The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 5

T >> Thomas Babington Macaulay >> The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 5

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Great as was the success of the embassy, there was one drawback.
James was still at Saint Germains; and round the mock King were
gathered a mock Court and Council, a Great Seal and a Privy Seal,
a crowd of garters and collars, white staves and gold keys.
Against the pleasure which the marked attentions of the French
princes and grandees gave to Portland, was to be set off the
vexation which he felt when Middleton crossed his path with the
busy look of a real Secretary of State. But it was with emotions
far deeper that the Ambassador saw on the terraces and in the
antechambers of Versailles men who had been deeply implicated in
plots against the life of his master. He expressed his
indignation loudly and vehemently. "I hope," he said, "that there
is no design in this; that these wretches are not purposely
thrust in my way. When they come near me all my blood runs back
in my veins." His words were reported to Lewis. Lewis employed
Boufflers to smooth matters; and Boufflers took occasion to say
something on the subject as if from himself. Portland easily
divined that in talking with Boufflers he was really talking with
Lewis, and eagerly seized the opportunity of representing the
expediency, the absolute necessity, of removing James to a
greater distance from England. "It was not contemplated,
Marshal," he said, "when we arranged the terms of peace in
Brabant, that a palace in the suburbs of Paris was to continue to
be an asylum for outlaws and murderers." "Nay, my Lord," said
Boufflers, uneasy doubtless on his own account, "you will not; I
am sure, assert that I gave you any pledge that King James would
be required to leave France. You are too honourable a man, you
are too much my friend, to say any such thing." "It is true,"
answered Portland, "that I did not insist on a positive promise
from you; but remember what passed. I proposed that King James
should retire to Rome or Modena. Then you suggested Avignon; and I
assented. Certainly my regard for you makes me very unwilling to
do anything that would give you pain. But my master's interests
are dearer to me than all the friends that I have in the world
put together. I must tell His Most Christian Majesty all that
passed between us; and I hope that, when I tell him, you will be
present, and that you will be able to bear witness that I have
not put a single word of mine into your mouth."

When Boufflers had argued and expostulated in vain, Villeroy was
sent on the same errand, but had no better success. A few days
later Portland had a long private audience of Lewis. Lewis
declared that he was determined to keep his word, to preserve the
peace of Europe, to abstain from everything which could give just
cause of offence to England, but that, as a man of honour, as a
man of humanity, he could not refuse shelter to an unfortunate
King, his own first cousin. Portland replied that nobody
questioned His Majesty's good faith; but that while Saint
Germains was occupied by its present inmates it would be beyond
even His Majesty's power to prevent eternal plotting between them
and the malecontents on the other side of the Straits of Dover,
and that, while such plotting went on, the peace must necessarily
be insecure. The question was really not one of humanity. It was
not asked, it was not wished, that James should be left
destitute. Nay, the English government was willing to allow him
an income larger than that which he derived from the munificence
of France. Fifty thousand pounds a year, to which in strictness
of law he had no right, awaited his acceptance, if he would only
move to a greater distance from the country which, while he was
near it, could never be at rest. If, in such circumstances, he
refused to move, this was the strongest reason for believing that
he could not safely be suffered to stay. The fact that he thought
the difference between residing at Saint Germains and residing at
Avignon worth more than fifty thousand a year sufficiently proved
that he had not relinquished the hope of being restored to his
throne by means of a rebellion or of something worse. Lewis
answered that on that point his resolution was unalterable. He
never would compel his guest and kinsman to depart. "There is
another matter," said Portland, "about which I have felt it my
duty to make representations. I mean the countenance given to the
assassins." "I know nothing about assassins," said Lewis. "Of
course," answered the Ambassador, "your Majesty knows nothing
about such men. At least your Majesty does not know them for what
they are. But I can point them out, and can furnish ample proofs
of their guilt." He then named Berwick. For the English
Government, which had been willing to make large allowances for
Berwick's peculiar position as long as he confined himself to
acts of open and manly hostility, conceived that he had forfeited
all claim to indulgence by becoming privy to the Assassination
Plot. This man, Portland said, constantly haunted Versailles.
Barclay, whose guilt was of a still deeper dye,--Barclay, the
chief contriver of the murderous ambuscade of Turnham Green,--had
found in France, not only an asylum, but an honourable military
position. The monk who was sometimes called Harrison and
sometimes went by the alias of Johnson, but who, whether Harrison
or Johnson, had been one of the earliest and one of the most
bloodthirsty of Barclays accomplices, was now comfortably settled
as prior of a religious house in France. Lewis denied or evaded
all these charges. "I never," he said, "heard of your Harrison.
As to Barclay, he certainly once had a company; but it has been
disbanded; and what has become of him I do not know. It is true
that Berwick was in London towards the close of 1695; but he was
there only for the purpose of ascertaining whether a descent on
England was practicable; and I am confident that he was no party
to any cruel and dishonourable design." In truth Lewis had a
strong personal motive for defending Berwick. The guilt of
Berwick as respected the Assassination Plot does not appear to
have extended beyond connivance; and to the extent of connivance
Lewis himself was guilty.

Thus the audience terminated. All that was left to Portland was
to announce that the exiles must make their choice between Saint
Germains and fifty thousand a year; that the protocol of Ryswick
bound the English government to pay to Mary of Modena only what
the law gave her; that the law gave her nothing; that
consequently the English government was bound to nothing; and
that, while she, her husband and her child remained where they
were, she should have nothing. It was hoped that this
announcement would produce a considerable effect even in James's
household; and indeed some of his hungry courtiers and priests
seem to have thought the chance of a restoration so small that it
would be absurd to refuse a splendid income, though coupled with
a condition which might make that small chance somewhat smaller.
But it is certain that, if there was murmuring among the
Jacobites, it was disregarded by James. He was fully resolved not
to move, and was only confirmed in his resolution by learning
that he was regarded by the usurper as a dangerous neighbour.
Lewis paid so much regard to Portland's complaints as to intimate
to Middleton a request, equivalent to a command, that the Lords
and gentlemen who formed the retinue of the banished King of
England would not come to Versailles on days on which the
representative of the actual King was expected there. But at
other places there was constant risk of an encounter which might
have produced several duels, if not an European war. James
indeed, far from shunning such encounters, seems to have taken a
perverse pleasure in thwarting his benefactor's wish to keep the
peace, and in placing the Ambassador in embarrassing situations.
One day his Excellency, while drawing on his boots for a run with
the Dauphin's celebrated wolf pack, was informed that King James
meant to be of the party, and was forced to stay at home. Another
day, when his Excellency had set his heart on having some sport
with the royal staghounds, he was informed by the Grand Huntsman
that King James might probably come to the rendezvous without any
notice. Melfort was particularly active in laying traps for the
young noblemen and gentlemen of the Legation. The Prince of Wales
was more than once placed in such a situation that they could
scarcely avoid passing close to him. Were they to salute him?
Were they to stand erect and covered while every body else
saluted him? No Englishman zealous for the Bill of Rights and the
Protestant religion would willingly do any thing which could be
construed into an act of homage to a Popish pretender. Yet no
goodnatured and generous man, however firm in his Whig
principles, would willingly offer any thing which could look like
an affront to an innocent and a most unfortunate child.

Meanwhile other matters of grave importance claimed Portland's
attention. There was one matter in particular about which the
French ministers anxiously expected him to say something, but
about which he observed strict silence. How to interpret that
silence they scarcely knew. They were certain only that it could
not be the effect of unconcern. They were well assured that the
subject which he so carefully avoided was never, during two
waking hours together, out of his thoughts or out of the thoughts
of his master. Nay, there was not in all Christendom a single
politician, from the greatest ministers of state down to the
silliest newsmongers of coffeehouses, who really felt that
indifference which the prudent Ambassador of England affected. A
momentous event, which had during many years been constantly
becoming more and more probable, was now certain and near.
Charles the Second of Spain, the last descendant in the male line
of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, would soon die without
posterity. Who would then be the heir to his many kingdoms,
dukedoms, counties, lordships, acquired in different ways, held
by different titles and subject to different laws? That was a
question about which jurists differed, and which it was not
likely that jurists would, even if they were unanimous, be
suffered to decide. Among the claimants were the mightiest
sovereigns of the continent; there was little chance that they
would submit to any arbitration but that of the sword; and it
could not be hoped that, if they appealed to the sword, other
potentates who had no pretension to any part of the disputed
inheritance would long remain neutral. For there was in Western
Europe no government which did not feel that its own prosperity,
dignity and security might depend on the event of the contest.

It is true that the empire, which had, in the preceding century,
threatened both France and England with subjugation, had of late
been of hardly so much account as the Duchy of Savoy or the
Electorate of Brandenburg. But it by no means followed that the
fate of that empire was matter of indifference to the rest of the
world. The paralytic helplessness and drowsiness of the body once
so formidable could not be imputed to any deficiency of the
natural elements of power. The dominions of the Catholic King
were in extent and in population superior to those of Lewis and
of William united. Spain alone, without a single dependency,
ought to have been a kingdom of the first rank; and Spain was but
the nucleus of the Spanish monarchy. The outlying provinces of
that monarchy in Europe would have sufficed to make three highly
respectable states of the second order. One such state might have
been formed in the Netherlands. It would have been a wide expanse
of cornfield, orchard and meadow, intersected by navigable rivers
and canals. At short intervals, in that thickly peopled and
carefully tilled region, rose stately old towns, encircled by
strong fortifications, embellished by fine cathedrals and senate-
houses, and renowned either as seats of learning or as seats of
mechanical industry. A second flourishing principality might have
been created between the Alps and the Po, out of that well
watered garden of olives and mulberry trees which spreads many
miles on every side of the great white temple of Milan. Yet
neither the Netherlands nor the Milanese could, in physical
advantages, vie with the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a land
which nature had taken pleasure in enriching and adorning, a land
which would have been paradise, if tyranny and superstition had
not, during many ages, lavished all their noxious influences on
the bay of Campania, the plain of Enna, and the sunny banks of
Galesus.

In America the Spanish territories spread from the Equator
northward and southward through all the signs of the Zodiac far
into the temperate zone. Thence came gold and silver to be coined
in all the mints, and curiously wrought in all the jewellers'
shops, of Europe and Asia. Thence came the finest tobacco, the
finest chocolate, the finest indigo, the finest cochineal, the
hides of innumerable wild oxen, quinquina, coffee, sugar. Either
the viceroyalty of Mexico or the viceroyalty of Peru would, as an
independent state with ports open to all the world, have been an
important member of the great community of nations.

And yet the aggregate, made up of so many parts, each of which
separately might have been powerful and highly considered, was
impotent to a degree which moved at once pity and laughter.
Already one most remarkable experiment had been tried on this
strange empire. A small fragment, hardly a three hundredth part
of the whole in extent, hardly a thirtieth part of the whole in
population, had been detached from the rest, had from that moment
begun to display a new energy and to enjoy a new prosperity, and
was now, after the lapse of a hundred and twenty years, far more
feared and reverenced than the huge mass of which it had once
been an obscure corner. What a contrast between the Holland which
Alva had oppressed and plundered, and the Holland from which
William had sailed to deliver England! And who, with such an
example before him, would venture to foretell what changes might
be at hand, if the most languid and torpid of monarchies should
be dissolved, and if every one of the members which had composed
it should enter on an independent existence?

To such a dissolution that monarchy was peculiarly liable. The
King, and the King alone, held it together. The populations which
acknowledged him as their chief either knew nothing of each
other, or regarded each other with positive aversion. The
Biscayan was in no sense the countryman of the Valencian, nor the
Lombard of the Biscayan, nor the Fleeting of the Lombard, nor the
Sicilian of the Fleeting. The Arragonese had never ceased to pine
for their lost independence. Within the memory of many persons
still living the Catalans had risen in rebellion, had entreated
Lewis the Thirteenth of France to become their ruler with the old
title of Count of Barcelona, and had actually sworn fealty to
him. Before the Catalans had been quieted, the Neapolitans had
taken arms, had abjured their foreign master, had proclaimed
their city a republic, and had elected a Loge. In the New World
the small caste of born Spaniards which had the exclusive
enjoyment of power and dignity was hated by Creoles and Indians,
Mestizos and Quadroons. The Mexicans especially had turned their
eyes on a chief who bore the name and had inherited the blood of
the unhappy Montezuma. Thus it seemed that the empire against
which Elizabeth and Henry the Fourth had been scarcely able to
contend would not improbably fall to pieces of itself, and that
the first violent shock from without would scatter the ill-
cemented parts of the huge fabric in all directions.

But, though such a dissolution had no terrors for the Catalonian
or the Fleming, for the Lombard or the Calabrian, for the Mexican
or the Peruvian, the thought of it was torture and madness to the
Castilian. Castile enjoyed the supremacy in that great assemblage
of races and languages. Castile sent out governors to Brussels,
Milan, Naples, Mexico, Lima. To Castile came the annual galleons
laden with the treasures of America. In Castile was
ostentatiously displayed and lavishly spent great fortunes made
in remote provinces by oppression and corruption. In Castile were
the King and his Court. There stood the stately Escurial, once
the centre of the politics of the world, the place to which
distant potentates looked, some with hope and gratitude, some
with dread and hatred, but none without anxiety and awe. The
glory of the house had indeed departed. It was long since
couriers bearing orders big with the fate of kings and
commonwealths had ridden forth from those gloomy portals.
Military renown, maritime ascendency, the policy once reputed so
profound, the wealth once deemed inexhaustible, had passed away.
An undisciplined army, a rotting fleet, an incapable council, an
empty treasury, were all that remained of that which had been so
great. Yet the proudest of nations could not bear to part even
with the name and the shadow of a supremacy which was no more.
All, from the grandee of the first class to the peasant, looked
forward with dread to the day when God should be pleased to take
their king to himself. Some of them might have a predilection for
Germany; but such predilections were subordinate to a stronger
feeling. The paramount object was the integrity of the empire of
which Castile was the head; and the prince who should appear to
be most likely to preserve that integrity unviolated would have
the best right to the allegiance of every true Castilian.

No man of sense, however, out of Castile, when he considered the
nature of the inheritance and the situation of the claimants,
could doubt that a partition was inevitable. Among those
claimants three stood preeminent, the Dauphin, the Emperor
Leopold, and the Electoral Prince of Bavaria.

If the question had been simply one of pedigree, the right of the
Dauphin would have been incontestable. Lewis the Fourteeenth had
married the Infanta Maria Theresa, eldest daughter of Philip the
Fourth and sister of Charles the Second. Her eldest son, the
Dauphin, would therefore, in the regular course of things, have
been her brother's successor. But she had, at the time of her
marriage, renounced, for herself and her posterity, all
pretensions to the Spanish crown.

To that renunciation her husband had assented. It had been made
an article of the Treaty of the Pyrenees. The Pope had been
requested to give his apostolical sanction to an arrangement so
important to the peace of Europe; and Lewis had sworn, by every
thing that could bind a gentleman, a king, and a Christian, by
his honour, by his royal word, by the canon of the Mass, by the
Holy Gospels, by the Cross of Christ, that he would hold the
renunciation sacred.11

The claim of the Emperor was derived from his mother Mary Anne,
daughter of Philip the Third, and aunt of Charles the Second, and
could not therefore, if nearness of blood alone were to be
regarded, come into competition with the claim of the Dauphin.
But the claim of the Emperor was barred by no renunciation. The
rival pretensions of the great Houses of Bourbon and Habsburg
furnished all Europe with an inexhaustible subject of discussion.
Plausible topics were not wanting to the supporters of either
cause. The partisans of the House of Austria dwelt on the
sacredness of treaties; the partisans of France on the sacredness
of birthright. How, it was asked on one side, can a Christian
king have the effrontery, the impiety, to insist on a claim which
he has with such solemnity renounced in the face of heaven and
earth? How, it was asked on the other side, can the fundamental
laws of a monarchy be annulled by any authority but that of the
supreme legislature? The only body which was competent to take
away from the children of Maria Theresa their hereditary rights
was the Comes. The Comes had not ratified her renunciation. That
renunciation was therefore a nullity; and no swearing, no
signing, no sealing, could turn that nullity into a reality.

Which of these two mighty competitors had the better case may
perhaps be doubted. What could not be doubted was that neither
would obtain the prize without a struggle which would shake the
world. Nor can we justly blame either for refusing to give way to
the other. For, on this occasion, the chief motive which actuated
them was, not greediness, but the fear of degradation and ruin.
Lewis, in resolving to put every thing to hazard rather than
suffer the power of the House of Austria to be doubled; Leopold,
in determining to put every thing to hazard rather than suffer
the power of the House of Bourbon to be doubled; merely obeyed
the law of self preservation. There was therefore one way, and
one alone, by which the great woe which seemed to be coming on
Europe could be averted. Was it possible that the dispute might
be compromised? Might not the two great rivals be induced to make
to a third party concessions such as neither could reasonably be
expected to make to the other?

The third party, to whom all who were anxious for the peace of
Christendom looked as their best hope, was a child of tender age,
Joseph, son of the Elector of Bavaria. His mother, the Electress
Mary Antoinette, was the only child of the Emperor Leopold by his
first wife Margaret, a younger sister of the Queen of Lewis the
Fourteenth. Prince Joseph was, therefore, nearer in blood to the
Spanish throne than his grandfather the Emperor, or than the sons
whom the Emperor had by his second wife. The Infanta Margaret had
indeed, at the time of her marriage, renounced her rights to the
kingdom of her forefathers. But the renunciation wanted many
formalities which had been observed in her sister's case, and
might be considered as cancelled by the will of Philip the
Fourth, which had declared that, failing his issue male, Margaret
and her posterity would be entitled to inherit his Crown. The
partisans of France held that the Bavarian claim was better than
the Austrian claim; the partisans of Austria held that the
Bavarian claim was better than the French claim. But that which
really constituted the strength of the Bavarian claim was the
weakness of the Bavarian government. The Electoral Prince was the
only candidate whose success would alarm nobody; would not make
it necessary for any power to raise another regiment, to man
another frigate, to have in store another barrel of gunpowder. He
was therefore the favourite candidate of prudent and peaceable
men in every country.

Thus all Europe was divided into the French, the Austrian, and
the Bavarian factions. The contests of these factions were daily
renewed in every place where men congregated, from Stockholm to
Malta, and from Lisbon to Smyrna. But the fiercest and most
obstinate conflict was that which raged in the palace of the
Catholic King. Much depended on him. For, though it was not
pretended that he was competent to alter by his sole authority
the law which regulated the descent of the Crown, yet, in a case
in which the law was doubtful, it was probable that his subjects
might be disposed to accept the construction which he might put
upon it, and to support the claimant whom be might, either by a
solemn adoption or by will, designate as the rightful heir. It
was also in the power of the reigning sovereign to entrust all
the most important offices in his kingdom, the government of all
the provinces subject to him in the Old and in the New World, and
the keys of all his fortresses and arsenals, to persons zealous
for the family which he was inclined to favour. It was difficult
to say to what extent the fate of whole nations might be affected
by the conduct of the officers who, at the time of his decease,
might command the garrisons of Barcelona, of Mons, and of Namur.

The prince on whom so much depended was the most miserable of
human beings. In old times he would have been exposed as soon as
he came into the world; and to expose him would have been a
kindness. From his birth a blight was on his body and on his
mind. With difficulty his almost imperceptible spark of life had
been screened and fanned into a dim and flickering flame. His
childhood, except when he could be rocked and sung into sickly
sleep, was one long piteous wail. Until he was ten years old his
days were passed on the laps of women; and he has never once
suffered to stand on his ricketty legs. None of those tawny
little urchins, clad in rags stolen from scarecrows, whom Murillo
loved to paint begging or rolling in the sand, owed less to
education than this despotic ruler of thirty millions of
subjects, The most important events in the history of his own
kingdom, the very names of provinces and cities which were among
his most valuable possessions, were unknown to him. It may well
be doubted whether he was aware that Sicily was an island, that
Christopher Columbus had discovered America, or that the English
were not Mahometans. In his youth, however, though too imbecile
for study or for business, he was not incapable of being amused.
He shot, hawked and hunted. He enjoyed with the delight of a true
Spaniard two delightful spectacles, a horse with its bowels gored
out, and a Jew writhing in the fire. The time came when the
mightiest of instincts ordinarily wakens from its repose. It was
hoped that the young King would not prove invincible to female
attractions, and that he would leave a Prince of Asturias to
succeed him. A consort was found for him in the royal family of
France; and her beauty and grace gave him a languid pleasure. He
liked to adorn her with jewels, to see her dance, and to tell her
what sport he had had with his dogs and his falcons. But it was
soon whispered that she was a wife only in name. She died; and
her place was supplied by a German princess nearly allied to the
Imperial House. But the second marriage, like the first, proved
barren; and, long before the King had passed the prime of life,
all the politicians of Europe had begun to take it for granted in
all their calculations that he would be the last descendant, in
the male line, of Charles the Fifth. Meanwhile a sullen and
abject melancholy took possession of his soul. The diversions
which had been the serious employment of his youth became
distasteful to him. He ceased to find pleasure in his nets and
boar spears, in the fandango and the bullfight. Sometimes he shut
himself up in an inner chamber from the eyes of his courtiers.
Sometimes he loitered alone, from sunrise to sunset, in the
dreary and rugged wilderness which surrounds the Escurial. The
hours which he did not waste in listless indolence were divided
between childish sports and childish devotions. He delighted in
rare animals, and still more in dwarfs. When neither strange
beasts nor little men could dispel the black thoughts which
gathered in his mind, he repeated Aves and Credos; he walked in
processions; sometimes he starved himself; sometimes he whipped
himself. At length a complication of maladies completed the ruin
of all his faculties. His stomach failed; nor was this strange;
for in him the malformation of the jaw, characteristic of his
family, was so serious that he could not masticate his food; and
he was in the habit of swallowing ollas and sweetmeats in the
state in which they were set before him. While suffering from
indigestion he was attacked by ague. Every third day his
convulsive tremblings, his dejection, his fits of wandering,
seemed to indicate the approach of dissolution. His misery was
increased by the knowledge that every body was calculating how
long he had to live, and wondering what would become of his
kingdoms when he should be dead. The stately dignitaries of his
household, the physicians who ministered to his diseased body,
the divines whose business was to soothe his not less diseased
mind, the very wife who should have been intent on those gentle
offices by which female tenderness can alleviate even the misery
of hopeless decay, were all thinking of the new world which was
to commence with his death, and would have been perfectly willing
to see him in the hands of the embalmer if they could have been
certain that his successor would be the prince whose interest
they espoused. As yet the party of the Emperor seemed to
predominate. Charles had a faint sort of preference for the House
of Austria, which was his own house, and a faint sort of
antipathy to the House of Bourbon, with which he had been
quarrelling, he did not well know why, ever since he could
remember. His Queen, whom he did not love, but of whom he stood
greatly in awe, was devoted to the interests of her kinsman the
Emperor; and with her was closely leagued the Count of Melgar,
Hereditary Admiral of Castile and Prime Minister.

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