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86 his servant Robarts was missing, and as Leeds insisted on his presence as evidence for him, the impeachment remained uncarried out. In fact, William, who, though suffering perpetually from the gross corruption all around him, was always the first to screen great offenders, now hastened parliament to a conclusion. The exposures were so numerous that nobody but the triumphant whigs desired to see the matter probed yet deeper. Who could say to whom the inquiry might not reach? William was tender, too, of Leeds, from the remembrance of the regard which his late queen had entertained for him, and the active services which he rendered her in his absence. He did not even remove him from being lord president of the council, but he advised him not to show himself there; but he never again recovered his position in the court, and William, in appointing the lords justices to exercise the government in his absence, left out his name. The parliament was prorogued on the 3rd of May. It had witnessed a marvellous display of the want of moral principle in its members; and the industrious endeavours of Wharton had placed the whigs safely and completely on the seat of power.

In the following week the Scottish parliament commenced its session, after an interval of two years. The duke of Hamilton was dead, and John Hay, marquis of Tweeddale, was appointed lord high commissioner, a man in years, and of fair character. The question which immediately seized the attention of the estates was the massacre of Glencoe. That sanguinary affair had now come to the public knowledge in all its perfidy and barbarity, and there was a vehement demand for inquiry and for justice on the perpetrators. The facts which had reached the queen long ago regarding this dark transaction, had greatly shocked her, and she had been earnest for a searching inquiry; but William, who by this time must have been fully aware that the matter would not bear the light very well, had not been too desirous to urge it on. The Jacobites, however, never ceased to declaim on the fearful theme; and the presbyterians, who hated the Master of Stair, who under James had been one of their worst persecutors, and was a man without any real religion, were not the less importunate for its unveiling. Seeing that the parliament would now have it dragged to the light, William made haste to make the movement his own. He signed a commission appointing Tweeddale its head, and sent it down with all haste to Edinburgh. The parliament expressed great thanks to the king for this act of justice, but it deceived nobody, for it was felt at once that no commission would have issued but for the public outcry, and it was now meant to take it out of the earnest hands of the estates and defeat it as far as possible; and this turned out to be the case. The report of the commission was long in appearing, and had not the estates been very firm, it might have been longer, and have been effectually emasculated. for the lord high commissioner was on the point of sending it to William, who was now in the Netherlands, and deeply immersed in the affairs of the campaign. The estates insisted on its immediate production, and Tweeddale was compelled to obey. It then appeared that several of the Macdonalds had been admitted to give their evidence on the atrocities committed in their glen; and the conclusion was come to that it was a barbarous murder. The king's warrant, however, was declared to have authorised no such butchery, and the main blame was thrown on the Master of Stair and the earl of Breadalbane.

Undoubtedly Sir John Dalrymple, the master of Stair, had urged on by his letter the massacre of the clan with unflinching cruelty; but William contented himself with merely dismissing him from his office. Nothing short of this man's execution for his crime could exempt William from the imputation of ordering, or at least favouring, this wholesale and detestable murder—detestable because perpetrated under such circumstances of revolting treachery. But, as we have observed, William seems to have had very little sense of the crimes and cruelties committed by those who were serviceable to him. On all occasions, instead of showing a virtuous indignation and a feeling of pity for the sufferers, he treated the criminals with impunity. It was thus with Ginckel, Coningsby, and other oppressors in Ireland; it was the same again here, where the most odious charges lay against himself and his agents. The earl of Breadalbane was found to have encouraged the clans in their adhesion to James, at the very time that he was employed to distribute money amongst them to reconcile them to William, telling them that he was himself all the while just as firmly attached to James himself. William resented this, and Breadalbane was arrested and committed to the castle of Edinburgh; but well did one of his contemporaries know the man, when he said that he was subtle as a serpent and slippery as an eel, and had no attachment to anything but his own interest, for he immediately declared that he had only told them so to get into their confidence, that he might find out James's secrets for William; and William seems to have at once accepted this rogue's plea, for he set him at liberty and granted him a new pardon. As to the subordinate instruments of the massacre, major Hamilton, captain Drummond, Glenlyon, lieutenant Lindsay, and sergeant Barbour, they were plainly pronounced murderers, though they had only acted according to the orders of the men so lightly let off, and there was a royal order sent down to seize and prosecute them; but no doubt there were also secret orders of another kind, for they appear never to have been proceeded against. The whole of this transaction, therefore, from first to last, leaves a black stain on the character of William; for, if he did not expressly order the massacre with a full knowledge of its injustice, when he had the most perfect knowledge of all its diabolical particulars, he treated it as a very venial affair.

To put the Scotch parliament into good humour, William promised them, through the marquis of Tweeddale, that, if they would pass an act establishing a colony in Africa, America, or any other part of the world where it was open to the English rightfully to plant a colony, he would grant them a charter with as full powers as he had done to the subjects of his other dominions. This was no doubt in consequence of a scheme agitated by Paterson, the originator of the bank of England, for founding a colony on the Isthmus of Darien, for trading betwixt the Atlantic and Pacific—forming, in fact, a link of commerce betwixt China and India, as well as the Spanish states on the Pacific coasts and Europe. The act, supposed to be drawn by Paterson