The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 4

T >> Thomas Babington Macaulay >> The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 4

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In truth the ability and vigour with which William repaired his
terrible defeat might well excite admiration. "In one respect,"
said the Admiral Coligni, "I may claim superiority over
Alexander, over Scipio, over Caesar. They won great battles, it is
true. I have lost four great battles; and yet I show to the enemy
a more formidable front than ever." The blood of Coligni ran in
the veins of William; and with the blood had descended the
unconquerable spirit which could derive from failure as much
glory as happier commanders owed to success. The defeat of Landen
was indeed a heavy blow. The King had a few days of cruel
anxiety. If Luxemburg pushed on, all was lost. Louvain must fall,
and Mechlin, Nieuport, and Ostend. The Batavian frontier would be
in danger. The cry for peace throughout Holland might be such as
neither States General nor Stadtholder would be able to
resist.450 But there was delay; and a very short delay was enough
for William. From the field of battle he made his way through the
multitude of fugitives to the neighbourhood of Louvain, and there
began to collect his scattered forces. His character is not
lowered by the anxiety which, at that moment, the most disastrous
of his life, he felt for the two persons who were dearest to him.
As soon as he was safe, he wrote to assure his wife of his
safety.451 In the confusion of the flight he had lost sight of
Portland, who was then in very feeble health, and had therefore
run more than the ordinary risks of war. A short note which the
King sent to his friend a few hours later is still extant.452
"Though I hope to see you this evening, I cannot help writing to
tell you how rejoiced I am that you got off so well. God grant
that your health may soon be quite restored. These are great
trials, which he has been pleased to send me in quick succession.
I must try to submit to his pleasure without murmuring, and to
deserve his anger less."

His forces rallied fast. Large bodies of troops which he had,
perhaps imprudently, detached from his army while he supposed
that Liege was the object of the enemy, rejoined him by forced
marches. Three weeks after his defeat he held a review a few
miles from Brussels. The number of men under arms was greater
than on the morning of the bloody day of Landen; their appearance
was soldierlike; and their spirit seemed unbroken. William now
wrote to Heinsius that the worst was over. "The crisis," he said,
"has been a terrible one. Thank God that it has ended thus." He
did not, however, think it prudent to try at that time the event
of another pitched field. He therefore suffered the French to
besiege and take Charleroy; and this was the only advantage which
they derived from the most sanguinary battle fought in Europe
during the seventeenth century.

The melancholy tidings of the defeat of Landen found England
agitated by tidings not less melancholy from a different quarter.
During many months the trade with the Mediterranean Sea had been
almost entirely interrupted by the war. There was no chance that
a merchantman from London or from Amsterdam would, if
unprotected, reach the Pillars of Hercules without being boarded
by a French privateer; and the protection of armed vessels was
not easily to be obtained. During the year 1691, great fleets,
richly laden for Spanish, Italian and Turkish markets, had been
gathering in the Thames and the Texel. In February 1693, near
four hundred ships were ready to start. The value of the cargoes
was estimated at several millions sterling. Those galleons which
had long been the wonder and envy of the world had never conveyed
so precious a freight from the West Indies to Seville. The
English government undertook, in concert with the Dutch
government, to escort the vessels which were laden with this
great mass of wealth. The French government was bent on
intercepting them.

The plan of the allies was that seventy ships of the line and
about thirty frigates and brigantines should assemble in the
Channel under the command of Killegrew and Delaval, the two new
Lords of the English Admiralty, and should convoy the Smyrna
fleet, as it was popularly called, beyond the limits within which
any danger could be apprehended from the Brest squadron. The
greater part of the armament might then return to guard the
Channel, while Rooke, with twenty sail, might accompany the
trading vessels and might protect them against the squadron which
lay at Toulon. The plan of the French government was that the
Brest squadron under Tourville and the Toulon squadron under
Estrees should meet in the neighbourhood of the Straits of
Gibraltar, and should there lie in wait for the booty.

Which plan was the better conceived may be doubted. Which was the
better executed is a question which admits of no doubt. The whole
French navy, whether in the Atlantic or in the Mediterranean, was
moved by one will. The navy of England and the navy of the United
Provinces were subject to different authorities; and, both in
England and in the United Provinces, the power was divided and
subdivided to such an extent that no single person was pressed by
a heavy responsibility. The spring came. The merchants loudly
complained that they had already lost more by delay than they
could hope to gain by the most successful voyage; and still the
ships of war were not half manned or half provisioned. The
Amsterdam squadron did not arrive on our coast till late in
April; the Zealand squadron not till the middle of May.453 It was
June before the immense fleet, near five hundred sail, lost sight
of the cliffs of England.

Tourville was already on the sea, and was steering southward. But
Killegrew and Delaval were so negligent or so unfortunate that
they had no intelligence of his movements. They at first took it
for granted that he was still lying in the port of Brest. Then
they heard a rumour that some shipping had been seen to the
northward; and they supposed that he was taking advantage of
their absence to threaten the coast of Devonshire. It never seems
to have occurred to them as possible that he might have effected
a junction with the Toulon squadron, and might be impatiently
waiting for his prey in the neighbourhood of Gibraltar. They
therefore, on the sixth of June, having convoyed the Smyrna fleet
about two hundred miles beyond Ushant, announced their intention
to part company with Rooke. Rooke expostulated, but to no
purpose. It was necessary for him to submit, and to proceed with
his twenty men of war to the Mediterranean, while his superiors,
with the rest of the armament, returned to the Channel.

It was by this time known in England that Tourville had stolen
out of Brest, and was hastening to join Estrees. The return of
Killegrew and Delaval therefore excited great alarm. A swift
sailing vessel was instantly despatched to warn Rooke of his
danger; but the warning never reached him. He ran before a fair
wind to Cape Saint Vincent; and there he learned that some French
ships were lying in the neighbouring Bay of Lagos. The first
information which he received led him to believe that they were
few in number; and so dexterously did they conceal their strength
that, till they were within half an hour's sail, he had no
suspicion that he was opposed to the whole maritime strength of a
great kingdom. To contend against fourfold odds would have been
madness. It was much that he was able to save his squadron from
titter destruction. He exerted all his skill. Two or three Dutch
men of war, which were in the rear, courageously sacrificed
themselves to save the fleet. With the rest of the armament, and
with about sixty merchant ships, Rooke got safe to Madeira and
thence to Cork. But more than three hundred of the vessels which
he had convoyed were scattered over the ocean. Some escaped to
Ireland; some to Corunna; some to Lisbon; some to Cadiz; some
were captured, and more destroyed. A few, which had taken shelter
under the rock of Gibraltar, and were pursued thither by the
enemy, were sunk when it was found that they could not be
defended. Others perished in the same manner under the batteries
of Malaga. The gain to the French seems not to have been great;
but the loss to England and Holland was immense.454

Never within the memory of man had there been in the City a day
of more gloom and agitation than that on which the news of the
encounter in the Bay of Lagos arrived. Many merchants, an
eyewitness said, went away from the Royal Exchange, as pale as if
they had received sentence of death. A deputation from the
merchants who had been sufferers by this great disaster went up
to the Queen with an address representing their grievances. They
were admitted to the Council Chamber, where she was seated at the
head of the Board. She directed Somers to reply to them in her
name; and he addressed to them a speech well calculated to soothe
their irritation. Her Majesty, he said, felt for them from her
heart; and she had already appointed a Committee of the Privy
Council to inquire into the cause of the late misfortune, and to
consider of the best means of preventing similar misfortunes in
time to come.455 This answer gave so much satisfaction that the
Lord Mayor soon came to the palace to thank the Queen for her
goodness, to assure her that, through all vicissitudes, London
would be true to her and her consort, and to inform her that,
severely as the late calamity had been felt by many great
commercial houses, the Common Council had unanimously resolved to
advance whatever might be necessary for the support of the
government.456

The ill humour which the public calamities naturally produced was
inflamed by every factious artifice. Never had the Jacobite
pamphleteers been so savagely scurrilous as during this
unfortunate summer. The police was consequently more active than
ever in seeking for the dens from which so much treason
proceeded. With great difficulty and after long search the most
important of all the unlicensed presses was discovered. This
press belonged to a Jacobite named William Anderton, whose
intrepidity and fanaticism marked him out as fit to be employed
on services from which prudent men and scrupulous men shrink.
During two years he had been watched by the agents of the
government; but where he exercised his craft was an impenetrable
mystery. At length he was tracked to a house near Saint James's
Street, where he was known by a feigned name, and where he passed
for a working jeweller. A messenger of the press went thither
with several assistants, and found Anderton's wife and mother
posted as sentinels at the door. The women knew the messenger,
rushed on him, tore his hair, and cried out "Thieves" and
"Murder." The alarm was thus given to Anderton. He concealed the
instruments of his calling, came forth with an assured air, and
bade defiance to the messenger, the Censor, the Secretary, and
Little Hooknose himself. After a struggle he was secured. His
room was searched; and at first sight no evidence of his guilt
appeared. But behind the bed was soon found a door which opened
into a dark closet. The closet contained a press, types and heaps
of newly printed papers. One of these papers, entitled Remarks on
the Present Confederacy and the Late Revolution, is perhaps the
most frantic of all the Jacobite libels. In this tract the Prince
of Orange is gravely accused of having ordered fifty of his
wounded English soldiers to be burned alive. The governing
principle of his whole conduct, it is said, is not vainglory, or
ambition, or avarice, but a deadly hatred of Englishmen and a
desire to make them miserable. The nation is vehemently adjured,
on peril of incurring the severest judgments, to rise up and free
itself from this plague, this curse, this tyrant, whose depravity
makes it difficult to believe that he can have been procreated by
a human pair. Many copies were also found of another paper,
somewhat less ferocious but perhaps more dangerous, entitled A
French Conquest neither desirable nor practicable. In this tract
also the people are exhorted to rise in insurrection. They are
assured that a great part of the army is with them. The forces of
the Prince of Orange will melt away; he will be glad to make his
escape; and a charitable hope is sneeringly expressed that it may
not be necessary to do him any harm beyond sending him back to
Loo, where he may live surrounded by luxuries for which the
English have paid dear.

The government, provoked and alarmed by the virulence of the
Jacobite pamphleteers, determined to make Anderton an example. He
was indicted for high treason, and brought to the bar of the Old
Bailey. Treby, now Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and Powell,
who had honourably distinguished himself on the day of the trial
of the bishops, were on the Bench. It is unfortunate that no
detailed report of the evidence has come down to us, and that we
are forced to content ourselves with such fragments of
information as can be collected from the contradictory narratives
of writers evidently partial, intemperate and dishonest. The
indictment, however, is extant; and the overt acts which it
imputes to the prisoner undoubtedly amount to high treason.457 To
exhort the subjects of the realm to rise up and depose the King
by force, and to add to that exhortation the expression,
evidently ironical, of a hope that it may not be necessary to
inflict on him any evil worse than banishment, is surely an
offence which the least courtly lawyer will admit to be within
the scope of the statute of Edward the Third. On this point
indeed there seems to have been no dispute, either at the trial
or subsequently.

The prisoner denied that he had printed the libels. On this point
it seems reasonable that, since the evidence has not come down to
us, we should give credit to the judges and the jury who heard
what the witnesses had to say.

One argument with which Anderton had been furnished by his
advisers, and which, in the Jacobite pasquinades of that time, is
represented as unanswerable, was that, as the art of printing had
been unknown in the reign of Edward the Third, printing could not
be an overt act of treason under a statute of that reign. The
judges treated this argument very lightly; and they were surely
justified in so treating it. For it is an argument which would
lead to the conclusion that it could not be an overt act of
treason to behead a King with a guillotine or to shoot him with a
Minie rifle.

It was also urged in Anderton's favour,--and this was undoubtedly
an argument well entitled to consideration,--that a distinction
ought to be made between the author of a treasonable paper and
the man who merely printed it. The former could not pretend that
he had not understood the meaning of the words which he had
himself selected. But to the latter those words might convey no
idea whatever. The metaphors, the allusions, the sarcasms, might
be far beyond his comprehension; and, while his hands were busy
among the types, his thoughts might be wandering to things
altogether unconnected with the manuscript which was before him.
It is undoubtedly true that it may be no crime to print what it
would be a great crime to write. But this is evidently a matter
concerning which no general rule can be laid down. Whether
Anderton had, as a mere mechanic, contributed to spread a work
the tendency of which he did not suspect, or had knowingly lent
his help to raise a rebellion, was a question for the jury; and
the jury might reasonably infer from his change of his name, from
the secret manner in which he worked, from the strict watch kept
by his wife and mother, and from the fury with which, even in the
grasp of the messengers, he railed at the government, that he was
not the unconscious tool, but the intelligent and zealous
accomplice of traitors. The twelve, after passing a considerable
time in deliberation, informed the Court that one of them
entertained doubts. Those doubts were removed by the arguments of
Treby and Powell; and a verdict of Guilty was found.

The fate of the prisoner remained during sometime in suspense.
The Ministers hoped that he might be induced to save his own neck
at the expense of the necks of the pamphleteers who had employed
him. But his natural courage was kept up by spiritual stimulants
which the nonjuring divines well understood how to administer. He
suffered death with fortitude, and continued to revile the
government to the last. The Jacobites clamoured loudly against
the cruelty of the judges who had tried him and of the Queen who
had left him for execution, and, not very consistently,
represented him at once as a poor ignorant artisan who was not
aware of the nature and tendency of the act for which he
suffered, and as a martyr who had heroically laid down his life
for the banished King and the persecuted Church.458

The Ministers were much mistaken if they flattered themselves
that the fate of Anderton would deter others from imitating his
example. His execution produced several pamphlets scarcely less
virulent than those for which he had suffered. Collier, in what
he called Remarks on the London Gazette, exulted with cruel joy
over the carnage of Landen, and the vast destruction of English
property on the coast of Spain.459 Other writers did their best
to raise riots among the labouring people. For the doctrine of
the Jacobites was that disorder, in whatever place or in whatever
way it might begin, was likely to end in a Restoration. A phrase
which, without a commentary, may seem to be mere nonsense, but
which was really full of meaning, was often in their mouths at
this time, and was indeed a password by which the members of the
party recognised each other: "Box it about; it will come to my
father." The hidden sense of this gibberish was, "Throw the
country into confusion; it will be necessary at last to have
recourse to King James."460 Trade was not prosperous; and many
industrious men were out of work. Accordingly songs addressed to
the distressed classes were composed by the malecontent street
poets. Numerous copies of a ballad exhorting the weavers to rise
against the government were discovered in the house of that
Quaker who had printed James's Declaration.461 Every art was
used for the purpose of exciting discontent in a much more
formidable body of men, the sailors; and unhappily the vices of
the naval administration furnished the enemies of the State with
but too good a choice of inflammatory topics. Some seamen
deserted; some mutinied; then came executions; and then came more
ballads and broadsides representing those executions as barbarous
murders. Reports that the government had determined to defraud
its defenders of their hard earned pay were circulated with so
much effect that a great crowd of women from Wapping and
Rotherhithe besieged Whitehall, clamouring for what was due to
their husbands. Mary had the good sense and good nature to order
four of those importunate petitioners to be admitted into the
room where she was holding a Council. She heard their complaints,
and herself assured them that the rumour which had alarmed them
was unfounded.462 By this time Saint Bartholomew's day drew near;
and the great annual fair, the delight of idle apprentices and
the horror of Puritanical Aldermen, was opened in Smithfield with
the usual display of dwarfs, giants, and dancing dogs, the man
that ate fire, and the elephant that loaded and fired a musket.
But of all the shows none proved so attractive as a dramatic
performance which, in conception, though doubtless not in
execution, seems to have borne much resemblance to those immortal
masterpieces of humour in which Aristophanes held up Cleon and
Lamachus to derision. Two strollers personated Killegrew and
Delaval. The Admirals were represented as flying with their whole
fleet before a few French privateers, and taking shelter under
the grins of the Tower. The office of Chorus was performed by a
Jackpudding who expressed very freely his opinion of the naval
administration. Immense crowds flocked to see this strange farce.
The applauses were loud; the receipts were great; and the
mountebanks, who had at first ventured to attack only the unlucky
and unpopular Board of Admiralty, now, emboldened by impunity and
success, and probably prompted and rewarded by persons of much
higher station than their own, began to cast reflections on other
departments of the government. This attempt to revive the license
of the Attic Stage was soon brought to a close by the appearance
of a strong body of constables who carried off the actors to
prison.463 Meanwhile the streets of London were every night
strewn with seditious handbills. At all the taverns the zealots
of hereditary right were limping about with glasses of wine and
punch at their lips. This fashion had just come in; and the
uninitiated wondered much that so great a number of jolly
gentlemen should have suddenly become lame. But, those who were
in the secret knew that the word Limp was a consecrated word,
that every one of the four letters which composed it was the
initial of an august name, and that the loyal subject who limped
while he drank was taking off his bumper to Lewis, James, Mary,
and the Prince.464

It was not only in the capital that the Jacobites, at this time,
made a great display of their wit. They mustered strong at Bath,
where the Lord President Caermarthen was trying to recruit his
feeble health. Every evening they met, as they phrased it, to
serenade the Marquess. In other words they assembled under the
sick man's window, and there sang doggrel lampoons on him.465

It is remarkable that the Lord President, at the very time at
which he was insulted as a Williamite at Bath, was considered as
a stanch Jacobite at Saint Germains. How he came to be so
considered is a most perplexing question. Some writers are of
opinion that he, like Shrewsbury, Russell, Godolphin and
Marlborough, entered into engagements with one king while eating
the bread of the other. But this opinion does not rest on
sufficient proofs. About the treasons of Shrewsbury, of Russell,
of Godolphin and of Marlborough, we have a great mass of
evidence, derived from various sources, and extending
over several years. But all the information which we possess
about Caermarthen's dealings with James is contained in a single
short paper written by Melfort on the sixteenth of October 1693.
From that paper it is quite clear that some intelligence had
reached the banished King and his Ministers which led them to
regard Caermarthen as a friend. But there is no proof that they
ever so regarded him, either before that day or after that
day.466 On the whole, the most probable explanation of this
mystery seems to be that Caermarthen had been sounded by some
Jacobite emissary much less artful than himself, and had, for
the purpose of getting at the bottom of the new scheme of policy
devised by Middleton, pretended to be well disposed to the cause
of the banished King, that an exaggerated account of what had
passed had been sent to Saint Germains, and that there had been
much rejoicing there at a conversion which soon proved to have
been feigned. It seems strange that such a conversion should even
for a moment have been thought sincere. It was plainly
Caermarthen's interest to stand by the sovereigns in possession.
He was their chief minister. He could not hope to be the chief
minister of James. It can indeed hardly be supposed that the
political conduct of a cunning old man, insatiably ambitious and
covetous, was much influenced by personal partiality. But, if
there were any person to whom Caermarthen was partial, that
person was undoubtedly Mary. That he had seriously engaged in a
plot to depose her, at the risk of his head if he failed, and
with the certainty of losing immense power and wealth if he
succeeded, was a story too absurd for any credulity but the
credulity of exiles.

Caermarthen had indeed at that moment peculiarly strong reasons
for being satisfied with the place which he held in the counsels
of William and Mary. There is but too strong reason to believe
that he was then accumulating unlawful gain with a rapidity
unexampled even in his experience.

The contest between the two East India Companies was, during the
autumn of 1693, fiercer than ever. The House of Commons, finding
the Old Company obstinately averse to all compromise, had, a
little before the close of the late session, requested the King
to give the three years' warning prescribed by the Charter. Child
and his fellows now began to be seriously alarmed. They expected
every day to receive the dreaded notice. Nay, they were not sure
that their exclusive privilege might not be taken away without
any notice at all; for they found that they had, by inadvertently
omitting to pay the tax lately imposed on their stock at the
precise time fixed by law, forfeited their Charter; and, though
it would, in ordinary circumstances, have been thought cruel in
the government to take advantage of such a slip, the public was
not inclined to allow the Old Company any thing more than the
strict letter of the bond. Every thing was lost if the Charter
were not renewed before the meeting of Parliament. There can be
little doubt that the proceedings of the corporation were still
really directed by Child. But he had, it should seem, perceived
that his unpopularity had injuriously affected the interests
which were under his care, and therefore did not obtrude himself
on the public notice. His place was ostensibly filled by his near
kinsman Sir Thomas Cook, one of the greatest merchants of London,
and Member of Parliament for the borough of Colchester. The
Directors placed at Cook's absolute disposal all the immense
wealth which lay in their treasury; and in a short time near a
hundred thousand pounds were expended in corruption on a gigantic
scale. In what proportions this enormous sum was distributed
among the great men at Whitehall, and how much of it was
embezzled by intermediate agents, is still a mystery. We know
with certainty however that thousands went to Seymour and
thousands to Caermarthen.