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William's landing and proclamation

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thought of landing in Yorkshire. But the unkindly wind forced him to run for the west coast, though it made up for this by binding King James' fleet in the Thames. As William's fleet passed the straits of Dover, the assembled crowds on either coast could hear the clash of cymbals and roll of drums, celebrating his birthday. The breeze bore the fleet strongly past Plymouth and then suddenly dropped, allowing it to get back to the harbour of Torbay. The services of the breeze were not yet over, for it revived on the night of the 6th, and dispersed the fleet of King James, which had sailed up in the hope of disturbing the landing. The disembarkation began on the 5th, and was speedily effected. On the 18th William's cavalry reached Exeter, and on the 19th the inhabitants were cheering the English regiments of Mackay and Talmash, gaping at the Dutch guards and the Swedish horse, and gazing on the stately form of Schomberg and the impassive face of William. The numerical superiority of the foreign troops to the English regiments in William's army illustrated the proportion between the international and the insular significance of the great enterprise.

On the banner of William were inscribed the words Pro Religione protestante Pro libero Parlamento, and beneath them his own proud motto, Je maintiendrai. His proclamation, published in England on November 5, expanded these sentiments. It declared that there was no attempt at conquest, and that the Prince had only come at the invitation of Lords Temporal and Spiritual. It denounced the dispensing power, the expulsion of the Judges, the establishment of the Court of High Commission, the attack on the corporations, and the raising of an army of Irish Papists. It concluded by hinting, in accordance with the widespread popular rumour, that the Prince of Wales was a supposititious child, and that Parliament must decide on his legitimacy. The procla mation was speedily followed by a supplementary manifesto denouncing "the pretended redressments and concessions" of James as illusory, and declaring that only a settlement by a free Parliament could be final or satisfactory. It is not easy to see how far this proclamation represents William's real views; but its purpose was to excite popular feeling rather than to propound a definite settlement. In particular it contained no hint of William's intention of bringing England into the alliance against France. On the still more urgent question of his own designs upon the Crown, the proclamation is equally silent.

On November 16 tidings of the landing at Torbay arrived, and James at once directed the royal army to concentrate at Salisbury. On the 17th James decided to join his army, of which Lord Churchill was commander-in-chief. When James set out, half-a-dozen noblemen had already joined William; Danby had raised the north and captured York; Devonshire was in arms at Derby, Delamere in Cheshire. The serious moral effect of these defections was such as to leave no resource to James but an immediate battle. But, on the morning of the 23rd, he had already

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247 decided to retreat, "as," wrote Barillon to Louis, " he had intended from the first." On the night of the 24th, Churchill and the Duke of Grafton. fled to William. On the 25th James, as he left Andover, learnt of the defection of Ormond and Prince George of Denmark. On nearing London the unhappy father heard of the flight of his daughter the Princess Anne. He found his capital in a ferment, and his hopes at their lowest ebb. So disastrous had been these last few days to James that the prescient Hoffmann was already able to foretell the result of the struggle. On December 9 he wrote to the Emperor that the English affair would be terminated in two or three months, and that all the forces now in arms would soon march conjointly against France.

When departing for Salisbury, James had refused a petition for a new Parliament, on the ground that the invasion made it impossible. But on November 27 he summoned a presentable substitute in the shape of a great Council of Peers, which thirty or forty attended. At the meeting Clarendon bitterly reproached the King, while Halifax spoke with more delicacy and respect. Their speeches outlined clearly the difference between the two parties represented by them. The High Churchmen were incensed with James because of his attack on the Establishment; the Moderates were less hostile because less fanatical. The upshot was a resolution to send Nottingham, Halifax, and Godolphin as Commissioners to treat with the Prince of Orange. On December 2 they started on their mission, which they appear to have conducted in good faith. In reality they had been completely deceived by the King, who merely wished to gain time for preparing his flight to France. On December 9, James dispatched his wife and the Prince of Wales to France by way of Portsmouth, promising to follow them in twenty-four hours. During the night of the 10th-11th, he cancelled the recently prepared writs of the new Parliament, and also wrote a letter to Feversham, who interpreted it as an order to disband the royal army under his command. At three in the morning, taking with him the Great Seal, which was afterwards fished up from the Thames, James secretly fled from Whitehall to Sheerness. On the afternoon of the same day the Commissioners returned to London, to find the city in terror and the King gone. The flight of James has always been regarded as the most fatal of all his mistakes. His avowed intention was to dissolve the Government of the State and to produce confusion by his flight, so as to make it clear to the people that the return of the King was the sole security of law and order. But he had taken measures before his departure which were actually instrumental in preventing this result. He had summoned the Peers to assist the Privy Council on the 11th; and it was natural, when they met and heard of his flight, that they should assume provisional authority. The assembly chose Halifax as its president, and drafted a resolution to co-operate with the Prince of Orange in procuring a free Parliament. On the 13th, they received a letter from James with the

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bewildering news that he had fallen into the hands of the mob at Faversham, in Kent. Assistance was promptly sent, and on the 16th, the Earl of Feversham, amid shouting crowds, escorted the King back to the palace he had deserted. On the same day the Privy Council Registers show that James held a last Privy Council, attended by eight councillors, at which some orders were issued to the Lords Lieutenant and the Secretary of the Admiralty. But neither the Lords Lieutenant nor Samuel Pepys seem to have paid any attention to the last commands which King James ever issued in England.

The duplicity with which James had deceived not only William but his own Commissioners, his evident desire to produce disorder, his craven flight all these things provoked general indignation. But his flight brought something more than wrath and humiliation upon James-it revealed his innermost secret. It was now fatally clear that France was the goal on which he had determined for his flight, and that he would trust to French arms for his restoration. France was the Power which had persecuted the Protestants and humiliated England; William, who had always defended the one, was now ready to befriend the other. The Prince of Orange saw his advantage and made prompt use of it. Until the flight of James, it seems certain that he had hoped for no more than a regency. Now-from the moment of the flight-he seems to have conceived the plan of directly assuming the Crown. His obvious policy was to convince England that James was the ally of France, that hereditary enemy of her race and her religion. Hence the second flight of James was, with consummate skill, facilitated by William. At ten on the night of December 17 the Dutch guards invested Whitehall, and carried off King James to Rochester early the next morning. Once there, James found his guards relaxed, and avenues of escape open. The man whom Turenne had declared to be inaccessible to fear was now a prey to almost childish terrors. He declared that there was but one step from the prison to the grave, and the memory of the fate of Richard II and of his own father hovered before his eyes. He therefore eagerly seized his opportunity and, on December 23, 1688, quitted the soil of England By this second flight, which William had deliberately encouraged, James committed political suicide. When Hoffmann first heard of the intended flight of the Queen and the Prince of Wales, he expressed his opinion to the Emperor that, if they went to France, the son would lose his crown. This far-sighted prediction applied even more strongly to the case of James himself. By remaining in England, James might have retained great influence and caused great difficulties, as his father had contrived to do while discredited and a prisoner. But once in France, however uncontrolled, he seemed the sworn friend, almost the henchman, of England's traditional foe. When William heard the news of the King's flight, he bade the French ambassador quit England within twenty-four hours. The action marked the complete immediate

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harmony between the wishes of the English people and the policy of the Dutch Stadholder. The protector of the public liberties and the Protestant religion of England had, with the applause of the nation, enlisted its resources in the service of that " Great Design" which he so inflexibly pursued, and of that "Grand Alliance" of which he was the recognised head. The English people did not as yet realise that "the Great Deliverer" had, in Halifax' luminous sentence, merely "taken England on his way to France

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With the opening of the year 1689 our interest shifts from the affairs of France and the Grand Alliance to the internal problems of England. All parties were agreed that James, as an actually ruling sovereign, was now an impossibility; but all parties differed as to the new settlement. The main lines of division were already shaped in December; but they were blurred and confused by the flight of James. The extreme High Church Tories, headed by Clarendon, advocated a regency, with James as the nominal sovereign; Danby and a small body of Tories argued that James had abdicated by flight, that proofs of his son's legitimacy were unobtainable, and that judgment therefore going by default, the next legal successor was Mary. The Whigs, under Somers and Maynard, went further and proposed the simple and logical plan of declaring the throne vacant and filling it by election. Halifax headed a fourth party of "Trimmers" or Moderates, who advocated giving the Crown to William and Mary. He objected to the plans both of Somers and Clarendon, wishing the settlement to rest, not upon logical perfection or historic precedent, but simply upon grounds of practical necessity.

On the news of James' second flight William had, at the request of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, the members of Charles II's Parliaments and the Common Council of London, assumed the administration. Following their instructions, he issued a circular to constituent bodies, requesting them to elect representatives for a Convention. William made no attempt to interfere with the elections. The secret of his calm is to be found in a momentous interview with Halifax about this time, which Halifax has recorded with his own hand. It shows clearly that William was resolved to retire if James returned to England, and to refuse the Regency if it was offered him. Regarding his succession to full power as practically assured, he awaited the progress of events with imperturbable calm. Perhaps no member of the Convention Parliament, which assembled on January 22, as yet thought that events would end in the way which William already foresaw. The Commons speedily (January 28) resolved that James, "having endeavoured to subvert the constitution by breaking the original contract between King and people, and by the advice of Jesuits and other persons, had violated the fundamental laws and withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, and that the throne had thereby become vacant." The logic of the

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resolution was as bad as its grammar; for it was obvious that, though desertion of the kingdom might produce vacancy of the throne, by all precedents misgovernment and acceptance of bad advice could not. Yet all three reasons were alleged as causes of vacancy and abdication. The lack of logic marked in fact the compromise of principles and the blending of views between the moderate Tories and the Whigs.

On January 29 this resolution was sent up to the Lords, together with another, to the effect that a Popish King had been found by experience inconsistent with a Protestant Government. This second resolution excited no dispute, and even no comment; but the first gave rise to the most envenomed controversy. The parties of Clarendon, Danby and Halifax were in conflict in the Lords, with startling results. The Lords threw out the "vacancy" clause; the Commons declined to accept this amendment; and the two Houses were thus at a complete deadlock. A conference took place on February 6, in which the views of all parties were stated with remarkable clearness. Clarendon and Pembroke appealed to the seven disputed successions in English history to prove that the vacancy of the throne had never been assumed, and that the hereditary principle had always theoretically prevailed. But there was a flaw in this argument which the Whigs were not slow to see. Maynard pointed out that if, as even Tories admitted, James had lost the exercise of his power, someone had a right now to that power. Both Houses had agreed to the resolution that no Papist could in future be King, and therefore Clarendon's faction, while urging that James was the nominal King, could not propose the Prince of Wales as either the actual or eventual ruler. Why not, then, admit the Whig doctrine of the original contract between King and people, with its proviso that the throne became elective when the contract was broken? The Whigs had the worst of the precedents and the best of the arguments; but their doctrine of an elective Crown still appeared too revolutionary for the Lords. At this point Halifax intervened, basing his appeal neither on history nor on logic, but on the grounds of practical common-sense. He argued that the Crown would only be made elective in the of exception and pro hac vice, and would then revert to the original hereditary channel. Frankly admitting the need of some break with tradition, he advanced the overwhelming plea of necessity, the defence of revolutionaries as well as of tyrants. When the Lords again debated the question alone, Halifax, to the great wrath of Clarendon, "drove furiously," and carried the acceptance of the Commons' resolution intact. It only remained now to settle the succession. William had declared publicly, at the beginning of the month, that he would return to Holland unless he were chosen King regnant conjointly with his wife, with the whole administration vested in himself. On February 6 the Lords resolved, without a division, that the Prince and Princess of Orange should be declared King and Queen of England. William

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