V
WILLIAM OF ORANGE

It is perhaps one of the most curious facts of our history that the Empire-Maker who, as it were, finally completed the work begun by his namesake William the Norman, should, like him, have been a foreigner, should have sprung from similar ancestry, and should have been his exact reverse in every mental and physical quality save one—an inflexible determination to do the work which he was appointed to do in spite of every conceivable kind of obstacle.

It is noteworthy also that this man should have come from those same Low Countries from whose shores our Saxon ancestors had first come on their plundering forays to do their share of the work of making the English people. The ancestry of the great-grandson of William the Silent stretched far back, probably even into those remote and turbulent times, and it is within the limits of possibility that some stalwart ancestor of the ancient House of Nassau may himself have had something to do in the early making of that Realm, over which, a thousand years later, his descendant was to rule during one of the most critical and perilous periods of its existence.

Be that, however, as it may, the central fact which stands out in the story of William III. is this: Whatever his country or ancestry, he was, so far as we have any means of judging, the one man in the world just then who could have accomplished the difficult and, as it must often have seemed even to him, almost impossible task which had to be performed if the work of the other Empire-Makers who had gone before him was not to be sadly marred, if not altogether undone.

William of Orange may perhaps be most truthfully described as an overcomer of difficulties. Probably no other man ever had so many difficulties to conquer as he had, and his triumph over them is one of the finest examples of irresistible will-power and purely intellectual force that all history has to show. Mentally he was a giant, and as such he acquitted himself in what was undoubtedly a battle of giants fighting for the spoils of Europe. Physically he was a miserable weakling, shattered by disease, seldom free from bodily pain, and foredoomed from his youth by an exhausting and incurable malady.

Yet even his sports and pastimes were those, not only of a healthy, but even of a robust constitution. His pale, sickly, small-pox-pitted face never flushed save under the stimulus of battle or the chase. He fought his fight with Fate and won it by sheer intellectual strength, yet none of the pleasures of intellect were his. He knew nothing of science, little of literature, and less of art.

Apparently fitted by Nature only for the pursuits of the study, he found his rare moments of real happiness when riding down a stag or a boar in the forests of Windsor or the woods of Flanders, or, sword in hand, leading his men wherever the battle was hottest or the danger the greatest. A creature of contradictions, in short, determined to make himself that which Nature had seemingly not made him, and to do that which he appeared least fitted to do.

No one possessing an intelligent grasp of the deplorable state of affairs which obtained in England, and the threatening aspect of matters on the Continent during the last decade but one of the seventeenth century, would have guessed for a moment that this “asthmatic skeleton,” as Macaulay somewhat roughly describes his hero, was the man to turn England’s weakness into strength, and even in defeat to grapple successfully with the colossal Power which was threatening the liberties of Europe.

In England the weakness and baseness of the two last Stuart kings had more than undone the work of the great Oliver. He had, as has been shown, made England one of the first Powers in the world, strong at home and respected and even courted abroad. Charles II. had sold his country, or at any rate his own independence and what should have been his royal honour, to France. He had, in fact, exhibited to the world the disgraceful spectacle of an English king who was the pensioner of a foreign monarch.

The for-ever infamous Treaty of Dover had brought the prestige of England to its lowest ebb. For the first time in nearly seven hundred years the Isle Inviolate had been seriously threatened with invasion, and London, for the first time since it had been a city, had heard the sound of hostile guns. Now this of itself, taking the whole history of these islands into consideration, is a fact of absolutely unparalleled infamy, and yet if such infamy could have been equalled, the brother and successor of Charles II. would have done so. Indeed, from one point of view it may be said that he excelled it.

The guns of William’s countrymen were heard in the Thames because Charles II., having his brother James for Lord High Admiral, had so scandalously wasted the funds which should have been devoted to the maintenance of the Navy that no adequate defence was really possible; but it was left for James II., the last and most contemptible, if not in all respects the worst king of the royal and miserable House of Stuart, to be the only British monarch who ever brought a foreign army on to British soil for the purpose of coercing by force the will of the British people. More than this, too, it must be remembered that these foreign troops were Frenchmen supported by renegade English, Irish, or Scotsmen who had deliberately deserted their own country to serve under the standard of a man who was to the seventeenth century what Phillip II. of Spain had been to the sixteenth.

So low, then, had Britain sunk in the scale of nations when William of Orange made his entry upon the stage of British history. The fact which made his entry possible is hardly of the sort that would commend itself to people of a romantic turn of mind, although few romances have been really more romantic than his own life-story.

He could never have become King of England, nor is it likely that he could even have been asked to constitute himself the protector of English liberties, had it not been for the fact that he was married to the daughter of James II., and of this marriage Lord Macaulay truly says: “His choice had been determined chiefly by political considerations, nor did it seem likely that any strong affection would grow up between a handsome girl of sixteen, well-disposed, indeed, and naturally intelligent, but ignorant and simple, and a bridegroom who, though he had not completed his twenty-eighth year, was in constitution older than her father; whose manner was chilling, and whose head was constantly occupied by public business or by field sports.”

His marriage was, in short, “a marriage of convenience,” and yet, in defiance of all the rules that are supposed to govern the most intimate of all human relationships, it was one of the best and, in the end, most devoted unions that history has to record. It is hardly possible to doubt that William of Orange married Mary Stuart because he saw with that keenly penetrating foresight of his that such a union would strengthen him in his life-long combat with the arch-enemy of his faith, his family, and his nation; and this enemy was that same Louis of France who had made Charles II. his pensioner, and was soon to make James II. his dependent.

To quote Lord Macaulay again: “He saved England, it is true, but he never loved her, and he never obtained her love.... Whatever patriotic feeling he had was for Holland ... yet even his affection for the land of his birth was subordinate to another feeling which early became supreme in his soul, which mixed itself with all his passions and compelled him to marvellous enterprises, which supported him when sinking under mortification, pain, sickness, and sorrow ... and continued to animate him even while the prayer for the departing was read at his bedside.”

It was this hatred of France and her king which nerved him to do for the liberties of Europe and Great Britain what Francis Drake had done for England against Philip of Spain, and in the doing of this he won the conspicuous glory of forcing the paymaster of the two English sovereigns whom he succeeded, to make peace with him on equal terms; and this, too, although he lost more battles than he won, and had to surrender more strong cities than he took.

It is comparatively easy for a conqueror to take triumph out of victory, but it is a higher quality which patiently endures defeat and confronts disaster, and by sheer genius wins triumph in the end. This is what William of Orange did, and it is from this fact that he derives his title to be ranked among the Makers of that Empire to whose throne he came as an alien, and whose honour he restored and upheld, as one might say, in spite of herself.

So far as England is concerned, the male line of Stuart came in with a fool and went out with a coward. One does not even care to imagine what would have happened if James II. had remained on the throne; or if William of Orange, with his hereditary and deep-rooted hatred of Louis XIV. and his policy, had not come to take his most miserably-vacated place in the nick of time.

The sentimentality which makes such a fuss about loyalty to persons as distinguished from loyalty to country, and the lawyer-quibbles which occupied men’s minds in the dispute as to whether James II. was King de facto or de jure, or both, of the country from which he had run away like an absconding debtor, may be dismissed, just as Harold the Saxon’s claims had been some six hundred years before. It is merely a question of the Fit and the Unfit, and James was Unfit.

James Stuart deserted his post as ruler of these realms because he found himself assailed by difficulties which the most ordinary ability ought to have overcome. William assumed the same position in the face of difficulties which only the highest qualities of kingcraft and statesmanship could have enabled him to successfully grapple with. In a word, James possessed no ideal that qualified him to be a king, much less an Empire-Maker. William did possess such an ideal, and that is the only reason why he became King of England, vice James Stuart, absconded.

Next, perhaps, to Henry VII., William was the most business-like sovereign who has occupied the British throne. With him all men and things, all beliefs and sentiments, were subordinated to the achievement of the one great end—the curbing of the power of France, and consequently the furtherance of political and theological liberty in Europe. He was, in fact, only incidentally an Empire-Maker, although without him and without the broad and firm basis of popular liberty and national strength which he laid down, as it were, in the doing of his greater work, the building up of the Imperial fabric would undoubtedly have been long delayed and seriously impeded.

He got himself made King of Great Britain and Ireland, not because he wanted to occupy the throne, but because from that eminence he would be able to look the Grand Monarch more equally in the face.

We get a luminous insight into the character of the man in his reply to the Convention or conference of the two Houses of Parliament which had proposed that his wife as actual and lawful heir to the throne which her father had forsaken, should occupy it as queen, and that he should reign by her authority as a sort of Royal Executive.

“My lords and gentlemen,” he said, “no man can esteem a woman more than I do the Princess, but I am so made that I cannot think of holding anything by apron-strings, nor can I think it reasonable to have any share in the government unless it be put in my own person, and that for the term of my life. If you think fit to settle it otherwise I will not oppose you, but will go back to Holland and meddle no more in your affairs.”

That was the kind of man William of Orange was. He had come to be a king, and a king he would be or nothing. And so king he was, and it was not very long before he was to show how well his self-confidence was justified. He had scarcely seated himself on the throne before the Parliament, recognising the fact that his work was something other than merely filling James’s place, deliberately suggested that he should resume as King of England the hostilities which he had begun against Louis as Stadtholder of the Netherlands, and he on his part showed how ready he was to take up the task by exclaiming, in one of his rare bursts of exultation, after reading the address:

“This is the first day of my reign!”

This address, however, welcome as it was, was somewhat belated. For more than a month before it was presented, Louis, under the pretence of helping the runaway, whom for his own purposes he affected to believe still lawful King of England, had committed the gravest of all acts of war, and James had crowned the disgrace of his flight by the infamy of heading an invasion of British territory by foreign mercenaries. On the 12th of March, 1689, he landed at Kinsale as enemy and invader of his own country, convoyed by fifteen French men-of-war, and supported by 2,500 French troops.

The story of this Irish war needs no re-telling here, save in so far as it brings out the contrast between William and James as the Fit and the Unfit for the doing of that work which had just then got to be done if England was not to sink back to the degrading position of a French dependency, and if the way of future progress and Imperial expansion was to be left open. William no sooner saw that the scene of the fight for constitutional liberty and religious freedom had shifted for the time being from the Low Countries to Ireland than he sent Marshal Schomberg, who was then one of the most skilful soldiers in Europe, with an army of sixteen thousand men to the scene of action.

Meanwhile the heroically stubborn resistance which has won immortal fame for the men of Londonderry had proved, not only to James and his foreign mercenaries, but to Louis himself and all Europe, that the struggle which was just then renewed was no mere war of dynasties, and that something very much greater than the mere question as to who should be king of England had got to be decided before the trouble was over.

James in Ireland and Louis in France stood for the already discredited and exploded doctrine of the divine right of kings to rule as they pleased because they were the sons of their fathers; for the dark tyranny of Rome, now almost equally discredited; and for the domination of Europe by the French autocracy. In Holland and England and Germany William and his allies stood for the very reverse of all this, so that it was not only the destinies of the United Kingdom, but those of the greater part of the civilised world that had to be decided, and it was by procuring through mingled victory and defeat, confronted by powerful enemies abroad and by conspiracy and threatened assassination at home, that the worthy descendant of William the Silent proved his real right divine as king of these realms and champion of those principles of which the British Empire of to-day is the concrete expression.

It was really on the shores of an insignificant Irish stream that William fought and won the battle of European liberty. But before he did this he had another battle to fight, as it were, in front of his newly-given throne.

His reign, unhappily, saw the commencement of that system of government which an intelligent Chinese Minister to the Court of St. James’ once described as “the election of one party to do the business of the nation, and of another to stop them doing it.” In other words, it was William’s fate, among all his other difficulties, to have to contend with the bitter and usually dishonest strife of Parliamentary parties, and so keen did this strife become after the foreign enemy had actually landed on British soil, that he was even then on the point of throwing up the whole business in disgust, and going back to Holland to fight his battles out there.

What would have happened if he had done so is anything but a pleasant subject for speculation. Happily, at the eleventh hour he refused to acknowledge himself beaten. Sick of the strife of words and longing for the reality of deeds, he announced his intention to place himself at the head of the English forces in Ireland, “and with the blessing of God Almighty endeavour to reduce that kingdom that it may no longer be a charge to this.”

In this we may see more than the expression of a pious hope. As statesman and soldier William had seen that Ireland was the back-door of Great Britain, and that so long as it remained open so long would the whole kingdom be vulnerable to foreign invasion, and so he went to close it.

It was a strange position for any man to be placed in. He was going to fight for everything that he held dear. He knew that if he lost in Ireland he must lose also in England and the Netherlands, but he was also going to fight against the father of the woman whom he had now come to love so dearly that her death, when it happened, came nearer to wrecking his imperial intellect than all the other trials and troubles of his laborious and almost joyless life. He had no feeling of personal enmity against James as he had against Louis, and it was duty, and duty alone, which took him to the Irish war. Almost the last words that he said to his wife concerning the enemy whom he was about to meet on the battlefield were:

“God send that no harm may come to him!”

Mr. Traill has thus tersely summed up the condition of affairs at this moment: “Ireland in the hands of a hostile army, the shores of England threatened by a hostile fleet, a dangerous conspiracy only detected on the eve of success, a formidable insurrection imminent in the country he was leaving behind him....”

And yet, gloomy as the outlook seemed, his spirits rose as they ever did when he saw the moment for doing instead of talking draw near, and Bishop Burnett tells us that he said to him on the eve of his departure: “As for me, but for one thing I should enjoy the prospect of being on horseback and under canvas again, for I am sure that I am fitter to direct a campaign than to manage your Houses of Lords and Commons.”

These words were well worthy of the man who, not many days later, quietly sat down to breakfast in the open air beside Boyne Water, within full sight of the enemy and within easy range of their guns. Breakfast over, he mounted his horse and was promptly fired at. The first shot from two field-pieces which had been trained on him and his staff killed a man and two horses. The second grazed his shoulder and made him reel in his saddle.

“There was no need for any bullet to come nearer than that!” was his remark on the occurrence. Certainly not many bullets have ever come nearer to changing the history of Britain, and therefore of the British Empire, than that one.

After the wound had been dressed, instead of taking the rest which a good many strong men would have taken, this consumptive and asthmatic invalid re-mounted his horse and remained until nightfall in the saddle, making his dispositions for the battle of the morrow, and attending to every detail himself. His prudent uncle and father-in-law, apparently bent on fulfilling William’s pious wish, was meanwhile taking very good care to keep himself out of harm’s way.

The battle itself, which, as every one knows, was fought on the 1st of July, brought out with startling clearness the contrast between the man who was king in his own right and the man who called himself king because his name was James Stuart.

“Men of Enniskillen, what will you do for me?” he cried at the critical moment of the fight, when Caillemot and Schomberg, his two best captains, had been killed, and he, drawing his sword and swinging it aloft with his wounded arm, led his trusty Dutch guards and Ulstermen against the Irish centre. James, meanwhile, having watched the first part of the fight on which all his fortunes depended from the safe eminence of the Hill of Donore, had already given up for lost the day which he had done nothing to win, and was making the best of his way to Dublin, whence, in due course, leaving the beaten and demoralised rabble that had once been his army to its fate, he fled to the congenial ignominy of his safe retreat at St. Germain, and the fostering care of his country’s worst enemy.

The Battle of the Boyne not only settled the fate of the Stuart dynasty for good; it decided the question whether this country was to be ruled by a feeble despotism under the patronage of France, or by that constitutional monarchy under which Great Britain has so worthily proved her title to be called the Mother of Free Nations, and in winning this battle and deciding this all-important question, William of Orange won the right to be counted among the wisest and strongest of our Empire-Makers. The disgusted Irishmen, too, had some reason on their side when they said to the victors after the battle: “Change leaders, and we’ll fight you again!”

The story of his wars in those countries which have been aptly termed the cockpit of Europe is the story of the continuation of that work which he came to England to do; not, as has already been pointed out, for England as a country, but for the establishment of those principles for which the British Constitution, of which he was one of the makers, stands. Ignorant or prejudiced critics have accused him of sacrificing English blood and treasure to the furtherance of his own ambition. The fact is that he employed them upon the best and most necessary work that there was for them to do just then.

“Look at my brave English!” he said to the Elector of Bavaria one day during the siege of Namur, while a British regiment was carrying the outworks on one side of the city. But they were doing more than carrying earthworks. They were fighting for the principles which their descendants crowned with everlasting glory at Trafalgar and Waterloo. They were showing the soldiers and generals of France, then held to be the best in the world, the sort of stuff that they were made of, and giving promise of future prowess that was soon to be splendidly redeemed at Blenheim and Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet.

It was a singular war, and by all the rules of warfare the issue should have been the reverse of what it was. But again and again William’s wonderful genius and indomitable persistence snatched victory out of defeat, and turned disaster into advantage, until at last the Grand Monarch himself had to confess the power of the enemy whom he had once thought so insignificant, and the signing of the Treaty of Ryswick left William triumphant if somewhat dissatisfied.

The results would no doubt have been much greater if William could have had his own way, and if the strife of parties in the British Parliament had not so sorely crippled him. But at least he had the satisfaction of knowing before he died that, whereas a few months before the French men-of-war had with impunity insulted and threatened the English coasts, and landed a small army on Irish soil, a few months afterwards every invader had been driven from British ground, and the French fleet almost destroyed, while the Mediterranean, on which British ships had sailed only by sufferance, was now well on the way to becoming a British lake.

And yet, in spite of all the triumphs that he had won over so many difficulties and so many dangers, and in spite of the consciousness of work well and nobly, if quietly and unostentatiously, done, William’s last days, like those of many another man who has deserved well of the world, were full of sorrow and suffering.

The death of his now adored queen had so shaken his mighty nature that for some days his reason was despaired of, and there can be no doubt but that it hastened his own end. And yet, weak and far advanced in disease as he was when he went out for that fatal ride from Kensington to Hampton Court, he was even then going a-hunting. The brutal Jacobite toast: “To the little gentleman in black velvet who works underground!” still serves to remind us of the mole-hill over which his horse stumbled and fell, breaking his rider’s collar-bone, and inflicting the death-wound which he had escaped on a score of battle-fields.

His death was worthy of his life, for it was the death of a brave, patient man and a Christian gentleman. No doubt he himself would have preferred to have died at the head of a charge, or in the thick of an assault on a French fortress, but his destiny ordered it otherwise, and the man who had a hundred times faced death in the most reckless fashion for the purpose of inspiring his followers with his own courage and enthusiasm, died quietly in his bed, leaving behind him the greatest work ever done by an individual British sovereign, and a fame which, but for the one dark and inexplicable blot of Glencoe, is as fairly entitled to be called spotless as that of any man who ever sat upon a throne and accomplished great things with such means as came to his hand.