Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/174

160 burthens first originated in these Dutch wars of William III. The people of England are at this day paying annually one million and a half for this very war, besides its having cost at the time a quarter of a million of the lives of Englishmen. We may well ask, too, what had we to do with the Spanish succession? That was the sole business of the Spaniards themselves; and, disguise the present alliance as historians may, it was but a combination of robbers to pluck a nation limb from limb, and possess themselves of the bleeding members. Austria was to get Naples, Sicily, Milan, &c., with the Spanish Netherlands; Holland and England the colonial dependencies, if they could conquer them. The petty princes of Germany contented themselves with the more certain subsidies from England and the States.

Whilst these great powers, under the gilded names of patriotism and restoring the much-admired though never-achieved balance of power, were contemplating the dismemberment of a great but enfeebled nation, the "sick man" of those days, the poor old ex-king James, was closing his career. James, towards the latter part of his life, had become more than ever a religious devotee. Though his religion was not of a kind which could preserve him from the worst of tyrannies, the most insane of follies, which could open his eyes to see the will of a nation must be respected as much as the will of a monarch, we must admit that at least he was sincere in his faith in it. It was a narrow and a mistaken faith, but it was deep and immovable in him. For his religion, such as it was, he actually sacrificed his crown and the brilliant destiny of his family; for his religion he refused every offer which might have restored him; he would abandon no iota of the dogmas in which he believed. On his deathbed he exhorted his son to the same cause, and to suffer any loss but the loss of his religion. He was a man, therefore, with all his faults, his follies, and his crimes, who was to be respected for his sincerity, and that was his only title to respect; for his creed was of a nature which went to destroy all liberty of life and mind, which would have made this nation a nation of slaves, and the worst kind of slaves, the slaves of priestcraft. As his end approached, the poor, worn-out, and, as we may say, doomed monarch—for he was the victim of his grandfather's theory of kingcraft, as his father, Charles I., was—he endeavoured to win his place in heaven by those outward penances and austerities which the church of Rome has so much substituted for the trusting faith in his Saviour of mankind, whose blood purifics from all sin. If James had had that enlightened faith, he need not have put so much faith in flagellations and fasts. As it was, he became almost a monk, and sought a savage kind of consolation amongst the most rigorous of them all, the brethren of La Trappe. He gives himself this account of his visits to La Trappe:—"At first it was partly curiosity, and a desire to see whether the discourses I had heard and the relations I had read whilst I was in England of that holy place came up to my expectations, and whether the abbot who began that reform deserved all the commendations that were given him. An old friend of mine, the marshal de Belfond, carried me thither, for which, as long as he lived, I gave him many thanks, and by degrees found myself, as I thought, improved; for, till I had been there some time, and made a kind of retreat for three or four days at a time — which I have continued to do at least once a year since my coming from Ireland—I found not that change which was necessary in myself It gave me a true sense of the vanity of all worldly greatness, and that nothing was to be coveted but the love of God, and to endeavour to live up to his law, and mortify oneself by all lawful means," &c.

How every one must wish that the marshal de Belfond had conveyed James to La Trappe in his youth and left him there. That was his right place, and his being in it would have saved the world much misery. James expired on the 16th of September, 1701, in the sixty-seventh year of his age. He made a most exemplary end. As we have said, on his deathbed he exhorted the prince of Wales to adhere to the catholic faith, let it cost him what it would, and it was sure to cost him every chance of the English crown. He endeavoured to convert lord Middleton and his other protestant followers. He declared repeatedly his entire forgiveness of the prince of Orange, his daughter Anne, the emperor, and all his enemies. When he had received the sacrament he exclaimed, "The happy day is come at last!"

Louis XIV. made three successive visits to the dying king; and this strange monarch, who had no feeling for human misery in the gross, who let loose his legions to lay waste happy human homes in all the countries round him, to ravage, massacre, and destroy the unoffending people by barbarities which must have instructed the very devils in cruelty—shed maudlin tears over the departure of this poor, silly, bigoted old man, whose life had been one great, miserable blunder, and whose death was the best thing that could happen to him. He promised the dying man that he would maintain the right of his son to the English crown as he had maintained his, though he had sworn at the treaty of Ryswick to do nothing to disturb the throne of William; and the moment that the breath was out of James's body he proclaimed the prince king of England by the title of James III.

After the body of James had lain four-and-twenty hours in the midst of lights, and priests, and monks, singing the office for the dead, and performing mass at two altars erected in the room, it was opened and embalmed, and part of his bowels were deposited in the church of St. Germains, part in that of the English college at St. Omer, the brain and the fleshy parts of the head were sent to the Scotch college at Paris, and the heart to the convent of Chalist. Thus were the fragments of the body of this wretched king distributed as precious relics, and the body itself deposited in the vault of the church of the English Benedictine monks in Paris, "there to remain till it should please God to dispose the people of England to repair, in some measure, the injuries they did him in his life, by the honour they should think fit to show him after his death." But England has never shown any compunction on that head.

The title of James III. was acknowledged by the king of Spain, the duke of Savoy, and the pope. The moment William received the news of Louis having proclaimed James's son king of England, he dispatched a messenger to inform the king of Sweden, who was guarantee of the peace of Ryswick, of this flagrant breach of it. He ordered the earl of Manchester immediately to retire from Paris without taking leave, and Poussin, the secretary of Tallard, to quit