charles had pre-
ferred to the chief ministry, the Chancellorship, because
he had capacities far surpassing his fellows in the group
of five (himself, Clifford, Arlington, Lauderdale, Buck-
ingham) which had hitherto administered the chief depart-
ments of Government.
He it was who had supported Charles in the Declara-
tion of Indulgence, and who had passed, in that hostile
class from which the King was compelled, in spite of its
hostility, to choose his servants, as the chief support of
the throne. The more powerful was the effect of his
treason.
The cost of the war had made it necessary once more
to summon Parliament after a prorogation of two years.
The Assemblies were called for the opening of 1673.
In the interval James's admission of Catholicism had
been made: Louis XIV, the continental champion of that
creed, had been checked by Holland or rather the House
142
THE CONFLICT
of Orange * its opponent, for there it was largely by the
young Duke of Orange, the King's nephew, the figure-
head of Protestantism across the North Sea, that Dutch
policy was represented.
It was the very moment for inflaming religious feeling,
especially in London, and launching it at full heat against
the monarchy. Shaftesbury had the Duke of York's con-
version there to hand for a goad with which to urge his
swelling team of remonstrants, and on it he based all the
successful actions which he now began to wage, which all
but overthrew the monarchy in that decade, the result of
which destroyed it in the next. With the opening of the
session he went down to the House of Lords, he the
Bang's Chancellor, and denounced the King's Declaration
of Indulgence, which he himself had framed, as illegal.
Charles dismissed him. He proceeded to war.
He was but one of that intermarried knot of great
families which at last usurped the national executive, and
made themselves masters of England, but, as the ablest
of those conspirators, let us take him for a specimen and in
him examine their type.
He had been born in 1621, and was therefore at this
critical moment already over 50 years of age, a little
man, but with a strong face and an excellent power both
of debate and rhetoric; in morals detestable and in religion
nil. Cooper was his name, and, from his mother, Ashley:
Anthony Ashley Cooper. He had vast possessions in the
south and west of England, and inherited them as a
minor. He married three times j the important marriage
1 When we talk of the 'Dutch* as the Protestant power of that day, we
must always remember that even in those few northern provinces of the old
Netherlands a very large proportion more than a third were Catholic.
But that minority, though given far more freedom than their fellows in
England, were ruled by the great wealth of the Calvinist merchants and
Jewish and Calvinist bankers. In this mass of wealth the largest private
fortune was that of the House of Orange.
143
JAMES THE SECOND
which put him into the very front rank was his second,
that with a Cecil the sister of Lord Exeter.
During his minority he had been a ward of the Crown,
pretending a grievance against the Royal Court of Wards
that the King's officials had allowed land of his to be sold
below its value. Such control had determined the leading
members of the landed classes to be rid of a power above
their own. He was in the very heart of that clot which
destroyed the popular monarchy of England. He was first
cousin to that masterful widow, Southampton's heiress,
who managed her weak husband, William Russell. He
was close cousin to Halifax (their fathers had married
sisters). His life, station, connexions, were the quintes-
sence of all that world.
Thus, with his great fortune, he is begged to accept
the freedom of the little town of Tewkesbury. As a
matter of course the Mayor and Corporation call him
their Member (for that, as we know, is the way in which
the Commons were formed), yet oddly enough he did
not sit in the Long Parliament. When it was summoned
in the latter part of the same year, 1640, he was under
age. To wealth on his scale that mattered little, but for
some reason there was a double return for Downton, in
Wiltshire, the next sham borough which he had picked
up. This probably means that he was not wanted at West-
minster by the authorities, and that therefore the half-
dozen local people who settled these affairs had been told
to name some other person. At any rate, the conflicting
claims were never arranged: nobody sat for Downton in
the Long Parliament $ and there was another grievance
for so rich a young man to brood over.
He began his career of the Civil War in a fashion most
characteristic of that opulent society to which he belonged.
He intrigued for this office and that under the King,
professing his devotion to royalty. He was given the
144
THE CONFLICT
government of Weymouth an important maritime post
which should not have been entrusted to such doubtful
hands, for the King lacked ports, and ports were essential
to his supply: it was, as has been said, the Parliamentary
possession of the ports which, coupled with the hold on
London and on the military stores, decided the rebellion
against Charles.
His motive was in part, perhaps, revenge 3 but also, I
think, a certain powerful judgment and prevision in the
man when in January, 1644, he betrayed his master.
It was his first betrayal: his apprenticeship in villainy.
He was only in his twenty-third year, but a character of
that kind is able to judge mankind even at 23. He saw
which way the cat was jumping, and in following the
athletics of the animal was an adept from his youth to his
grave.
Having gone over to his fellow squires, with their
tail of yeomen and big merchants what is called by
some c the parliamentary party,' and by others c the people
of England' he steadf astly served them as long as they
looked certain of winning, were actively winning, and had
won. His great Cecil marriage was made after his master
the King had been put to death 5 his vast fortune made
men on the democratic side pay him a deference he would
never have had from a monarch. In some obscure way,
perhaps by financial contribution, perhaps through a re-
spect for his judgment in men and affairs, probably
through both, he managed to get a considerable hold over
Cromwell.
Cromwell allowed him to have back his estates (seques-
trated for his former adhesion to the King) and saw to it
that no fine was paid though a fine of 500 had been
agreed on. Cromwell next put this man Cooper into one
of his little sham Parliaments: he put him in for Wilts,
and he continued to serve Cromwell well. Thus on the
JAMES THE SECOND
occasion of Lilburne's imprisonment, he was on the small
body which advised that piece of tyranny and carried
it out.
Lilburne by his consistent republicanism had offended
Oliver. In spite of a great military force gathered by
Cromwell to overawe the court, Lilburne was acquitted.
These people, who pretended they were fighting against
arbitrary power, kept Lilburne in prison in spite of his
acquittal, Cromwell specially 'suspending' Habeas Corpus
for the occasion.
Cooper was more Cromwellian still. It was he among
others, and perhaps he more than any other, who urged
Oliver to make himself king.
Then came his second betrayal. He turned against this
second master a much more shaky one than the first
before the end of 1654.
The probable reason of this shift was that he was
working (his Cecil wife being dead) to marry one of
Cromwell's daughters. It must be remembered that at this
moment and especially after he had urged the be-
wildered Oliver to seize the crown that most men would
have laid odds on a Cromwell dynasty ruling England.
It was therefore natural that a man of the future Shaf tes-
bury's temperament should make his way by alliance with
it. At any rate, the marriage, if this astute suitor had in-
tended it, was not allowed; and from that moment
Anthony Ashley Cooper became a careful but powerful
insistent opponent of the Protector.
Yet the Protector never dared do anything against him.
The man must have had some secret power over Oliver,
whether of debt, or of exposure, or dread of his abilities.
To say that his faculty of speech or his great wealth were
enough to account for the position is doubtful. Cromwell
could have dealt with them, both. But he dared not deal
with Anthony Ashley!
146
THE CONFLICT
After CromwelPs death he was nominated in the usual
way by a few corporation officials to the Parliament of
Richard Cromwell in 1659. Then we get his third
pirouette. The little man is one of the eight who sign
the commission for Monk to be Commander-in-Chief
of the Army, and he asks with all his might for the
Restoration another example of his foresight. No one
can help admiring the dexterity in wiliness and tortuous
ways of this wily and tortuous fellow. It is like watch-
ing a conjuring man who has turned thief picking pockets
with impunity.
After the Restoration it is staggering to note that he
helped to try the Regicides! And in 1661 he becomes
a peer under the title of Baron Ashley.
On the top of all this multiple betrayal and rebetrayal,
he was exceedingly corrupt. He took money from this
side and from that; he took it on contracts; he took it
whenever and wherever he could get it. It is true he
was no exception in this, they all did it. The high-souled
or high-phrased Algernon Sydney took money from Louis
XIV as freely as did the stern patriot Osborne of whom
Louis's Ambassador reported that he was always asking
for more. In the true spirit of your demagogue, and espe-
cially of your very wealthy demagogue, Ashley had 'no
enemies to the left.' He was all for toleration by which
he meant the following of a popular stream of opinion in
favour of a general Protestantism, and for the extirpation
of that large minority of the nation which was still pro-
fessedly Catholic, and that much larger minority which
still had sympathies with Catholicism.
But to do him justice, this attitude was not due to any
general sympathy with Protestant doctrines, which led so
many at that time to desire a sort of coalition against
Catholicism without looking pedantically to the political
difference between the official Establishment and the
H7
JAMES THE SECOND
various independent Protestant sects. He was himself
atheist, or perhaps (for the fashion of the day is a strong
influence) a Deist: but it was again, in this crisis of the
approaching Popish Plot, an example of his genius for
seeing how things were going that he felt in his bones
the sympathy with Catholicism to be a sympathy with the
authority of the King, a sympathy opposed to the power of
the rich and therefore of Parliament. And if there is one
thing one may say of him throughout his life, one in
which he was consistently sincere, it was his hatred of the
Catholic Church.
He was a patron of learning and genius with an excel-
lent power of selection, though used for his own political
purposes. He made Locke, for instance j and Locke re-
paid his creator, not only by spreading a political philoso-
phy exactly suited to the rule of such magnates, but with
steadfast praise: indeed, but for the prestige of Locke, the
baseness of the man would be more apparent to-day than
it is.
Ashley strongly supported the Roos divorce, and by
that gained the favour of the King, who was so oddly
upon the same side. But Ashley supported it for clearly
perceived reasons of his own. If the principle of divorce
were introduced into England, the King might marry
another wife who would bear him an heir to the exclusion
of the immovable James. It is even possible (of this in a
moment) that by muddying the waters the divorce might
be turned into an engine for making people recognize the
Duke of Monmouth as heir 5 for after all, if the English
Parliament could destroy a Christian marriage by one Act,
it could equally turn a bastard into a legitimate son by
another. Once admit the principle that not the authority
of the Church is required for these things, but only the
authority of a group of well-to-do men sitting in an assem-
bly, and you can get rid of illegitimacy as easily as you can
148
THE CONFLICT
of the marriage tie. Ashley knew well enough that a Duke
of Monmouth as king would be a puppet in the hands of
him and his, while a Duke of York meant the menace
of a royal master.
He was privy to the Treaty of Dover. It has always
been said that he was not made acquainted with the strange
half -clause in it (which meant very little, but which at
any rate would, had it been publicly known, have created
violent opposition) by which Charles proposed at
some time to call himself Catholic. The treaty was
Charles's own. Officially of the five in Council only
Arlington and Clifford were familiar with its whole con-
tents 5 but it has always seemed to me incredible that
Shaftesbury should have been ignorant of that passage.
He was in the centre of public things. He was astute. He
met every day the two men who had actually signed. For
historians to tell us at this time of day, as they repeatedly
do, upon the word of most untrustworthy men (whose
business it was to apologize for their chief leader), that
Ashley was kept ignorant of one subsidiary but, still,
striking point in the document, is a little like telling us
to-day that a Cabinet Minister had heard nothing of one
of our modern Parliamentary scandals. What makes the
story still less credible, is that in 1673, at the height of the
Test Act agitation, Cooper got his earldom from the King
and the title of Shaftesbury to hand down to his distin-
guished descendants. He was Charles's support and vice-
gerent. Well, the capital point, which explains the whole
nature of the time, is that the King had no choice but to
depend upon such servants who were really his masters
and Shaftesbury's action is the grand example.
It was at the meeting of Parliament in the early weeks
of 1673, that Anthony Ashley Cooper, Baron Ashley and
Earl of Shaftesbury, determined upon his fourth betrayal.
He determined to oppose the Royal Family, and in par-
149
JAMES THE SECOND
ticular the heir apparent, James. He made up his mind
what course it would best pay him at this moment to
pursue. From that moment onward he put all the weight
of his great ability, his immense fortune, his knowledge
of men, his complete lack of morals (the strongest ele-
ment in intrigue), to the purpose of keeping James from
the throne. Nor do I believe that his reason was mainly
pique. Men of that calibre (and Shaftesbury was of large
calibre) do not act from pique. He had a policy. His un-
failing flair told him that the final duel was imminent
between the dying principle of popular monarchy and the
rising principle of government by the few rich of which
he himself, Shaftesbury, was one 5 that was the motive of
his move.
His contemporaries agreed in applying to him the
epithet knavish. The epithet is sound in itself but quite
insufficient. He had discovered long ago the trend of the
tidej he had never failed, in his various treasons against
this master and that over a course of thirty years, from
his earliest manhood, to smell out which way things were
going. Here and now in 1673, he felt himself to have
joined the winning side. And he was right.
Such was Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Lord Shaftes-
bury eloquent, intelligent in the highest degree, in-
dustrious, without morals or honour, immensely wealthy,
crapulous, tenacious, looking upon other men from a
superior plane, successful, and very probably damned.
His first shot, well aimed and of full effect, was the
passing of that Test Act the reply to the Declaration of
Indulgence to which I briefly alluded in my last chapter.
Since the Crown had used its power during the proroga-
tion of Parliament to relieve Dissenters and Catholics of
their civil disabilities and to allow them any employment
and the practice of their religion, the Parliament was used
to contradict that power flady and to insist on the exact
150
THE CONFLICT
reversal of what had been done. The Declaration had been
cancelled on the news of Shaftesbury's treason to the
King in the House of Lords. With his own Chancellor
abandoning it, it could not be maintained. The active op-
position, the spear-head of the advancing gentry (called
'the Country Party' organized, under cover, by Shaf tes-
bury), pushed through both Houses this law of the Test
Act which governed religious policy in England unin-
terruptedly right up to modern times. It is significant that
no one dared oppose its passage. Not even in the Lords
where Catholic peers sat of right.
The proposed law laid it down that no one might hold
any office, civil or military, who would not take the Oath
of Supremacy that is, admit the King head of the
Church receive the Sacrament after the rite of the
Church of England and declare against Transubstan-
tiation.
It was in this last that the core of the manoeuvre lay.
The Oath of Supremacy it was possible to turn in flank.
Certain Catholics had done so for the purpose of sitting
in the House of Commons. They could interpret it to
mean that no foreign power (even the Pope) had civil
jurisdiction in England, and that the King was head of
his own Church which was no concern of theirs. Non-
conformists (except Quakers, who abjured all oaths)
could, at a pinch, make the same reservation about the
King's ecclesiastical power (though many would refuse).
They might, the moderate, persuade themselves that a
formal reception of the Sacrament (to which no doctrine
abhorrent to them was attached), though a humiliation,
was not a repudiation of their essential common tenet,
which was the right to worship by association rather than
under authority. They could enthusiastically repudiate
the Pope's right or any one else's to exercise any
jurisdiction in England. They would reject Transub-
JAMES THE SECOND
stantiation with transports: but there the Catholic, and
the Catholic alone, was necessarily stopped: and was
meant to be stopped.
Shaftesbury's Test Act was a weir to catch Catholics,
to expose the numbers of them in the public service
(nothing like as numerous as their proportion to the whole
population warranted, but, still, considerable) and this
was the main thing to throw a shaft of light upon the
Duke of York to point him out as the villain of the
piece: the Heir to the throne an avowed Papist j Protestant
England flouted!
It shows Shaftesbury's knowledge of men that he
should have foreseen what James would do.
Charles had urged his brother to conform outwardly.
It was such an easy thing, and such a little one! It meant
nothing. It was but a form. Even if he would not take
the Sacrament in the Royal Chapel, let him at least attend
its services on occasion. It was but an outward show, it
could wound his conscience in nothing and it would help
this only surviving son of their murdered father, his
King, and one who had given him loyal support, to pass
through a grave crisis.
James had replied that he would rather die: and on
James's lips phrases of that sort were not rhetoric.
He resigned. All England was advised publicly by
his own action not only that he was now a Catholic, but
that he thought his religion worth any price and would
hold it against any challenger. The Admiralty was his
life's work. He had done most excellently there in Ad-
ministration on command and on active service. It was his
interest and, at his time of life, at forty, the routine to
which he had formed himself. He was willing to abandon
it rather than compromise even in gesture. This iron
kind of resolution throws out its friends and is the 'for-
tune of its enemies.
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THE CONFLICT
At the same time the other resignations which took
place in every branch of official service but especially
in the military commands, coming thus all at once, affect-
ing London where the Court and all Government were
centred produced the effect and even more than the
effect which the conspirators had expected. William
Russell, the son of Bedford (the family most enriched of
all, perhaps, by the Reformation), Coventry, Cavendish,
the whole group of great landed interests which was at
work, felt that a first victory, sharp and determining the
future, had been won. And they were right.
The power of the appeal to anti-Catholic feeling lay
not in its intensity it was intense only in a minority,
and not even with them save under special excitement by
skilful managers but in the absence of a defence. There
was plenty of feeling for the Crown, but how could you
get a strong movement in favour of the Catholic fraction?
A movement to defend it? The average man was luke-
warm in his hostility to Catholicism, but he was not in
favour of it.
The Catholic minority was England no doubt, had
strong national traditions, was closely intermixed with
the general life, was large but it was not average. It
was peculiar; it was becoming foreign to the bulk of
its fellow citizens. Since also, to a very considerable body
of the people, a body larger than its own, it was actually
hateful, to start a current against it was always easy. With
concrete examples to strike the imagination it was possible,
at intervals, to light up a flame against it. There could
always be aroused at such moments in London a mob
which had nothing to lose and would follow the stream.
There could be no corresponding force on the other side.
And now that the Royal Family was mixed up in the dis-
content aroused, that discontent had become a permanent
and powerful means of indirect attack upon the Court.
153
JAMES THE SECOND
The resignations, here, there, upon every side, could
be made to seem not only widespread which they were
but so numerous as to be, in a community Protestant
in type, signs of an abnormal Catholic reaction which
they were not. In Holland, for instance, which passed
everywhere as the typical Protestant state but where toler-
ation was admitted, the Catholics employed were, in
proportion, more numerous than in England even at the
moment of their greatest freedom, just before the passing
of the Test Act. But the impression was produced, it was
profound, it was sufficient for Shaf tesbury and his follow-
ing to build upon.
The first blow had been delivered and it had gone home.
The second blow designed by Shaftesbury failed. An
agitation was got up against James's proposed marriage
with Mary of Modena, because she was a Catholic. The
King ordered the Chancellor to prorogue Parliament be-
fore the resolution should be voted on. He deliberately
disobeyed, thinking in his contempt of the failing Royal
Power that even such flagrant flouting of it would
be accepted by the King in his determination to survive
by concession.
But this time Shaftesbury had gone too far. Charles
abruptly dismissed him from his post and its vast revenues.
Thenceforward it was open war between Shaftesbury, as
the type and head of the Magnates, and the National
Dynasty.
The succeeding four and a half years are full of history
for the general life of the realm and of Europe. Charles,
aided by Danby, moves in a fashion to make Louis XIV,
angry at Charles's success in the diplomatic game against
him, expose Danby's transaction in a recent subsidy. The
patriot statesmen of Parliament take bribes greedily from
the King of France. But those years have no public effect
upon James, He has been compelled to retire from office.
154
THE CONFLICT
He is apparently defeated. His determination or obstinacy
has permanently embarrassed his brother the King, but he
will not modify it. Small or great effects of his resolution
are all one in his estimation. He will give way on nothing
his faith demands. Such is his temper.
The King had signed the Test Act. He had admitted
that defeat. He gave his enemies their head, and at the
same time he used the interval to strengthen himself for
further negotiation in that see-saw between France and
her opponents by the action of which he so well main-
tained the English power. He leant again towards Hol-
land, and, to strengthen himself against his cousin Louis,
as well as to compete with the Country Party and Shaf tes-
bury's aim of weakening him at home, he arranged that
fatal marriage between his niece and William of Orange
which was to produce had he known it! the extinction
of his own line. But foreign policy must always be short-
sighted. To take long views in it is to fail.
This policy, destestable to Louis, was wounding to
James. The Duke of York had affirmed his faith by
marrying Mary of Este, the daughter of the Duke of
Modena. The Parliament, as we have seen, had protested,
and had been put in their place. Here, at least, was
ground on which they could not decently intrude, and
their leaders felt at heart that they had gone too fan
Moreover, their fears of a Catholic heir to James proved,
for the moment, groundless; one year and another and
another went by and no heir was born to that marriage.
Meanwhile Charles saw to it, as I have said, that Mary
and Anne, the ultimate heiresses (as things stood) to
the throne, should be brought up Protestant. In 1676,
when the eldest of these girls, Mary, was 14, he allowed
the Bishop of London (Compton: later to be chief con-
spirator against the throne) to insist on her confirmation,
and paid no heed to her father's rights or protests. It
155
JAMES THE SECOND
was the beginning of her estrangement from him. Anne,
still too young for the rite, though brought up like her
sister in the Establishment, remained his darling.
In the next year, 1677, Mary was married to the Prince
of Orange: it was the climax of Charles's 'swing to the
left' in that pendulum of policy whereby he maintained,
precariously, the equilibrium of his throne. The little sour,
determined man of 27, with his already evil reputation,
took off to The Hague and to his singular companions this
dull young girl of 15, never to have children by him.
It was the end and the climax of the anti-French move.
Immediately after came peace upon the continent
Charles had already refused further aid from France
the Peace of Nimeguen left Holland intact and saved:
Louis XIV solidly in possession of conquests made at the
expense of Spain. England was free from further expense
of war for ten full years, and that, with the continual
rise of revenue from the customs, left a barely sufficient
revenue for the Crown.
Had the customs revenue and excise grown but slightly
more the Government would have had room to act.
Even as it was, Charles, in the next storm of attack,
was free for the first time to dissolve the Parliament j he
was no longer quite under the old dependence on it for
grants: he was beginning to gain some economic freedom
from its leaders.
It was perhaps on this account, because they saw par-
ticularly because Shaftesbury saw the danger of losing
one of two modes of action against the King, that the
other was emphasized: since supply of money at the good-
will of the aristocracy was not the immediate necessity it
had been to the Crown, the exceptional chance given by
the Duke of York's affirmation of Catholicism must now
be worked for all it was worth. On that as a foundation
the Test Act had arisen. With that as centre, the spectacle
156
THE CONFLICT
of Catholic officers and officials expelled by the score had
been afforded. Whatever in huge London was already
suspicious had been inflamed 5 to a less degree the
provinces, especially in districts where the evangelical
feeling was strong; in many of the country towns, men 1
had been rendered nervous by the intrigues of Shaf tes-
bury's set, and expectant of some vague coming trouble,
when there suddenly broke out the fury of the Popish
Plot of 1678.
It is not permissible to affirm that this insanity was the
work of Shaf tesbury and his crew. The evidence is lacking.
It is never permissible to affirm that the sudden corporate
ecstasies flaming up in great cities are necessarily the
product of intrigue or are originated by deliberate inten-
tion. Maf eking in the London of 1900 was spontaneous,
so was the raving lunacy of the 'Russians in England'
which distinguished I9I4- 1 No man of competence or
authority was at the origin of the Gordon Riots. No cold
speculative genius, still less any political adventurer,
created the orgy of the South Sea Bubble; though, it is
true, one financial charlatan made it possible. An ardent
imaginative race, full of energy, falls at times into these
excitements, which are its fevers. The Popish Plot may
have arisen from nothing more than the coincidence of
sickly mood in thousands and bold adventure in a couple
of scoundrels.
On the other hand, it is certain that it was opportune
in the highest degree to that immensely wealthy opposi-
tion, already half in rebellion, which now James was set
down was beginning to lack material for attacking the
Royal House; and it is equally certain, it is matter of
detailed and recorded history, that Shaftesbury and
1 Many acquaintances have assured me that in this latter case the
public insanity was deliberately designed and have given at second or
third hand chapter and verse. But I am not convinced. It seemed, and
seems, to me spontaneous.
157
JAMES THE SECOND
Russell, Buckingham, Essex all the great fortunes which
directed rebellion most industriously circulated and sup-
ported stories which they knew to be monstrous lies and
rejoiced to see accepted by crowds the suggestion that each
Catholic (one man in seven or eight!) was pledged to
murder his six or seven neighbours; that Papists were told
off to burn all the shipping in the Pool of London and
the city itself while they were about it for the second
time in two years. That in the succeeding desert their chief
men had been given each his department in Government
(by the Pope or the General of the Jesuits) ; and that
King Charles of all men (no longer a secret supporter of
Papists now, but a martyr to the Protestant cause) was to
be stabbed, poisoned, shot: and all this by Jesuits or per-
haps by the poor Queen. A populace can always be roused
for its king, and to make the King's peril part of the plot
was a shrewd move.
The curious consideration of James Stuart's nobility,
narrowness and misfortune has little to do with this
frenzy save in so far as it affected his own story. All
have read and may read again of Oates, his brazen
courage, his huge face, his bandy legs, his fertility of
monstrous imaginations. All know how, in the trials, Chief
Justice Scroggs raved at and bullied the Catholic pris-
oners at the bar, shouting at one batch that he was 'satis-
fied of their guilt' before any proof had been offered,
at another, 'You eat your God and you kill your king'}
at another 'Much good may their 30,000 Masses do them.'
Our point is that the hurricane left James impassive.
Charles bowed to it at the peril of his soul. He signed
the warrants for the deaths of innocent men, and once or
twice jested as he did so. It was statecraft. But there is a
Judge of statecraft also. He could not have resisted
without losing his throne? He could have resisted and
158
THE CONFLICT
have lost his throne. For there are other things a man
may lose.
Anyhow, his brother, with no responsibility it is true,
but in extreme peril, was indifferent. He left for Brussels
not because he so desired but because the King ordered it.
The chief source of irritation was thus removed, and
Charles could breathe more freely, till the tempest should
have blown itself out and he could look round the decks
and note the wreckage.
He had dissolved that Parliament which had sat since
his restoration eighteen years he had summoned an-
other which arrived more rabid than the last. He deter-
mined on yet another piece of Policy. With London in
a frenzy over the Popish Plot he could not openly con-
tinue the battle with his opponents. He proposed to com-
promise with them if only to gain time. He procured
from Temple, whom he called back from Holland, a plan
for a large body of thirty to sit as Council in place of the
few hitherto used as Royal Ministers: it was to include the
worst of the opposition. He hoped thus to manage them
till the peril created by the Popish Plot agitation should
be over. He received all his chief enemies with open arms
into this new council Shaf tesbury at its head, his cousin
Halifax (a man more sympathetic, detached, of a very
high culture, necessarily like all his class an opponent of
monarchy, yet oddly enough never caught taking
money), Russell, Cavendish, Essex, all the crowd of
large estates, the masters of the English people and their
king.
In part Charles was successful in this perilous experi-
ment (James, from Brussels, condemned it). Thus the
King prevented these magnates from dismissing the loyal
judges and packing the Bench in their own favour. But
in the long run that experiment broke down, as we shall
see, for Charles could not prevent a further move to
159
JAMES THE SECOND
destroy the regular royal right of succession. That Council
sat, that Parliament met, while the courts were full of
those trials wherein so many priests and laymen were put
to a barbarous death I by process of law on the perjuries
of Gates and his fellows.
They died innocent. Yet two things must always be
remembered in connexion with the murderous extrava-
gance of 1678-9.
The first is that the horror expressed at it by the his-
torians of the last generation is largely hypocritical they
are taking an opportunity to say a number of smooth
words preparatory to saying a number of false ones. They
condemn the absurd Popish Plot and its blatant perjurers
in order to salve their conscience for calling toleration *the
Establishment of Papistry.'
The second is that the frenzy of so many in London
at that time had a basis.
I have some sympathy with those moderns who, in
reaction against the old humbug, have recently tried to
maintain that there was something in the Popish Plot
after all. Not that I think them sincere far from it.
I think they are writing to a brief and largely out of
irritation against the rapidly increasing power of the Faith
in the moral anarchy of their own world to-day. But they
have solid ground below their fantasies. There was no
plot. But there was a new situation in which the Catholic
Church was threatening to count for more and more. En-
thusiasts like Coleman believed in her triumph at the
time or in the near future: a folly. But the highest minds
of that day in England were sceptical, the noblest were
troubled, and the Church made a strong appeal. Either the
*They were hanged till half strangled, then cut down alive and con-
scious. Then castrated. Then ripped up, their hearts torn out and burnt
in front of them. Then cut into quarters, the which (and the head),
carted away, were exhibited in public places as a terror to their co-
religionists.
1 60
THE CONFLICT
Faith must be crushed as at last it was or it would
spread 5 for it is a fire. All States discover that sooner or
later. There was no danger of Catholicism governing that
England. There was danger of its modifying the Protes-
tant tone of that England, of its strengthening Popular
Monarchy and weakening Aristocracy, by its permanent
presence in a strong minority of all classes.
With which let me return to the new Council, the new
Parliament, and the effect of both on James.
There entered the Council at this time another close
relative of the magnates 3 clique, Robert Spencer, Lord
Sunderland. If a man were told nothing else about the
time than what Sunderland's actions were and how, in
spite of them, first Charles and then James were under
the necessity of using him and even of leaning upon him,
he would be watching under a searchlight the last phases
of the dying monarchy of England.
Not that Sunderland's own career and character form
an interesting or even a possible subject of study. The
whole thing is such a welter of falsity and baseness that
there is no connecting thread, not even of strong personal
calculation and well-managed campaigns such as you may
find in the vile character of his brother-in-law Shaftes-
bury.
Sunderland played double all his life; perhaps because
he was never quite certain what was going to happen next;
perhaps simply because he loved playing double for its
own sake; perhaps from the very obvious motive of get-
ting double pay by serving both sides. For we must remem-
ber what a very great part money played in all the
shuffling of that time. The men who were, as a body,
eliminating the Crown were struggling as individuals one
against the other for coin, salaries and perquisites in the
gift of the Crown. Their fortunes were all large, some
of them colossal, yet their craving for money was never
161
JAMES THE SECOND
satisfied. When their modern apologists can find one who
(doubtfully) can be acquitted of taking bribes from for-
eign governments it is made an occasion for enthusiastic
praise. The most famous writer-up of the revolution,
Macaulay, is moved to his highest flights in assuring us
that Russell never received *a consideration.' Though he
spoils his case by adding that this was due to his enormous
wealth. The same is, as we have seen, the chief glory of
Halifax and there may have been three or even four
others. But a ministry enriched a man of that day very
rapidly. Hence the scramble for posts. Legislation enriched
them; presents from suitors 5 land acquired by pressure
or through special Acts of Parliament; commercial
privilege: all is grist to their mill. 1 So it was with Sunder-
land. The riddle of his motives other than gain will never
be solved, for it could only be solved by getting into
the inside of the fellow's mind. But if we make a list of
what he did and remember that, in spite of all, both the
royal brothers had no choice but to depend upon him, we
understand the determining power, in the late seventeenth
century in England, of territorial wealth and its easy
defeat of the Crown.
Sunderland was a young man of 20 when Charles was
restored to the throne. He and his wife (whose love-
affairs were innumerable the most steadfast of them was
with her husband's own uncle Sydney) paid assiduous
court to the mistresses of the King, especially, at the end
of the string, to Louise de Querouaille. It was through
this connexion that Sunderland was virtually governing
in 1679.
It is Sunderland more than any one else who gets
James away to Scotland before the meeting of Parliament
1 Thus Lord Bristol, a Catholic, spoke in favour of the Test Act, and
got a large pension out of the taxes from his grateful colleagues as a
reward.
THE CONFLICT
in October, 1680; and meanwhile behind the scenes it is
Sunderland who, through his wife's intrigue with his
uncle and that uncle's presence as Ambassador at The
Hague, works up the outrageous Dutch interference with
English affairs when those foreign merchants were good
enough to tell the King of England whom he should
choose as his councillors, and what he should do. While
the violent storm of the Popish Plot was still blowing,
Sunderland ran before the gale, and his voting for the
Bill to exclude James from the throne lost him his place
in the Council. Within two years he was back again, and
as powerful as ever. Then, noting the reaction, he sup-
ported James as openly as he had opposed him.
When James comes to the throne, Sunderland is to
be the most zealous of all in the chastisement of Mon-
mouth's rebellion. He had already in the past been an
active supporter of Russell's execution after the Rye
House plot. He is to be present when James sees Mon-
mouth, and it is the most probable conjecture though
we are not certain of it that what Monmouth intended
to divulge in order to save his life was Sunderland's
treason the fact that Sunderland, with all his open zeal
for the repression of the rebellion, had connived at it.
It is equally probable, though also not certain, that Sunder-
land had promised Monmouth his life if the divulging
of this double dealing were not made and then saw to
it that the poor dupe was got out of the way by death.
As the crisis of James's reign approached, his action
was of a sort normal to the great territorial lords of the
day, but perhaps in degree excessive. He was taking a
regular pension from Louis XIV of what would be to-day
between ten and fifteen thousand a year. He asked for a
large addition to it as the price of his support; and all the
while he and his wife were carefully informing the Prince
of Orange of all that passed in the English Cabinet. It
163
JAMES THE SECOND
was he who at the end persuaded James to refuse the offer
of Louis's fleet. It was he who, as we shall see, put in
Petre as a foil to draw anger away from himself. It was
he who played at religion so assiduously as to deceive his
master.
There is the man, one like twenty others of the sort,
and a relation to half of them, who enters the Council
during the Popish Plot. One contemporary phrase sums
the fellow up: 'He disliked women and he hated wine.'
Charles had yielded all that could be yielded as his
policy and custom was. It was a policy which had served
him well. In the long run he could boast that it had
brought him final success but perhaps his death was
opportune. Had he lived a year or two more the attack
would have returned.
His constant method of letting out all the rope in
hand was here in full play. At his Council board were
the men who had done all in their power to degrade him.
At their head he had set Shaftesbury, the man who of
all men had most shamefully betrayed and most im-
pudently attacked. But the license had reached its limit
there was no more line to slack.
In the new Parliament, at the instigation of these very
men, the proposal was made, the bill introduced, whereby
the Duke of York should be debarred from the succession.
There on the essential point of dynastic right
Charles struck. He went much too far, later, in concession
even here. He proposed to maintain his brother's rights
under conditions shameful and even puerile: that a Cath-
olic king should not present to benefices was arguable, but
that the Parliament should control his armed forces would
be the end of monarchy. The suggestion that he should
live far from the country and be king in name alone,
with an heir directing in his stead, was still more incon-
gruous. But even with such expedients the men who now
164
THE CONFLICT
felt themselves finally triumphant over kingship would
have nothing to do. It must be the bill and nothing but the
bill, the exclusion of James wholly and utterly.
They used, of course, the fact of his religion. With
their followers, still under the excitement of the Popish
Plot, it was a genuine motive. Not with them. The
Russells and Capels, Spencers, Coopers and the rest had
not James's religion in mind save as a most valuable tool
with which to work. But the work they had set out to
accomplish was not so particular a thing as James's exclu-
sion. Their business was to prove once and for all that
they gave orders and the Crown obeyed: that they were
prince and the Crown their subject. The ceaseless activities
of their class, spread over a century, were rewarded. The
Exclusion Bill, indeed, did not pass. But within ten years
the Monarchy had fallen.
Charles used every expedient. He prorogued and dis-
solved that short Parliament* He summoned another. It
was as hostile. He dissolved this in its turn j but not before,
during its anxiety for the measure, the combat had taken
an ominous turn. The name of Monmouth had been
mentioned. Shaftesbury was playing his last cards.
It is sadly amusing, but a little wearisome in its like-
ness to our modern politicians and their professions, to
read throughout the Duke of Monmouth's career his loud
protestations of Protestantism, his peculiar enthusiasm
therefore.
They were the product, of course, of the rivalry which
he always felt and which evidently succeeded after he
had lost his own battle at Sedgemoor: the rivalry of that
other champion of the wealthy English faction, William
of Orange. But there was this difference between them,
very marked indeed. Monmouth cared nothing whatever
for the differences in religion} it was mere play-acting,
and he knew very little of continental politics 5 he was but
165
JAMES THE SECOND
a figure-head put forward. William of Orange, though
certainly caring nothing for any positive set of doctrines,
had a fine active dislike of the Catholic Church. More-
over, he knew more of European politics than most young
men of his time; and he fully understood what the
position of the French Monarchy then was, what its claims,
what its weakness, and how it might be met. He saw in
its final defeat the aggrandizement of himself and his
house, and for that defeat he continuously worked. He
needed England to use as a pawn in his continental game.
Shaftesbury, then, played both strings. It was both
the Duke of Monmouth and William of Orange whom
he proposed as successor to the reigning king when his
legitimate heir, James, Duke of York, should on the
passing of the Exclusion Bill be 'deemed dead.'
As for the Protestant heiresses of James, his two
daughters Mary and Anne, Mary was William's wife,
and of Anne there would not be a question unless that
should prove impossible, which already seemed unlikely
with so strange a husband as William, that Mary should
have children.
It must be remembered in this double play of Shaf tes-
bury's that the Duke of Monmouth, though having no
right whatever to the throne, was by considerable sections
of the people, especially in London, acclaimed as a poten-
tial heir, simply because he was a male Stuart and at the
same time, by profession, a leader of the Protestant cause.
Thus when later he returned to England at Shaftesr-
bury's bidding in the teeth of the King he made almost
royal progress. The Whig cabal of great merchants who
still ruled London (he reached the town at midnight
from abroad) ordered bonfires and peals of bells. He
went up and down England like a young king, touching
for the evil. He studied popularity like any modern can-
didate for Parliament, familiar with all, joining in games
1 66
THE CONFLICT
and kissing babies. He thought himself universally be-
loved. It was his undoing within five years, for it brought
him to the scaffold.
Shaftesbury is generally credited with the policy of
putting forward the bastard as sole candidate for the
throne. Macaulay in his simplicity imagines his hero to
have been simple. I doubt it. I give Shaftesbury credit for
a better brain. He was playing the very familiar double
game of putting forward two candidates in order that
he might be tied to neither of them he kept the other
up his sleeve: and that other was the young William of
Orange, as Mary's husband.
The fact that the Duke of Monmouth's name should
have been mentioned at all (and it was mentioned thence-
forward at intervals with emphasis until his invasion, and
miserable failure, six years later) throws a vivid light
upon all the time. Here was a man who had no claim.
He was not only the mere bastard of the King (Louis
XIV also had thought of making the Due de Maine
capable of succession), but he was a bastard by an ignoble
prostitute, born before the Restoration. Against him the
legitimate Stuart was a man with heiresses of his own
blood born to him and surviving. Monmouth counted
not at all. Yet the times were such that it was possible
to put Monmouth forward as a candidate for the throne
upon the exclusion of a man who was brother to the King,
who had won a great victory at sea for England as Ad-
miral, who had again fought with success and splendid
courage in command of the Navy, who had been the most
powerful man in the Council.
That support of Monmouth would not have been pos-
sible unless there had been some large minority of the
people fanatically opposed to James's accession (at least,
at this moment, just after the Popish Plot). It would not
have been possible had the Crown had anything like its
167
JAMES THE SECOND
old power. Lastly, it would not have been possible if
James II had had any of that fascination for the crowd
which Monmouth undoubtedly had, and which the legiti-
mate heir wholly lacked. For though the sailors who had
seen him at work felt strongly for James they cheered
him as they went to their deaths in the wreck of the
Gloucester yet by land he was but a name, and a name
in London still associated with the nightmares of Titus
Oates's dupes.
The bastard was now (in 1679) 3 7 ears f a e > he had
been born at Rotterdam in the April after Charles Fs
death, and while his successor, the young king, was wan-
dering impoverished in exile. The woman Walters, his
mother, had had plenty of lovers if one can use the
term for a person in her position. It was a common joke
of the times that this particular child was not Charles's,
but rather that of a certain colonel; but surely no one who
has seen that fine painting of his head after death can
doubt his being a Stuart. There is not another of the
natural sons of Charles II who bears so strongly stamped
upon his features that strange concave shape of face, with
its dark, somewhat scanty hairs, and its sad anxieties of
expression.
It is a very good example of the way in which the
intriguers would say and do anything to achieve their
end, that the Duke of Monmouth was being called
legitimate! Just as later they lied shamelessly in the
matter of James's young heir, making the child supposi-
titious, so in the matter of Monmouth they lied shame-
lessly upon his bastardy, some even pretending that Lucy
Walters, the mother, had married Charles II in his exile.
When the populace is to be deceived its imagination
must be fed by concrete things. A story had long been
current, and it was now spread on all sides, of a certain
Black Box containing Lucy Walters's marriage lines
168
THE CONFLICT
oh, if only that black box could be found! But in its
absence, on the phantasm of it the populace was fed by
great gentlemen of culture whose circle include Shaftes-
bury and Russell, Sydney and Buckingham. The absurd
falsehood took root at such a moment with the same
rapidity that the lies of Titus Gates had taken root; and
by the early summer of 1679 there were whole blocks
of the duped middle class in the capital who firmly
believed the Duke of Monmouth to be legitimate.
Charles behaved wejl and with firmness. He made a
Declaration, dated 2nd June, 1679 (and repeated in the
following January and March), that he had never been
married to Lucy Walters, and thus confirmed his own
brother in his legitimate position.
The character of James was never better seen than in
one detail of this exceedingly difficult passage of his
life. It was an episode at the beginning of the struggle
for the exclusion of James from the throne.
The Exclusion Bill depended upon the excitement of
the Popish Plot.
That excitement was bound to die down. The Exclusion
Bill would then seem to the average Englishman in his
sober senses an absurdity, and even to the strongly excited
Englishmen of the capital it seemed extreme. To defeat
the project not very much handling of circumstances was
needed: not very great finesse. After all, the Duke's Cath-
olic life was not daily before the public, nor emphasized.
The devotion of the plain citizen to the royal line and
legitimate monarchy was instinctive and deep-rooted. It
needed but one thing to save James from any further
trouble, the same action that would have preserved the
Admiralty for him six years before would now give him
the throne; and that was, once more, the mere simulacrum,
I do not say of outward conformity, but of a sort of
169
JAMES THE SECOND
negative conformity, such as surely any man may prac-
tise without doing too much violence to his conscience.
The Church of England was still strongly attached,
and remained so attached for nearly ten years, in its
chiefs, to the full royalist position, the duty of obedience
to the Crown, the importance of legitimate descent and
of right tide. It was the bishops of the Establishment,
or, rather, certain among them, who now saw what ought
to be done, in their eyes at least, to save the situation.
They approached James and suggested that he should
yield at last, and appear side by side with his brother at
the official services in the Royal Chapel.
Once more, there was nothing that could offend, as it
would seem, a man's honour, let alone his duty to the
Faith. Once more he was asked to renounce nothing, to
take no oath repugnant to a Catholic. He was not asked
to take the Sacrament in the Established rite; he was
not even asked to avoid the Mass, which he might per-
fectly well hear in his private capacity, though thus offi-
cially appearing, now and then at least, at Charles's side
in the Chapel Royal.
There is not one man in a hundred but would have
accepted in such a position and at such a crisis. It was
no longer an office, it was his crown that was at stake.
To have yielded at last, this second time, would have
saved his right to the throne, at the expense of a mere
outward attitude or gesture which involved no direct
inconsistency, no essentially apostate act. It would not
have been much worse morally than what many a Catholic
does daily in the England of our time, that is, condone
in speech and accent and gesture the anti-Catholic hatred
around him: the praise of anti-Catholic history and fiction:
the hatred of Catholic nations, the contempt of the Cath-
olic past.
We can only understand James's character when we
170
THE CONFLICT
understand why he refused. We have seen how he had
already, years before, asked for information upon a def-
inite point of conduct: whether a man having been bap-
tized into the Catholic Church was justified in hiding his
membership thereof in any fashion. He had been told
that there could be no such justification. He had accepted
the decision with the courage and wholeheartedness which
were his special marks; and acted upon them as auto-
matically as a private soldier acts upon a word of com-
mand.
He refused the advice. He advertised his dissent.
He was warned that if he stood out on this one appar-
ently minor point, that if he would not consent to be
present officially in the Chapel Royal, while the service
of the Establishment was being read or intoned, there
could not but follow his own ruin and that of the King;
probably even a revolution. He was further warned by
such of the Anglican prelates as were not without their
private sympathies for the Universal Church that, if he
remained rigorous, the remaining body of the Faith in
England would be crushed out.
They were right in all these warnings except in that
which referred to his brother, King Charles. He indeed
was not over-set. He died a king and steered through
successfully. But all the rest came true.
Whether James knew that all the rest would come true
or not, we cannot tell. Probably he did not; he was a
man who never plotted, and therefore never troubled to
look far ahead at the consequence of action: content when
he had decided within his own mind whether action were
right or wrong. At this decisive moment though not em-
phasized in histories it was really the pivot of the whole
affair he answered in these words, which I translate into
English, from the French transcript of what he seems to
have given to a friend: < My principles do not allow me
171
JAMES THE SECOND
to dissimulate my religion after this fashion*, I cannot
resolve to do evil that good may come of it*
The concision of it recalls another phrase of his in a
similar trial. 'By God's grace I will never do so damnable
a thing. 9
This stubbornness raised friction all around.
It gravely disturbed Charles, who, however much he
may have admired it in his heart, must have been irritated
by it intellectually and exasperated by it as a statesman.
It must have seemed to him to be a sort of wantonness,
a deliberate extreme of position with which his brother
had no right to embarrass him.
It perplexed, confused, and even angered his friends
among the English hierarchy. And it took a strong argu-
ment away from those who would have defended him in
Parliament, especially in the House of Lords.
But James was persuaded of his duty and did it. He
was consistent with himself at that essential moment as
he was upon nearly every other critical occasion of his
life.
I say 'upon nearly every other' j but the phrase is un-
gracious; for on those occasions when he seems inconsistent
or wavering, on the occasion, for instance, of his daugh-
ter's fatal marriage, it was not weakening but misappre-
hension of the situation.
Now, rather than yield he went into exile. At the be-
ginning of March he was in Brussels, and hoped by that
absence, as did his brother, that the impossible situation
would be solved.
The calculation failed. Within two months, by the end
of April, the Gentry of the Commons passed the resolu-
tion, that, being heir to the throne and a Catholic, James
had led the Popish Plot. It was upon this manifest false-
hood (which no one believed, save perhaps the more yokel
of the squires, the more suburban of the merchants) that
172
THE CONFLICT
the Exclusion Bill which Shaf tesbury had worked up for
so long^was read for the first and second time.
Such inhuman steadfastness in James was not without
its temporary reward. In the last but one of those short
successive Parliaments which Charles desperately sum-
moned- and postponed to gain time, Halifax (acting
hypocritically for the Prince of Orange and to exclude
the chances of Monmouth) spoke with such excellence in
the Lords that the Bill was thrown out. To their honour,
the Bishops voted against it (it would be interesting to
know what Compton felt!).
We all know how the last Parliament of the reign was
summoned at Oxford so as to be free of the mob which
Shaftesbury could organize in London how tumul-
tuously it met in arms, with what just contempt it was
dissolved. By such Charles was no longer pestered in the
short remaining years of his life.
The appeal to the people had come and was for the
moment sufficient. They were certainly behind their King.
A last desperate plot was foiled, wherein some proposed
to murder the royal brothers, others probably, some cer-
tainly, to raise rebellion. Its authors perished. Russell
(in spite of an abject appeal to the Duke of York) and
Sydney on the block: the lesser men hanged.
Monmouth was in exile. Shaftesbury had fled over-
sea and died. The merchant oligarchies, especially that
of London, were broken and loyal corporations succeeded
them. The Duke of York returned to the Council, and
the long struggle ended for a brief interlude in peace.
So far the character of James had been tested, though
severely, only in the simple crux of 'Yes 3 and c No*. Its
morals, not its judgment or constructive faculty, had alone
been searched.
There was awaiting him an ordeal of quite another
173
JAMES THE SECOND
kind: the ordeal of action over men: of Government.
And that he could not meet.
NOTE ON LADY RUSSELL
I have alluded briefly in the text to the use made by
Shaftesbury, in his attack on the Crown, of his first cousin,
Lady Russell. It is important to emphasize the part played
by this woman as Shaftesbury's agent. She was heiress
to the great fortune of her father Southampton, which
included Bloomsbury. Hence Southampton House in that
district of London where the conspiracies against the
King were hatched. She was of the iron Huguenot fight-
ing blood through her mother, a Ruvigny. As a widow
this masterful millionairess married William Russell, a
blameless weak man three years younger than herself and
heir, after the death of his witless brother, to the vast
territorial wealth of his father, Lord Bedford. That
father had put him into Parliament for the family borough
of Tavistock. He sat for fourteen years without opening
his mouth until his wife's cousin, Shaftesbury, turned
against the King. Then he is used to promote the Exclu-
sion Bill, lends to the new policy all the weight of the
Bedford interests, ends by getting mixed up in conspiracies
and has his head cut off.
VII
THE ORDEAL
//CHARLES THE KING lay dying in Whitehall. It was
\~s late, long after dark on that cold February day of
London brume, 16855 Thursday the 5th.
He had been suffering for but three days. The great
bedroom of the Palace was crowded there were forty
or more around the bed and waiting in attendance, Peers,
Privy Councillors, five of the Bishops, doctors, servants
at the walls. Men went in and out. There was whispering
by the main doors; but at the head of the King's bed a
little door on the right-hand side, opening on a small back
staircase and to the queen's rooms, was kept shut and
unnoticed.
For many hours the Duke of York had stood by the
bed, watching. Earlier in the day the Bishop of Bath
and Wells, Ken, had read the Anglican Office for the
Sick, had urged his master to communicate. To that plea
the dying man had answered nothing. When it was re-
peated, he said faintly that 'there was time enough'.
When the Elements were brought in and the insistence
continued, he would only say again, and more than once,
'I will think of it'. Now, in the dark evening and after
so many hours, the moment had come to act otherwise.
Louise de Querouaille, her baby face all tears (for she
loved Charles), Barillon, the French Ambassador, knew
the King's great desire and were disturbed at the Duke
of York's delay. That Prince had been sending orders
out upon every side, to the guards, to the city, taking on
his office of authority in the perilous moment, but he
175
JAMES THE SECOND
acted in good time though what he was about to do was
a capital offence in law.
There was in the Palace at that time an English Bene-
dictine, Dom Huddlestone. He had helped to save
Charles's life after Worcester, and on that account had
been specially protected during all the fury of the late
persecutions. He was advised to be ready, and sent an-
other monk, of the Portuguesie Embassy, over to St.
James's Palace for the Blessed Sacrament. Then (it was
between six and seven o'clock of the evening) James,
having asked the company to draw off a little to the end
of the room, knelt by his brother and asked him in a
low tone if he might send for a priest. Charles answered,
'For God's sake, do.'
The Duke of York rose, and in a loud voice called to
all in the bedroom to withdraw, by the King's order;
all save Feversham, the old French Huguenot soldier,
Duras, so long a commander in England, and Bath, Groom
of the Stole. These three Protestants remaining seemed
guarantee enough even to the Bishops as they filed out
into the antechamber. The rest were indifferent.
Chiffinch hurriedly brought in the Benedictine through
the Queen's rooms by the little 'door, and James said, 'Sir,
this good man once saved your body.- He comes now to
save your soul.' Charles whispered faintly, 'He is wel-
come.' He was received into the Faith, repentant espe-
cially that he had delayed so long. He was anointed and
annealed, the Absolution given. When the Blessed Sacra-
ment was held up he made some poor effort to kneel, but
was dissuaded, for it was not in him; he could hardly
even swallow and had to be helped with a glass of water.
Then as his head sunk back he saw the Crucifix held
before his eyes and heard the adjuration to depend upon
the sufferings of Jesus Christ. The little door opened
again, and the priest was gone. It was something later
THE ORDEAL
than eight o'clock. The company was recalled and came
back numerous into that changed room. They watched all
night as he sank, blessing his children, recommending
his women lest they should suffer, and, at times, groaning
in great pain. At the turn of the night, lethargy eased
him. At dawn he was failing, but could still ask for the
curtains to be drawn that he might look for the last time
upon the morning light. A little later his speech failed 5
then he fell blessedly unconscious of pain or anything.
At noon he very quietly died.
James desired to be alone. He commended with him-
self perhaps praying for his brother's soul for about
a quarter of an hour in a room apart. Then he issued
and met the Council. He made a speech to them which
was printed and distributed, saying in this that he would
support the Church and State as he found them, and
immediately summoned a Parliament to meet in three
months; on the igth May. He had inherited Laurance
Hyde (Lord Rochester), his brother-in-law, from
Charles's administration, and he put him at the head of his
Government a strong Protestant and supporter of the
Church of England. He kept Lord Sunderland as Secre-
tary to the Council.
Two problems of very different magnitude met him
at the outset of his new responsibilities and demanded
solution: one a question of revenue, the other of religious
practice. He took in each steps not extravagant nor unwise,
but already, by a shade, on the blunt side.
The Duties at the Ports continued to be levied^ of
course, day by day; as in the last week of Charles's life,
so in the first of James's reign. Thus had it been for
centuries and it was, by this time, a mere necessity of
the routine in the greatly increased commerce and revenue
of London.
177
JAMES THE SECOND
One cannot imagine the Port of London in 1685 held
up and all its goods in bond pending an assembly of county
gentlemen at Westminster} or, alternatively, a anarchic
rush for free import during the interregnum.
There was further a very strong feeling loudly ex-
pressed by the London merchants that it would be grossly
unfair to allow the competition of goods entered free
against goods already brought under the customs. James
was not only right in collecting, but compelled of neces-
sity to collect. Guildford, experienced in Treasury mat-
ters, but timid and of doubtful loyalty, proposed an
impossible scheme for holding the money till Parliament
met which would have meant, in practice, opening the
reign with a quarter's burden of debt and incurring high
interest as well. 1 James was careful himself to proclaim
the fact that technically the only legal foundation for the
customs lay in a vote by Parliament, and he emphasized
this by summoning that assembly more immediately than
any previous king had done.
Charles had died on February the 6th, the Friday.
James had been proclaimed and called his first regular
Council on the Saturday} at the very first opportunity
after the intervening Sunday, Monday morning, the 9th
of February, the writs were ordered and the summons
for a new Parliament issued. Not till this had been done
was the proclamation for continuing the regular customs,
pending the meeting of the Houses, issued. When they
met they heard his claim with satisfaction and their first
act was to confirm the revenue for life.
Nevertheless, James might have done one thing which
he did not do and which would have been of excellent
effect for the future. He might have emphasized the
deplorable necessity and the strong need of early confir-
1 The Bankers already powerful charged the Crown eight and even
ten per cent.
178
THE ORDEAL
mation by the House of Commons. He might have made
the whole thing an occasion for throwing into high relief
his vast respect for the now fixed rights of Parliament in
the provision of revenue and his own misery at being
driven through necessity of doing justice by the Merchants
of London, even to so brief a technical breach of what
had been law for nearly sixty years. Such a protestation
would have been humbug, of course, and that was why
James would not stoop to it: but it is just that sort of
humbug which is essential to the government of men.
The matter of his private worship was of greater mo-
ment. Those of James's subjects who objected to his
having accepted the Catholic faith were reconciled by this
time to his domestic practice of a minority religion, though
most of them probably wondered why he would not pub-
licly attend the State Service while privately hearing Mass.
But public expression of Catholicism even within the
Palace was a different matter. It bore the character of
a challenge. That instinct for using the unpopularity of
Catholicism as an instrument against the Crown was as
strong as ever in the territorial class, and though its most
daring members had lately been scattered and punished,
new intriguers could always arise. James compromised by
agreeing that when he went to Mass it should be in the
Queen's chapel, and as an individual, not as a monarch.
But he insisted on some of the ceremony which he thought
due to a monarch, and therein, again, he erred. As in the
case of the customs, he should for policy at least have
beslavered his critics: he should have emphasized the
wholly private character of his worship. But here, again,
he refused to cringe. On the contrary, he had himself
accompanied to the very doors of the chapel by the great
officers of his Court, the guards lined his way, and though
it was understood that no one need follow him farther
than the doors, the doors stood wide open. This cere-
179
JAMES THE SECOND
mony, and the fact that Mass could be seen and followed
half publicly in the Palace, gave rise to violent anti-Cath-
olic sermons in the City of London whose bishop, be it
remembered, was that Compton of the best birth on the
bench, and a ceaseless intriguer against the Crown.
It was sincerely feared by many that James intended
by such acts to make the full public worship of his religion
familiar, and through that familiarity to spread its in-
fluence. Probably he did. But that was not the way to set
about it. It gave a handle to the more calculating of his
enemies who were spreading the falsehood (already!)
that the King was making an attack upon the State religion.
In the matter of toleration, he did nothing unwise. He
released the thousands of Catholics who were still in prison
for nothing but their Faith and also the great number
of Nonconformists so persecuted. But he went no further 5
except to warn the lawyers that the Government discour-
aged prosecutions on grounds of religion. Any further
action towards toleration of Catholics and Nonconformists
alike he put off to the assembly of Parliament.
On St. George's Day, the 23rd of April, he was crowned
and anointed in Westminster Abbey by the officials, and
according to all the rites (saving the Communion) of
the Church of England. He took the Coronation Oath to
support that Church as by law established.
There followed the trial of Titus Oates, which was
already in process and which only the death of Charles
II had postponed. His guilt was clearly established and
the judges in condemning him to a heavy fine, flogging
and the pillory, expressed regret that they could not
hang him.
Here again nothing clashed with popular humour.
Oates had been over in Holland hobnobbing with Shaf tes-
bury before that worthy's death, but no one could use his
sufferings now as an excitement against the throne. Oates
180
THE ORDEAL
was found out, and most men in London had grown
ashamed of their past madness. Since he could not legally
be put to death, he lived on to receive a handsome pension
for his perjuries from the grateful Prince of Orange,
when he became King of England.
On the 1 9th of May the Parliament met. By way of
opening speech James re-read the declaration he had made
to the Council on his accession, promising to support
Church and State as he found them. He asked of them the
regular revenue of half excise and all customs for life,
which his brother had had, and some further special vote
to meet Charles IPs debts and the expenses of putting
down a rebellion which Argyll had begun and of which
more in a moment.
The Parliament were enthusiastic in his support, they
cheered the speech continually, willingly granted the
revenue for life and gave him as special revenue for the
moment more than he had asked. A motion to persecute
dissenters was rejected unanimously on account of the
King's desire for tolerance.
So far as the Commons and the people and merchants
of London were concerned, the support of the King on
his coming difficulty with the Rebellions was strong,
sincere and united. These Rebellions we have not to fol-
low in detail save as illustrations to the King's character
and position. They were also invasions and were planned
for Scotland and for the South, by Argyll and Monmouth
in Holland. The Dutch connived at their departure.
Argyll sailed from Holland (financed by a rich widow
of that country) on May the 2nd, and after touching at
the Orkneys landed on the west coast of Scotland, where
he raised his own retainers and issued a proclamation
against King James. He had little following and the whole
affair was over in six weeks, Argyll himself being captured
on June the iyth and his last hundred men dispersed.
181
JAMES THE SECOND
He was executed on the 30th at Edinburgh, showing great
firmness to the end. But in the matter of that execution
the King was guilty of a false attitude directly due to his
ill understanding of men.
Scotland was led by its nobles. The small governing
class had very high moral power in the lowlands; in the
highlands the clans followed their chiefs like devoted
families. These nobles were in high feud, fed with blood.
The lineage of Argyll had judicially murdered, and would
gladly murder again, their opponents. When the turn of
these opponents came they exercised the same ferocity.
Now James had been appointed to the Government of
Scotland five years before (1680) during his brother's
reign when, after the excitement of the Popish Plot, it
was advisable to keep him away from London. A subtler
and more far-seeing man would have imposed peace upon
the Scottish factions (so far as was possible) and would
certainly have prevented what followed in the case of
Argyll. That great Highland Chief had taken the Oath
under the Test Act in order to maintain his numerous
jurisdictions he was a sort of king in his own western
lands. In taking the Oath he had explained the sense in
which he took it. His enemies on this ground eagerly
condemned him as a traitor (1681). It was a monstrous
verdict and it was a piece of folly in James to have per-
mitted it. He did so because, of the two factions, the
dominant one of the moment supported the official estab-
lishment in Church and State: because the fanaticism of
the persecuted Calvinist enthusiasts had led them to
murder and to the open profession of armed rebellion.
But the motive was worthless. It had no place in a judicial
record.
Argyll escaped from prison and fled oversea. Now,
upon his invasion, failure and capture, he was put to death
not on the ground of his present armed action against his
182
THE ORDEAL
King which was clearly treason but (in order to em-
phasize the triumph of his enemies) upon the old ini-
quitous sentence of 1681. It was a permission on James's
part lamentable and inexcusable. Because he had heard
that one must satisfy opinion, and because the ruling
opinion in Scotland was thus inclined, he gave it its head.
Because he knew that statesmanship should be wary in
going counter to the powerful, he supported the power-
ful just when it was an error to do so; yet later he
offended them just when he might usefully have yielded.
Because, in this case, one violent body called itself the
friend of the Throne, he connived at its excesses out of
season. When, later, he might have curbed the Scottish
nobles by relying on their inferiors, he missed his chance.
In the much graver matter of Monmouth's invasion
the King showed more balance,
Monmouth had not struck coincidentally with Argyll.
He had delayed. He could only scrape together a force
of eighty in one ship, but he rightly counted on some
measure of popular support in the West and he carried
arms for five thousand. He landed at Lyme Regis, at the
boundary of Dorset and Devon, on June the nth. He
issued a proclamation that he was come to defend the
Protestant Religion, laws and liberties of England} de-
nounced James (whom he called c Duke of York 5 ) as a
usurper, idiotically accused him of poisoning his brother
the late King and of setting fire to London, He declared
war on him, such a monster. 1 Monmouth was so well
received at Taunton that it turned his head. He declared
himself King (under the title of James II), ordered the
1 Argyll's proclamation made the same asinine accusation of murder.
But we must remember, in that rebel's favour, that he respected imme-
morial tradition, and when he sent round the Fiery Cross to his clan saw
to it that it was (a) made for yew, (b) duly fired, and (c) extinguished in
goat's blood.
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JAMES THE SECOND
dissolution of Parliament and set a price on the real James
IPs head!
Monmouth, after the rout (pompously called 'the
Battle 3 ) of Sedgemoor, was caught near Ringwood, in
flight. Thence he wrote a piteous appeal for his life to the
King. On his arrival in London a week later James con-
sented on his earnest appeal to see him, but was disgusted
by his cowardice: for Monmouth knelt before him and
then crawled on the floor imploring mercy and denouncing
all his comrades in arms. In the carriage on his way to the
Tower he continued his supplications. Next day he still
stormed the King, the Queen, the Queen Dowager Cath-
erine of Braganza, and others at Court with letters implor-
ing pardon. When all that failed and he knew he was to
die he rallied to a sort of indifference in which he showed
an equal carelessness to the agony of his legitimate wife
(upon whose great fortune he had kept his state) and to
the religious talk of the bishops. At ten o'clock on June
the 1 5th he was beheaded, with shocking indecision, on
Tower Hill. His last words affirmed the rights of his
mistress (as against his wife) and his assurance of Heaven.
^ Of the rebels found in arms a small minority were
given over to military execution at the hands of one Kirke,
formerly in command at Tangiers: a man whose vileness
is sufficiently proved by his desertion from the flag a few
years later, his treasonable relations with William of
Orange and his horrible cruelties in Ireland. His action
here, in the West, did not exceed the severities common to
the time, but they disgusted the King sufficiently for him
to call a halt and to submit the authors, aiders and partici-
pators in the Rebellion to the Civil Courts. Five judges
were sent into the West to try the great number of crimi-
nals presented; at their head was Jeffreys, an able, very
handsome lawyer, time-serving as the rest, whom Charles
II had picked out to be Lord Chief Justice. They first
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sat at Winchester, where the old widow of one of Crom-
well's regicides was condemned by the jury, in spite of her
own very ardent lying, on overwhelming evidence of har-
bouring fugitive rebels in arms 5 but James used his royal
power to commute her sentence, from burning, the legal
course, to beheading. 1 The court proceeded through the
West as far as Exeter and back to Wells. Of the many
thousand presented most were acquitted ; of the rest some
were pardoned; the remainder received a short sentence
of flogging or imprisonment. Between 1,100 and 1,200
were more severely dealt with, principally as being guilty
of rebellion in arms. Of these only just over a quarter 2
actually suffered the full penalty; the remaining three-
quarters were given sentences of ten years' transporta-
tion to labour in the plantations.
And here the next point arises in the examination of
James's character. Was the- repression of Monmouth's
rebellion excessive? Was the severity exercised due to
him? Did he strengthen or weaken the Throne by its
severity?
Of his right to use such severity no one of the time
could make any question. The conception that such punish-
ments are intolerable is a modern one, which we are justi-
fied in holding, but which was unknown to that day.
The victims loudly complained. They would have acted
in exactly the same fashion towards armed rebellion
against their power, had their faction been uppermost.
The question does not turn upon the character of what
was perfectly legal in the circumstances, moral in the
eyes of contemporaries and normal in the forms of punish-
ment enforced. It turns upon the policy of such action.
1 James has been blamed for the clemency as c an example of his arbi-
trary government* interfering 1 with the due course of the law !
2 331. We have a sample in the case of Dorchester: 292 condemned
to death j only 74 executed.
185
JAMES THE SECOND
I think, upon the whole, the verdict must be in James's
favour but somewhat doubtfully. A very great measure
of severity was certainly necessary. For now a long life-
time England had been in a recurrent state of actual
or potential civil war; the whole mind of society was dis-
tracted by that mood, in spite of its rapid advance in com-
merce and discovery. War had devastated the country
during one set of active campaigns; it had led to the
murder of a king, to the attempted murder of the King's
two sons. Men the men of average sense in England
were intolerant of renewing all this chaos and violence.
Moreover, the assault on Monarchy had been merciless.
It was win or lose all the time. Charles II had said with
admirable conciseness and truth of the Rye House con-
spirator,, William Russell, Bedford's son, the weak vic-
tim of his wife, 'If I do not have his life he will have
mine' and that was still more true as between James
and his bastard nephew. As for the 30x3 odd executions,
the number is nothing startling. Europe had seen and has
seen infinitely greater holocausts and was and is
accustomed to them, from the Irish coasts of the Atlantic
to Poland.
Compared with the irresponsible abominations of Crom-
well and the more legal but sanguinary vengeance of Eliz-
abeth in the North of England, the example made of
the rebels in Monmouth's rebellion was mild. When
James II had been driven from power by the faction
opposing him a legend arose which enormously magnified
the character of the legal repression exercised, and in-
vented a thousand tales against the infamous Kirke and
the more regular Jeffreys. History must not be confused
with legend, but legend serves a useful purpose in guiding
history. This legend, though it would not have "arisen
but for James's fall so soon after, is evidence of:
(i) The strong support throughout the country of the
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THE ORDEAL
faction opposing James: a small minority in action but
probably a considerable minority in vague sentiment.
(2) Of the change in custom by which severities normal
a hundred years before, and even thirty years before,
would now, in 1685, be criticized. True, they were criti-
cized by interested parties. But these parties appealed to
neutrals and even to opponents. They would not have
done so had not opinion been upon the change.
It is such considerations as these which make me say
though with hesitation that James might have more
wisely reduced, if not the capital executions, at any rate
the large number of transportations. The action came late
in his time more than thirty years after the worst offences
of Cromwell. The world was slowly changing, and the
Assizes under Jeffreys were allowed to become a myth
damaging, in some degree, to the Throne.
We must not allow our natural disgust with the vul-
garity and falsehood of official Whig history, made cur-
rent by the Revolution, to blind us to reality. James,
though not a cruel man he had never been guilty of a
single act of cruelty in his life was a fixed one. And he
was a man to whom no mercy had been shown or would
be shown if he yielded. Yet some relaxation of sternness
half-way through the business might have profited him.
As it was he expressed his condemnation of the lengths
to which his justice proceeded. But he expressed it too
late. Moreover, he specially promoted Jeffreys and him-
self later acknowledged that error. He did it because in
the midst of powerful enemies he wanted sure friends. But
it was an error.
Anyhow, the rebellion was crushed, and whether too
severely or not made no very great difference to the
power of the Throne at the time, though a great deal to
the later myth against James himself. What was next
toward was of far greater moment. After the summer of
187
JAMES THE SECOND
1685, when the Rebellions were over and done and the
Crown assured, he proceeded to his main effort, which
cost him all Toleration.
With the end of the summer the Rebellions had been
crushed and punished and the adjourned Parliament met
again in November.
It was the prime object of James II to obtain, with its
aid, not an increase of the Catholic party (though he hoped
for that) but an England in which the various forces of
the nation should combine in support of the Government
and in a general tranquillity under a popular Monarchy.
James, in making the chief aim of his life and reign
the solid founding of Toleration in England, was but
carrying out a policy which had been the central idea of
the Stuarts since Charles at the end of his exile had made
his declaration at Breda. Over and over again had Charles
II returned to it. He had attempted from the first days
of his reign to the last to enforce it by personal action.
He had always been foiled both by his Parliament and
by his own too constant policy of preserving his Throne
by yielding to the powerful. James proposed now at last
to reap the fruit of such persistent effort, to take advantage
of the recent defeat all opposition had suffered, from
Shaftesbury's to the last rebellions, and to set up the
policy of general religious Toleration finally, firmly and
for good.
But what do we mean by Toleration?
To-day the word has acquired a vague sentimental
atmosphere of Justice. With uneducated people it is even
used as though it meant a sort of virtue. Even with those
accustomed to think and acquainted with the past of
Europe, the modern fashion is very strong. Therefore
to say that James was working for Toleration might sound
like a sort of slight praise; indeed, those moderns who
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desire to blacken him in history, are eager to tell us that
his real aim cannot have been Toleration at all, because
he was too stupid, too wicked, and withal too obstinate a
man to entertain so noble an ideal.
Certainly James's admission of other than Catholics to
similar equality with the members of the Established
Church was but a consequence of his own Catholic sym-
pathies. Certainly his action did not proceed from any
general principle that all philosophies (and therefore all
the actions consequent upon them) are equally to be
admitted in the State. That is what your average modern
historian, or, what is much worse, politician, means by
the word Toleration. No man in a period of clear think-
ing could be stupid enough to entertain the idea for a
moment and the vigorous, though constrained, mind of
James, least of all. The real position was something more
like this:
No society will willingly admit among its membership
a body alien to its own principle of life, for such a body
will always remain potentially destructive of the rest.
Thus treason is punished. The spreading of counsels sub-
versive of human society is punished. The practice (or
even publication) of ideas regarded as subversive to any
particular society is also punished. For instance, polygamy
of a particular kind was punished by the United States
in the nineteenth century, and Toleration was forbidden
to the Mormons. Again, advocacy of surrender during
a national war is punished everywhere. But when, of two
kinds of unity, one is regarded as the more essential to
the life of that society than the other, then, in order to
preserve the life of society, the less important difference
is (reluctantly) allowed to exist: that is, Tolerated.
In the seventeenth century the principle of social unity
was not a devotion to the nation, such as we presuppose
.to-day, but obedience to one's lawful Prince.
189
JAMES THE SECOND
The argument behind religious toleration was the argu-
ment that subjects of this lawful Prince, having been
reduced to the common acceptation of one government,
yet being hopelessly divided in religion, their division in
this should be recognized so long as they obeyed that
common head. To preserve this good of political unity,
the other good of religious unity must be sacrificed. That
was the argument for Toleration in 1660-88.
It was not a principle of universal application: Tolera-
tion can never be such. To say *I will tolerate anything 5
is a contradiction in terms ; you tolerate only what is
tolerable. It was a particular policy relative to a par-
ticular problem. It is perfectly conceivable that some
one other than James, ruling seventeenth-century Eng-
land, might have strongly supported the principle of
Toleration merely for the sake of order, though himself
equally contemptuous of the original Catholic faith and
of its various Protestant derivatives. James's policy had
for its personal motive, without a doubt, his strong sym-
pathy with the Catholic Church, of which he was now a
member. But that policy remained, none the less, a policy
of Toleration alone, and of Toleration with the political
object of internal peace.
Is it then true that those who opposed James's policy
of Toleration, and who said that he was by it attempting "
to impose his own faith upon the nation, were mere liars
or fanatics accusing him of absurdities and impossibilities?
No, it is not true.
In the first place there was, and had always been, in
a certain small proportion of the Established Church
parsons and Bishops (and laymen too), a tradition vaguely
in favour of reunion with the Universal Church of the
West. They would have it that in doctrine the Church of
England was not pledged to anything un-Cath^lic: that
only points of discipline and organization separated her
190
THE ORDEAL
from the older Communion. They thought for them-
selves alone. They would never have moved the great
corporation of which they were so small a part. England
was then mainly made up of agricultural parishes. The
actual communicants of the Church of England were then
certainly a very large majority of the people, and that
people was profoundly opposed to the prime doctrine of
the Real Presence and all the atmosphere of Catholicism.
James himself overestimated the possibilities of the ten-
dency, and it is perhaps this which accounts for his blunder
in the case of Massey.
But the second ground for fear of Catholicism was
much the stronger and more universal. It was this: that
if the Catholic Church were once given free play in the
England of 1685, its very numerous adherents admitted
to every profession, appearing in both Houses of Parlia-
ment, on the Bench, in the Commons, as officers of the
Army and Navy, its practice openly performed and its
facilities for education completely enfranchised, there
would necessarily have been (in that time) a large acces-
sion in numbers to the Catholic body, and, over the State
in general, a large accession of Catholic influence. This
was what opponents of Toleration dreaded. They dreaded
it so much, that some even many thought Toleration
might make Catholicism triumphant.
In that they were quite wrong. The opposition to
'"Catholicism was by 1660-88 so widespread through-
out the bulk of the nation, and so intense within a very
large fraction of it, so connected with its organized wealth,
and indeed with almost everything corporate in England
(University, Bar, Borough), that no matter what scope
were allowed to its argument and persuasion, the Cath-
olic Church would never have achieved any other position
than that of a perhaps larger but still unpopular minority.
191
JAMES THE SECOND
England as a whole would have remained a Protestant
State.
That is what would presumably have happened, even
had James had his way and had his effort endured. We
might have had England something like what Holland
is to-day a country with a good deal more than a third
of its people Catholic, though its central tradition and
ethics were Protestant. But there would have been this
difference beween the case of England and the case of
Holland: in the Northern Netherlands, as in Scotland,
the Reformation had come in the shape of a very violent
movement, full of intense emotion, Calvinistic in form,
combative, and determined upon victory. Whereas in Eng-
land the Reformation had been worked by a dominant
unpopular governing group against the grain of the people,
very slowly, confusedly, and, as it were, without vitality,
because that very governing group were concerned, not
with Protestantism so much as with keeping their newly-
gotten millions of church spoils. All the development of
true Protestantism in England had been arrested or
diverted by an Official Establishment which preserved
many Catholic terms and not a few Catholic forms.
Further, in England there was no territorial division as in
Holland. There was not in England, as there was in
Holland, a whole Catholic district; though here and there
(as in Lancashire) the Catholic proportion might be some-
what larger than elsewhere.
This and the religious tradition of many of the older
families, might have made Catholicism in modern Eng-
land, had James II succeeded, a stronger force even than
it is in modern Holland.
One thing is certain: had he succeeded, English litera-
ture would have had its large proportion of overt Cath-
olic spirit. As it is, whether in Dryden, or in Pope, or in
Swift (who, beneath the surface, was more than half
192
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sympathetic), the Catholic force in English literature is
not overt. English literature, at once the expression and
the moulding of the English people, has been (and is),
from the time when Shakespeare ceased writing, definitely
Protestant.
Toleration being the 'great idea' of James's reign, let
us see what forces opposed and what supported his effort.
Against James's main object of Toleration stood the
following forces:
(1) (Much the strongest.) The wealthy as a whole,
including the great merchants, especially those of London.
The form of government was still in the King^s hands.
The real power, ultimately, lay in the newly rich class,
which had steadily increased in strength since the Ref-
ormation, especially since Cecil's working of the Gun-
powder Plot. Their persistent policy was to weaken the
formal Government of the Crown till they could com-
pletely capture it: which they did, in 1688.
(2) Supporting this, against a Catholic King, was the
anti-Catholic feeling of the nation. This feeling had
grown steadily in the eighty years since the Gunpowder
Plot. Much the larger part of England in numbers was
now Protestant in life and anti-Catholic in tone. A large
minority perhaps nearly half was definitely anti-Cath-
olic. A lesser minority but still a large one, perhaps a
quarter desired to extirpate the Catholic religion by
whatever means, wherever it was found, but especially in
England. Only a small ^minority, an eighth to a. seventh
we say, was actively Catholic 5 but numbers varied very
much with persecution, and the Catholics wlw would
sacrifice all to maintain their religion and hand it on to
their children were perhaps not one in twenty of the whole
people. But as much as a fifth to a quarter of the adult
English may as late as this date have been Catholic
193
JAMES THE SECOND
more or less counting in those of vague Catholic tradi-
tion. Much the most of these last were by now indifferent.
(3) The National feeling, covering nearly all the nation
and including many active Catholics, was irritated by the
great strength of Louis XIV and the French nation, for
the moment much the strongest power in the West of
Europe. Now this national rival (a) Stood for Catholi-
cism (though at some issue with the Pope); () Stood
for Popular Monarchy against the wealthier classes every-
where. Therefore, in reaction against it, the National
feeling in England tended to suspect Popular Monarchy,
to support the growing power of the wealthier classes
here, and even, in part, to sympathize with the similar
power of Merchant Government by the rich in Holland,
at whose head was William of Orange; the opponent of
Louis XIV.
(4) A further cause of weakness was the fact that,
while James's main object was general toleration and
peace under the active rule of his house, he himself was
a convinced Catholic, so that (a) He necessarily thought
first of his co-religionists in trying to secure freedom of
worship; () All his acts would be interpreted as part
of a plot in favour not of unity but of Catholicism
alone.
In support of James IPs attempt to establish a tranquil
and tolerant society under a Popular Monarchy, only one
main force was in action: the devotion of the English to
their traditions and therefore to the reigning house, and
the remaining power of Kingship. But to this we must add
two lesser forces which were in contradistinction one
to the other, but which both helped to make the attempt
possible: (a) The effect of time. James was a man of only
52 years. If he lived to carry on his policy for, say, twenty
years, it might well take root, and England become a
united country still essentially Protestant but with a con-
194
THE ORDEAL
siderable and contented Catholic minority, probably des-
tined to increase j () The inheritance of the Crown lay
in two young women of 23 and 21, his daughters Mary
and Anne: both strong Protestants and married to Prot-
estant husbands: Mary to William of Orange the Dutch-
man, head of the opposition to Louis XIV abroad, and
Anne to Prince George of Denmark. As James, after a
marriage of thirteen years, had had no son by his present,
second, Catholic wife, Mary of Modena, it seemed certain
that the Crown would fall ultimately to a Protestant
succession, and this helped to modify the forces acting
against James.
As we shall see, it was the upsetting of this last ex-
pectation, by the birth of a son, which turned the scale
against James and led to his defeat.
Under such conditions did James II begin his great
experiment of religious toleration.
His policy had three parts.
(1) (The essential.) To repeal the Test Act and Acts,
which, it will be remembered, prevented any one from
holding a post, civil or military, or voting in Parliament,
unless he took communion as a member of the Church of
England and swore an oath denying the presence of Our
Lord in the Blessed Sacrament.
(2) The forming of a small army some fifteen
thousand men to act in defence of the Government.
His existing forces were but a handful of 5,000 men
for all garrison purposes as well as for action in the field,
and the recent rebellions were a warning of its insufficiency.
Apart from these there was only the militia under com-
mand of the local squires j that is, of the rich class which
stood, in the main, against Popular Monarchy.
(3) (Much the least important.) The modification 1
1 The falsehood is continually repeated that he desired its repeal. It is
one of many score such traditional falsehoods in connexion with this reign.
195
JAMES THE SECOND
of the Habeas Corpus Act. This Act still survives as an
historical curiosity, but is now of no effect, because a mod-
ern government can suspend it at will, and can secure, even
without its suspension, the imprisonment of any one it
chooses; since the Courts are now part of the executive.
But in Charles IPs and James IPs time the Habeas Corpus
Act was a weapon for powerful men against the Govern-
ment, and was intended to be used as such. For though the
King could usually rely on some judges he could never
be certain of all as a modern government is. The legal
body in general had become, in the seventeenth century,
part of that wealthy class which was, on the whole, in
opposition to the Government, that is, to the King. Any
judge was free, under the new Act, to say that a prisoner
should no longer be detained pending trial, under the
pretence that the Government's plea for delay did not
satisfy him, and thus limit the time for the collection of
evidence by the King against conspiracy.
Even before the Parliament met, James was opposed
in his own Council by Halifax (whom he dismissed),
and, less clearly, by Rochester: both supported the Test
Act against Catholics, and the former tried to confuse
the modification of Habeas Corpus with its abolition. The
Test Act was the real battle-ground, and support of it was
increased by the news, in October, that the King of France
had abolished the makeshift Edict of Nantes, which had,
in its origin, been hurriedly put forward to patch up peace
after a disastrous civil war which threatened to destroy
the French, but which had lingered on, and in effect
created a separate privileged and hostile Nation in the
midst of France. For it must never be forgotten that the
Edict of Nantes was not a mere declaration of Toleration.
It was the granting of special territories and governmental
powers to the small but wealthy Huguenot minority which
was so intensely bitter against the mass of the French
196
THE ORDEAL
people. Over 400,000 Huguenots emigrated one-tenth
of these came to England and greatly inflamed public
feeling.
Parliament met on the 9th November. It opposed
Toleration. It supported the Test Act in the House of
Commons, refusing to continue the commissions given
to certain Catholic officers who had acted against the late
rebels 5 and the House of Lords the Bishops unanimous
through their aristocratic spokesman Compton of London
were equally determined to maintain the civic disabili-
ties and persecution of all Catholic subjects.
The King prorogued the Parliament and determined to
act in favour of Toleration through the Dispensing Power.
The Dispensing Power was the right of the King to relieve
particular cases from the action of a general law: a larger
application of the principle by which he can pardon even
a convicted felon. There had never been any doubt of this
old national principle: it was immemorial and taken for
granted. But because the relief now offered would give
civic rights to a Catholic, dissension arose, even among the
Judges. It is characteristic of the time that, just as the great
Lords specially chosen by the King for his Council were
divided in their allegiance, the Judges, whose support
of any form of Government is essential, began to waver.
It will be remembered that Shaftesbury, Russell and
the rest had proposed a few years before to dismiss the
Judges who supported the legitimate Government and
to appoint in their place lawyers favourable to the new
revolutionary claims. It will also be remembered that
Charles successfully maintained the immemorial right of
the King to appoint and dismiss his magistrates. But he
could not prevent the legal corporation from being part
of the new upper-class oligarchy which was undermining
the Crown 5 and in any body of Judges at this date most
would sympathize with their class. Some would even help
197
JAMES THE SECOND
a revolutionary change in favour of the Parliament and
gentry, against the King. So it was on this occasion of the
Hales Judgment.
A minority of four Judges two of great weight
astonished James by putting forward (in private) the
novel doctrine that the King could not give a particular
dispensation. This though private manifesto of revolu-
tionary opinion on the part of such important members
of the new oligarchy was a signal of all that was to follow.
Just as the wavering of the Judges between the rich and
their King in Charles Ps day on the matter of revenue
had been a sign that the aristocratic House of Commons
was already winning against the old Popular Monarchy,
so the wavering of the Judges now on the fundamental
points of royal right showed that the last remnant of
power in Kingship was in danger of being lost to his son.
The f our revolutionary Judges were removed, and a
test case was tried. Sir Edward Hales was a Colonel in
the Army j could he remain in that office, accepting the
Crown's ambiguous 'supremacy', but without publicly and
solemnly denying the real Presence of Our Lord in the
Blessed Sacrament (the essence of the Test Act) ?
The Lord Chief Justice, Herbert, the most respected
figure on the Bench, held that he could remain an officer
without such apostasy, as the King had given a special
dispensation. But he urged the gravity of the case and
called in all his colleagues. All save one concurred.
This instrument in favour of Toleration was thus
henceforward legal and James would and did use it in
strict conformity with law and custom. But the Hales
case was unpopular, especially in London and wherever
the hatred of Catholicism was strong, both because it
emphasized the claim of the minority to civic rights and
because Hales was a recent convert $ he seemed to give
a lead to that large number of indifferent or curious men,
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THE ORDEAL
or men with some vague memories of the older religion,
who were approaching the Church.
It also tempted those many men without religion who
will always try to please whatever power can advance
them 5 in this case, the King. In general, Toleration
favoured the growth of the Catholic body. To the wealthy
class who counted much more than the populace, but
who used popular feeling the Hales case was alarming
because it emphasized and fixed one of the few remaining
powers of the Crown.
The effect on the gentry showed itself at once. Comp-
ton, whom we so perpetually come across in this reign,
a member of the Reformation aristocracy, had been made
Bishop of London by James's special favour during
Charles's reign. Yet he had been specially prominent in
attacking the King in the House of Lords. James had
to bear this ingratitude, for it was legal; but now, things
went further and threatened disorder. Sermons of a violent
kind were preached in London inciting the Protestant
majority to the hatred of the Catholics in their midst.
One case, that of Sharp preaching in St. Giles', was par-
ticularly flagrant, and Compton was asked to restrain him.
He demurred. James, though head of the Church, rightly
decided that his abnormal position as a Catholic forbade
him to act directly in the discipline of the Church of Eng-
land. Only a fool could have decided otherwise. Yet he
exceeded, not his right indeed, but sound policy, in the
indirect action of his which followed^ He nominated an
Ecclesiastical Commission to deal with Compton's in-
surgence. It was framed according to both Statute and
Precedent; all its members were Protestant and Church-
men; the Primate (who excused himself on account of
age) was put first, the Bishop of Durham (a man of
great weight and strongly in favour of religious peace)
and the Bishop of Rochester, three Lords of Council, and
199
JAMES THE SECOND
the Chief Justice of Common Pleas. On the 6th of Sep-
tember, 1686, they suspended Compton.
In the same year, earlier, James had allowed Sclater,
Curate of Putney, to keep his emoluments after conver-
sion on condition of paying for a substitute. The action
is comprehensible on the plea that conversion should not
ruin a man. Still, it was allocating an Ecclesiastical income
away from the Establishment in that one isolated case, and
therefore seemed as unjust as it was certainly unwise. Also,
characteristically, James quite misjudged his man. Sclater
was a low parasite who in the subsequent persecution
ratted in the most abject manner.
Meanwhile the Universities, essential parts and sup-
ports of the New Aristocracy and the Church of England,
were most resolute against Toleration. James was as
resolute in imposing that policy upon them. It was per-
haps too much to hope that the Catholics (and Non-
conformists) should have places in Oxford and Cam-
bridge in proportion to their numbers, but the King was
determined that complete exclusion should cease. He
maintained in their posts and fellowships Walker the
Master of University College, who had become Catholic,
and three others a tiny proportion out of the whole body
of the University, but a test of toleration. This was in the
spring of 1686. But by December he took a further and
most ill-judged step. He appointed another convert Cath-
olic, Fellow of Merton, Massey, to be Dean of Christ
Church. I say the step was most ill-judged 5 but it must
not be imagined that James had no reasons. The Dean of
Christ Church is head of a college: and two heads of
colleges, Catholic, was no excessive proportion. Moreover,
as with Sclater, James imposed on Massey the duty of
providing a substitute, out of his own salary, for the
services of the Church of England. But the Deanery of
Christ Church is not only the headship of an Oxford
200
THE ORDEAL
college. It is also a high ecclesiastical Dignity in the
Church of England, and James's choice of such a college
on which to put a Catholic head was a direct (though his
only) interference with that great national organ which he
was pledged to maintain intact. Early in the next year,
1687, he failed in a more important point: Cambridge
refused (in spite of the King's orders) to grant a Catholic
his degree (one Francis, a Benedictine) unless he aposta-
tized and repudiated the real presence of Our Lord in the
Sacrament of the Altar. James in this case admitted defeat,
and the right of the University to make its own rules.
So far the policy, even in the matter of the Ecclesias-
tical Commission, had with the exception of the bad
Massey case been consistent and possible though it
would have required a very skilful hand to maintain it.
But James, who was as unskilful as he was straightforward
and sincere, also blundered very badly on a capital point:
the distinction between his religion as an individual and
his office as a king.
He published, as King, arguments in favour of Ca-
tholicism found among Charles IPs papers in Charles's
own hand; he added to the Council a quite disproportionate
number of Catholic peers (four); he attempted the con-
version of his chief Minister and brother-in-law, Laurence
Hyde, Lord Rochester, and on that peer's refusal he
dismissed him with a large income out of the Royal
Purse, it is true, and with more from the forfeit lands
of the rebel Lord Grey, but still he dismissed him; an
act which at once appeared not neutral and tolerant, but
active and propagandist.
Two men had fought for supremacy in the Council
which directly ruled England, Rochester and Sunderland
(Spencer), both of the new oligarchy. When Rochester
fell, Sunderland was supreme. We have seen his charac-
201
JAMES THE SECOND
ter. Partly through a love of intrigue and power, partly
to shield himself in case of disaster, he gave James advice
unfailingly bad and ultimately ruinous. It was he who
insisted on Father Petre, a Jesuit, being taken secretly
into the Council. He foisted this additional member on
to the governing committee to shield himself, so that any
outbreak of popular anger could be deflected on to this
priest. So James in his exile sadly admits. But how blind
to allow himself to be bamboozled! Sunderland supported
the most extreme, the most unwise of measures: he ulti-
mately professed himself a convert of doubtful sincerity.
He probably thought that James would succeed in his
policy of toleration, and he wanted to fill his pockets as
Minister; but he hedged by keeping in secret touch with
James's enemies, the exiles in Holland j he and his wife
regularly betrayed James to William, and his judgment
in domestic affairs was wild. It is a signal example of
James's lack of perception that he increasingly relied on
such a man.
So far we have seen James in a sort of preliminary
action against the strong forces which he proposed to
meet and to overcome. He had proposed to himself to
accomplish what Charles had not achieved, but had at any
rate kept successfully in the balance. He proposed to
do what seemed possible through Charles's final (ap-
parent) victory over the aristocratic opposition of great
Merchant and Territorial Magnates. But Charles as I
have said had won his battle, not his campaign. He was
like a commander besieged who, after heavy battery of
his defences, has compelled the foe to retire for a while
and refit. But the long bombardment has left his defences
half ruined, and a return of the enemy may easily over-
throw them.
202
THE ORDEAL
In such a situation James, when the struggle grew
general and warm, should have used every element of
concession, of division, of delay. We are about to see him
do the opposite; to make a frontal attack upon far superior
forces and to find himself enveloped and undone. He is
to be discovered in this last and conclusive phase of his
ordeal incapable of manoeuvre.
We have completed the first two years of the reign.
Rochester had been dismissed at the very end of 1686.
By the turn of the year, in early 1687, James was defi-
nitely opposed by a growing National feeling. It was
the moment to draw back and temporize: he went for-
ward: and all his acts, even those many of which in them-
selves were just and suited to a full tolerance, fell on a
public opinion inflamed by his excess.
Thus it was consistent and just that he should allow
Catholics to worship in public but the Mass 'flaunted'
was intolerable to the large minority of fanatics and
irritating even to the general Protestant majority of
London. If Catholicism was to be tolerated it was just that
the Religious Orders should have their houses in London,
their schools, their chapels; but, at such a moment, it was
a violent provocation to sustain them with a special favour.
The King's attempt to impose a President of his own
choosing (not a Catholic) on Magdalen College in Ox-
f ord led to another failure after a prolonged and undigni-
fied quarrel, and its effect was worsened by filling the
College with outsiders many of them Catholics. Later,
on the President's death, a Catholic Head was appointed
and something like one Catholic College in the Uni-
versity there created.
He was well within his rights when he burnt a libel by
one Claude (a French refugee) on Louis ^ XIV; but he
did it at a moment when the false idea of his subservience
203
JAMES THE SECOND
to France 1 (the one thing he was trying to avoid!) was
widely received and when Louis himself was adverse to
the prosecution. He had raised a regular force of more
than 13,000, less than 16,000 men more than a third
but less than a half the largest of his brother's armies in
the past quartered in a camp on Hounslow Heath. In
this he acted as any Government must act if it is to exist
in face of potential rebellion 5 but he had a greater object,
which was to provide England with a standing force in a
Europe where large armies were now normal. It made him
independent of France. 2 It was admirably drilled, as might
be expected of so industrious an organizer, but he exag-
gerated its parades and his visits to it. He also favoured
a public Mass in Lord Castlemaine's tent; and he most
severely punished a Minister of the Church of England,
one Johnson (formerly a Chaplain of the Russells) for
circulating a tract inciting the army to mutiny.
In all this, logic was not offended. Policy was. If you
are to have toleration certain privileges are the logical
result of it. But they should be allowed to grow rather
than be suddenly thrust upon an inflamed opposition.
Incitement to mutiny must be punished. But there, again,
is policy in degree. James acted as though the positions
and strength of his opponents were indifferent to him.
To a strategist they are everything. He acted without
'feeling* his enemy: without discovering where resistance
would be solid, where shaken. In other words, his tactics
were null.
All the forces against him had thus been given their
opportunity when he proceeded to the main act of his
1 He had consistently followed his original protests against the use of
subsidy from France. He had claimed a sum due on his accession, but
refused to his ruin all further aids in money or men.
2 James's own words were : Vassal! Vassal to France? Had my Parlia-
ment allowed it I would have made this realm more powerful than in the
days of the kings my fathers!'
204
THE ORDEAL
reign, excellent and just and he proceeded to it just at
that critical date when it was certain to arouse the maxi-
mum of resistance.
On April the 4th, 1687, James II published his famous
Proclamation establishing the equality of all before the
law irrespective of creed. This, the most serious of those
many Stuart efforts at Toleration, was the last: 'The
Declaration of Indulgence*.
By this order, modelled on a parallel already estab-
lished in Scotland, 1 all offices were thrown open to Dis-
senter and Catholic alike, all persecution of opinion under
the old Criminal Statutes was forbidden.
The active Dissenters a minority of the Protestants
were delighted and hastened to express their gratitude.
But the stumbling-block was the proposed freedom of the
old Religion. Such a proposal raised a monstrous image.
Popular imagination will construct any monster in mo-
ments of exasperation, and the wild idea took root of a
plot to compel by force a change in. the new Religion
of the English. We can afford to smile at the folly, but
its effect was very real and in many textbooks still en-
dures. It was believed that, in some magic way, a now
Protestant country was to be compelled immediately
by force to Catholicism and henceforward every attempt
to confirm the policy of Toleration took on the simple
aspect of Tyranny. To this James's own fatal confusion
between his person and his office contributed at every
step: his surroundings were Catholic, his public actions,
his Council, in the midst of an alien air.
An Order in Council, a Proclamation, had been for
centuries a legitimate instrument of government. But
however prolonged, it remained provisional. To be perma-
1 But In Scotland, where the extremists had committed murder, levied
war, and openly preached the death of the King, their gatherings in the
open were forbidden.
205
JAMES THE SECOND
nent it must be confirmed in a Statute j that is, an act of
the King in Parliament assembled.
James had said as much in his Declaration and pro-
ceeded to the summoning of a Parliament which should
make law what was certainly a righteous and (as he
thought) an acceptable piece of justice. He argued that
the safeguards were ample: that only Protestants could
sit in the House of Commons 3 that even from the Lords
the Catholics had been excluded: that a Catholic minority
in the realm could never be a menace to the overwhelming
majority 5 that their freedom was of right and was common
sense. He sent round to see whether the gentry in a new
House of Commons would agree to social peace. He was
disappointed. His inquiries discovered 1 that while most
of the independent borough votes would accept religious
freedom for they were strongholds of dissent yet the
Squires small and great were by at least two-thirds op-
posed. They knew they could now once more raise the
cry of a Papist peril. And this class was much more than
the country representatives. They dominated half the bor-
oughs, so many of which were but villages or less. Half
the peers who, as Lords-Lieutenant of Counties, had been
asked to give a list of Catholics and Dissenters fit to
represent the Shires, resigned. It was clear that no new
House of Commons would make Toleration law.
Things were at a deadlock. Without the gentry no law
could be passed. Without a fixed law Toleration could not
be permanent.
At this point, in the summer of 1687, we come on
the first important forgery in favour of William. It was
presented by the Dutch Ambassador, Van Citters, and
called 'The Remonstrance'. It pretended to be a solemn
1 I append in a note at the end of this book an analysis of this inquiry
partly preserved in the Bodleian and privately published. I owe it to
the kindness of Mr. Douglas Woodruff.
2O6
THE ORDEAL
declaration of the Council offering the Crown to Louis
XIV as successor to James. Clumsy nonsense but the
impudence of the thing is significant.
What James, in his sanguine mis judgment, had thought
a self-evident piece of justice, which all would approve,
the territorial aristocracy used to the destruction of his
House. Active, though secret, intrigue by them had begun
to bring in his son-in-law and nephew, the Prince of
Orange. Yet the feeling for the Throne and the reigning
house was as much a part of the main English feeling
as distinguished from the wealthy directing class as was
Protestantism. And if it be asked why in such an atmos-
phere of disaffection, James could still carry on, the
answer is this: The succession to the Crown was clearly
Protestant. James was elderly. He had reached the age
at which his brother had died. Of his two daughters, Mary,
the elder, was married to William of Orange, the Prot-
estant champion. When her turn came all would be well.
She was childless j but her sister Anne, married to the
Prince of Denmark, was not barren nor her husband
vicious. She was, in spite of efforts to convert her, as
Protestant as Mary. The future seemed secure^to a Prot-
estant succession} for James had no son by his Catholic
wife whom most believed to be incapable of bearing
children, especially since a recent illness. The discontented
could afford to wait. So things stood, when, in December,
1687, it was rumoured, then confirmed, that the Queen
was with child.
All things changed. The child that was to be born
might be a boy, and if he were, the immediate succession
of Mary, with William of Orange at her side, would be
certainly long deferred and most probably debarred alto-
gether. Had James understood government, he would
have been warned, as the Cedls had been during their
long reign from 1559 to 1612, as Oliver had been during
207
JAMES THE SECOND
his brief one, as even Charles had imperfectly been, by an
organization of secret service: in plain English, Spies.
Had he conceived what the wickedness of men could be,
he would at least have been prepared for the intrigues
now woven all around him. But he was wholly simple in
intention as in vision, and it was his downfall.
A campaign of falsehood began at once, malign and
utterly unscrupulous. The Queen's pregnancy was denied
in pamphlet and story 5 the people were filled with an
absurd lie that the whole thing was a plot to prepare in
due time for the substitution of some other man's son as
the King's. It is good proof of the impotence into which
the ancient Monarchy of England had fallen that such
demonstrable lies could not be checked or their authors
punished.
From that moment onward bursts and blooms such a
foison of forgery, treachery and falsehood as perhaps
no country had ever seen before and as certainly England
had never known with the King as the bewildered vic-
tim of these lies and false documents. Its atmosphere
seems to have poisoned posterity itself, so that those who
have written on this brief turmoil have lied upon it with
a grand assurance astonishing even in academic historians.
They are still at it.
James was not even aware of how sharp a change the
expectation of an heir to the exclusion of Mary and Wil-
liam had made. It is incredible, but it is true. He chose
the moment when the peril was rising highest to fall into
the chief trap kid for him.
The great Edict of Toleration had been out a year. It
was wise and just, and grossly inopportune. It was at this
juncture doubly so.
He republished it on the 25th April, 1688, with an
admirable preamble in defence of civic appeasement and
religious liberty for all 5 telling the people what they.
208
THE ORDEAL
might make of a united England, and adding that it would
certainly be confirmed and made law by Parliament when
it should meet in the autumn. But ten days later he took
one step further which opened his guard, and at once the
enemy took advantage.
On Friday, the 4th of May, he and the Council issued
an order to the Bishops that the arguments and Edict
for Toleration should be read from the pulpit of every
church in London upon the next Sunday fortnight (Sun-
day, the 2Oth), and at every country church on the fol-
lowing Sunday, the 2yth, and the two following.
James's object was both plain and sincere. It was but
the thorough publication of the Document to all, a thing
only to be effected in those days by reading in all the
churches: but this effect was a direct challenge to the
Clergy of the Church of England as individuals. For most
of them rejected the whole idea of Toleration, thinking
Unity in Religion the chief guarantee of society, and a
large minority of that clergy (in London certainly a
majority) hated the idea of freedom for Catholics as
strongly as they hated Catholicism itself. The two ideas
were identical in their minds.
Thg political opportunity this blunder afforded was
immediately seized, and used with great skill. What fol-
lowed was a plot against James which can best be called
Compton's Plot. For, in the lack of documents (when all
was done secretly by words alone), we have the moral
certitude that in the small gathering about to be described
and its action, only Compton, Bishop of London, can
have been the active agent and the good old Archbishop
no more than a puppet.
The order to read the Edict from the pulpit was, we
have seen, given on May the 4th. Nine days were allowed
to pass without protest, as though obedience was to follow
as a matter of course. On the evening of Sunday, May the
209
JAMES THE SECOND
1 3th, after a dinner at Lambeth Palace (when the un-
initiated had departed), the energetic aristocrat Compton,
Bishop of London and James's personal enemy, was
secretly closeted with old Sancrof t, the Primate, Turner
of Ely, and White of Peterborough. They drew up a
secret resolution against obeying the order. Not a word of
this was allowed to reach the King.
Next, seven others judged favourable were summoned
to join them} only four came: St. Asaph, Bath and Wells,
Chichester, and Bristol. Some Bishops, we know, favoured
Toleration and were therefore not consulted. The seven
agreed to, and signed a Memorial, nominally drawn up
by Bancroft, as head of the Church, asking to be excused
on the political (and false) ground that the dispensing
power was illegal. The thing was carefully kept back till
the last in order to deceive James with a false security.
He took it for granted, after so long a silence without
protest, that he was to be obeyed. They did not present
it to the King till late on Friday night, May the i8th,
as an ultimatum, calculating that it would then be too
late for the King to compromise as the order was for
the following Sunday morning and that James would
have to refuse point-blank, or capitulate. In point of fact,
kte as was the hour, the King had, for once, the wisdom
to negotiate. He bade them return next day, Saturday,
when he would have considered his answer. But the snare
devised for him was more cunningly laid than he knew.
The Bishops Memorial had been secretly set up in type
and printed in very large numbers, and was ready organ-
ized for delivery everywhere.
By way of forcing his hand the confidential document
on which he was deliberating was, to his amazement and
disgust, published broadcast throughout London early on
the Saturday before the time arranged for his private
conference with the Bishops. On that day, which he had
210
THE ORDEAL
probably designed for a reconciliation, was he thus check-
mated. Therefore did the Saturday pass without negotia-
tion, while every clergyman in London and thousands of
the laity had read what the King had been led to believe
was a private memorandum! The Declaration of Indul-
gence was read in very few London churches the next
morning!
The Council, thus caught suddenly in the noose, were
divided as to what should be done. Sunderland, and even
Petre, thought it wiser to accept the successful ruse and
insult rather than to provoke a conflict. Other Bishops
meanwhile signed the original Memorial now that it
seemed accepted. The original seven signatories were sum-
moned to appear before the Council on Friday, the 8th
of June. On the day before, the 7th, it was urged by the
venerable Bancroft that, to avoid embittering the quarrel,
they should not suffer imprisonment awaiting trial but
should give their own recognizances for coming up for
trial. The others agreed, Compton presumably with re-
luctance. But when they came before the Council, where
they were received with dignity, even Bancroft^ (who
had been got at in the meanwhile by the ^ politicians
manoeuvring in the background against the King) broke
his word and all refused recognizances. There was thus no
choice, since they refused to be at liberty, but to make
martyrs of them by keeping them in custody till^ their
offence was tried. That was the second move, and it was
a most effective one. Their confinement was of almost
honourable sort j they were given complete freedom in the
Tower, and that very evening met at Evensong; but
Compton had had the satisfaction of seeing a vast popular
gathering acclaiming these fathers in God on the way to
the horrid dungeons of a Tyrant.
Such was the second step in the successful manoeuvre
against poor bewildered James. Thousands, I say, had read
211
JAMES THE SECOND
the protest, published prematurely to force James's hand.
Tens of thousands had watched from the river banks the
Via Dolorosa of the Martyrs from Westminster to the
Tower.
By this time half London was at fever height and the
Bishops were its heroes. No one troubled about the exact
point at issue: the broad division was between Toleration
of the Catholics and their suppression j and the seven
Bishops stood as a symbol for their suppression. That was
enough.
All this was on Friday, the 8th of June. On Sunday,
June the loth, the royal child was born, and it was a son.
William of Orange had been informed that the Queen's
child ^would be born in July. Such had been the Queen's
own judgment, and it was reiterated by all those in her
confidence. From the moment a child was expected he
had determined to await the issue and, if it were a son,
to try his fortunes at war. His plans were thrown into
complete disorder by the antedating of the birth a full
month. He sent his Dutchman Zuyleistein to James to
convey his most emphatic congratulations on the birth of
an heir and began his new preparations to supplant that
child. I have said that perhaps no group of men in history
were so steeped in falsehood as the conspirators against
James II, and William in this, as in other vices, was easily
the master of them all.
^Zuyleistein, after he had left William's false message
with James on June the 23rd, made visits to the greater
gentry who had^ determined on destroying the Monarchy.
These had met in every sort of secret gathering here and
there since the Prince of Wales's birth. On June the 3Oth,
just a week after Zuyleistein's leaving the Court, he met
seven of the boldest probably at his instigation but with
Compton an ardent second they signed a cipher letter
212
THE ORDEAL
to William inviting him to come over. The thing was
done at the house of Shrewsbury 5 there, with their host,
and Compton, Danby and Devonshire, the renegade Turn-
ley, Sydney (in whose handwriting the document was
drawn up) and Admiral Herbert set their names.
The letter was based on the undoubted truth that
James was generally unpopular and distrusted personally
as an opponent of Protestantism, and, as King, the deter-
mined author of Toleration. It absurdly exaggerated the
numbers who would join the foreign invasion, and con-
tradicted itself by warning the Dutch leader to do all in
great secrecy and to bring over an ample force lest the
English Monarch should secure himself by victory for
they knew how the mass of Englishmen were torn be-
tween their objections to the Catholic Church and their
love of the National reigning house.
But where the conspirators could speak with authority
(and were indeed right) was in their affirmation that, at
the first proof of the invader's strength, the gentry of
which they were examples would desert what was left of
the Monarchy. Herbert took the letters over to Holland,
and then joined that foreign Government at a substantial
salary as naval commander over the Dutch sailors who
were to effect the invasion of England.
Meanwhile the pitch to which the Anti-Catholic feel-
ing had risen in London was shown by the popular out-
burst over the Trial of the Seven Bishops. James had been
forced, by the intentional delay in the private protest,
by its wide, instant and organized publication behind his
back, into a position where his wealthy opponents, now so
much stronger than the Monarchy, held all the trumps.
Either he must accept the rebellion of the plotters and
thus admit the new revolutionary doctrine against the
Crown, or he must bring them to trial. Once brought to
trial either acquittal or condemnation was fatal to him,
213
JAMES THE SECOND
the former through popular rejoicing that the enemies of
Toleration had won, the latter through popular anger
against their failure. The trial began on June the 29th
and occupied two days, ending on the 3<Dth. It was made
to turn on the dispensing power of the Crown. The Judges
were divided. The Jury acquitted} and a vast popular
demonstration, spreading to the Army, acclaimed the ver-
dict. The Plot had thoroughly succeeded.
What we have now to follow is the series of treasons
which ended with the Dutch invasion and the capture of
the Palace by foreign troops.
William of Orange had prepared to interfere at the
birth of the child if it should prove a son, which, as we
have seen, he expected in July. We have seen also how
his plans were confused by the birth of the Prince of
Wales taking place a month earlier, on June the loth.
The letter inviting him to invade in due season, written by
the plotters under their ringleader Compton, the Bishop
of London, was before him within a week of its writing/
To bring his foreign army into England, William had
now to consider the situation on the Continent and to
manoeuvre for success in spite of various (and mutually
conflicting) obstacles. He had already formed two years
before, in 1686, the League of Augsburg against the
great power of Louis XIV of France. It was not a Prot-
estant Alliance 5 it was an Anti-French alliance, originally
including the Catholic King of Spain and the Catholic
Emperor and including Venice and the Pope, Innocent
XI, who feared the Gallicanism of Louis and who cor-
dially supported William.
William did not chiefly now June 1688 desire to
reduce Louis' power, much as he desired that end. He
chiefly desired to usurp the Throne of England where he
could further attack that power. His legitimate reversion
to that throne, at least as consort to his wife, was now lost
214
THE ORDEAL
through the birth of a prince. He had to deceive (i) His
Catholic Allies against Louis, (2) The people of England,
most of whom, though divided on James's policy of
religious toleration, loathed the idea of a Dutch mon-
arch. He had also to get the Dutch Government (of which
he was not master though its most important subject)
to lend him ships, men and money for the enterprise.
Now the Dutch were chiefly concerned with preventing an
attack on their territory by Louis XIV. They put 20,000
men on their borders and would certainly divert nobody
for William's invasion so long as Louis' great force stood
ready to move either against them or against the Rhine:
no one knew which direction it would take though the
Dutch were nominally at peace, so far, with the French.
All that summer, July and August, Louis kept warn-
ing James of William's duplicity and intended invasion,
and he offered the support of the French Fleet. James
did not believe him, and his pride was hurt at what he
thought patronage. For James's great idea was by tolera-
tion at home and a strong fleet, avoiding all entanglements
with France, to make England as strong and independent
as possible.
William told his Catholic allies the falsehood that he
had no intention of dethroning the Catholic King of
England. His agents repeated that falsehood to their
English agents. But so long as Louis' movements were
uncertain, William could be lent neither money, ships
nor men: he was hung up.
On September the ist Louis declared to the Dutch
that if a move were made against James, the Dutch must
expect attack from himself. The declaration checkmated
William and nearly saved James. But James repudiated
the proffered aid. It made the Crown of England seem
dependent} it made him look, in the eyes of his Protestant
subjects, the hanger-on of a Catholic Power, and he would
215 '
JAMES THE SECOND
have none of it. He publicly repudiated Louis' friendship,
said he could trust to the solemn promises of the Dutch
Government. He recalled his Ambassador in Paris (Skel-
ton) to mark his disapproval of so anti-national a policy
as that diplomat had advised. James's decision to stand
alone was patriotic, sincere and proud but against such
forces as were then massed against him it was fatal. It
was the act of a truthful and open man incapable of fol-
lowing a conspiracy, and it was the end of his chances.
Louis gave him up as hopeless, promised the Dutch
that he would not attack them and turned his great armies
off towards the Rhine.
That was September the 24th, and from that moment
James was lost. The Dutch Government, the pressure on
their frontiers thus removed, consented to William's
secret scheme.
Meanwhile yet another forgery appeared. It was fab-
ricated in Holland by Burnet, made Bishop of Salisbury
later by William. It was a document purporting to come
from England and to disprove the legitimacy of the Prince
of Wales. William had an enormous edition of it printed:
80,000 copies (corresponding to a million to-day).
James woke up, too late, to his danger. And thereupon
performed the last acts of a man quite separate from his
world: a man who saw things through the wrong end of
a telescope.
If there was one thing he ought to have done in this
crisis it was to stiffen. Now was the time for that immov-
able resolution which he had shown out of season for so
long.
He was doomed. But to maintain his principles to the
last, to go down fighting, would have given him back in
all men's eyes the prestige his chivalry had cost him. He
would still have lost the battle, for the gentry, the sup-
ports of society, were abandoning him 5 but he would have
216
THE ORDEAL
left a great name and might (who knows?) have re-
turned. But his ignorance of men left him bewildered.
He lost his head. He took the very opposite of the course
that would have been the moral salvation of his legend.
He prepared to compromise with the great conspiracy
against him.
He did not go so far as to forbid religious freedom or,
as the Bishops amazingly suggested (to such a man!),
abandon the Faith. But he reversed his former action at
the Universities, he restored the old town franchises
the old corrupt corporations with their dependence on
wealth. He offered the Dutch a formal alliance. He was
still in part deceived. The peers who were most deeply
intriguing with William swore the most vividly to their
loyalty: the Bishops three of whom were now strictly
bound to William prayed publicly and loudly for James.
On October the I4th William renewed his affirmations
to his Catholic allies against Louis that he had no inten-
tion of dethroning his father-in-law. Nothing was farther
from his thoughts! On the contrary, he would, on reach-
ing England, do all he could for the freedom of the
Catholics. The Dutch Government solemnly confirmed
the falsehood, and on October the I9th William sailed.
A gale blew him back and held the great Dutch fleet
and the Dutch and mercenary troops in the transports
wind-bound for a fortnight. On November the ist the
wind went easterly and he sailed again. Making north-
ward, as though for Yorkshire, he went round in the
night, passed the Straits of Dover on the 2nd (the British
Fleet at the mouth of the Thames could not beat up
against the strong breeze to attack), and, after passing
the Start in a mist, turned, and on November the 5th
landed at Torbay with his 16,000 men and moved inland.
He was ill received. The populace saw the strange host
go through, German, Swiss, Huguenot mercenaries of
217
JAMES THE SECOND
every kind, solemn Dutch Guards a large and powerful
corps, the six British regiments in Dutch pay, and
officering more than half the force the French Hugue-
not gentry as cadres. They received the vile pamphlets
which Bishop Burnet had drawn up denying the royal
parentage of the Prince of Wales they heard the pro-
testations and read the banners proclaiming 'Religion
and Liberty'} but, much as most in Devon might mislike
Catholicism, they hated invading foreigners more, and
they stood aside. William, sullen, disappointed and
alarmed, proposed to abandon the attempt within the first
week. What saved him was Churchill's treason. On the
eve of William's landing the plotters in London still
carried on their deceit. The Bishops especially lied boldly,
still vowing and protesting their deep loyalty to the King.
Sanscroft assured him no Bishop had arranged with
William! r-per haps he was deceived. But Compton sur-
passed himself. He affirmed that he was as innocent as his
colleagues! Thus James, duped, as ever, still hoped.
The King had a larger army than William. It was
very well trained, and, though irritated by the presence
of a few Irish units and though (many of them) sharing
the popular disgust with the King's religion, loyal to
the national dynasty and to the King's person as was
the great mass of the common people. But, more powerful
than the people and far more powerful than the poor
remnant of monarchy, was the wealthy class now in full
political power. From these, of necessity, the officers were
chosen, and that class, those officers, were determined to
rule and to destroy the King.
Churchill, with the rank of Lieutenant-General, was
the chief traitor.
On November the i6th he swore a special and peculiar
loyalty to James and went off to organize the betrayal.
He sent to Salisbury, as though to oppose the Dutch,
218
THE ORDEAL
three regiments of cavalry whose commanders were in the
plot. They deserted and tried to bring over the rank and
file, who to their honour, in a great majority, refused:
less than 200 followed their leaders into William's camp.
on London, Churchill pressed him hard to remain; find-
ing him determined, Churchill went over to the enemy
on November the 23rd. It is some slight relief in the
almost uniform baseness of William's character that on
such an enormity he expressed a measure of disgust.
With Churchill's desertion it was clear that the gentry
as a whole were lost to James: they began to desert en
masse, and with them the framework of the army was
broken up.
Indeed, the remarkable feature in this revolution of an
Aristocracy against a King is the purely aristocratic quality
of it in the army. The gentry betrayed, the rank and
file in the main stood loyal. It is what one knows to be the
truth with regard to the nation as a whole, but it is impor-
tant to emphasize it in the case of the military forces.
That army is spoken of vaguely by historians under the
title of 'disaffected,' even as being what, let us hope, no
army ever was, 'constitutional.' In point of fact, the mass
of the men were, as one might have expected, with their
king. The contemporary account is clear enough: and it is
difficult to say which was most surprising the desertion
of the officers from their prince, or the ineffective loyalty
of the poor private soldiers at a few pence a day, dissolv-
ing into a dust without cadres.
It was on November the 2ist that the King decided
thus to fall back. The army was bidden to take up its
place at Reading, Windsor, and the villages round about.
219
JAMES THE SECOND
The royal party halted for that night at Andover. James
had with him that stupid glutton, his son-in-law, Anne's
husband, Prince George of Denmark, whose perpetual
bleat, *Est-il possible?' has given him his nickname in
history for as each new desertion came in, that was his
comment. He waited till his father-in-law had gone to
bed, .and then stole off to the first Dutch outposts (the
situation of which he already had in his pocket). He
left behind him one of those letters which all he and his
kind had been instructed to leave, full of a pretended
sorrowful devotion, torn between love and duty its terms
dictated by we know not certainly whom, but most prob-
ably by Churchill through ChurchilPs wife, Acme's
masterful mistress.
James made no great case of the fellow's treachery.
He simply gave him his nickname, and said that apart
from the foulness of the affair, the loss to the army was
less than that of a single trooper. And he was quite right.
The action of his wife, Anne, was a more serious
matter. It is a good example of the way in which the rich
men who were working this revolution had organized
its every detail, that though her husband, the Prince of
Denmark, had not abandoned the cause (in which he had
been called 'the foremost volunteer 5 ) twenty-four hours,
yet she, nearly seventy miles away, was acquainted with
it the very next day. She got the news post-haste. Who
brought it? In the day and night between the 26th and
27th she and her master-mistress, ChurchilPs wife, got
away by the back stairs to the street door of the Cockpit.
The man who was conducting the whole nasty business
was still that same Compton, Bishop of London the
greatest by birth on the Bench of Bishops who had per-
sistently, regularly, and industriously betrayed his master
it was to James that he owed his position. He had a
coach and six waiting for the Princess, and himself,
220
THE ORDEAL
mounted, with sword and pistols, conducted the armed
guard which he had gathered together as escort: he took
Anne away from her father's palace, to the North, by the
Nottingham road.
Anne also had to leave a letter behind. For it was part
of the organization. And she also had to tell the lie which
had been appointed to her particular role. She pretended
that she also was sadly torn between two affections and
had but gone away under the impossibility of determining
her duty on hearing of her husband's departure to her
'unexpected.' She hoped she looked forward to a
reconciliation.
The King himself arrived at Whitehall that morning,
while everything was in a turmoil of discovery, and it is
both comic to remember, and illuminating upon the
hysteria of the time, that Anne's old nurse, finding her
mistress's bed unslept in, roared through the corridors
that the Papists had murdered the Princess.
James had always loved this particular child more than
the rest} more than those little ones whom he had lost,
and more than her peevish, weak but offensive elder
sister. There had been something more buoyant and gay
about the stupid Anne than about the other, though
Heaven knows that neither was a daughter for a man
to be proud of. All the memories of the years in which she
had been his little child and in which he had been so
devoted to her struck him at once at this moment, and it
has been said by those who were witnesses that he seemed
at the moment so distraught in his manner, that it looked
as though the sudden, the unexpected thing had deranged
him. What he said through his tears was simple 'enough:
Kjod help me! My own children have forsaken me!'
It would be worth a reasonable historian's while, en-
gaged upon understanding the past, to ask himself why
this woman acted in this fashion. What were the in-
221
JAMES THE SECOND
gradients of the vileness? Had she been her sister Mary,
there would be nothing to explain. But Anne was not her
sister Mary. And there is the very powerful testimony
in her favour of Swift, one of the very few men in that
generation who told the truth. Swift, writing in a private
paper for no eye but his own, said of Anne, when she was
Queen, that she was 'the only good woman he had ever
met in his life.* That she had, like her sister, in youth been
troubled by vices, is well known; something of the taint
followed her through her lifej but that has nothing to do
with this particular black action.
When I think of her character as a whole, her amia-
bility, her passivity, her stupidity, I can put it down to
nothing more than a yielding like a jelly to the strongest
push, and particularly to the masterful Sarah. All her
world was moving for treason, it would have wanted a
little touch of heroism in Anne to have remained; and
heroism she certainly had not. She was conducted away,
by the most intelligent and most unscrupulous of the con-
spirators, the Bishop of London; and hanging to her
arm, dragging her forth, as it were, was the wife of the
most unscrupulous and the most treacherous of the officers,
John Churchill. Between them both, she left that hypo-
critical letter behind, and went her way. But how hypo-
critical it was we may judge by that phrase, 'unexpected
departure,' applied to her husband. Remember, that phrase
was written in a letter left for her father on Sunday,
November the 26th. Just over a week before, on Saturday,
the 1 8th, she had written herself to William of Orange
that he 'had her wishes for his good success in his just
undertaking; that she hoped her husband would soon be
with him.' She added that he (George of Denmark) had
gone the day before, the I7th, with the King towards
Salisbury, 'but intends to go pom thence to you as soon as
his friends think proper.'
222
THE ORDEAL
What was James in this moment of despair? What
should we have seen if we had met this man, now 55 years
old, in his fall?
There remained to him something of the vigour which
had inspired fine episodes in arms by sea and land: the
man who had been thought as a youth, under the great
Turenne, the bravest of the brave j the lad who had
challenged all he met} the young sailor who had shown
such superb courage in the battles of the North Sea. He
still retained determination; but something physical in
him was weakened. He had aged.
Any man finding himself, unprepared, jostled against
one appalling situation after another, is physically struck}
especially if he be elderly.
James's judgment is to be blamed without limit for
not having appreciated against what forces he was pitted,
and it was this lack of judgment which had brought
him to such a depth of disappointment. But even so,
he might have met them with some of the rapidity of
new resolutions, grasping the change in the situation even
though that change should be developing before^him so
rapidly had he not been under p&ysical disability. It
betrayed itself in some hesitation of speech} he stam-
mered a little. He had very heavy bleedings at the nose,
which would not be stanched; and it was already noted
that in conversation he would sometimes remain in a
sort of lethargy.
In such a state of body, active through the persistence
of his will, dull through the recent ageing of his senses
and substance, you have two men, as it were, struggling
one against the other: the younger man surviving by mem-
ory, by the persistent strength of his right, by an unalter-
able standard of honour which he maintained till his last
breath, and by a powerful conviction of religious truth
in the face of men who had no care for the things of the
223
JAMES THE SECOND
soul, or who were fanatics contemptibly inferior to him.
In all these things James was a figure worthy of the
occasion.
But with all these things he would none the less have
failed. He would have failed perhaps after a fashion
more consistent, or at the lowest, more dramatic, had he
not now suffered the fatigue of body, the lessening of
physical activities, the beginnings of the weakness of age
which yet took twelve years to kill his spare, tall and
nervous frame.
* * * * *
It was the Monday, December the 17th, and evening.
Those in the houses on the extreme west of London, new
built (where are now Albermarle and Dover Streets),
heard through the raw and foggy air a regular tramp of
armed men coming up Piccadilly Lane from the west.
Under the rare lights their blue uniforms could be dis-
cerned; the loud noise of their drums reverberated from
the brick walls, and they bore their colours before them.
The lighted matches (for they were ready to fire, and
shoot down the Englishmen who were still defending
their king) glowed through the murk in little points of
red.
The Hollanders put out a detachment down the hill
to hold St James's Palace, the Dutch words of command
ringing through the December night; then the mass of
them marched on towards Whitehall. They fell from
column into line in front of those fine windows, standing
on the earth that had drunk Charles's blood, and at the
gate where the British Guards still stood they shouted
their summons.
The British Guards were commanded by Lord Craven,
a man now 80 years old, long a soldier. He refused the
summons: and his command in their turn fell into line,
drawn up with loaded arms to meet the invaders.
224
THE ORDEAL
It would have been a fine incident in the history of this
country if the English Guards had been permitted to lay
down their lives, as they were willing to do, for their
king, and to have fallen under the fire of that superior
force of foreign invaders. It would have been a symbolic
action only, but it would have been something stamping
history honourably for posterity to remember. Yet James
must not be blamed for his refusal to shed blood. He
had fought so often, and was so accustomed to the affair
of arms, that he could not think of these things as a mere
king, still less^with an idea of the future. To resist under
hopeless conditions he thought not military: and he was
perfectly right.
He gave the order to withdraw. And the Guards, their
lips full of oaths against their shame, retired. The Dutch
sentries were placed at the very doors of the Palace, and
beneath its windows; the uncouth Dutch syllables, at the
changes, went up through the foggy air. James was a
prisoner within.
The enemy had calculated that to wake the King from
his sleep would add to his disarray. It was after the turn
of the night, between twelve and one o'clock, and nearer
twelve than' one, that the messengers from William of
Orange (including Halifax, who had been compelled to
this ignominy in just retribution for his dirty work) de-
manded to see the King. James was asleep. Lord Middle-
ton woke him, and Halifax announced in as brutal a
fashion as he could avenging by his rudeness the in-
dignity thrust upon him by William his master that
James must leave London before ten o'clock next morn-
ing, and go off to Ham, as the Prince and his foreigners
would be in Westminster by noon.
James refused Ham, as ill suited to that season, and
said that he would move to Rochester; but (and this is
particularly to be noticed) Halifax had orders to insist
225
JAMES THE SECOND
that he should go by water, lest his passage through the
town should excite once more the loyalty of the populace
for their king.
Somewhat before noon next day the tide served.
Whether William had been told this and so advised in
fixing the hour of his arrival, we do not know. It is
probable. It was at eleven that James said good-bye to the
Ambassadors and such of the peers as were faithful to
him, and went on to his barge. The rain was falling piti-
lessly, and it was very cold. All about the barge were
twelve boats filled with Dutchmen who were his escort
and his goalers. A great mass of his subjects, miserable
at the sight, watched through the misty rain the craft drop
down the tide. Not many hours before they had acclaimed
with enthusiasm his return to the City. And such men
under arms as James still had, Englishmen, not Dutch,
murmured. Clarendon, who would not exaggerate on that
side, tells us how 'it was not to be imagined what a damp
there was on all sorts of men.'
So the last king left England.
An hour later William was in St. James's with six
thousand of his best troops, Dutch, French, German, and
the rest, and another thousand in the Tower. And that
same night Anne, his sister-in-law, with her master-
mistress, Lady Churchill, at her side, went off to the play
in a splendid carriage. It was her father's.
VIII
DERRY AND THE BOYNE
TAMES was in St. Germans. A year and more had passed
since his landing from a small ill-found boat off a
JJ stormy sea in the cold and furious gusts of rain on
that Christmas evening in Ambleteuse. His wife and the
child had safely preceded him, though in the same
miseries, under the guardianship of Lauzun.
Louis had received the King, in this his second exile,
very nobly. He had met him with all the Court in splen-
dour from Versailles. He had lodged him royally in the
Palace of St. Germans where it stood on Le Notre's
high terrace looking over the miles of wood below, to
Paris and St. Denis, a dim broken line of roofs and spires
upon the eastern horizon. There until the strain of the
wars led to embarrassment they received from Louis'
strong generosity an income for their dwindled and im-
poverished court. Thence James could proceed, when
the moment should seem arrived, to the re-conquest of his
throne.
Not many weeks after William's usurpation, in March
of the following year, that moment had come. The clique
which had betrayed the English Crown was at issue with
itself, as men who act from avarice and ambition may well
be* If leaders could be found for the English people, the
King of England would return. But his enemy was estab-
lished over the organization of England. The blow should
be delivered in flank 5 and the flank presented was Ireland.
Ireland was still held for James. It appeared at that dis-
tanceto afford an ample recruiting field, and upon
227
JAMES THE SECOND
Ireland was the effort directed. Thither should James
proceed, to that front should William be drawn, leaving
Great Britain uncertainly grasped in his absence. Then,
with a broad sea interrupting his communication, might
he be entangled, delayed and perhaps defeated; while the
populace in England, already murmuring against an alien
and degraded court, might discover the necessary chiefs
and rise for the restoration of the natural line.
The military advice and decision to attack by way of
Ireland proceeded from Vauban. We are about to follow
the actions of James II in a campaign which Vauban coun-
selled and for that purpose we will concentrate upon its
two chief episodes Deny and the Boyne.
Vauban is not the subject of this book he might be
the subject of libraries. That very great man, that very
strong brain (the maker of the defensive for two cen-
turies, the strong middle-class character which imposed
itself upon all that shining court and army of Louis XIV)
determined the Irish expedition.
Was he right?
The event went against his judgment, and when the
event goes against the judgment of soldier or statesman,
he has been proved wrong. Vauban was wrong for the
same reason that Napoleon was wrong in undertaking the
campaign of 1812. He did not understand the local
conditions.
The local conditions in Ireland were such that, short
of an^effort far greater than the French monarch could
spare in that one direction out of so many, the 'expedition
was certain to be defeated. The reason for this was that
there was complete lack of material,
A man receives the report that there are so many stands
of arms, so many guns, such and such a recruiting field.
He presumes that the ammunition for the guns will be
228
DERRY AND THE BOYNE
present, he thinks of the guns in terms of his own army,
he is particularly impressed by the numbers of men avail-
able.
Now in the case of Ireland the numbers were there ;
what is more, the material for recruitment was the finest
in the world. Louis' civilian envoy wrote buoyantly at the
beginning of the compaign in admiration of the young
men coming in to serve tall, eager, serviceable; and the
numbers were large. There would be no difficulty in
getting twenty, thirty, forty, fifty thousand if one needed
them. The loyalty of that recruitment was undoubted; its
enthusiasm was universal.
A man acquainted with this sort of outline, these rough
elements of the situation, might well misunderstand the
position. The Allies misunderstood the Russian position
in 1914 in much the same fashion. But numbers of avail-
able recruits, their physical powers, their rude health,
their devotion to the cause, are all worthless unless you
can make of them an army. Now to make an army of
them, especially for the particular purposes of this cam-
paign, you needed at least a sufficient material. It was the
material that was lacking.
It was lacking in a degree which astonishes us who read
of it to-day. We find it difficult to understand how under
such conditions any prospect of success could have been
held out. We should be less astonished if we understood
how difficult it was to obtain at short notice, with regard
to a country of which so little was known, and from envoys
who were ill acquainted with the details of military equip-
ment, what a modern well-organized intelligence depart-
ment would demand and God knows that even modern
well-organized intelligence departments learn little
enough!
In the first training of the recruits few had anything
to handle but staves; some tipped with iron, most of
229
JAMES THE SECOND
them of the bare wood. The stands of arms avaikble were
reported at 20,000. That is how they stood on paper. In
reality they were in such a condition that only one in
twenty could be used. The trouble had been going on for a
long time, and the decay was at its worst at that moment.
The paucity of artillery was shocking. In the first march
northward something like 5,000 men on foot and 800
or 900 horse were accompanied by exactly two guns.
Under the walls of Derry, when the siege began, there
were, in a force of some ten thousand men, but three field
pieces, two small mortars, and two cannon firing shots of
not more than twelve pounds weight apiece: these to
attack walls twenty-four foot high and eight or nine foot
thick and defended by thirty pieces of ordnance!
But there is something more. Of the muskets present in
the host, the proportion that could be securely and con-
stantly used, even out of those which had been passed as
serviceable, was insignificant. 'Out of every ten muskets/
says Hamilton (speaking of the infantry in front of the
walls of Derry), 'one might be counted upon to shoot.'
Here, again, is a letter from the French envoy writing
to Louis XI Vs Minister of War and giving a report of the
Colonel of a regiment at the siege. The Colonel says, that
*in all his regiment there are only seven muskets; the
others have little sticks three foot long; a few have pikes,
but without iron upon them.' Then he goes on to say that
there is no organization of hospitals, of medicines or pro-
visions.
What was perhaps even worse than the ridiculous lack
of artillery, was the lack of gunners, or perhaps (for we
cannot decide in the absence of evidence) the bad state of
the pieces themselves. They could not make certain of a
mark. It is particularly noted that at about half-extreme
range the single mortar at work fired almost at random.
'They could never say what house they were going to hit.'
230
DERRY AND THE BOYNE
Here is a typical detail. In the absence of firearms an
attempt was made to rush up over the vile roads, and in
abominable weather, a certain number of sabres for the
cavalry. The sabres arrived, but they were without belts
so that (as the contemporary account goes) c the soldier
had, all the time, to carry his sword drawn in his hand. 3
But even so the sabres were few enough at a time when
cavalry was the decisive arm in the field. One little
anecdote quoted in the MacPherson original papers, is
sufficiently illuminating, not only as to the material con-
dition of the army but as to its discipline. A captain in
O'Neill's regiment happened to die, whereupon twenty-
five of the dragoons immediately deserted taking their
horses with them, and such of the Captain's command as
remained argued that they need no longer serve, since
they had engaged themselves personally to their officer,
and to no one else.
It is to be advanced in their excuse that not only regi-
ments but troops and companies were throughout the
Europe of that day, as a rule levied personally, and that
there was still a strong personal tie between the local
followers and their officer. How much stronger this tie was
in Ireland with its still tribal memories, need not be
emphasized. But the point is that it made cohesion very-
difficult, and the full discipline necessary to a force which
was in reality but a forlorn hope (and therefore needed
a specially strong bond of union) was quite unattainable.
Anyhow, these mutineers were tried by Court Martial,
and condemned to draw lots that one of them might be
shot. But when the unlucky man had drawn his lot, it
was found that there was. not a firearm in the command
which would go off. The officers dared neither borrow
their muskets, nor even perhaps their firing party, from
other troops of their own regiment. They had to beg them
of another unit, Lord Mayoe's. And note that these men
231
JAMES THE SECOND
were dragoons 5 that is, mounted infantry supposed to be
specially detailed for fighting on foot with firearms.
The truth is that the expedition could not conceivably
succeed against the force which an organized English
Government would certainly sooner or later send against
it, and could not even succeed against the small walled
town, Deny, with which it had first to deal.
There was a total of thirty-five thousand men enrolled,
of whom in the infantry, not one-sixth were fully trained
soldiers. There were three regiments of horse, and one
of dragoons, partly armed (say three thousand five hun-
dred), and of artillery, on the first parade when James
reached Dublin, exactly eight small field guns there
were some few other pieces laid by but not yet mounted.
Of course, certain relief came in from France in the course
of the campaign, but nothing like enough. And here it is
essential to understand what part Louis XIV could playj
what extent of aid he could afford. Louis XIV could not
make it his mam object in his wide European policy, nor
even a principal object, that James should succeed. It
could only be with him a quite subsidiary part in a general
plan: the plan of a French king defending, in the turn of
his fortunes, three frontiers against a gathering of ever
more numerous and more powerful enemies. The situa-
tion of his ^ armies, the campaigns as a whole, compared
with the Irish episode, stood as ten to one.
Louis did what he could for the legitimate King of
England: he lent him what aid was in his power. But it
was impossible for that Crown to support the Irish expedi-
tion with any substantial weight of riien, money, or army.
There were twenty other things to be done.
The instrument, then, at the disposal of the Royal
cause in Ireland was lamentably insufficient. It is remark-
able rather what, in such pitiable conditions, was done.
Thus the bridge at Caldy in the advance northward was
232
DERRY AND THE BOYNE
forced against a very much larger body with less than a
thousand men, of whom only one-third were infantry:
yet the rebels broke before them, running all the way to
Deny and leaving 400 killed and wounded behind ; and
generally, before Newton Butler, the forces of the legiti-
mate king had the better in the open field. But what
destroyed the campaign at its outset (the final issue, I say,
was never in doubt) was the attempt to lay siege to Deny.
Derry was the capital point. It was the chief port of the
north (Belfast in those days was not yet a town: the
only Williamite place of consequence besides Derry was
Inniskillen). Derry was the critical port in the North. It
could afford a rallying point to all the disaffected: it was
a gate of entry from the sea for munitions and men. It
must be occupied.
The story of the so-called 'Siege of Derry' is sufficient
to explain all the breakdown of those operations.
The city of Derry stood and its nucleus still stands
upon a striking site. It is a rather narrow oblong hill,
more than 100 feet in height, overlooking the River
Foyle at some four miles distant from its mouth in the
bay or lough of the same name. This hill lies to the west
of the river which is here about three hundred yards
broad. It had (and they are preserved) strong walls
twenty-four feet high and from eight to nine feet thick,
with a good ditch outside: these walls flanked by nine
bastions and two half bastions. There were four gates
to the four points of the compass. At the river-mouth
where the stream considerably narrows four miles, as
I have said, below the town there juts out a point of
land, called Culmore, upon which a fort stood; and here,
for the purpose of what follows, it is important to explain
the role of land batteries against vessels at this time.
It was now more than forty years since Blake had
proved that, with the gun power of the day, the ships of
233
JAMES THE SECOND
war of the seventeenth century could pass in front of, re-
turn the fire of, and escape destruction from, land bat-
teries. Of course, things would depend upon the strength
of armament on either side, on the range, on the condi-
tions of wind and tide. But the point to remember is that a
land battery did not close a passage to men-of-war, save
where the battery was very strong and the passage very
narrow. Land batteries could inflict heavy loss, but they
could hardly hope as a rule to destroy an enemy fleet. The
risk of heavy loss prevented ships approaching them save
under necessity; but when necessity arose ships could in
those days approach them. That, put very generally, was
the balance between the two; and we have to remember it
in the story of what follows.
The town had recently been thoroughly well muni-
tioned and provided. There were eight regiments there,
counting well over seven thousand men; and a certain
body of volunteers were available less than one might
expect from the political and religious enthusiasm of the
place and time, but still numerous. It mounted thirty
guns upon its walls, and had ample provision of gun-
powder and stock. This garrison and munitionment had
recently arrived (upon the 25th March, 1689), so there
was plenty wherewith to meet any enemy coming up in
April, when the forces of James were due. The only
weak point in the situation of the Williamite side was that
considerable numbers of refugees from the country had
taken refuge behind the walls, and a really prolonged
blockade might lead to difficulties in feeding the whole
of that swollen population.
Why such a blockade was ever allowed to be established
by so weak a hostile body, why so large a number of
trained and well-armed men with such a superiority of
guns should have submitted to be contained by an in-
sufficient force is still a mystery. But contained they did
234
DERRY AND THE BOYNE
allow themselves to be and therefore in the long run
pressed for food. Still they always had plenty of powder
and shot.
The inception of the attempted siege was due to a
blunder. James was advised that if he appeared in person
the presence of the legitimate king would be enough to
make the authorities of the town admit his forces. His
illegitimate son, the Duke of Berwick, who was with the
army advancing upon the place, had written to him to
that effect. It was an error: and what James did upon
receiving this advice (he ought to have remained in Dublin
and never to have gone north at all) is characteristic.
In the first place, he took what he believed to be every
precaution 5 riding thirty miles across the country to see
the Commander-in-Chief of his army (Rosen of whom
more in a moment) at Newtown Stewart. In the second
place he imagined that the very confused situation in
England (where the mass of the nation, though Protes-
tant, were certainly in favour of the Stuart line, and
where the large Catholic minority still had great social
standing) was repeated in this corner of northern Ireland.
Here also were Protestants indeed, and (so James im-
agined!) they would be divided in the matter of alle-
giance, as were their English co-religionists. Many would
hesitate to attack their lawful king. Many would loyally
support him. He did not appreciate the truth that the
Protestant in Ireland had convinced himself for a life-
time past that he belonged to a superior race and was of
right the master of the place, and that the Catholic
native population were a menace only as animals may be
a menace 5 he did not know that he was dealing with
frenzy and illusion raised to that degree.
There are three excuses for him. One was that no Eng-
lish authority (since the Lancastrian usurpation of the
English throne in the Middle Ages) had ever attempted
235
JAMES THE SECOND
to understand Irish conditions. The Lancastrians let Ire-
land go. The Tudors returned to it as to another world.
James knew vaguely more about the Irish than do our
professional politicians to-day, for he was of great birth
and European experience; still, he misunderstood them}
and we have all seen how the ignorance of those modern
politicians of ours, even today, with Ireland at twelve
hours from London for transport, at a few seconds for in-
formation, with overwhelming superiority in wealth and
power, has managed to lose Ireland.
The second excuse for James is that he had had recent
experience of the enthusiasm for his claim in the South,
at Dublin, where the considerable Protestant body with
its organized English Church and great endowments
seemed to have accepted him readily enough.
The third is that, as we shall see in a moment, the man
originally commanding in Deny had prepared to yield,
and that the town only resisted because a strong popular
movement insisted that it should do so.
At any rate, on April the i8th, 1690, James rode out
to summon Deny, and to present himself before its walls.
Here appears one of the defects of James in his later
years. He had always been prodigiously industrious. He
had always from youth attended to detail with masterly
industry. But these habits seem, after his fiftieth year,
to have hardened into meticulousness and the losing of
judgment under a mass of petty things: into a loss of a
sense of proportion, even in matters which he was daily
handling and which were before his eyes.
We have a very clear sentence upon that new defect
in him, passed by a contemporary who was with him
himself a great diplomatist trained to judge a situation.
He says of the King at this moment: *he is perpetually
attending to unimportant matters, passing by the essentials,
and he accumulates such a load of small particulars in his
236
DERRY AND THE BOYNE
head as, when it comes to taking a broad judgment, com-
pletely impedes the action of his mind.'
It was obvious that James ought to have consulted not
only the Commander-in-Chief, Rosen, thirty miles away,
but the man in local command of the force actually in
front of Deny Hamilton. Now Hamilton had already
summoned the city, and the authorities so summoned
(that is, in practice, the well-to-do merchants of the place
for the Corporations were always that) had already
virtually capitulated. They said they were ready to treat,
and, as essential to that transaction, stipulated that King
James's forces should not advance within a certain distance
of the city. 1
It is only just to them to point out that their military
adviser, the Governor, Lundy, who absurdly exaggerated
James's military resources, had called the place untenable,
advised capitulation, and prevented the landing of two
further English regiments which were lying ready to
disembark in Lough Foyle. The mass of the people 2
who had less to lose, were discontented with the policy
of Lundy and the Corporation. They were all for defend-
ing the place. They knew nothing of military affairs, but
by a piece of luck their military judgment happened to
be perfectly sound. James had nothing serious to bring
against them, yet would they not have had their way but
for another blunder on James's part. The King may have
had some vague knowledge of negotiations going on be-
tween Hamilton and the Corporation ; but without con-
sidering what the effect of advancing soldiers beyond the
agreed limits would be, he appeared on Windmill Hill,
southwards of the town, and rode on towards its gates
and round him was an escort of dragoons.
1 They were not to go beyond St. Johnstown.
2 In that day Derry was in the main Protestant. The modern town is
almost exactly,, half Catholic.
237
JAMES THE SECOND
The rumour at once flew round the town-mob that they
were betrayed: that the stipulation of keeping the King's
army at a distance had been treacherously broken: that
they were all to have their throats cut by the murderous
papishes marching against them. The mob took charge,
shut the gates, manned the walls, and when the royal
trumpets rang out to give the summons, they answered by
firing a piece which killed an officer at James's side.
I will not say that the ignorance and enthusiasm of
the Derry mob saved the Crown for William. William
would have defeated the royal forces in Ireland in any
case 5 he had overwhelmingly superior strength, and noth-
ing could have withstood it in the long run. But the re-
sistance of Derry put heart into the Williamite cause, and
aiBFected the legitimists with a memory of failure.
James went back to Dublin, taking his Commander-
in-Chief, Von Rosen, with him, and left, for what was
now to be called the c siege j of Derry, de Maumont in
command, Richard Hamilton second, the Duke of Ber-
wick and that able French officer de Pusignan as the two
Major-Generals below the Commander-in-Chief and
Hamilton.
Of a true siege there was none. The conditions were
quite unsuitable for a siege: indeed, they were so unsuit-
able even for a blockade that it is to the credit of James's
commanders or to the shame of their opponents that
they could establish even that.
The total royal force available for the North was on
paper under thirteen thousand men. Of these the number
that could be spared for Derry was only six thousand.
There had been days of incessant rain, through which
these raw troops had marched} there was* no proper surgi-
cal or hospital equipment, nor doctors, nor medicines, nor
surgeons; and the active force seems never to have been
more than two-thirds or at the best three-quarters of the
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DERRY AND THE BOYNE
nominal total, Inniskillen lay on the flank and occupied
the other moiety of the troops available.
Within Deny there was actually a larger force of men
and a very much better provision of artillery and firearms,
and a larger amount of ammunition, than in the lines out-
side the town. If we try to put the thing in military terms,
it is almost farcical: a larger, a better-equipped force con-
tained behind its walls by a smaller and worse-equipped
one, a formidable defensive attacked with inferior
weapons that could not affect it: the besiegers working at
a great distance from their ultimate base over very bad
roads, the besieged handicapped by no distance over which
to convey their munitions and arms: the besieged with
ample housing, living under conditions of comfort so long
as the provisions lasted, the besiegers in the open field
under what was, at the beginning of the operations,
abominable weather.
I have said that it is a mystery how, under these condi-
tions, the men of Deny allowed themselves to be shut up
at all. If the mystery can be solved, it can doubtfully be so
from the difference of command on the two sides. The
King's army was led by officers experienced in European
warfare; the regular commanders on the rebel side had
abandoned action and the men of Deny were led by
amateurs, of whom the most famous was Mr. Walker, a
clergyman, a rector from County Tyrone, whose account
of the siege, lively, inaccurate, and in some places deliber-
ately false, makes very good reading. He at least had no
doubts that the war was a war of religion! He did two
great services to the besieged: he provided them with a
head in the first moment when they were but a mob or
rabble acting against the constituted authorities 3 he re-
stored order and put discipline into the people he had to
manage.
We ought to remember in this brief account of the
239
JAMES THE SECOND
operations, that the trained professional officers left to
their own judgment would not have attempted the reduc-
tion of Deny. The man in chief command, that big
gormandizing German, of excellent military capacity,
called Von Rosen, knew very well that the idea of a siege
was nonsense and objected to it from the beginning.
Theoretically the person who ordered the operation to
be undertaken was James himself j but James acted on the
advice of Melfort, and Melf ort was thinking of Scotland
rather than Ireland. As for poor Richard Hamilton, who
was in active command in front of the place, he had to
tell his Government in Dublin that there were but six
battalions, heavily under strength (the best of six hundred
men, others of less than four hundred), and that about one
musket in ten might be expected to work properly. It
sounds ridiculous, but I believe it to be historically true,
that for effective purposes the Royal Infantry in front of
Deny in the first weeks of siege would not have counted
at the most much more than three thousand men in actual
line^and that the useful firearms at their disposal were
certainly less than four hundred. 1
In such conditions it was obvious that the so-called
besiegers must dig themselves in, or they would have been
at the mercy of a surprise sally by the very numerous be-
sieged. Even against entrenchment such a sally should
have succeeded. It was never made. If the reader desires
to know how many shovels there were for the purpose of
rapid entrenchment in the hands of some three thousand
odd men, he will be interested to learn that there were
thirty.
So the situation stood for not quite two months, when
with the early part of June, the lack of provisionment
1 As late as the end of June the French Ambassador quotes a letter from
one of the Commanders who had been sent up as reinforcement to Derry.
The unfortunate Colonel takes the roll of the muskets at his disposal in
the whole regiment. He finds that there are seven 1
240
DERRY AND THE BOYNE
began to be felt for the first time by the men of Deny,
who had thus allowed themselves, in spite of their superior
numbers and far superior armament, to be contained
within their walls. If the situation could be maintained
long enough, something might after all be done for the
King's cause, and an army ridiculously insufficient for a
true siege might effect its purpose by a blockade and
hunger,
On June the I5th three sail from England despatched
by William's Government appeared in Lough Foyle,
and they bore ample provisionment for Deny. For some
little time, southerly winds blowing straight down the
Lough forbade any approach, and meanwhile the royal
troops had thrown a strong boom across the river some-
what below the town. They were compelled also, in order
to meet the threat of the Williamite shipping, to move
down the banks of the stream to the point called Fort
Charles, with a few big guns which had by this time
reached them as reinforcements for, five weeks earlier, a
French fleet in Bantry Bay had beaten off the English
vessels under Admiral Herbert and had landed stores.
There is in connexion with that action a very pretty
anecdote. When the French Ambassador came, overjoyed,
to tell James of the French successes, James, whose
patriotism had the intensity of a religion, and for whom
the British Navy was the darling of his own creation (how
admirably he had commanded it!), answered: 'You
have defeated us? It's the first time!'
It was always so with him. We shall find him later on
the Norman cliffs watching the British fleet destroy his
last hopes, but pointing, even as they did so, with admira-
tion to their gunnery and seamanship, to their intrepidity
in boarding.
Mainly on account of the adverse winds, then, this
Williamite fleet in Lough Foyle with two regiments of
241
JAMES THE SECOND
trained veterans on board, well officered and munitioned,
and with provisions for the town as well, lay useless so
far as the men of Derry were concerned. They could
signal to the town, and town to them, and an individual
could get through as one did by swimming} but there
could be no reinforcement or provisioning.
The two Commanders of this fleet were Rooke and
Kirke, the first destined fifteen years later to occupy
Gibraltar, the second, a very strange person, to find him-
self on the quarter-deck. He was that Kirke whose repu-
tation for murderous brutality had been laid in Tanger,
whose 'Lambs' made themselves famous for the same
brutality after Sedgemoor, and who was now more con-
genially joined to the Usurper's party. The whole of that
generation was full of soldiers of fortune, but not one
other so unscrupulous, so daring, so free from morals, as
this worthy.
He had strategy in him too. When he found that there
was no getting up the river to Derry, he profited by the
adverse wind to go up west round the land and reinforce
Inniskillen and its already strong, well-equipped body
of Protestants who, lying on the west flank of the Derry
operations, had reduced to the slight proportions we know
the forces available for the Siege.'
Meanwhile the hunger of Derry increased, and the
position within the walls became serious as the end of
June approached.
Rosen, knowing very well that he had not the where-
withal to attack the town, proposed to make war in our
modern fashion, and to sacrifice the civilian population
at large. He wrote a letter to James telling him that
the 'conditions had induced him to determine to. exter-
minate all the rebels throughout the country.' He told
those within Derry that if they did not surrender the
place by July the ist, he would gather the rebels from
242
DERRY AND THE BOYNE
all over the countryside and drive them under the walls
where they would starve.
He was as good as his word, and on July the 2nd a
great drove of all sexes and ages, including little children,
appeared driven in front of the Royalist lines towards the
city. Derry held twenty prisoners, and the besieged replied
to Von Rosen's German tactic by putting up a great gal-
lows in sight of the Royalist army, and threatening to
hang thereon the twenty gentlemen, who very naturally
wrote, not to Von Rosen indeed, but to Hamilton, beg-
ging him to give way.
It was James who saved the situation. The moment he
received Von Rosen's letter he ordered the manoeuvre
to be stopped. A circular was sent round at once to all
his officers telling them to 'refuse obedience to any order
of this nature from our Field-Marshal-General.' Indeed,
of all those concerned, James seems to have been the most
indignant at the cruelty and the most effectually so.
There is a contemptuous tone in the letters of those about
him as though blaming him for too great softness of heart.
But a very fine phrase should be sufficient for us. He said
that 'his honour as a king and the keeping of his word
was to be preferred to the preservation of his throne' 5 and
he added that if Von Rosen had been his own subject he
would have hanged him.
As July ran out it became more and more evident that
attack would never be possible. It was a race between
hunger and relief. How bad the situation was we know
from the prices fetched by horse-flesh and by dog-flesh
'fattened' (as we are told by the amiable clergyman who
commanded the Hosts of the Lord) on the bodies of
James's dead soldiers. The besieged tried to get meat by
stampeding cattle from the enemy's camp. With that ob-
ject they tied up their own last cow to a stake near the
walls and set the animal on fire, in the hope that its
243
JAMES THE SECOND
career in agony, breaking loose, would carry confusion
into its fellows. But the stratagem failed. Relief came on
the I05th day of the siege (July the 3Oth, 1689). Kirke
had the north wind he wanted and enough of it. The few
guns on Culmore Point could do nothing against the ad-
vance of his ships. The first struck the boom and recoiled.
The second, the Dartmouth, a frigate, or perhaps the
Moimtjoy, broke the obstacle, and rather over half an
hour later, bowling up the river before the strong breeze,
three ships and their provisionment lay at the quays of the
town.
On the next day, the last of the month, Rosen, with
his men, turned south and marched away.
There intervened, between Deny and the Boyne, a
year. It was passed in a precarious but seemingly assured
administration sufficiently solid. A kingdom was attached
to its king, and Dublin was a capital. The ancient dispos-
sessed nobility and gentry of Ireland had resumed the
lands which a swarm of adventurers had seized less than
forty years before. There was a Court. A renewed world
lived. But Ireland is not England. It was King of Eng-
land (of Scotland only after that of Ireland) that James
would be. He disapproved in silence the restoration of
the Irish lands. His religion taught him nothing as re-
garded Ireland. It was England which he must recover.
All those who saw Europe as a whole told him to be
patient. With Ireland secure, England would come at
last. But James was perhaps not so out of perspective as
usual in still hankering after a direct appeal to England
and a landing there. Ireland he was to lose. Action from
Ireland the English would resent. England itself might
yet rally to him.
At the moment when James was entering the rapids, in
1687, there had appeared at The Hague an aged Com-
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DERRY AND THE BOYNE
mander, who might properly be called the veteran of all
Europe: Schomberg.
He was a man already 72 years of age. He had come
after a stormy voyage (necessitating a landing in a
British port) from Portugal. He saw the Prince of
Orange. What they said to each other will not be known.
It is possible or probable that they talked over Orange's
approaching treason to his father-in-law. But Schom-
berg had nothing to do with that. His sword was at the
service of whoever would have it. He was worth a brigade
to any man his name alone.
He was a great noble of the Rhine (his mother was an
English woman Dudley's daughter) who had fought in
all wars. It was his father who had. arranged for James I
the Palatinate marriage. Before he was 20 he had been
in the field side by side with that Von Rosen, a similar
soldier of fortune, whom we have just seen at Deny
and who was destined to face him, opposed, when Schom-
berg himself came over to fight against James in Ireland.
He had steeped himself in arms during the struggle be-
tween the Protestant princes and the Empire what is
called the Thirty Years' War. Though Protestant by
birth, and, it may fairly be said, by conviction (for he was
tempted at one moment to join the flowing Catholic tide in
France and would not), he went over to the service ^of
the French King before he was 40 years of age, by which
time he was among the most renowned captains in the
west. He was given a command in the French Scots
Guards and for seven years was perpetually fighting in
the service of the French Crown. Indeed, upon the ap-
proach, of his fiftieth year, he naturalized himself and
his sons subjects of Louis. Five years later he married
into one of the great Huguenot families (as they then
were) of the French nobility, the Aumales of Harcourt.
When Louis, with Charles of England, was fighting the
245
JAMES THE SECOND
Dutch, his service was lent to the English King. He pre-
pared that invasion of Holland which the battle of the
Texel perhaps prevented and (it is important to note this)
he devised the details for a large standing^army to sup-
port Charles II against the rich men of his Parliament.
He had raised German regiments for the French} he was
in the grandest way a soldier and nothing else, appearing
in this field and that, under this master and that in-
differently} and now in his old age his name alone was
a military fortune to whoever might command it, for
wherever he went a refusal of his advice led to disaster,
and acceptance of it to victory. He knew admirably how
to form, to command, to restrain, to launch any armed
force of whatever material, and already ten years before
he had out-generaled Orange before Maestricht. He had
already been a Marshal of France (the last Huguenot
Marshal) in 1675.
It is one of the strong arguments against the revocation
of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV (and the weight of
political opinion is against it) that it lost to the French
service so many admirable Commanders, but in particular
this Captain.
Not that he was exiled; he was honourably sent off as
Ambassador, but he would no longer stay} for he felt
that the taking away of privileges from men of his rank
on the plea of religion made it incumbent on him to leave
the service of the French King.
Even at this great age of his, he sat a horse as well as
any man in Europe, he inspired men's confidence in any
troops under his command, and, as we shall see, he died
gloriously enough, his face slashed with the sabres of the
cavalry charge of the Boyne but the mortal blow was
struck by some bullet from behind him: from his own
side} a bullet aimed by some discontented trooper of the
246
DERRY AND THE BOYNE
French brigade, or perhaps some random wasted missile.
We shall never know.
At any rate, he died well and has left a great name.
They buried him (after William had entered Dublin) in
St. Patrick's Cathedral. His relatives for more than half
a lifetime after that glorious death of his refused the
money for his monument. Swift with his creative indig-
nation put up the thing we know; but its original and very
fine inscription was not allowed to stand. There he lies.
I was at the pains of paying reverence to his tomb some
few weeks before writing this. Soldiers of his calibre
are not so common.
This man led the vanguard of the Williamite force,
landed at Carrickfergus in the late summer of 1689 which
had seen the failure at Derry. Through the winter of
1689-90 his command, and the royal army opposed to it,
lay inactive. Schomberg's force, waning with disease, ill-
found, was yet on a front protected by ground which for-
bade attack. The opposing armies could only watch each
other. Neither had a hope of victory in attack. With t he-
next season, the summer of 1690, William himself hud
landed with heavy reinforcement and a powerful park of
alt i le ^' The dds Were turned > a11 the stren g& was now
on William's side, and James's troops with their few pieces
and insufficient numbers awaited them to fight a defensive
action behind the line of the River Boyne.
In the world of politics and religion the Battle of the
Boyne is a date, or a symbol, or a turning-point, or any-
thing you will. In the world of legend it is a thick growth
of nonsense, beautiful or ugly according to one's taste in
gods and men There is a sort of ghostly Battle of the
Boyne up m the air, where kingdoms are won and lost,
heroes perform incredible feats, and a complete decision
247
JAMES THE SECOND
is arrived at in a doubtful struggle between two mighty
armies one of Papists, the other Orangemen victorious.
But in the interesting field of military history the
Boyne is nothing of all this.
It appears (to those who care for reality) as a conflict
in which under 25,000 men, of whom a quarter to one-
third had sufficient training, possessing six field guns,
fought a rearguard action to allow the retirement of the
army, resisted, in a bad defensive position, for some hours
the attack of between 42,000 and 45,000 men a good
three-quarters of them of long training, and supported by
fifty gunsj and allowed the force to retire with safety.
There was no decision. The defensive so maintained
by the much weaker force was successful in permitting
it to effect its retreat; the superior force failed, or was
too badly hammered, to follow upj their far inferior
opponents, who might have been destroyed, remained an
army in being, and were able, in spite of the overwhelm-
ing odds against them, to continue the war. The covering
action of the Boyne allowed James's army to get away with
less than six per cent losses in men and the abandonment
of only one gun.
First as to the position.
The River Boyne runs eastwards into the sea thirty
miles north of Dublin. At the first bridge across it, one
and a half miles from the bar, stands the maritime town
of Drogheda, approachable at high water by vessels of
moderate draught. The time of high water, at the full
and change of the moon, is about half -past ten (this
detail is important in the story of the battle). At the
quarter moon, low water is at about that hour.
Above Drogheda there is no bridge until you come to
Slane, eight miles away. A couple of miles from Drogheda
Bridge up-stream (rather less, of course, from the last
houses of the town), some six miles therefore from the
248
DERRY AND THE BOYNE
Bridge of Slane, stands, on the southern side of the
river, a slight open elevation known as Dronore, round
which the Boyne curls in a half-circle. The slope of Dro-
nore it is only 300 feet high lies open to view from
the opposite or northern bank in its whole extent. Where
Tonta. of
Elements of the Boyne
it falls on the left in the direction of Slane the ground
becomes rather more difficult, and in places was marshy,
or at any rate intersected with wet ditches, at the time of
the battle. At the other, the Drogheda end, the ground
sinks to a lower elevation and is dry. The River Boyne,
as it curls round this half -circle jutting northward, is at
that point on an average 150 yards wide, growing slightly
wider as it descends, to a full 250 or 300 yards by the
time it approaches Drogheda town. The river is f ordable
at low tide; easily f ordable at springs, and still f ordable
at neaps. 1
1 The term 'spring tides' means the very high and low tides just after
full and new moons. The neap tides are the tides of the quarter moons
in between, where the water rises less and also falls less.
249
JAMES THE SECOND
On the day the battle was fought, July the ist, 1690,
the moon was five and a half days old: the tides were far
from their extremes; the neaps were already beginning;
but they were sufficiently low to make the river f ordable
in several places before the end of the ebb. But a little
below the bend the fords became unpleasantly deep even
at the end of the ebb. Further, let it be remarked that when
troops have to ford a tidal river, they have not an un-
limited time in which to do it; if only a certain number get
across in time before the water rises the operation is dis-
astrous, because it leaves a section of your force cut off
and at the mercy of their opponents, without the possibility
of being relieved and supported by their own men. On the
day of the Boyne the lowest moment of the water was
between 9.30 and 10 a.m. The day was not chosen to fit
the tides; battle fell on the date it did independently of
that factor: but the fording of the river by William's
attack had to wait for the tide. The depth of water differs
with recent weather, rainfall and wind; but probably at
the fords the men had less than three feet to wade through
at the lowest water; by one in the afternoon their depth
would be increased by a foot to eighteen inches or more,
and the deeper would be impassable.
Again, though the position of Dronore could be turned
by the Bridge of Slane, that bridge was a couple of hours*
march away, and by the time the enemy had got to it
and crossed it, and doubled back again to the defensive
position on Dronore, a morning would have been ex-
pended, fatigue would have been incurred, and warning,
given to the defence to retire in time to prevent en-
circlement, and the cutting off of their line of retire-
ment. That line of retirement passed through Duleek
the only road: a point where all the retreating army
must pass as there was marsh on either side.
Again, the town of Drogheda, in the streets of which
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DERRY AND THE BOYNE
no army would engage itself on the offensive, was some-
thing the right o the defensive could repose upon: it
was unlikely to be turned from that direction.
On the whole, therefore, the position of the Boyne
was not so very bad, as it is sometimes described to be.
Still, it was weak. The troops occupying it were in full
view of an enemy on the northern bank} it was approach-
able on many points at low tide; it contained little oppor-
tunity for cover behind which to gather reserves; it
could be turned on the left by a superior force, and behind
it was the narrow defile of Duleek.
The northern bank, on the other hand, was excellently
suited for the preparation of an offensive. It contained
deep ravines opposite either end of the defended position
across the water, depressions so shaped that it was possible
to gather very large bodies of men in them and prepare
for the attack without being observed from the southern
side, or molested by its fire.
Now as to the composition of the opposing forces.
The Williamites had for their best troops the Dutch Blue
Guards under Solms, which were veteran and of first-
class quality, in three battalions; two French Huguenot
regiments, so called, 1 and a further Dutch force under
Nassau; there was a brigade of English under Hanmer,
and a Danish body under Cutts. There were two Innis-
killen regiments present also. The Reverend Walker,
'bombarded Genera? for the occasion, was on the field
and fell there. Which moved William to comment what
the devil was he doing in an army.
This force, so diverse in composition, but Dutch and
French for its main professional body, was to undertake
the direct frontal attack across the river.
1 The rank and file were not picked for religion. All the officers were.
Thus a private in one of the Huguenot regiments dying pulled out a
rosary to tell his beads on it. A Dane, moved by the sight, shot him dead.
251
JAMES THE SECOND
The first line, the spear-head of the attack, was de-
signed for the French and Dutch, the greater part of the
small English force was to come up in second line, and
(it is here that the reality differs most from the legend)
the Orangemen played on the whole the least part in the
battle. This is no derogation of their valour; it is merely
an account of the part which their general gave them
to play.
So much for the Williamite attack. One-fifth or rather
less of William's army was detached far off to his right
or west to cross the river at Slane; the infantry by the
bridge, the cavalry by the ford called Rosnaree.
As to the 'general idea' on both sides, that also is mis-
represented in legend, though more accurately appreciated
in our histories as regards William's side than James's.
Neither James nor his commanders intended to hold
the line of the Boyne and to risk a decision there. Any
one could see that it could not be permanently held, and
that only incredible luck on James's side or incredible
blundering on the other could prevent the obstacle being
crossed by such superior numbers, and the position being
turned on its left towards Slane as well.
The 'general idea' on William's side was simple
enough: to make a strong frontal attack across the river
at low tide upon the defensive position at Dronore,
previously cannonaded, and meanwhile, with the extra
fifth of the army, which could easily be spared out of such
large numbers, to cross higher up at Slane and make
straight for the road leading to Duleek. If this outflank-
ing party got to the Duleek road in time it would cut off
the chances of retirement from James's men, envelop
them, and so achieve a decision by the destruction of the
whole force.
The 'general idea' on James's side was to fight a delay-
ing action only, in order to give the main army time to
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DERRY AND THE BOYNE
get away, in the hope of its fighting again under better
conditions with reinforcements. Perhaps the opportunity
might come with the exhaustion of William's much larger
command. There was the possibility of William's having
to recall troops to England if the French effort against
him by sea, or if the English disaffection against him at
home, compelled him to do so. The delaying action must
also be fought to cover the capital, an error to which I
refer in Note III at the end of this book. A retreat was
intended from the first, and was successfully carried out.
The army was saved.
Now this idea of a covering action involved the absence
of even the very few guns which James's force had at
its disposal. They were, as I have said, twelve ; and, of
these, six were sent back with the baggage in preparation
for the retreat that had been planned: the remaining six
were withdrawn before the attack on the fords began.
William's attack was made therefore with the support
of fifty pieces and against the defence of none.
This withdrawal of the guns was not (as has been
represented) an elementary blunder: it was a choice of
two evils: either certainly losing the few guns of the force,
for the advantage of possibly gaining some delay 5 or
suffering more rapid pressure for the advantage of saving
them, so that the army in its retreat should not be entirely
deprived of artillery. On the whole the withdrawal of
the twelve guns was such a choice as most commanders
of the day would probably have made.
Let it be remembered that in any case William's artil-
lery was overwhelmingly stronger than James's more
than four to one that guns in those days had not regular
teams and were very slow-moving affairs, drawn by cart-
horses pressed for the service immediately before they
were needed. Had James's twelve guns been used on the
banks of the Boyne during the heat of the action they
253
JAMES THE SECOND
would have been lost. Nor were they sufficiently nu-
merous to have defended the many places over which the
enemy could get across at low water. It might have been
worth while to risk the loss of the guns for the sake of
checking the passage of the fords; but so few would have
done little more than check, and perhaps they would have
been pounded to silence by the immensely superior fire
of their opponents before the advance was undertaken.
Guns could not be moved rapidly at will in 1690$ they
had very little mobility, their rate of fire was slow. At any
rate, withdrawn the guns werej first half of them six
before a shot was fired j then the remaining half-dozen
before the heat of the action developed.
The task of covering the retreat on Duleek, which had
been designed, was to be left to the cavalry, and very
well did they fulfil the task allotted to them. Tyrconnel
had grown fat, and his health was gonej but he showed
vigour enough throughout the dayj and Berwick behaved
admirably, charging over and over again and, taking it all
in all, effecting the purpose which he and his father had
desired.
Now, as a last point before briefly recounting the action,
let us appreciate the importance of Duleek. Duleek, lying
four miles back from the centre of the position at Dronore,
was a 'defile/ a word which means a 'narrow' through
which an army must pass in single column. Upon it the
roads of the neighbourhood converged j it was the only
gate to the only avenue of retirement j for an army with
its train is tied to roads, and, as I have said, the sodden
ground on either side forced all the troops to pass in
single column through the place. The retreat, if it could
be accomplished, would have to go through Duleek, and
so, too, would the advance following upon that retreat
should the attack not prove decisive.
For the retreat to get to Duleek first, therefore, before
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DERRY AND THE BOYNE
William's 8,000, who had been sent to outflank (round
by Slane), could cut them off, was the essential point of
the Jacobite plan. It was achieved. As for the commanders
upon William's side, the detachment going round by Slane
was under Douglas (whose treachery to James we may
regard as comic or tragic, according to our mood, but
which has nothing to do with the military movement) 1 3
the cavalry of this flanking detachment was under the
command of the younger Schomberg. The elder, that
famous white-haired veteran of fight after fight through-
out Western Europe, the whilom Marshal of France, the
true professional soldier of the day, was with the main
attacking party, where he met his death a man respected
by every soldier, and by many beloved. William himself
was nominally, as King, conducting the main movement,
the frontal attack, under the real guidance of the elder
Schomberg. Solms and his Dutch Guards we have already
mentioned, also Cutts leading the Danes j while of the
Huguenot French force the best regiment was commanded
by de Ruvigny, a very gallant cavalryman in his thirty-
eighth year, known by the courtesy title of Caillemotte.
He also was to fall on that field.
Those who desire to visualize the conflict must not
forget this thing about it that the cries of encouragement
to attack and resistance which proceeded from the leaders
on either side were for the main part given in the French
language. This was not due to the presence of a French
Huguenot brigade on the one side or French regular
royal horse upon the other: it was because French was
the language of the higher gentry there engaged on either
1 He had always avowed a tender attachment to James (who had made
his career), and only fifteen months before, on the eve of the Dutch
invasion, had been drinking that monarch's health upon his knees, coupled
with the toast of 'damnation to whoever should be so base as to draw
sword against him.' Let us hope that the curse did not take effect. But
one never can tell.
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JAMES THE SECOND
side; for these were all either bilingual or wholly French-
speaking: William, Schomberg, Berwick, Hamilton, James
himself (for all his ill accent and English contempt of
the French tongue). .
The day Tuesday, July the ist, 1690 broke m a
fine clear dawn over the neighbouring sea; and the sun
rising just before four o'clock into an unclouded heaven
showed the Irish dispositions clear to William and to his
gunners upon the northern bank.
It was the moment of high water, or, rather, the last
of the flood. The mixed detachment sent by William
towards Slane went off, apparently, about six o'clock upon
its flanking errand} too late. Schomberg had urged its
despatch the night before it would then have appeared
on James's flank suddenly, at the beginning of the action.
William delayed it. Probably he thought, in some dull
way, a flanking force ought not even to be close to its final
point of attack till the front was engaged. He seems to
have mistaken that for 'synchrony' it lost him his deci-
sion. But, then, William was no General. If James were
a doubtful commander for a large force, William was a
much worse one.
The main frontal attack waited for the fall of the
water, but during the morning William's fifty guns
pounded away across the river upon the exposed Irish
lines and their raw troops. We may conjecture that it was
somewhere about nine o'clock, the last two hours of the
ebb now running furiously, and the river rapidly lower-
ing, that a galloper brought in news from William's ex-
treme right by Slane, that the infantry under Douglas had
crossed by the bridge: with more difficulty the mounted
force under the younger Schomberg by the ford of
Rosnaree.
Here also the command of a king nearly spoilt the affair.
James did not understand the capital importance of the
256
DERRY AND THE BOYNE
Slane turning movement. He suggested that a few
mounted men sent out westward 'to observe' would suffice.
He- was frightened of weakening his main front. Luckily
he was overruled, or, rather, overpersuaded. A whole
regiment, O'Neill's, was detailed for the purpose of
guarding James's left flank, and was drawn up that
morning facing, and checking, across a belt of difficult
wet land, the Williamite flanking force when it appeared.
At this moment it is probable not certain that a
blunder was committed by Douglas. Under the conditions
of those days especially (and, indeed, until the advent of
quite modern inventions for rapidly communicating
orders) a flanking party sent out from the main body and
separated from it had, while it was in such a position, all
the responsibility of an independent command. If Douglas
with his infantry, and Schomberg's cavalry as well, had,
with part of his force, engaged O'Neill over the obstacle
of wet ground, and pushed the rest on at once for Duleek,
the battle that was about to be engaged in might have been
decisive, for they might have cut off James's line of
retreat.
But one cannot fight in column. Douglas noted that
body of his opponent's, O'Neill's, drawn up as a flank
guard and halted. Meanwhile Lauzun brought up in sup-
port of O'Neill on this extreme left or western flank a
column of French, and gradually advanced further Irish
troops to threaten Douglas's flank movement. But though
Douglas, thus halted, hesitated to hold the Irish and
French against him with part of his force and with the
rest press on up the Duleek Road, his movement had been
already sufficiently menacing to determine the pressing of
James's retreat, and it was at this juncture, in the mid-
morning, that the six guns still remaining in the defensive
position on Dronore were withdrawn to take part in the
retirement.
257
JAMES THE SECOND
James, having seen to that withdrawal of the guns,
went off to Lauzun upon the Slane flank, taking with him
further foot and horse and leaving orders that yet more
reinforcements should be drawn from his main body to
protect the vital road to Duleek. As yet not a man had
moved from William's side of the river to^ cross the
stream. The state of the water did not permit them to
begin this attack till 9.30 to ip o'clock, and by that time
not a gun was present on the side of the defence to check
the Williamite crossing.
In infantry, the defence on Dronore in the frontal
position was now reduced to eight battalions under Rich-
ard Hamilton, and to the horse on the right under the
command of the Duke of Berwick: both Generals were
nominally under the orders of Tyrconnel, but really each
was responsible for his own action.
William's guns, which had already thrown disorder into
the Irish troops on the open slope, redoubled the pressure
of the cannonade 5 the fifty drums of Solms' Blue Dutch
Guards matched their noise as the column to which they
were attached, debouched from the ravine where they had
been hidden and took the water upon a front of ten men.
These veterans achieved in this first stroke all they had
intended.
Though the Irish had held their fire until the approach-
ing Blues were at the deepest of the water, that fire was
ineffectual in the hands of raw men against soldiers of long
training. The Dutch made the southern bank with but
small losses, broke down the resistance of the much lesser
force opposed to them, and forced it to fall back in some
disorder upon the fields sloping up from the river.
Thus was the Boyne first crossed and the first point on
the southern bank held.
A little later as to the head of its column but with
many of their men crossing simultaneously with the later
258
DERRY AND THE BOYNE
part of the Dutch Guards came the two Orange regi-
ments, Inniskillen and Londonderry, just below down-
stream. A hundred yards again to their left, farther down
the slackening current, the Brigade of French Huguenots
took the water. Beyond them again the English regiments
under Hanmer, and to the left of these, on the extreme
left of William, opposite the horse of the Irish right, the
Danes under Cutts and the Dutch body under Nassau.
The total number which had surmounted the obstacle and
were now on dry land was something like 10,000 men.
But this stage of the battle, in which the attack was only
beginning to make good its hold of the farther shore,
was propitious to cavalry work, and to that checking of
William's pressure which had been left to James's horse
in the original plan.
The Dutch Guards were charged by Tyrconnel before
they could completely form, and though the Irish infantry
failed to check the French Huguenots, the Irish cavalry
broke in among them as they were with difficulty making
their landing upon the southern bank. Their leader, Caille-
motte, was mortally wounded in the sabre strokes, but still
had the strength to cry to his men, A la Gloire!'
So it was all along the river-bank: King James's horse
charging and charging again at the Dutch, the French,
the Danish, the Orange, the English units, as these pain-
fully made good their formation on the farther shore and
thereby acquired an increasing power of fire to beat off the
sabres.
The Jacobite horse obtained local successes, not suffi-
cient to check the general attack. The Danes in particular
were thrown back by yet another charge of Berwick's,
who had already struck hard, but unsuccessfully, at the
English brigade under Hanmer.
It was in the midst of this pell-mell of Williamite
infantry slowly and partially forming, of Jacobite horse
259
JAMES THE SECOND
furiously charging to prevent such formation and to drive
the invaders back into the tide, that the great Schomberg
met his death in the strange fashion to which I have
alluded for it was not an enemy's bullet that killed him.
The old man had seen Caillemotte fall, a man bound to
him by strong personal ties; he took that commander's
place at the head of the Huguenot brigade, crying out to
them in French that they should recall their courage
and their indignation against their persecutors. Tyrconnel's
horse charged, and in that charge Schomberg received a
sabre wound or two in the face; but what felled him was
a bullet coming (no one knows who fired it) from behind
his own position. He was hit in the back of the neck,
and fell.
Now, as the last stage of the action approached, the
advantage of numbers told heavily. William himself,
upon the extreme left near Drogheda (he had been
slightly^grazed by a cannon-ball while still on the far side
of the river, the day before, while James's guns were still
in line), found very few at first to resist him. He gathered
his horse, Dutch, Danish, and French, but containing also
a certain proportion of the Orangemen; and, there being
hardly anyone to oppose at this point, he easily held the
Meath shore of the stream. 1
From the security of this virtually undefended place
William led his whole column forward against the Irish
retreat. He was unexpectedly charged by Berwick. Wil-
liam's Inniskillen men broke, when the Williamite French
under Belcastel came up just in time to prevent the rout
of the Orange cavalry; but the still steady fire of the
few remaining Irish foot at the side of Berwick's Horse
forced Belcastel slowly back. There was still one fresh
1 It was marshy ground; William's horse got bogged. He was forced
to dismount, and had there been enough men on James's side to do any
execution at that point, his enemy might have fallen.
260
DERRY AND THE BOYNE
body of cavalry, of those thus commanded by William
on the Drogheda or east wing of the battle. It was under
the Dutchman Ginkel. The Irish forced it back as it
appeared} but a body of English troops shot into them,
and so confused them that only one last charge by Berwick
could extricate his friends.
The melee died down; the full retreat had begun. It
had been impossible to prevent the complete forcing of
the river 5 but Berwick .and TyrconnePs cavalry had so
far saved the situation that the King's forces could retire
in order.
Douglas on the flank by Slane with more than ten
thousand men still stood impotently facing Lauzun,
James, and the considerable force which had been brought
up in rapidly succeeding detachments from the centre:
he had proved hesitating and sluggish, but at any moment
he might move.
There was no time now to be lost upon either side.
Douglas, seeing the main Jacobite force in full retreat,
now marched straight and rapidly for Duleek. Lauzun
marched parallel with him on the other side of the low
ground between them, making for the same point.
It was the defensive which won in that critical race.
It was at this hour that the one gun, which I have already
mentioned, was caught in the mud of the main road and
could not be saved.
A few stragglers fell out from James's retiring force,
but the main body covered the four miles to Duleek in
a steady column, and even as they reached it Berwick
and his horse back from Dronore drew up behind them
as a rearguard. The defile was saved, and the retreat con-
tinued with that screen of cavalry facing the now cautious
and perhaps exhausted bodies of William's cavalry which
headed the enemy advance.
At the end of the long July day the royal army was
261
JAMES THE SECOND
saved} it had lost some 1,500 men, over 21,000 were in
column and secure. It was not attacked in the night.
William had lost some 2,000 men, and the defence had
been so damaged that his large force was exhausted.
The legitimist army fell back upon the capital during
the following day, still in good order, and remained
intact for the furthering of the war.
The capital was lost, and James withdrew from it. It
was for him to decide whether he would remain in Ireland
with the army there left to meet its increasingly superior
foe, to assist at its last struggles and to fall with it, or
to pursue what he had always desired and had been
reluctantly compelled to postpone, an appeal to England.
^ He had long ago decided. He had a ship waiting for
him at Waterf ord, and he sailed for France from Kinsale
to prepare what he still thought the main affair: a crossing
of the Channel and a rising summoned for him in his
own realm of England.
Tourville and a French fleet had cleared the Channel.
The Dutch, allied with their Prince, had sent their ships
against him and had been defeated off Beachy Head.
The English Fleet under Russell had not engaged. It had
retired to the Thames, left the Dutch in the lurch and in
inferior numbers and so secured their defeat.
While the Irish armies still maintained the losing game
and held their enemy with decreasing power, James
planned what he believed would be the decisive move-
ment. Of the great men who had driven him from the
Throne by their treason, many were changing again, in
a new treason to their new master or servant the Prince
of Orange. Russell, the Admiral, was engaged in that
conspiracy; Churchill promised James support. Shrews-
buryin whose house the final plot against James had
262
DERRY AND THE BOYNE
been devised was entirely engaged in turning his coat;
Godolphin corresponded with the Queen.
When the large body of Irish soldiers in their last
defeat had obtained honourable terms and so many had
retired overseas, James believed that these, with a French
contingent, would form a nucleus for him sufficient to
turn the tide and to rally a rising to his side. To the num-
ber of 8,000 with their allies a force of 12,000 they
were gathered in the Contentin, and Louis XIV lent his
fleet to secure their passage. One half of the French naval
force was to come up from the Mediterranean and join
the other half in the Channel.
It was then that the last blow fell and that the King's
untiring efforts were ended for ever.
Those who watched called it c the finger of God', and
indeed so complete a set of coincidences one may rarely
meet in the human story. In full summer, heavy gales
from the west held half of Louis' fleet in the Mediter-
ranean. No junction could be effected. In the narrow seas
Tourville, with but half the total force, had orders to
attack the Dutch Fleet before the English could effect a
junction with it. He was just their match. Hardly had he
started when news came to hand that the English Fleet
under Russell who now betrayed for the third time
had joined the Dutch. Corvettes were sent out in desperate
haste to recall Tourville; they did not find him.
Pursuing his original orders, or perhaps because he
remembered the bkme given him for not following up
his victory the year before, Tourville engaged under odds
of two to one, off Barfleur. A mist prevented his de-
struction on the first day. He kept the desperate action
up through a second and a third. On the night of the
third most of his ships fell off and escaped to St. Malo
through the race of Alderney, where their enemies dared
not follow. The remaining thirteen, anchored under the
263
JAMES THE SECOND
insufficient batteries of The Hogue, right inshore, were
boarded and burnt by the British sailors under James's
eyes. The loss in ships was of little effect on Louis'
fortunes} it was not a tenth of his fleet in numbers, not
an eighth, in fire-powder. It was soon replaced.
But the defeat was the conclusion of James's active
life. He could hope no more. His throne was lost for ever.
There are two points to be curiously examined even
in this moment, when all is over.
Why did Russell who had promised to support James
fail to do so? Why did not the fleet which he com-
manded act as it had acted at Beachy Head and weaken
the Usurper? Russell was but a distant connexion of the
great family whose name he bore, and even had he been
its very head, most of these families were hesitating for a
restoration. Why did he betray?
Next: Was James's proclamation issued before his
intended crossing a cause of failure?
^As to Russell, historians have attempted to reconcile
his declarations with his actions, his double treason with
his quite straightforward fighting of the fleet at the head
of which he found himself. But a simple consideration of
what he did and said would seem to solve the difficulty.
Russell was playing the familiar game which nearly
all traitors have played throughout the ages, of keeping
open two^ doors for escape. He was not particularly con-
cerned with his professional pride as a sailor, but he was
very much concerned with being on the victor's side, who-
ever should turn out to be the victor. In a conversation of
which we have record, and which has every mark of being
authentic, he conveyed to an intimate what his real position
was. He would keep out of the way of James as much as
possible. He would give the French Fleet the opportunity
for escorting James's expedition and seeing it safely landed
264
DERRY AND THE BOYNE
on the English shores. He knew very well that if it were
so landed, the reaction in favour of James after those brief
months of Dutch rule would be explosive and he,
Russell, would find himself on the right side.
But he also knew that if he had orders to join the Dutch
Fleet, and if that junction was effected and action were
joined, no mortal could prevent in that case a plain ham-
mer-and-tongs fight. When the shots had begun, one side
or the other must conquer. There was no opportunity
for betraying in the midst of the battle, and apart from
that, it would have been the worst of policy to attempt it.
Perhaps up to the very moment when the fleets en-
gaged Russell was still prepared to take James's side. But
his captains would not have followed him; they were
professional men; when an enemy was to be fought, they
fought him. What decided Russell's final attitude was
the preponderance of strength which appeared upon the
day of the action. If Tourville had not engaged, he might
have shilly-shallied long enough to give James a second
chance. But Tourville chose to engage, against odds of
two to one, and having so engaged, it was impossible to
prevent the superior fleet from carrying out the action
to its inevitable conclusion.
As to James's declaration, after The Hogue, it made
no difference one way or the other. But to a student of his
character it is important. Was it one more injudicious
act, or was it justified?
This is what happened.
While making his preparations for the counter-invasion,
James issued a declaration which was of great length,
but the gist of which lay in three brief and simple pas-
sages. He was still determined upon toleration for the
Catholic and the Nonconformist; on that point he would
not budge. He knew, of course, what a risk it was to
265
JAMES THE SECOND
maintain his principles intact ; he preferred to maintain
them.
Next he offered a general pardon for the rebellion,
without looking too closely into the motives of the worst
actors therein. To this pardon he marked certain excep-
tions. He put down twenty-seven names of the more
prominent of the traitors 5 he added three of the seamen
who had outrageously misused him at Sheppey in his mis-
fortunes, and a general phrase reserving to himself the
right of bringing the rest of that lot to the punishment
which they richly deserved.
Thirdly, he announced it to be the duty of magistrates
and gaolers to release those who might be ordered to
prison by the usurping government and said, in effect,
that he would not pardon continued treason upon their
part in support of the clique who had seized his throne.
Of these three points of the declaration by far the
most important was the renewed affirmation of tolerance.
It was this which aroused the strongest antagonism in
those members of the governing classes who were now
turning again towards the support of the legitimate king.
It was because he would not budge in Ms matter that the
declaration did have a certain adverse effect when it ap-
peared in England.
As to the exceptions from pardon, many of them were
set in with the object of covering those who were really
working in aid of him 5 for instance, he exempts from
pardon Churchill, by name, yet at that very moment he
is depending upon Churchill as his chief support against
William. The list is not entirely composed of men whom
he would thus conceal from the vengeance of the new
masters they had given themselves, but it is more than
half composed of such names.
As for the assertion that it was the duty of magistrates
266
DERRY AND THE BOYNE
and of the officials of the law to support the legitimate
cause, it was so obvious that it hardly needed reiterating.
James in this declaration (which was drawn up by
Herbert, not by Melfort) acted as he had acted through-
out his whole life far too straightforwardly for the
management of men. He desired that when he should be
victorious, when the double traitors who had promised
him their aid should have brought him back again, when
the English people had welcomed him as they certainly
would have welcomed him in a second Restoration, no
one could accuse him of having laid traps and having
punished men unwarned, however wicked. The contrast
is absolute here between what James did in preparation
for his counter-invasion to recover his legitimate rights
and what William had done in his first Dutch invasion
to cozen and to oust the true king. William, it will be
remembered (and his advisers), lied and forged steadily
from the first declaration in Holland that they had no
intention of seizing the English Crown to the final repudi-
ation of their pledge in the Treaty of Limerick. You
cannot, perhaps, put your finger on one single declaration
that these men or their leader made which did not de-
ceive its victims and was not intended to deceive its
victims. James, by the form of his declaration, as Herbert
has drawn it up, clearly showed that he repudiated such
methods, and adopted their opposite: that he would give
fair warning, saying the most he intended to do, and keep-
ing his honour clean.
And yet he was wrong, if we are considering the gov-
ernance of men. For without duplicity the governance of
men in great bodies and in moments of conflicting opinions
is impossible. But if he was considering not so much the
governance of men or even his material success as the
maintenance of his own honour and the salvation of his
soul, then he was right.
IX
THE END
THE loss of the thirteen ships at The Hogue, the
flight of the rest, was the end of James's active
effort to recover the throne. He was just on 60, had nine
more years to live.
During five of these the ultimate political chance still
lay in the balance, though very doubtfully. They were
marked by little that could affect James's mind.
Two years after The Hogue his daughter Mary died.
With his love of his children he may have felt a pang;
but there was little to mourn. It may be doubted if any
human being felt a void at her passing, unless it were
William. She had been a sort of cold companion to his
morose, barren, and perverted life; and it is touching to
read that his unpleasing indifference to women did not
prevent his keeping a memorial of her: a locket with her
hair. After all, through her he had achieved that ambition
in the pursuit of which he had passed through every
moral degradation of falsehood, forging, and hypocrisy.
Moreover, with Mary dead, he was alone among the great
nobles who had set him up and made him feel at every
turn the ignominy of his false title: alone, save for the
too dose companionship of his minions, the elderly Ben-
tinck, inherited from a long dead youth: the young Kep-
pel, more pleasing to age. Yet even in that companionship
there was a flaw, for the two were jealous one of the other:
the now elderly Dutchman of good birth, still serviceable
but no longer of the same attraction; the young Dutch
268
THE END
beauty of no birth at all, loaded with the spoils of the
loyal and the defeated.
Three years after Mary's death, in 1697, her father's
claim, in practice long lost, was ended in a formal docu-
ment. The general peace whereby Louis XIV concluded
the last long phase but one of his continued wars included,
as regarding his negotiations with William, the Treaty
of Ryswick.
The loss or gain to France or to the Dutch (for the
English had no lot in the affair, and were merely used as
pawns by their new King) do not concern us. All that
concerns us in the settlement which Boufflers and Bentinck
arrived at is the manner in which it affected James II:
and that turns upon three matters, all in the much-con-
tested opening clause.
(1) The recognition of William III as King of Eng-
land.
(2) The payment of her jointure, hitherto pocketed
by William and his favourites (50,000 crowns a year),
to the Queen of England, James's wife, Mary of Modena.
(3) The recognition of James's son as William's heir.
I will take these in order.
1. All that Louis XIV consented to in the matter of
recognizing William, was an open promise that he would
not abet any effort in the future to deprive William of his
acquired position.
The thing was gone into in great detail: every word
weighed; that was the final result. Louis did not recog-
nize William III as legitimate King of England, but he
promised for the future not to enter into alliance with
those, nor to aid those, who were trying to prevent the
continuance of William's being King de facto\ King de
jure he could never be, either in Louis XIV's mind, or in
his own, or in anybody else's.
2. On the second point we have one of the worst
269
JAMES THE SECOND
examples in that great series of betrayals, falsehoods, and
thefts, which make up the story of the Dutch invasion
and of the Revolution.
William was anxious intensely anxious to get the
Treaty through. He and those about him knew that one
necessary condition of success was that the robbery of
James IPs Queen, Mary of Modena, should not continue.
This annual income of fifty thousand was her own private
property: nothing could excuse the theft of it. Had Wil-
liam or his emissary boldly refused to pay this money,
had they kept it without excuse or apology, for their
own advantage, they would have cut a less sorry figure
with posterity. But to act thus straightforwardly was not
in the man's nature. It was still less in the nature of those
who had betrayed their last king to let- him in, and then
done their best to betray him in turn. Further, with that
clique money was the chief consideration of life, and al-
most the only one 5 whereas it is only fair to William
to admit that his hatreds, his ambition, and his peculiar
ideas of pleasure, were more to him than financial profit.
The Treaty had to be got through: it was urgent,
it was pressing. The terms were far better for William
than, in their hearts, he and his intimate and negotiator
had expected j therefore the promise was given to fay
back her money to the Queen. But mark in what form
that promise was made! The promise was to pay that
'to which she was legally entitled'. The word 'legally'
was specially used to bamboozle the more honourable
negotiators. And it succeeded. No one can doubt that if
by the word 'legally' we mean 'of right' or 'lawfully',
the money was simply Mary of Modena's property, and
to keep it back from her for the advantage of
the usurper and his friends, native and foreign,
was plain theft. But the word 'legally' might also
mean 'by the decision of a court of justice' or of a
270
THE END
lawyer, without specifying what court of justice or what
lawyer. They knew very well what the decision of their
own lawyers would be. The money was never paid.
3. There is no doubt that William III, being childless
and with no prospect of having a child (for in his case
indeed could be affirmed what was a falsehood in the
case of his rival, and any child purporting to be his would
certainly be supposition), admitted the principle that
James IPs boy (he was now 9 years of age) should
succeed ^him upon the English throne. But he only ad-
mitted it upon the condition that the child should be
brought up a Protestant. It was sound policy upon the
part of the Prince of Orange.
For the student of James IPs character the interest
of this third point lies, of course, in the fact that he would
not for one moment have accepted the turning of his son
into renegade, nor would the boy's mother. He had given
up everything for the Faith. It was not in him in these
last days, when he had nothing more to lose, to exchange
the eternal for the temporal.
The Treaty as a whole James met with a fine dignity.
He showed both justice and gratitude when he said that
the King of France had first of all to consider the good
of his own people and of his realm. He might have
added that if this realm were so exhausted and this
people so drained in blood and wealth that further war
would have been a crime, then peace even at great sacri-
fice was necessary. It may be debated how great the sacri-
fice^ was. Vauban in his famous letter to Racine was most
indignant. But then Vauban was a soldier and an engineer
a very great one; but not a statesman.
At any rate, the Treaty, whether wise or unwise, from
the point of view of Louis XIV, a success or a failure
from the point of view of William III and his intimates,
matters not to our subject. James saw it quite rightly
271
JAMES THE SECOND
as the foreign act of a prince not responsible for the rights
of England or her national dynasty, and of the many
proofs in his career of sound discrimination in close moral
points, of distinction between justice and advantage, this
admission of his was perhaps the noblest.
He said also in connexion with it a very fine thing:
that one more necessary disappointment of his hopes
meant little to him because Fate had from his earliest years
c inured him to contradiction'.
With the Treaty of Ryswick his hope or opportunity
of any reversal in this world's evil fortunes was at an end.
But in- his own heart it had been at an end long since. He
had engaged himself long since upon matters of greater
moment than the Crowns of England, Scotland and Ire-
land.
For those last years of James were occupied in a spiritual
contemplation so noble, so profound, that it is no wonder
it is ignored or ridiculed. His whole being burnt and was
purified in repentance and in the love of God, in sacrifice
willingly made, in self-abasement before the Divine, in
humility and therefore (unperceived as yet by himself)
in glory.
He has left of that last passage memorials 1 in his
own hand that are among the most moving in the great
assembly of worship and praise with which the story of
Christendom is filled. He was though he knew it not
reaping the reward: the reward of a constancy to the
Faith^ which had begun with none to help or persuade
him, in that isolation of soul which was his bitter doom,
of a loyalty in service which was so strangely maintained
through years of sensual licence and vagary with women
neither loving nor loved, through continuous unbridling
i They have been privately reprinted for the Roxburghe Club by Lord
Derby, from which text I quote, and to whom I must tender my thanks
for giving me the book.
272
THE END
of the^ flesh, relieving the body, never relieving that soul
from its dreadful loneliness. It was a reward for that
temper in which he had written, 1 during the most fiery
of his trials, in the midst of the Popish Plot, with his
greatness seemingly ruined: 'It occasion were, I hope that
God would give me grace to suffer death for the true
Catholic Religion, as well as Banishment 3 .
^ I know not where to begin in that fine body of secret,
sincere expression to God from that soul.
( I abhor and detest myself for having so often offended so gracious and
merciful a God, and having lived so many years in almost a perpetual
course of sin, not only in my youth when I was carried away with the
heat of it, and ill example, but even after when I was come to years of
more discretion, and that thou hadst been pleased to have called me from
the Pit of Heresy, to have opened my eyes to have known and entered
thy true religion, to have covered my head so often in the day of Battle,
delivered me so many times from the dangers of the Sea and noise of its
waves.
'The noise of its waves. . . .' He had braved them
all of every kind.
Then again, there was found in the fragments of his
papers this touching thing, a writing out of the words
of Our Lord from the memory of a French Gospel
Book and how pathetic is the misspelling!
c Si quel cu'um veut venir apres moy, qu'il renonce
a soy mesme, qu'il porte sa croix, et qu'il me suive.'
Let me, even in so brief a study, quote one more
extract. I translate it from the French version published
in the mid-eighteenth century. The original (I presume)
was written like most of his devotions in English, but at
the French Revolution the greater part of that manuscript
perished.
C I am fixed that the longer I live in this world, the more do I hazard
my eternal salvation, and that I cannot be in safety till I am freed of
this contemptible body and united with you, O my God! Lord, when will
that happy day arrive when I shall taste the vision of Beatitude and be
1 In his letter to George Legge: 12/22 July 1679.
JAMES THE SECOND
one with the Saints who praise and will praise you for ever? It will be
at your good time, my God 5 but Lord, delay not long.'
The memorial he left for his son should he reign, the
guide for a prince of England, is a proof of his sincerity
as of his steadfastness in the Principles for which he had
lived and which he carried with him to this end unchanged.
'Keep your kingly right. But disturb not your subjects
in their goods or in their religion. Neither can a king
be happy if his people be ill at ease, nor a people if their
king be constrained, for he cannot then protect and defend.
. . . Do all to establish freedom of conscience by some
(fundamental) law. Whatever persuasions men use, never
abandon that task till you have achieved it. It is the Grace
of God that gives the Faith, and men are to be gained by
goodness, and example and teaching, not by fear . . .
wage no aggressive war. . . .'
Conspicuous in this advice is the right to guide him,
should he become King of England: 'Preserve the mastery
of the sea?,
In the very days when that class in England which
had destroyed the monarchy were voting in their parlia-
ment the rejection of every Catholic heir, James suffered
his first stroke. It was 1701. He was already in his sixty-
eighth year. He spat blood. They sent him to the waters
in the Bourbonnais (where all those years ago he had
sent Berwick's mother^ ^Arabella how he must have re-
membered !^~They"somewhaFrelieved him but not for
long. On Friday, September the 2nd, after a troubled
night, he fell faint at Mass in his chapel of the Palace
at St. Germans, and lost consciousness as the Queen, with
a tenderness whidi had come on her in these years of his
dereliction, helped him to his room. He was put to bed.
On the Sunday they knew that he was dying. He knew it
too. He made his general confession, and was so weakened
274
THE END
that he again lost much blood and they feared his pass-
ing.
But he lingered. They brought his boy, the Prince of
Wales, whom he blessed. When they would have taken
the child away he clung to his father and James bade them
let him be; and turning to him again said, 'Keep the Faith
against all things and all men!' He had done so indeed.
Also he blessed the last little daughter, 9 years old
<The Consolation'.
As the King lay dying, Louis called, in the Palace of
Marly, within a half-hour's ride of St. Germans, a council
of some moment. It was to decide whether upon James's
death the boy his son should be publicly recognized as
King of England, and officially so proclaimed by the
French King. The best judgments have debated the mat-
ter, and are debating it still. In that same council the
Princes of the Blood and Louis himself decided for the
course of honour; all the Ministers were for the course
of policy. The main argument against publicly recognizing
James III was that William would not long last out. He"
had not the physique of the man whom by intrigue he
had supplanted. The small body was breaking up. His
legs were swollen. He could only crawl with difficulty in
and out of his carriage. He was bent and twisted, and it
was manifest that death was upon him. 'The little fellow
in black velvet' (as loyal men called, in their toasts, the
mole which caused his horse to stumble and threw its
rider out of the saddle) did but hasten an event in any
case due I mean the sending of William to his account.
Hence the main political argument against Louis' rec-
ognizing the Heir to England. It is always well to buy
in the cheapest market, to avoid all unnecessary friction,
never to raise an unnecessary difficulty, to let sleeping
dogs lie. William's end was near. There was the boy, safe
275
JAMES THE SECOND
under Louis' protection. There might he remain. Louis'
pledge of non-interference had not been given to Anne
or her husband, but only to William as an individual, and
when William was gone to explain himself in another
place, it would be time to emphasize the claims of James
III. Meanwhile public recognition would effect nothing.
It was an empty form. It would look like a foreign power's
interfering with the affairs of England (already a strong
argument on the side of the Usurper) and it would rally
to a man who was now supported by but a fraction of the
English nation a much larger number of the doubtful
who were ready to decide of themselves and freely in
favour of the rightful line, but not to accept that line
from the foreigner,
It was one thing to be ardent, as a large proportion
of Englishmen had been, for James II 5 it was one thing
to be at least in favour, as the majority of Englishmen
certainly were, for the rightful blood so long as James
II (who had been their king, who had fought for them
with such valour, worked so hard in their administration,
and had shown the national character of tenacity so
strongly) was alive to continue his claim even though
that claim were being advanced from a foreign place of
exile. It was another thing to rally to his son, whom they
had never known. And if such adhesion were to take place,
better work for it by spontaneous, or apparently spon-
taneous, means than proclaim support of the claimant in a
moment when that support could not possibly come into
effect.
These arguments have convinced the general sense (if
one may so call it) of history. Just as the general sense of
history condemns the revocation of the Edict of Nantes,
so it condemns this other act of Louis XIV: his immediate
recognition of James III after his father's death. I do
not say that that verdict is to be reversed, probably upon
276
THE END
the whole it is sound. Everything being considered
though no man could tell the future, and though we must
always remember that a decision taken in the past is taken
in ignorance of what we later know has to happen it
would have been wiser upon the part of Louis to have
postponed the recognition of the true heir until William's
death.
But we must not imagine that nothing but a sense of
honour, or of pride, or a desire for consistency, moved
that great man when he decided openly to support the
claim of the family over which he had thrown his power-
ful shield. There is also something to be said for the
policy. Had James III not been recognized openly, then
upon William's death a new agitation would be required.
Could it be organized in time? The possession of the
governing machine is half the political battle. Would not
those who possessed the governing machine in England
have been able to organize full resistance against a boy
of whom it might be said that even his strongest sup-
porter had not admitted his claim? Was it not better that
the voice of Europe, as it were, or at least the chief voice
in Europe, had told the plain truth and had said that this
child was rightful king? Would not such a recognition
lead to continued debate, at least, upon his rights, and
therefore, later, to actual kingship? I mean, not a debate
in Parliament, but in the conversations of men? Would
not an apparent abandonment of the lad just where sup-
port was most expected, have been interpreted as the com-
plete collapse of the Stuart cause?
It may be so: at any rate, I am convinced that all these
arguments weighed upon the mind of such a man as
Louis more than those important as they are to all men
of honour or even of -consistency.
As for the talk that he was swayed in the matter by his
wife, or at any rate unduly swayed, and mainly determined
277
JAMES THE SECOND
by her, I think that those who make it (and many con-
temporaries did) understand neither him nor her.
Perhaps the best, as it is one of the latest, studies upon
this dominant figure in the story of Europe is that of
Louis Bertrand. His conclusion is that to which I think
sober reflection will lead most men. Louis depended upon
Madame de Maintenon for the happiness of his old age;
he respected her judgment, and he was right to respect it.
He was grateful to her, and there he was doubly right.
But it was not in the character of the man who had taken
so many great decisions, whose lucidity of thought and
whose firmness of judgment were not only unimpaired
but increased as the years proceeded, to have been decided
in so capital a point of policy by the whim or chance
pleading even of the woman to whom he very properly
allowed so much. She had paid her respects to the lad's
mother, as was only decent at such a moment, and of
course Mary of Modena had then desired her son to be
recognized. It is likely enough, or certain, that Madame
de Maintenon agreed. Why should she not? She was of
a strong and generous temper, and the public abandon-
ment of the true heir, even for great political purposes,
would have run counter to a character of that high kind.
But whatever she said or did not say, thought or did
not think, Louis did not decide mainly through her in-
fluence. He never did. He recognized James III because,
all things considered the prestige of his throne, his duty
(and Louis XIV never neglected that), his honour (and
to this he was perhaps even more attached), most of all,
upon balance, his policy decided in favour.
Therefore it was that the great King came into his
dying cousin's room and announced his decision: there-
fore it was that James's last recognizable words (so far
as we know) on earth were whispered murmurings of
gratitude, and that the loyal English and Scotch exiles,
278
THE END
falling upon their knees, acclaimed the firmness and
grandeur of the Bourbon j therefore it was that when the
last thing had happened and the wearied sacrificial man
had gone from expiation to his reward, the blare of trum-
pets was heard in the court of St. Germans, before there
was any mourning, and James III of England was pro-
claimed.
Well, after all, to-day, seeing what happened, we can-
not regret it. Indeed, a man even a man at the head of a
state rarely has to regret doing right. The Stuarts were
not to be restored. The English popular monarchy had
long been doomed. But when men or things have to die
it is as well to die nobly, and it has been greatly said,
'Death for death 5 better the death of Athens than the
death of Corinth.'
But before there was need for this the Viaticum had
come. The Priest, entering the death-chamber, held up
the Blessed Sacrament asking, 'Do you believe Jesus Christ
to be really and substantially present in this Host?' To
which the King was heard to answer, fervently, with
ardour, gazing on That for which he had given the three
crowns and all his House:
C I do believe it. I believe it with all my heart.'
NOTE I
ON THE NUMERICAL SITUATION
OF CATHOLICISM IN ENGLAND
DURING THE ATTEMPT AT
TOLERATION UNDER JAMES II
THE phrase 'Number of Catholics' (as applied to
England in 1685-88) is misleading, because there
was no 'Catholic body' in our modern sense: that is, there
was no distinct society of men and women more or less
regularly practicing their religion and separate from a non-
Catholic world around them.
The Catholicism of England in 1685-88 was essen-
tially the large surviving fragment of a general social
habit which had been almost universal a century before
the Restoration, which half England still retained eighty
years before James's own accession, of which there was
everywhere a lively memory and with which there was
everywhere considerable familiarity through the presence
all over the kingdom of numerous Catholic landed gentle-
men with their Catholic tenants, villages and households
and as numerous Catholic trading and working-class
families in the towns.
Moreover, the line of demarcation between the Cath-
olic and non-Catholic was not the strict thing it is to-day.
Very often a man would avow Catholicism before (ap-
parently) any formal act of conversion. Conversely men
would abandon Catholicism and show their abandonment
of it by no more than taking part in the services of the
Established Church. There was a very large 'floating
belt' of neutrals and sympathizers: people who respected
280
NOTE I
the recent memory of actively Catholic parents or the
devotion of near relatives j many others who leant towards
Catholicism somewhat but were not so moved as to em-
phasize their attitude j many others who would have pro-
claimed themselves Catholic in favourable circumstances
perhaps after some delay but not prepared to trouble
much about the affair and prepared to run no incon-
venience $ many others whose family traditions had been
Catholic within a life-time but who had themselves drifted
inertly with the increasing Protestantism of the mid-seven-
teenth century.
On the other hand, all Government and official organi-
zation was violently anti-Catholic. Only very rarely could
any one hear Mass a regular Catholic education was
almost impossible for the bulk of families and the regular
practice of religion (which we take for granted to-day)
was utterly impossible to all but a very few. To admit
Catholicism publicly and to be known openly as a Cath-
olic was to submit to heavy loss, occasional grave peril and
every sort of daily inconvenience: it was prohibition to
many activities and a heavy handicap in the rest. A man
advertising himself as a Catholic before 1685 was deliber-
ately incurring grievous hardship and helping to ruin the
chances of his children.
Therefore, if we take as our basis the numbers of those
who did so sacrifice themselves, and who, in the face of
such suffering, continued the old tradition violently and
continuously persecuted for a century and a quarter we
are reckoning no more than a nucleus: the numbers of
those consenting to run such risks and to submit continu-
ally to oppression was perhaps half the total of all sym-
pathizers.
What was the nucleus? What proportion of the English
people was avowedly and publicly Catholic under persecu-
tion in the generation before the Revolution?
281
JAMES THE SECOND
We have no exact statistics. It was not an age of
statistics. The only written figures happen to be, unfortu-
nately, in a form which renders them not only worthless
but ridiculous. Danby, desiring to convince Charles II that
toleration was unnecessary because non-conformity (and
papistry) were of small numbers, asked the bishops to
back him up and send in figures to that effect. But the
result was a farce. Hampshire, Wiltshire, Somerset, Dor-
set, for instance, were set down as having not three adults
in a hundred Nonconformists, while for the Papists of all
the Provinces of Canterbury (four-fifths of England at
least in population) one worthy bishop sends in to Danby,
'jotted on the back of two playing-cards,' the figure
11,000. Barely a third of active London Catholics alone.
This, then, may be neglected. But though we have no
direct evidence we have what is most valuable in all such
cases, a number of converging pieces of indirect evidence.
That is, we have a number of quite independent facts
which, when they are compared, all point to the same
result. These I will tabulate, beginning with the most
vague and proceeding to the more particular.
(1) We have the estimate of the beginning of the
century that then some half of the people were more or
less on the Catholic side.
(2) Some forty years later and more, of five hundred
officers killed on Charles's side in the civil wars over one-
third were avowedly Catholic (the Cromwellian phrase
c a papist army'). That points to a fifth or more of their
class as a whole, to which most of the officers of the other
side also belonged.
There is a rate of decline showing itself, and
(3) Louis XIV writes, a lifetime later still, of James
foolishly, supporting the cause of those who were but
c a tenth 3 of his country. There, as we shall see, he is giving
282
NOTE I
but a vague impression and specially emphasizing the
smallness of the number. He was wrong, as we shall see;
but I quote him to show that even a foreigner arguing
against Catholic numbers at the end of the seventeenth
century put them as high as i in 10.
(4) In 1676-78 two men give us two interesting judg-
ments which, though quite vague, confirm each other
remarkably.
Coleman, an intense Catholic (hanged, drawn and
quartered in the Popish Plot), regards the Catholics as
a body strong enough to serve as a basis for converting the
country and estimates those who would actively oppose
them at no more than a third of the people.
Meres, of the exactly contrary faction, an anti-Catholic
enthusiast, speaking a little later in the House of Com-
mons, says that in the event of a Catholic movement only
a third would actively oppose. He also speaks of the very
large number of Catholics, and the state of public opinion
during the Popish Plot agitation i.e. in 1678-80 clearly
shows how large this Catholic body was. True, that opinion
was frenzied and unbalanced, but the panic is at least
evidence of a very considerable body of Catholics.
(5) Out of 140 lay peers at least 30 are reputed Cath-
olic when the exclusion of papist peers was resolved.
Twenty-three are named. Of these, 20 actually prefer an
open avowal of Catholicism to their political places in the
House of Lords. Say, one-fifth reputed, one-sixth named,
one-seventh sacrificing.
(6) When an inquiry is made in the middle of James
IPs reign to find out how many country gentlemen will
support toleration, about one-third are found in that
category. Now, whenever (as sometimes happens in the
surviving fragments of the inquiry) religion is mentioned,
we find that half those in favour of toleration, that is one-
sixth of the whole, are openly and admittedly Catholics
283
JAMES THE SECOND
(e.g. Staffordshire: 9 out of 47$ Hampshire, u out of
685 but Essex only 8 out of 57. Bucks: Catholics not
given, but 40 per cent for toleration and so on).
Here then we have two classes of evidence.
(0) (Very vague.) The evidence of general impres-
sions in 1676-88, which has a minimum of one-tenth
(from a foreign source), a maximum of the vague phrase
'very large' (from opposed close observers at home), and
a further estimate that only about a third of the people
are so anti-Catholic as to rise actively in favour of per-
secution.
(b} (More particular.) A rate of from about one-half
in 1600 to about one-fifth (or rather more) of the gentry
in the middle of the century, and one-sixth to one-seventh
of the gentry thirty years later.
The particular evidence relates only to the gentry. But
it must be remembered that though the well-to-do had
greater opportunities for private education, yet on them
fell the main burden of the persecution. The enormous
fines pressed them to apostatize in a fashion which the
poorer Catholics did not feel or, at least, not con-
tinuously. Moreover, the lay lords had trebled in number
since the Reformation and the new creations had all been
made by persecuting governments. Further, unlike modern
times, the proportions in the gentry are a good index in
the seventeenth century to total population, for their
territorial influence was supreme and a man's tenants and
great household and 'local towns were all influenced by
him. Even to-day the very few survivals of continuous
Catholic villages with their squires in the north remain
as evidence to what a large Catholic body of squires and
peers meant when all were territorial and when the great
mass of England was agricultural.
But if these considerations, with only statistics of the
gentry to support them, be insuificient for more than a
284
NOTE I
rough conclusion, we have one further piece of evidence
which approximates to precision. It is most valuable, and
is as follows:
(7) In 1696 London, rebuilt, with a very largely ex-
panded trade and a flood of new population, counted half
a million souls.
In 1678, with the Plague only thirteen years over and
the Great Fire twelve, London, as yet but partly rebuilt,
may have had 300,000: probably less. By the contemporary
map showing the proportion of burnt area to unburnt it
should have far less. For the burnt area was the most
densely inhabited, it left 75,000 people homeless, and
the area not burnt is certainly much less than three times
the burnt part.
However, call it at a maximum 300,000. Well, in that
year, 1678, just on 30,000 people left London under an
order expelling those who confessed Catholicism. That is,
at least one-tenth of the population exiled themselves
under conditions of extreme danger rather than keep silent
on their faith or make an outward show of conformity. No
one will believe that this number covers all those who
were Catholics, and to call the full proportion one-eighth,
at least, instead of one-tenth, is reasonable.
One may sum up and say: In the years of the experi-
ments in toleration, pursued tentatively by Charles II,
actively by James II, from one-sixth to one-seventh of the
gentry were still openly and avowedly Catholic, and
presumably with them their social adherents throughout
the nation: of London one-eighth or more; and presum-
ably of the general population some such proportion of
between I2j^ and 15 per cent. How widely may have
extended, over and above these, the belt of those more
or less in sympathy with Catholicism, there can, in the
nature of things, be no numerical evidence. Our general
285
JAMES THE SECOND
knowledge of the proportion between those who resist and
those who yield to persecution and terror, coupled with
the numerous conversions appearing when these were re-
laxed, and the fear this relaxation caused in their oppo-
nents, are our only guides.
NOTE II
CONSULTATION OF THE
COUNTIES AND BOROUGHS,
LATE 1687
IN LATE 1687, as we have seen, James wished to test
the probable results of summoning a new Parliament.
Parliament meant, principally, of course, the great terri-
torials, the great landed lords, their following of lesser
squires and their ultimate tail of freeholders under the
lesser squires. It also meant the burgesses from a great
number of towns: a number by this time fixed so that
the Crown could not (as it still could do while there was
some vestige of real power about it) increase. James was
compelled to summon the so-called members from the
completely fantastic 'towns' (like Old Sarum, where
there may have been a dozen voters in his time, but which
was a desert at the time of the Reform Bill) j or from
Gatton near Reigate, where the electors were once a
doctor, a squire, and one other man.
The towns were not quite so much under the domi-
nation of the great territorial lords as the countrysides.
They were heavily under such domination, but not entirely
so. The county representation was simply a matter of these
big landowners.
The King ordered a minute and private examination
of the territorial interests, to find out how they stood: to
find out how these owners of the peasantry and domi-
neerers of the towns would act if he were to summon a
new Parliament. And he went at it statistically by a ques-
tionnaire.
287
JAMES THE SECOND
The questions he asked to have thus privately put
were three.
(1) How would these big landed people vote upon the
question of toleration if summoned to Parliament?
(2) What support would they give to a candidate who
should support toleration?
(3) (A really futile question seeing the conditions
were virtually those of war between popular monarchy
and a rich oligarchy.) Would they live friendly and
peaceably with their dissenting or non-conforming neigh-
bours?'
This set of questions was to be applied to the counties:
the boroughs he asked his commissioners to report upon
individually. How each borough corporation stood towards
toleration. What kind of members they were likely to
return, and why.
In our histories the general remark is made that the
returns frightened him into not accepting a Parliament.
But those returns have never yet, to my knowledge, been
analysed. I do not pretend to give here in this brief note
a full analysis but only to give the general results in the
records of nineteen counties which have been preserved.
We will begin with the boroughs and we will also
begin by remembering that in spite of the vast com-
plexity of borough representation, that representation was
roughly of three kinds.
(i) It was representation of a considerable body (often
from one or two to as many as three or four hundred
occasionally even more), something that might fairly be
argued as testing general opinion of householders. This
was in quite a small minority of boroughs. (2) It was a
mere corporation vote, meaning a handful of the richer
men of the place. (3) It was the nomination of a local
rich man (e.g. Lord Bedford puts in his son for Tavistock.
288
NOTE II
Salisbury puts in his for Old Sarum and so on for dozens
of instances).
Now we find on looking down the boroughs of Berk-
shire, Buckinghamshire, Essex, Staffordshire, Yorkshire,
Wiltshire, Kent, Sussex, Somerset, Devonshire, Hamp-
shire, the following state of affairs.
It is reported to James that fifty-six boroughs are safe.
It is particularly to be noted that when there is a doubt
whether their members will accept the policy of toleration
or not, the opinion depends a great deal (a) upon the
number of dissenters, who are normally favourable to
toleration; () upon whether the representation is under
the thumb of a local rich man; (c) as to whether it is in
the hands of a corporation, i.e. of the clique of local rich
men of the commercial rather than the territorial sort
(but the commercial men were dependent upon the terri-
torial in these little towns).
Here we have our number 56 for the favourable. Now
let us turn to the doubtful. We have 14 only, and of these
14, 3 are marked 'doubtful but hopeful', 2 are marked
'will require management', i is marked as dependent upon
the influence of two men strong in the locality and opposed
to the King, and one other (this is very significant) is
safe for toleration because a big rich man, 'a friend of the
King', can do what he likes there.
Now let us examine in this list, which I admit to be
only a set of samples, but which I think is fairly char-
acteristic, being spread over wide areas and including a
large number of counties, the adverse boroughs. We have
here twelve only, and of these twelve six are frankly put
down as solely depending upon the very rich men in their
neighbourhood who are opposed to the Crown. To this list
must be added half a dozen on which the reports are
given, c Wholly mercenary: will vote as they are paid',
289
JAMES THE SECOND
or, as in the case of Cambridge, 'Wholly dependent upon
the University, which is adverse'.
I know not what the results would be for the complete
analysis of the whole kingdom, and perhaps the materials
for it are no longer available. But at any rate here are
surviving fragments fairly representative, and the con-
clusion to be drawn from them is unmistakable.
(1) What James had to fear even in the case of the
borough representation, was the organized wealthy class,
especially in the form of (0) the big landowners, and also
() the corrupt little oligarchies of commercial men in the
local towns.
(2) Wherever there was a large body of dissenters he
was safe. The dissenting body as a whole was in favour
of toleration. I know it is the fashion to-day even for
dissenters to praise their remote ancestry for refusing
toleration rather than admit the freedom of Catholics to
civic life. But that is a calumny on the English dis-
senters. For instance, where there were many voters
and where John Bunyan had most power, the principle
of toleration was safe; and no wonder, after what they
had suffered. That the same was true of Penn we all know.
This particular instance, however, was not so valuable as
the general conclusion of the inquiries, that, wherever
there was a sufficient dissenting population (all over
England in the towns there were great bodies of these,
often a large majority) this new principle of toleration
was safe.
(3) Where the policy of toleration was strongly
opposed there is naturally always a close corporation of
local rich men with the power of sending members to
Parliament, and in order to secure representatives in
favour of toleration James is asked to change the old
charters and substitute others.
With such a clearly preponderant tide in his favour
290
NOTE II
so far as boroughs are concerned (and on that there can
be no doubt in the mind of a man who carefully reads
the figures), why was it still impolitic (if impolitic it were)
to call a Parliament? The Parliament did not mean and
could not mean the vote of a popular majority. It was at
the best, even when James should have broken up the
corrupt oligarchies of the local corporations, an appeal
to a small minority of the nation, and to a minority under
the control of a few.
Still it would seem upon reading this list of the repre-
sentative boroughs that according to our modern ideas
he could safely have gone ahead, summoned his Parlia-
ment, and made toleration what we should call to-day the
chief 'plank' in his 'platform'.
To answer that let us turn to the counties, and there
indeed we get our answer, for the counties mean the
squires who dominated the life of England.
Our remaining statistics cover nineteen counties. The
answers were generally given entirely in favour, or en-
tirely against, or doubtful. We get in favour of abolition
among these country gentlemen so sounded 336 replies.
But we get of point-blank refusals very nearly the same
number. It must be remembered that here the inquiry
was not undertaken in the form of judgment by the in-
quirers on how the squires would act, but by plain c yes'
or f no' addressed to the squires themselves; therefore
the real number of potential refusals was much larger.
There are certainly in the case of these selected counties,
on which alone I have direct evidence, a majority of
squires openly against toleration. A very large number,
without committing themselves, are clearly opposed to
the idea of allowing the Catholics to live as fellow citizens.
The total number of these doubtf uls who hedged or who
absented themselves, or who put in clauses which clearly
show that they are opposed to toleration, is over 400*
291
JAMES THE SECOND
The squires then rather than the boroughs were op-
posed to toleration, and that is what turned the scale.
More than two-thirds of them would have refused to
help the new policy, and it is remarkable that nearly one-
third of them had the boldness to reject it altogether.
In the denial of civic rights to Catholics they were pre-
pared under their own hands to stand out against the
Crown, and of course the main body of their colleagues
were with them. It was this which determined James not
to summon them again to share his power in the immediate
future. It is particularly worth remarking that a num-
ber of them, notably in the county of Devon, stuck to a
formula upon which they had obviously previously agreed,
and the exact wording is also worthy of remembrance:
'They follow Sir Edward Seymour in declaring them-
selves doubtful to the first and second questions till it be
debated in Parliament how religion by law established
may be otherwise secure; but they will help 'elect only
such men as they either know or believe loyal subjects
who will both faithfully serve His Majesty in all things
with security to our said religion.' In other words, they
would have no truck with abolition of the Test Act.
NOTE III
ON THE BATTLE OF THE BOYNE
IT is described in the text how the Battle of the Boyne
was no decision and, as a military operation, a failure
on the part of the offensive. But why was it fought at
all against such a crushing superiority of men and guns?
Why was not the retreat continued southwards and west-
wards until the cost of William's lengthening line of
communications should have restored something nearer
to equality between the two forces?
The cause of that strategical error was one frequently
appearing in the history of war and notorious as lately
as in 1914: political motive interfering with military.
The Boyne was fought because James hesitated to uncover
the capital. He had to uncover it sooner or later, so the
decision was unwise; but this fear of the moral effect
of letting the enemy occupy territory unopposed, even
when it is politically justified, is a source of military
weakness. It is also possible that James's staff had insuffi-
cient information of the enemy's superiority. It looks like
that, when one reads the French complaints (and his own)
against what was in reality a respectable effort by half-
trained infantry against overwhelming odds and under
crushing artillery fire to which there could be no reply.
INDEX
ADMIRALTY, THE, 81 ff., 152
Anne, Princess (afterwards Queen),
25> 79> !22, 155, 156, 166, 195,
2O7, 22O, 221, 222, 226
Argyll, Archibald, 9th Earl of, 181,
182, 183
Arlington, Sir Henry Bennet, Earl
of. 136* i37> 142, 149
Ashley, Anthony. See Shaftesbury,
Earl of
Augsburg, League of, 214
BARILLON, PAUL, 175, 241
Bath and Wells, Bishop of, 210
Bedford, family of, 153
Belcastel, General, 260
Berwick, James Fitzj.ames, Duke of,
235* 256, 260, 261
Boyle, Mr., 97, 102
Boyne, Battle of the, 228 F.
Breda, Peace of, 116
Bristol, George Digby, Earl of, 53,
note i6z
Brouncker, Henry, Lord, 99, 100
Buckingham, George Villiers, 2nd
Duke of, 136, 142, 158
Burnet, Dr. Gilbert, 133, 216, 218
CAILLEMOTTE, GENERAL, 260
Carlisle, Lord, 53
Catherine of Braganza, m, 131,
I33> 184
Catholicism, in England, 48, 108,
112, 120 ff., 139 if., 190 ff., 203,
280
Charles I, note 37, 38, 69, 8a, 83
Charles II, 22, 23, 24, 39 , 41, 69,
76, 79, 106, in, 113, n8, 119,
I 3^ i34> i54> 158, 159, 164,
J ^5> 175
Chichester, Bishop of, 210
Churchill, John, 28, 103, 218, 219,
222, 226, 262, 266
Citters, Van, 206
Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of,
i7> 77> i4> 226
Clifford, Sir Thomas, 136, 137,
142, 149
Coleman, Edward, 23, 160, 283
Colonial Enterprise, 118, 136
Commonwealth, 84
Compton, Dr. Henry, 28, note 122,
T 55> JSo, I99> 200, 210, 211,
212, 213, 214, 225
Conde, Prince de, 71, 75
Cooper, Anthony Ashley. See
Shaftesbury, Earl of
Coventry, Sir John, 153, 154
Craven, Lord, 224
Cromwell, Oliver, note 37, 62, 67,
73> 74, 84, 85, 145
Cromwell, Richard, 147
Cutts, John, ist Baron, 251
DAMPFIELD, COLONEL, 66
Danby, Thomas Osborne, Earl of,
i47> 154, 213
Darcy, Thomas, note 87
Dartmouth, the, 244
Declaration of Indulgence, 124,
125, 142, 143, 150, 205, 2ii
295
INDEX
de Roos, Lord, 126, 148
Derry, Siege of, 230 ff.
Devonshire, Duke of, 213
Digby, Sir Kenelm, 116
Dissenters. See Nonconformists
Divorce Act, the, 126
Douglas, Earl of, 255, 256, 261
Dover, Treaty of, 116, 126, 136,
149
Dunes, the, Battle of, 74
Dunkirk, 21, 74, 124
Durham, Bishop of, 199
EDGE HILL, 13
Edward VI, 134
Eendracht, the, 98
Elizabeth, Queen, 134
Ely, Bishop of, 210
Essex, Earl of, 158
Exclusion Bill, 140, 165, 169
FAIRFAX, GENERAL, 62
Falmouth, Lord, 97
Fauconberg, Thomas, Viscount, 53
Fire of London, the, 125
GEORGE OF DENMARK,
PRINCE, 220, 222
Ginkel, Godart Van, 261
Gloucester, Duke of, 26, 75
Godolphin, Lord, 263
Grey, Lord, 201
Guildford, Francis North, Lord,
178
HABEAS CORPUS ACT, 196
Hales, Sir Edward, 198
Halifax, George Savile, Marquis of,
116, 119, 159, 173, 196, 225
Hamilton, Richard, 237, 238, 240,
243, 256, 258
Hanmer, Sir Thomas, 251, 259
Harmon, John, 99, 100, 101
Henrietta Maria, Queen, 26, 69, 78,
121
Henry VIII, 36, 37, 38
Herbert, Admiral, 198, 213, 267
Heylin, Peter, note 26, 124
Hogue, The, Battle of, 268
Huddlestone, Dom, 176
Huguenots, the, 196, 197, 217
Hyde, Anne, Duchess of York, 55,
7*> 77, 78, 79> "2, 138
Hyde, Edward. See Clarendon,
Earl of
Hyde, Laurence, Earl of Rochester,
I7> *77> i9*> aoi, 202, 203
JAMES I, 134
James III (Old Pretender), 213,
275, 276, 277, 278, 279
Jeffreys, Judge, 184, 186, 187
KEN, DR. THOMAS, 210
Keppel, Admiral, 268
King's Council, 33
King's Letter Boys, 87
King's Ships, the, 32, 82
Kirke, Commander, 184, 186, 242,
244
Knights of the Shire, 44
LAKE, DR. JOHN, 210
Lauderdale, Duke of, 133, 136, 142
Lauzun, Due de, 227, 257, 261
Lawson, Commander, 103
Lilburne, John, 146
Limerick, Treaty of, 267
Locke, John, 148
Louis XIV, 1 8, 19, 69, 70, 73, 115,
116, 136, 142, 154, 163, 194,
203, 214, 215, 227, 232, 269,
275
296
INDEX
Lowestoft, Battle of, 92 ff.
Lundy, Governor of Deny, 237
Luther, Martin, note 130
MACPHERSON PAPERS, quoted,
231
Marlborough, Duke of. See
Churchill, John
Mary I, Queen, 134-
Mary II, Queen, 79, 116, 122, 155,
156, 166, 195* 207, 208, 268
Mary of Molena, i54> i55> *95>
269, 270, 278
Massey, Dr., 191, 200, 201
Maumont, General de, 238
Mayoe, Lord, 231
Mazarin, Cardinal, 70, 73, 79
Melfort, Earl of, 240
Meres, Sir Thomas, 283
Middleton, Lord, 225
Midshipman, defined, 86, 87
Money, value of, note 45 , 46
Monk, George, Duke of Alber-
marle, 78, 103, 147
Monmouth, Duke, 24, 54> 148, i49>
165, 166, 167, 168, 173, 181,
183, 184
Mountjoy, the, 244
Mousson, Siege of, 72
Muskerry, Lord, 97
NANTES, EDICT OF, 196, 246
Nassau, Prince of, 259
Nationalism, 20, 21
Navigation Acts, 106
Navy, the, vii, 32, 81 ff., 115*
ii7) "4-
Nimeguen, Peace of, 156
Nonconformists, 114, i*5> i5* *5
Norfolk, Duke of, note 131
Northumberland, Earl of, 64
GATES, TITUS, 180
Oath of Supremacy, 151
O'Neill, General, 231, 257
Opdam, Admiral, 95
Osborne, Thomas. See Danby,
Earl of
PARLIAMENT, 30, 31, 33, 40 ff.,
84
Petre, Father, 28, 164, 202, 211
Plague, the, 92, 103
Popish Plot (1678), 157, 159, 160,
172, 182
Portland, Lord, 103
Private Act (1692), note 131
Protestantism, 120
Pusignan, Major-General de, 238
QUAKERS, 151
Querouaille, Louise de, 162, 175
RATCLIFFE, SIR GEORGE, 64
Reformation, the, 36
Restoration, the, 76, 87
Richelieu, Due de, 83, 89
Rochester, Bishop of, 199
Rooke, Admiral George, 242
Rosen, Marshal Von, 235, 237, 240,
242, 243, 244, 245
Royal Charles, the, 92, 93, 97, 99
Rupert, Prince, 96
Russell, Admiral William, 153,
162, 173, 1 86, 197, 260, 264,
265
Ryswick, Treaty of, 269, 270, 27-2
ST. ASAPH, BISHOP OF, 210
St. Ghislain, Siege of, 72
Sancroft, Dr. William, 210, 218
Sandwich, Earl of, 105
Schomberg, Marshal, 245, 246,
297
INDEX
Sclater, Dr., 200
Scrog-gs, Chief Justice, 158
Sedgemoor, Batde of, 184.
Sevigne, Madame de, 16
Shaftesbury, Earl of, vii, 118, 119,
142, 143, 144, 146, 149, 154,
i5*> i57> i66> 167, 173, 197
Ship Money, 32, 83
Shrewsbury, Earl of, 262
Skelton, Mr., 216
Solms, General, 251, 255
Sunderland, Lord, vii, 28, 116,
119, 161, 162, 163, 177, 201,
202, 211
Swift, Jonathan, 222
Sydney, Algernon, 147, 162, 173,
2x3
TAXATION, 85, 86, 117
Temple, Sir William, 116
Test Act, 109, no, 121, 149, 150,
151, 152, 155, 156, 197
Toleration, Edict of, 208, 209
Toleration, Relig-ious, 26, 154,
188 F., 196, 265
Tourville, Comte de, 262, 263
Trelawney, Dr. Jonathan, 210
Trip, Mr., 66
Tromp, Admiral Von, 98
Turenne, Marshal, 17, 71
Turner, Dr. Francis, 210
Turnley, J., 213
Tyrconnel, Earl of, 258, 259
VAUBAN, MARQUIS DE, 228
WAGES, OF SEAMEN, 91, 92
Walker, Dr., 200
Walker, Rev. Mr., 239
Walters, Lucy, 24, 167, 168, 169
White, Dr. Thomas, 210
William III, 28, 69, 155, 165, 184,
212, 214, 215, 238 ff.
Worcester, Battle of,. 70
Worcester, Bishop of, 56
YORK, DUCHESS OF. See Hyde,
Anne
ZUYLEISTEIN, 212
