William the Third - H. D. Traill

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England. A Scots lawyer named Stuart, who had taken refuge in Holland from the religious persecution during the late reign, having made, or been bribed to make, his submission to the royal authority, was procured to open a correspondence with the Grand Pensionary Fagel, in which he pressed the latter to advise the Prince of Orange to support his uncle's policy, declaring that James would not repeal the penal laws unless the tests were repealed also. Fagel for some time returned no answer, but at last, finding the rumour in circulation that the Prince had associated himself with the King's measures, he wrote a reply, which had no doubt been drafted by William, to the refugee's request. In this remarkably politic document the Prince contrived to hold the balance equally between the English Protestants, with whom he was particularly anxious to stand well, and the Catholic continental sovereigns, whom in his struggle with France he could not afford to offend. While maintaining his former attitude with regard to the tests, William declared that he would gladly see all other grievances on the part of the English Catholics removed. He would have no man subjected to punishment for his opinions, but—and on this point he instanced the practice of the States-General themselves with respect to Roman Catholics—he was not prepared to remove all official disabilities founded on religious opinion. This letter was forwarded by Stuart to the King, and was by him considered in council. Burnet declares that all the lay papists of England who were not engaged in the intrigues of the priests earnestly pressed him to accept the Prince's terms as being what would render them safe and easy for the future; but the King as usual was obstinate, and no resolution was taken on the matter.

      During most of the remainder of this year the King was filling up the measure of his political offences. From March till October the dispute with Magdalen College had raged, and the breach between James and the once devoted Church of England proportionately widened. But at the end of the year 1687 a momentous announcement was made to the Court. The Queen was pronounced to be pregnant, and in July of the following year she was delivered of a male child. That an infant brought into the world at so opportune a moment should have been loudly alleged to be supposititious by the inflamed political partisans of the time was naturally to be expected. A word or two more will be said on that point hereafter; it is here only necessary to remark that whether William shared the suspicions of his partisans or not his outward behaviour on the occasion was irreproachable. He congratulated his father-in-law on the auspicious event; and the infant prince was duly prayed for in his private chapel at the Hague, until the protest hereafter to be referred to was made against the ceremony by his English partisans. Meanwhile the events of the eventful year 1688 had been ripening fast to their destined issue. The end of April had witnessed the second promulgation of the Declaration of Indulgence, and the ferment occasioned by that new assertion of the dispensing power. In July, in almost exact coincidence of time with the Queen's accouchement, came the memorable trial of the Seven Bishops, which gave the first demonstration of the full force of that popular animosity which James's rule had provoked. Some months before,[1] however, Edward Russell, nephew of the Earl of Bedford and cousin of Algernon Sidney's fellow-victim, had sought the Hague with proposals to William to make an armed descent upon England, as vindication of English liberties and the Protestant religion.[2] William had cautiously required a signed invitation from at least a few representative statesmen before committing himself to such an enterprise, and on the day of the acquittal of the Seven Bishops a paper, signed in cipher by Lords Shrewsbury, Devonshire, Danby, and Lumley, by Compton, Bishop of Northampton, by Edward Russell, and by Henry Sidney, brother of Algernon, was conveyed by Admiral Herbert to the Hague. William was now furnished with the required security for English assistance in the projected undertaking, but the task before him was still one of extreme difficulty. He had to allay the natural disquietudes of the Catholic supporters of his continental policy without alarming his Protestant friends in England; to win over the States-General, not by any means universally favourable either to his designs against James or to his attitude towards Louis (Amsterdam, for instance, had sided with the former monarch in his dispute with William about the return of the English regiments); and, above all, he had to make his naval and military preparations for a descent upon England without exciting suspicions, or provoking an anticipatory attack. That he managed matters with much address is evident from the result, but it is no less clear that luck was on his side. A quarrel of the French king with the Pope, on a question of diplomatic extra-territorial rights in the papal city, and his arrogant interference in the election of the Elector of Cologne, had arrayed against Louis the spiritual and temporal forces of Catholicism, represented respectively by the Papacy and the Empire; his ill-timed persecutions of Protestants, and certain prohibitive measures adopted by him against Dutch trade, had the effect of alienating his partisans in the States-General. In the meanwhile the combined blindness and obstinacy of James permitted William to prosecute his military preparations unmolested, if not unsuspected. These preparations were very extensive and conspicuous, and seem to have had their commencement at an earlier date than is consistent with Burnet's theory referred to in the note on a previous page. It was not, however, till the summer was beginning to give place to autumn that they began to excite any very distinct suspicions as to their object. The Cologne quarrel formed a plausible excuse enough for them; for if Louis, as events seemed to threaten, were to occupy the Rhine provinces with an army, it would be obviously necessary for Holland to stand on guard. By the middle of August the French king had become uneasy, and despatched a special envoy in the person of M. Bonrepos to awaken James to a sense of his danger. He had authority, according to Burnet (whom, however, Macaulay, who mostly follows him, on this point contradicts[3]), to offer James not only naval but military assistance to repel the invasion with which he believed him to be threatened. Bonrepos was directed by his master to promise the King of England that ten or fifteen thousand (others, according to Ralph, say thirty thousand) men should be landed at Portsmouth if required, and asked that that place should be put into his hands to keep the communication between the two kingdoms. Sunderland, acting perhaps bona fide, but more probably not, most earnestly counselled James to reject the offer, and it was rejected accordingly, the King's characteristic imbecility of judgment being never more characteristically shown than in his unwillingness to offend the patriotic prejudices of his subjects by accepting an offer which, had he been aware of their true feelings towards him, he would have recognised as his last chance of saving his crown and kingdom. At this juncture Ronquillo, the Spanish ambassador, went out of his way to assure James of what he probably knew to be false, and certainly had no reason to believe true—namely, that no descent upon England was in contemplation on the part of William. On an early day in September, however, Albeville was despatched to the Hague with instructions to present a memorandum of complaint on the subject of the Dutch preparations; and the day following d'Avaux delivered, on the part of Louis, a threatening note to the States, in which he warned them to desist from their designs upon a monarch to whom he was bound by "such ties of friendship and alliance" as would oblige him, if James were attacked, to come to his assistance. That Louis's motive in taking this step was to commit his brother of England to the alliance which he pretended to exist it is almost impossible to doubt; but James, more and more bent upon repudiating the assistance of France the more necessary it became to him, did his utmost to assure the States that there was nothing in the nature of an alliance between himself and Louis. William, however, and his partisans in the States-General, asked nothing better than this excuse for continuing their preparations, and the Dutch armament was actively pushed forward. In October the final alienation of the Dutch friends of France was brought about by Louis's despatching an army under the Dauphin to besiege Philipsburg, and simultaneously issuing manifestos against the Emperor and the Pope. Avignon had been seized by him the day before the siege of Philipsburg was opened; and the attack on the latter place was followed by the rapid seizure of most of the important towns of the Palatinate.

      On the 10th of October, matters now being ripe for such a step, William, in conjunction with some of his English advisers, put forth his famous declaration. Starting with a preamble to the effect that the observance of laws is necessary to the happiness of states, the instrument proceeds to enumerate fifteen particulars in which the laws of England had been set at naught. The most important of these were—(1) the exercise of the dispensing power; (2) the corruption, coercion, and packing of the judicial bench; (3) the violation of the test laws

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