Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/88

74 gallows, Treby so intimidated them by his language, that they gave way. He was condemned for high treason, and spite of strenuous endeavours made to get the sentence mitigated, was hanged at Tyburn.

But the death of Anderton, far from quieting the malcontents, only added fierceness to their attacks. The carnage of Englishmen at the battle of Landen was actively commented on, to bring William into odium; the distressed people and artisans out of work, and the sailors whose pay was far in arrears, were all excited, by ballads and halfpenny broadsides, to believe that there was nothing but misery and fraud for them so long as the Dutch dynasty continued on the throne. The sailors' wives were told that their husbands would never obtain their wages, and many of them appeared before Whitehall clamouring for their rights. Some of these the queen admitted and soothed, by assuring them that their husbands should be fully and speedily paid. Bartholomew Fair was seized on as a means of incensing the people against the admirals for their wretched management. The admirals Delaval and Killigrew, as well as the lords of the admiralty, were all burlesqued, and with such success, that government sent a posse of constables to arrest the bold caricaturers, with all their scenery. There was scarcely a street or a tavern in London in which the work of sedition was not boldly carried on.

At such a crisis William returned from his unsuccessful campaign, only to find the whole public greatly exasperated at the issue of affairs. He arrived at Kensington on the 30th of October. William found that his endeavours to employ and conciliate both parties—whigs and tories—had not answered. They could not work together, and between them everything went to ruin. The tories were almost to a man in alliance with his enemy James, and yet he dreaded again putting himself into the power of the rapacious and domineering whigs. They were, it is true, the only party really attached to his own principles. They had fought out the revolution for him, and were disposed to carry on the war with vigour; but at the same time he had found them so banded together when in office, that they were rather his masters than his servants, and their rapacity was so insatiable, that the whole resources of the country were in continual danger of being embezzled under one pretext or another, and diverted to the aggrandisement of their own families. Neither were they all free from the same treason as the tories. Russell and others were in close intrigue with James. It was necessary, however, to decide on employing, almost exclusively, one party or the other. If he employed the tories, they were bent on abandoning the war on the continent, and confining it to a maritime contest. In this they had great reason on their side. It was clear that since William came to the throne, we had been drawn in to take the principal part of the continental warfare on ourselves. The whole governmental expenditure in James's time amounted to only about two millions: it was now annually at least five millions, and was rapidly increasing. We had not been able, even with that, to pay as we went on, but had formally established a national debt. We were again deeply in arrears: the navy was a million behind, and the sailors were clamorous for their wages. We were paying three-fourths of the expenditure of the campaigns in the Netherlands. Our army was now annually upwards of eighty thousand men, our navy forty thousand. We were, in fact, shedding our blood and exhausting our resources to defend the pauper princes of Germany, who, when well paid for doing it, would not combine heartily in the cause.

The tories very reasonably demanded whether this state of things was to be continued. It was clear that if we had retained an English prince on the throne, we should never have been drawn into this system of defending the continental powers, who, if they would not rouse themselves to defend themselves, ought to be beaten and trodden on by Louis till their spirit was roused for the maintenance of their own independence. At sea we were capable of not only securing our own coasts, but of annoying France, and thus serving the allies.

On the other hand the whigs asserted that if we left the Flemish and German states to fall under the victorious arms of Louis, he would then invade us. This, however, was a fallacious argument; for it is a notorious fact that, if nations are worthy of independence, they will maintain it, and that no extraneous props can hold them up if they are not politically sound at heart. Moreover it was clear that the fears of invasion were futile if we concentrated all our power at sea, and in internal strength; for we could do all that with half the force and the money that we wasted on the continent. But the whig arguments best suited William's views of using England to defend Holland, and, therefore, he was driven by circumstances towards that party. He had admitted to his favour the infamous Sunderland, one of the most unprincipled men of the age. Sunderland had been one of the most unscrupulous of James's ministers, and to please the arbitrary monarch he had actually turned papist. He had been foremost in advocating James's most detestable measures, and in executing them as a judge in the atrocious high commission court. One of his last acts was to appear and give evidence against the seven bishops. When the revolution appeared inevitable he was one of the first to betray James; and then he had, to hide himself from the contempt and abhorrence of all parties, returned to Holland, where he again returned to protestantism, and waited for time to abate the odium against him before he reappeared in the political arena. After a time, though expressly excepted from the act of grace, he ventured to return to England, and lived in retirement. No one imagined that he would have the audacity to show himself again in public life, but he had the secret good-will of William, and by degrees he crept out, and, though at long intervals, gradually accustomed the public to his presence. He had insinuated himself into the counsels of William to that degree that he secretly swayed his judgment in them—a fact, considering his most base and hypocritical character, by no means to the credit of William's own. Sunderland was firm in his advice that nothing could insure the efficiency of the public service but the return of the whigs to power; he even advocated that of Marlborough, but for a time unsuccessfully. His first success was in recalling Russell to the lead of the admiralty.

On the 7th of November parliament met. William had a poor story of his campaign to relate, but he attributed his defeat to the enormous exertions which Louis had made, and on that plea demanded still greater efforts from this