Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/349

A.D. 1715.] Care and hope sate on every busy Irish face. Those who could write and read had letters to show, and those who had not yet arrived to this pitch of erudition, had their secrets to whisper. No sex was excluded from this ministry." And all this under the vigilant eyes of lord Stair, the English ambassador. One of the busiest of the busy in this shabby and incautious crew was a Mrs. Olivia Trant, a woman of what lord Byron calls uneasy virtue, and very uneasy politics.

Whilst Bolingbroke was contemplating this promising preparation for the invasion of Great Britain, he received a memorial signed by Ormonde, the earl of Mar, lord Lansdowne, and other Jacobite leaders, which again strongly urged the necessity of the pretender bringing over a strong force; but if that was impracticable, that he should not come without twenty thousand stand of arms, a train of artillery, five hundred officers, and a considerable sum of money. That in that case he should not attempt to land till September, old style, when the parliament would be prorogued, and all the influential Jacobite members and ministers would be in their respective counties.

Bolingbroke, who was now in close intercourse with De Torcy, the French minister, laid this memorial before him. Both he and the duke of Berwick contended that nothing could be so certain as the enterprise, were it supported by France. De Torcy replied that so completely was France engaged by its treaty, and its then circumstances, not to furnish any such assistance in the shape of soldiers, that he would not even undertake to name the matter to his master; but that the French court would not be averse to granting secret supplies, and that Louis had already allowed a small armament to be fitted out at Havre, partly at the expense of the government, but under a fictitious name.

This was not very encouraging, and should have induced Bolingbroke to endeavour to check the impatience of the Scots, and urge on a more thorough organisation of the malcontent party in England; but at this moment came another warning of the perilous nature of the few props upon which he madly leaned. The duke of Ormonde had assured him that he would stand his ground to the last; would remain at Richmond, or if compelled by danger of arrest, would go down to the western counties, and put that quarter of the kingdom, on which he most relied, into a condition for rising at the earliest warning. That he had concerted measures for seizing Bristol, Plymouth, and Exeter, and had assigned stations to a great number of disbanded officers in his pay, and even provided relays of horses. On the heels of these energetic assurances, however, Ormonde himself appeared in Paris a helpless fugitive, having found it prudent, to avoid a lodgment in the Tower in order to his trial, to make a hasty escape.

But a more disastrous event was soon added—the death of the old despot, Louis XIV. This monarch, the most applauded of his time, whom his sycophantic courtiers and poets had exalted to the rank of a god—as Racine in his triumphal ode on the taking of Namur—

this king, who had set out to put down all protestantism, and ruin and subjugate all protestant countries; who, hounded on by Jesuits, mistresses, and servile ministers, imagined that he could dominate over all Europe; who had perpetrated the most diabolical barbarities in the countries that he invaded, and on his own unhappy protestant subjects—had gone down to the grave amid the just judgments of Providence. He had seen his victories all reversed, his own country entered by the once-distressed foreigners whom he had invaded, his capital in danger, and only saved from seizure and a probable sacking by the Jacobite ministers of England. He had been so reduced by his wars and reverses that he had been compelled to strip his palaces of any valuables that he could turn into money, to tear away and melt down the very gold which embossed his shaken throne. He had seen all around him gloomy looks, heard the silence of contempt, or the murmur of a ruined people, and died with the sense of having sought a criminal glory and received a well-deserved humiliation. He had besides laid the foundation, in his attack on the thrones of other monarchs, of the destruction of his own dynasty, of monarchy itself in France. This disturber of Europe and scourge of France died on the 1st of September; and Bolingbroke, writing to Wyndham, said—"He was the best friend the chevalier had; and when I engaged in this business my principal dependence was on his personal character. All I had to negotiate by myself first, and in conjunction with the duke of Ormonde afterwards, languished with the king. My hopes sunk as he declined, and died when he expired."

Louis was succeeded for the time by the duke of Orleans as regent, who had other views, and was surrounded by other influences than the old king. He had secured the regency in opposition to Madame Maintenon and the royal bastards. He changed all the ministers, and was not inclined to risk his government by making enemies of the English abroad, having sufficient of these at home. He had been for some time cultivating the good offices of the present English government, which had offered to assist him with troops and money, if necessary, to secure the regency. He had seen a good deal of the new secretary of state, Stanley, in Spain, and still maintained a correspondence with him. Lord Stair, therefore, was placed in a more influential position with the regent, and the pretender and his ministers were but coldly looked on.

Bolingbroke and Ormonde, deeply sensible of this change, omitted no means, even the most scandalous, to obtain some degree of support from the regent. As Orleans was a man of the most libertine life, Ormonde tempted him by the beauty of Mrs. Olivia Trant. The regent was very ready to fall into the intrigue, but he was too subtle to allow it to influence his public measures. At the same time he was compelled to be more acquiescent to the demands of lord Stair. This vigilant minister had discovered the ships prepared at Havre, by the connivance and partly by the aid of the late king, and he insisted that they should be stopped. Admiral Byng also appeared off Havre with a squadron, and lord Stair demanded the ships should be given up to him. With this the regent declined to comply, but he ordered them to be unloaded, and the arms to be deposited in the royal arsenal. One ship, however, escaped the search, containing, according to Bolingbroke, one thousand three hundred arms, and four thousand pounds of powder, which he proposed to send to lord Mar, in Scotland.