What was to be done? Was James still
King? Had Mary become Queen? Who was to call a Parliament ? (Only a King can do this,
and it seemed as if there was no King.) William, however, called a “Convention” (which was a Parliament in all but name), and, after some debate, this body decided that James was no longer King, but that William and Mary were joint King and Queen of England and Ireland.
A Scottish Convention declared the same thing for Scotland. A document was drawn up called the “Bill of Rights” which is a sort of second edition of Magna Charta. It fully expressesthe idea that thg Sovereign of England is a
“limited monarch” and that there are a great many things he may not do.
This “Revolution of 1688” was mainly the work of the Whigs, and William has often been called the “Whig Deliverer.” Revolutions are bad things, but it is difficult to see how this one could have been avoided. James was a real tyrant, almost as impossible a King for Englishmen as John or “Bloody” Mary I had been;
and, since Mary II refused to reign without her husband, and the baby Prince of Wales had fled with his father, the question was perhaps settled in the only satisfactory manner. But
England was by no means united by the settlement; William was a foreigner and a foreigner he remained till his death.
CHAPTER X
WILLIAM III TO GEORGE II 1688-1760; THE GROWTH OF EMPIRE
“Brown Bess.”
In the days of lace-ruffles, perukes and brocade
Brown Bess was a partner whom none could despise —
An out-spoken, flinty-lipped, brazen-faced jade
With a habit of looking men straight in the
eyes —
At Blenheim and Ramillies fops would confess
They were pierced to the heart by the charms of Brown Bess.
Though her sight was not long and her weight was not small,
Yet her actions were winning, her language was clear;
And every one bowed as she opened the ball
On the arm of some high-gaitered, grim grenadier.
Half Europe admitted the striking success
Of the dances and routs that were given by
Brown Bess.
When ruffles were turned into stiff leather stocks,
And people wore pigtails instead of perukes,
Brown Bess never altered her iron-gray locks;
She knew she was valued for more than her looks.
‘‘Oh, powder and patches was always my dress.
And I think I am killing enough,” said Brown
Bess.
So she followed her red-coats, whatever they did,
From the heights of Quebec to the plains of
Assaye,
From Gibraltar to Acre, Cape Town and
Madrid,
And nothing about her was changed on the way;
(But most of the Empire which now we possess,
Was won through those years by old-fashioned
Brown Bess).
In stubborn retreat or in stately advance,
From the Portugal coast to the cork-woods of Spain,
She had puzzled some excellent Marshals of
France
Till none of them wanted to meet her again:
But later, near Brussels, Napoleon, no less,
Arranged for a Waterloo ball with Brown
Bess.
She had danced till the dawn of that terrible day —
She danced on till dusk of more terrible night,
And before her linked squares his battalions
gave way
And her long fierce quadrilles put his lancers to flight.
And when his gilt carriage drove off in the press,
“I have danced my last dance for the world!”
said Brown Bess.
If you go to Museums — there’s one in Whitehall —
Where old weapons are shown with their names writ beneath,
You will find her, upstanding, her back to the wall,
As stiff as a ramrod, the flint in her teeth.
And if ever we English have reason to bless
Any arm save our mothers’, that arm is Brown
Bess!
The Bill of Rights had said that “to keep an
Army in time of peace was against Law.”
Only the fact that England was at war for very long periods during the next hundred years saved the Army from being abolished; and at every interval of peace it was reduced far too much for the safety of the country. In 1689
war with France was certain, for, as I told you,
William had come to England mainly to in-duce England to help Kolland and other countries whom France was threatening. Also the
French King at once took up the cause of James.
James went to Ireland and called on the
Catholic Irish to help him; French troops and money were sent after him. Ireland had now some real wrongs to avenge, for Cromwell’s conquest had been cruel, and many old Irish families had lost their lands, to make room for
English settlers; these Catholics, therefore,
gave James a good army, with which, early in
1689, he advanced to try and subdue the most
Protestant of the Irish Provinces, Ulster.
But he failed to take the city of Londonderry,
which held out against a most awful siege for three months and more. It was not till a year after this that William was able to muster enough English and Dutch troops to begin the reconquest of Ireland. He smashed James to pieces at the Battle of the Boyne, and drove him once more into exile in 1690; a year later the war ended with the surrender of
Limerick, which the Catholics had defended as bravely as the Protestants had defended
Londonderry. Ireland was at last completely conquered.
William wanted to give, and promised to give, the defeated Irish Catholics peace and protection; but the English Parliament in-tended that those who provoked the war should pay the expenses of the war. A vast number of estates were therefore again taken from the Catholics and given to the Protestants,
and a fresh set of grievances began for Ireland.
Harsh laws were also passed in this and the next reign, both in the English and Irish Parliaments, with the intention of stamping out the Catholic religion altogether. They were hardly ever put in force, for the whole Irish people, Catholic and Protestant alike, hated them; and men, after what they had gone through, only wished to live at peace with their neighbours. Harsh laws were also passed and had been passed since 1660 in the English
Parliament against Irish trade; for the jealous
English merchants feared that Irishmen would make woollen goods, or grow fat bacon, beef,
or butter cheaper than England could do.
These laws were put in force; and their result in the long run was to make Ireland ripe for rebellion.
The same jealousy was displayed toward
Scotland, which was just beginning to have a few small manufactures of its own, and which certainly grew excellent and cheap beef and mutton. Then, too, there was a large party which had clung to King James or was ready to rise for him, especially in the wild Highlands
ttr
north of the Forth and Clyde. The south and east of Scotland had accepted the Revolution of 1688, and the Presbyterian Church had again been established. The risings for
King James were put down, though not without tough fighting. But when Scotland asked to be allowed a share in the trade with our colonies, the English Parliament answered with a contemptuous “no”; and the result was that Scotland growled and growled more and more throughout the reign of William. But in the next reign, after long and fierce debates,
the old Scottish Parliament was induced to vote for union with the English (1708); and henceforward there was one united Parliament of Great Britain, and trade was perfectly free between the two nations. Then began the great commercial prosperity of Mo
dern Scotland. Within fifty years Glasgow had got an enormous share of the trade with the British
Colonies and India, and one of the most interesting tales of town history is the story how the grave merchants of Glasgow got together and set to work to deepen the river Clyde so as to make it carry the trade which they knew would come. The first Glasgow ship for tobacco sailed to America ten years after the union, and began what is still one of Glasgow’s greatest industries.
William III paid far too little attention to these questions of Ireland and Scotland, but his excuse was that he and his Dutch and
German allies were engaged in a desperate struggle to save Flanders and the line of the river Rhine from King Louis of France. With great difficulty could he squeeze out of the
English Parliament men and money for these wars. None of the English statesmen, Whigs or Tories, really liked the war, and the Tories in particular began to dislike the Revolution which they had helped to make. But wherever the English regiments fought they covered themselves with glory, especially at Steinkirk
(1692), and Landen (1693), though they were defeated in both battles. William was a fierce and dogged fighter, but he was not a first-rate general, and France had still the upper hand when a sort of truce was concluded in 1697.
Parliament, in which the Tories then had the upper hand, at once reduced the army to
7,000 men.
This was most foolish, as every one knew that old King Louis XIV was only preparing for a fresh war in order to put his own grandson on the throne of Spain, which fell vacant in
1700. The Austrians also claimed the Spanish crown, and it was the plain duty of England to help them. Many Englishmen, however,said, “No, let them fight it out. What does it matter to England? This- is what comes of your foreign king,” and so on. William,
foreigner as he was, knew better. The growing power of France threatened every nation in
Europe. The time had gone by when England could afford to stand aside from the quarrels of her neighbours.
William might, however, have failed altogether to convince Englishmen of this if
Louis had not made one great mistake. Old
King James II died in 1701, and Louis at once recognized his son (the same Prince of Wales who was born in 1688) as “James III.” This was the same as dictating to Englishmen who should be their king; and the whole nation voted for war at once. William would have led it to battle as bravely as ever but for his death in 1702. His good wife, Mary, had died childless seven years before, and her sister
Anne now became Queen. But Anne, too, was now childless, and so, to find an heir of the old royal blood who was also a Protestant, England would have to go back a long way, in fact to the descendants of James I. James I’s daughter
Elizabeth had married a German Prince, and that Elizabeth’s youngest child, Sophia of
Hanover, a very old lady, was the best Protestant heir. She had already a son and a
grandson, who were one day to be King George
I and King George II. No one liked the prospect of a petty German prince as our king,
but most people thought anything was better than a Papist, and unfortunately our lawful
King, James III, remained a Papist all his days. He could have bought his throne at any moment by turning Protestant, but he was far too honourable to do that.
Before we leave King William we must i notice an important change which took place
‘ during his reign, a change which really transferred the sovereignty of the country from King to Parliament. To previous kings Parliament had usually voted, at the beginning of the reign,
. a certain sum of money to be paid each year out of taxes, which sum, they thought, should be enough to pay all the expenses of governing and defending the country. It never was enough, and extra money had always to be voted for wars. Now, however, William’s
Parliament voted him only a small sum for his life — enough for himself and his court
“to live on”; but the expenses of governing and defending the country, paying the Army and Navy and Civil Service, they only voted from year to year. So since his time the kings have always been obliged to call a Parliament every year whether they wanted to or
not I- or else to leave Army and Navy without pay.
Further, as William’s wars cost a great deal of money, and as Parliament shrank from laying on the heavy taxes which were necessary to pay for them, it allowed the Crown to borrow money from any one who would lend it at interest. The interest had to be paid yearly till the loan was repaid. Few such loans ever were repaid, and so a perpetual debt was created called the “National Debt,” which has now increased to an enormous amount.
But people are always glad to lend money to the Crown, because they know they will get the interest on it paid quite punctually. As long as we pay the interest on this National
Debt we are still paying for some of King
William’s wars and for those of all later sovereigns; but we need not grumble, because,
if these great wars had not been fought, there would have been no British Colonies or Empire,
and probably no independent Great Britain;
our country would have been a province of
France. So let King William sleep in peace.
Queen Anne’s wars were going to be very successful indeed, though they continued till the last year of her reign. She herself was almost the stupidest woman in her dominions;
but she was a good and kindly soul, devotedto the Church of England, and had generally the sense to leave affairs of State to her ministers. She called herself a Tory, and her ministers called themselves Tories; but they were going to fight a “Whig War.” By this
I mean a war to maintain the Protestant
Kings in England, and to increase the trade and Empire of England. And so they really had to act as Whigs. The hero of that war was
John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, the greatest soldier England ever produced. He was not only great in planning a campaign and in fighting a battle, but also in his care for his soldiers, their food, their clothing, their comfort and their pay. Also he was very clever at keeping the allies of Great Britain united.
These allies — Dutch, Austrians, and Germans, were very difficult to manage; for each thought mainly of their own interests, and quarrelled with the others continually. But
Marlborough thought of only one thing —
how to beat the French, and very handsomely did he beat them. At Blenheim (1704), Ramillies (1706), Oudenarde (1708), Malplaquet
(1709), he won victories as complete as those of
Edward III and Henry V. And our redcoats were foremost in all these battles and won immortal glory. By 1710 we had swept the
French out of Germany and Flanders, and werewell on the road to Paris. Our Navy had been equally successful; we had beaten a great
French fleet off Malaga in Spain, and had taken Gibraltar and the Isle of Minorca. In
America our colonists, with little aid from home,
had begun to bite away the frontier of the
French colony of Canada. All looked like ending in a Treaty of Peace of great glory for Great Britain.
But in Great Britain itself things were not going so well. “Politics” had now become a sort of unpleasant cheating game between a lot of great families of the nobility, Whigs on one side, Tories on the other. Each party strove to control the House of Commons by getting its own friends elected to it, and thus to get itself into office. The Tories, who were also the “High Church” men, hated, or pretended to hate, the war and the Duke of Marlborough. They said, “It is a Whig war, a war for the interests of the merchants, many of them Dissenters too, the brutes! It is a war for foreigners. It is all the fault of those who made that wicked Revolution of 1688 and turned out our natural King. Anne, of course,
is a native, but who is to come after her ? — a disgusting, fat German!”
Moreover, the war was expensive, and, wha
t-’
ever ministers may pretend, no one likes payingtaxes. So these men got the ear of the electors,
and a Tory Parliament came in determined to end the war at any price. The Duke of Marlborough was accused of prolonging it for his own reasons, and being bribed by foreigners to do so. Of course this was ridiculous nonsense,
but he was dismissed from the command, and in 1713 peace with France was concluded at the Treaty of Utrecht, and Great Britain openly deserted her allies.
Yet so great had been our victories that this treaty of Utrecht could not fail to be of great advantage to us. It was, in the eyes of all
Europe, the foundation of the British Empire.
It was like a notice-board: ..
there is a british empire:
foreigners please take notice and keep off it
For we kept not only Gibraltar and Minorca,
which were the beginnings of the power of our fleet in the Mediterranean, but also Nova
Scotia and Newfoundland, which had been the outworks of French Canada. Also we secured certain definite rights to trade with the
Spanish colonies in South America. It was on trade the Empire was founded, and by trade it must be maintained. But, remember, a
great trade needs a great defence by a great fleet and a great army. One gets nothing for nothing in this world.
Yet old King Louis XIV had won his point;
his grandson kept the throne of Spain, to prevent which we had originally begun to fight.
He did, indeed, give up the “Low Countries”
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 840