Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/175

A.D. 1701.] London. Louis pretended that his acknowledgment of the prince of Wales was mere form; that he meant no infraction of the treaty, and might justly complain of William's declarations and preparations in favour of the emperor. In fact, kings never want pleas when they have a purpose, however unwarrantable it may be. The people of England hastened to express their abhorrence of the perfidy of the French king. Addresses of resentment were poured in from the city of London and from all parts of the kingdom, and with declarations of their determination to defend the king and his crown against all pretenders or invaders.

William was impatient to be in London to make the necessary arrangements for a new ministry and a new parliament, and also for the war, which was now inevitable. But he was detained by a severe illness; in fact, he was fast succumbing to the weakness of his constitution, and the ravages made on it by his stupendous exertions in the wars he had been constantly engaged in, and, still more, by the eternal wear and harass of the unprincipled factions which raged around his island throne. He was, in addition, menaced by another attempt on his life by one Boselli, an Italian ruffian, infamous for many villanous deeds, and who had either escaped from the Bastille, or had been let out for this purpose. To cast a damp on his allies, and to encourage proportionably the adherents of Louis, the Spanish minister, De Quiros, hired a number of physicians to consult on William's health, who issued a bulletin that he could not live many weeks, and this opinion was circulated in all quarters with all diligence. Certainly Louis and his court watched with intense interest for the death of William, believing that, if he were out of the way, their course all over Europe were easy.

But though William was detained in Holland, he was busily corresponding with that wily statesman, Sunderland, on the subject of the ministry and parliament; and the Hardwicke State Papers let us into the views of William and this subtle and unprincipled diplomatist, as well as of Somers and other leaders of the whig party. The family of Sunderland had made an alliance with that of Marlborough. Sunderland's eldest son, lord Spenser, had, in January of this year, married Marlborough's second daughter, to whose children the ducal title eventually descended. Lady Sunderland had contracted a great intimacy with lady Marlborough, and there was strong interest exerted to bring the party into power which was in favour of the war, and, therefore, of Marlborough's chance of distinguishing himself. Though professing himself still a tory, Marlborough was leaning to and acting secretly with the whigs. We find Sunderland, therefore, using all his eloquence for the restoration of the whigs. William wrote to him from Loo in September, asking his advice regarding his difficulties with his ministers and parliament, and having evidently more confidence in his political sagacity than in any one else's. He expressed his uncertainty about dismissing his parliament, notwithstanding the manner in which it attacked him and his ministers. The tories, he said, made him great promises, and that he was advised to pass an act of indemnity as a means of putting an end to the party violence which disgraced the last session. This inclined him, he added, to try again what the present ministers and their party would do, with a resolution to change on the first occasion they should give.

In reply to this, Sunderland informed him that the ministry grew more detested every day; which was a pretty good indication of Sunderland's coming advice. He then went on:—"It is said the king is persuaded still to try the same party and the same ministers, because, if he changes and fails, there will be no resource; which is as much as to say, Continue in the hands of your enemies, for, if they do not save you, you may return to your friends, who will; which is a sort of reason which ought not to be answered, but hissed." He then went on sarcastically to tell the king that if the king tries the whigs and they cannot help him, he can always have the tories at a price—that of completely stultifying himself; by altering the lieutenancy of London, giving up all attempts to check the encroachments of France, and breaking the ecclesiastical commission, which was a commission consisting of two archbishops and four bishops, for managing the church patronage, which the high church party and the tories detested. Winding up, this man, who had played many parts, and many of them very cautious and creeping ones, now assumed a tone of such boldness and freedom as is rarely used towards a king, and could be dictated only by a knowledge that only a striking portraiture of his position could rouse the king to act in his wavering mood. "Another dangerous opinion," he argues, "which the king is led into by flams and lies, is, that if those he now depends on do not act as they promise, he can try new measures in the middle of a session, which is impossible; and that he must know if he pleases to reflect. He will be wheedled, and complimented, and cheated, and, at the latter end, ruined. Can he forget how the tories agreed to the ten thousand men, and the address to enter into the alliance with the emperor? Was it not because it could have been done without them, and that they were frightened out of their wits, and to oblige him to thank them at last, that they might go into the country with safety? Are not their promises on the same account, and because they dread a new parliament? Can he forget the pains that were taken, after the king of Spain's death, to persuade the world that all was well, and that nothing would be so fatal as war? What a fine speech was made for him at the opening of parliament four months after the king of Spain died, and a fortnight after the French were actually masters of Flanders? Or that, during the session, the ministers told him every day they nor their party never would come into a war; of which mind they are so much now, that yet they continue to say, It will undo us? And if they are anyways forced into it, it will be with a design of raising money, which shall both be insufficient and laid so as to be most uneasy to the people that is possible. But to what purpose is it so much as to think of anything of the kind, when, after a thirteen years' experience, the king will not judge right of things he knows, but will be undone infallibly by believing himself more cunning than a whole party by whom he is beset, and who wheedle him every day, and of which, in his whole reign, he never yet could gain any one man? The king ought to consider that, most luckily for him, the whole moderate church-party who are not Jacobites are joined with the whigs, but he will be deceived if he reckons that they will help to establish this