Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/130

116 dominions, filled him, as every far-seeing man, with deep anxiety. Though no king ever less sought to infringe the liberties of his subjects, yet William, naturally fond of an army and of military affairs, was especially anxious at this crisis for the retention of a respectable force. He knew that Europe, though freed from actual war, was, through the restless ambition of Louis, still living only in an armed peace.

The commons did not leave him long in suspense. In a few days they went into the subject of the proposal to keep up the army. The spirit of the house was high against a standing array. All the old arguments were produced—That a standing army was totally inconsistent with the liberties of the people; that the moment you put the sword into the hands of mercenaries, the king became the master of the rights of the nation, and a despot. They asked, if a standing army were to be maintained, what should they have gained by the revolution? The tories, who were anxious to damage the whigs, and the Jacobites, who were anxious to damage William's government altogether, were particularly eloquent on these topics. The true patriots, and they were few, were eloquent from principle.

It was in vain that the friends of William represented that it was a very different thing to maintain an army under particular circumstances, which depended on the will of parliament, to maintaining one at the sole pleasure of the king. The opponents of a standing army contended that a militia was the natural force for internal defence, which could be brought to nearly as much perfection as regular troops, and could be called out when wanted, and that the navy was our proper army, and that, if kept in due efficiency, it was able not only to protect us and our trade, but to render all such assistance to other nations as became a generous and Christian nation. By a division of a hundred and eighty-five votes against a hundred and forty-eight, the house resolved that all the forces raised since 1686 should be disbanded. This fell with an appalling shock on William. By this, at one blow, all his army of gallant mercenaries, his Dutch guards, his Huguenot cavalry, must be sent away. He would, it was found, be left only with about eight thousand regular troops. Never was there such a stripping of a martial monarch, who had figured at the head of upwards of a hundred thousand men against the greatest military power of Europe. He made little remark publicly, but he poured out his grief to his great correspondent, the Dutch grand pensionary, Heinsius, and to Burnet. To him he said that it would make his alliance of so little value, his state so contemptible, that he did not see how he was to carry on the government; that he never could have imagined, after what he had done for the nation, that they would treat him thus; and that, had he imagined it, he would never have meddled with the affairs of England; that he was weary of governing a country which had rather lay itself open to its enemies than trust him, who had acted all his life so faithfully for them.

But it was useless complaining; the country was resolved on having no standing army, and every attempt of ministers to modify or enlarge the resolution was disregarded. They proposed that the bill should be committed, because it would leave the king in the hands of the old tory regiments; and again, that five hundred thousand pounds per annum should be granted for the maintenance of guards and garrisons. Both motions were negatived. There was a strong feeling excited against Sunderland, on the supposition that he had strengthened the king in his desire for a large army, because he warmly argued for it, and that minister, equally odious to both parties, felt it safest to retire. He therefore resigned his post of lord chamberlain, though William did all he could to dissuade him from it, and sought the seclusion of his princely abode of Althorp.

If the commons sternly refused the king a large army, they at all events granted him a large income. They raised the civil list from £600,000 to £700,000 a year; they voted £2,700,000 to take up the exchequer bills; they granted £2,348,102 to pay off arrears, subsistence, general officers, guards, and garrisons, and £1,400,000 to make up other deficiencies. Here was a total of £7,148,000 to pay the expenditure of the year—a sum never voted before, and voted now with a liberal, ungrudging spirit, considering what was yet behind. Besides the floating, funded debt of £5,000,000, they now found a debt owing for the navy, £1,392,742; for the ordnance, £204,157; for the transport debt contracted by the reduction of Ireland and other services, £464,493; and there was £49,929 for quartering and clothing the army, raised by one act of parliament in 1677 and disbanded by another in 1679. There were again upwards of two millions of war debt to deal with, and to meet its liquidation the land tax was continued, and new additions of tonnage and poundage in addition to the old, and to the hereditary excise, and other imposts to maintain the civil list. The £50,000 for Mary of Modena's jointure was admitted in these sums, and a pension for the establishment of the young duke of Gloucester. William, however, to the great wrath of the Jacobites, refused to pay the jointure-money so long as James and his queen continued, in defiance of the treaty, at St. Germains; and he would not allow more than £15,000 a year for the use of the duke of Gloucester, who was but in his ninth year, and he appointed Burnet his tutor.

Well might the house of commons be anxious to be rid of so expensive an army, and their desire to free themselves from it blinded them to the fact, so clear to William, that Louis would immediately presume on the reduced force of England. Whilst discussing these measures, however, the house had come upon several gross frauds in the government officers, which heightened their severity. They found that Charles Duncombe, receiver-general of the excise, Burton, a man who had a post at the same board, Knight, treasurer of the customs, and Harriot, deputy-teller of the exchequer, had colleagued in a system of fraudulently endorsing exchequer bills, in which they made a great trade. The house sent Duncombe and Knight, both of whom were members of it, to the Tower, and the other delinquents to Newgate. It brought in and passed bills of pains and penalties against them, but the lords threw them out, partly through the aristocratic connections of Duncombe, and partly through his free application of his money, for he was very rich. The lords discharged Duncombe from the Tower, but the commons recommitted him, and he was kept there for the remainder of the session.