Page:Imperialdictiona02eadi Brandeis.pdf/1088

JAM the law of succession he was the rightful heir to the crown, and the strength of the party adverse to his claims had been broken by the severe measures which brought such men as Sidney and Russell to the scaffold. Had the nation been polled, he would have been elected to the vacant seat of power by a large majority; and when he announced that neither the established religion of the realm nor the civil liberties of the subjects had anything to fear from him, he seemed to enter upon the functions of royalty with the full concurrence of the nation, who in a few years expelled him from the throne, and extended the forfeiture to the male line of his children. A wiser policy might have secured him in the sovereignty, and transmitted to his son the regal inheritance of the Stewarts; but he either failed to appreciate, or resolved to brave, the risks of which previous events had given him full warning. Within a few days of his accession, his public appearance at mass, and his proceeding to levy on his own warrant the custom and excise duties, which parliament had granted to Charles only for life, awakened uneasiness and suspicions, which were augmented by his objections to the coronation oath for Scotland, by the mission of an agent to Rome, and by negotiations with France, which compromised the dignity of the British crown, and imperilled the independence of the Low Countries. In the north also the persecution of the presbyterians continued, and the duke of Queensberry was commissioned to meet the estates at Edinburgh with an arrogant assertion of the royal prerogatives. The discontent occasioned by these measures, and by other despotic acts, such as the prosecution and imprisonment of Richard Baxter, induced the whig refugees in Holland to hazard an appeal to arms; and though both the Scottish and the English parliaments proved wholly subservient to the wishes of their new master, the projected invasion was attempted in two quarters. The duke of Argyle crossed from Amsterdam, and raised the standard of insurrection in the western highlands. But his delay at Kirkwall had given the government warning of his design, and opportunity to counteract it. Less than two thousand men responded to his manifesto; his attempt to penetrate into the Lowlands resulted in the disbanding of his troops at Kilpatrick; he was taken prisoner and died upon the block, winning by the calm and pious fortitude with which he suffered, a fame which has survived the failure of his enterprise. Meanwhile the duke of Monmouth had landed at Lyme, and rallied around him a considerable force, with which he occupied Taunton, penetrated to the borders of Gloucestershire, and after an unsuccessful attempt to surprise Bristol, established himself at Bridgewater. But on Sedgemoor, in the neighbourhood of that town, his army was defeated and dispersed by the king's troops under Feversham. The duke himself fell into the hands of the conquerors and was conveyed to London, where he was executed, after humbling himself to tears and terrified entreaties and proffers of embracing popery before the king, who admitted him to an audience, for no other purpose apparently than to embitter his punishment, by crushing the hope which the unusual step was fitted to awaken in his bosom. James must be held responsible for the reckless cruelties which his troops under Colonel Kirke afterwards perpetrated in the disaffected districts, and for the equally odious judicial proceedings in which the insolent brutality of Jeffrie's outstripped the violence of the licentious soldiery. The judge returned from "the bloody assizes" to be rewarded with the office of lord chancellor; and the infatuated monarch passed on from that fierce triumph to other schemes of aggrandizement and acts of despotism.

The test act stood in his way; by requiring all who took office under government to abjure the doctrine of transubstantiation, and thus excluding the Roman catholics whom he was anxious to favour. As there was little hope of its repeal by parliament, he employed his royal prerogative of pardon as a means of evading its provisions. If papists to whom he issued commissions declined to take the oath, he might condone the offence, and thus gain his object of retaining them in office. But the concurrence, or at least the connivance of the judicial tribunals, was necessary to his free exercise of that dispensing power; and he did not hesitate to let the judges know that he was resolved to have a bench conformable to his wishes. The opposition which he encountered only provoked him to persist in his unjustifiable claims. In 1687 he published an edict which virtually abolished the disabilities of dissenters, by empowering them to hold office without taking the tests. This act, however consonant with modern views of religious liberty, was foreign to the prevalent tone of opinion in that day. It also exceeded the constitutional powers of the sovereign; and there can be no doubt that it was dictated solely by a desire to further the interests of popery, for it was followed by a submissive embassy to Rome, by the consecration of four Roman catholic bishops in the royal chapel, by the appointment of a papist to the presidency of Magdalen college, and by the lavish bestowal of military and civil commissions on the adherents of that religion. In the following year the Declaration of Indulgence was reissued and ordered to be read in all the churches. Some of the dignitaries of the Anglican church, with Sancroft, archbishop of Canterbury, at their head, ventured to remonstrate; whereupon they were arrested, committed to the Tower, and arraigned before the court of king's bench as seditious libellers. Public feeling was now effectually roused; the accused bishops received sympathy and encouragement from all classes; and when the trial terminated in a verdict of "not guilty," the result was celebrated with rejoicings throughout the city. The king, however, would not yield. He issued orders for a new prosecution of the clergy, removing two of the judges who had spoken in their favour, and thus heaped fuel upon the fire of national disaffection, which was soon to involve in ruin himself and his son, whom his queen bore to him at this juncture. The desires and hopes of the people now centered on his daughter Mary and her husband, the prince of Orange, who was carefully watching the progress of affairs in England. The crisis had been anticipated by William, and it found him prepared to enter on the path which the earnest solicitations of men of all ranks opened to him. Refusing the mediation of the king of France, and strengthening his frontiers against an apprehended attack from that quarter, he left Helvoetsluys with an army of fourteen thousand men, and disembarked them in safety on the coast of Devonshire. His arrival was speedily followed by a bloodless triumph; the nation hailed him as a deliverer; continual accessions swelled the number of his adherents; and James, deserted by his ministers, his troops, and even his daughter Anne, found himself utterly helpless. The unfortunate king on the first appearance of danger had sent his wife and infant son to France. A few weeks compelled him to set out in the same direction. His first attempt to escape was unsuccessful, and he was still at Whitehall, when William reached London. But the prince had no intention of adopting harsh measures against his father-in-law. The latter was simply desired to leave the palace, and proceed under a guard of Dutch soldiers to the mansion of the duchess of Devonshire at Ham. He was permitted, however, to visit Rochester, where some of his friends joined him; and thence he escaped without difficulty to St. Germains to become the guest and pensioner of the king of France. Meanwhile the parliamentary council, which William summoned, declared the throne vacant, and made a formal tender of it to the prince and princess conjointly. Their acceptance, and the proclamation of their investiture with the supreme power, took place on the 13th of February, 1689, and that day will be long remembered as the commencement of a new and better era in Britain.

In the course of the following year James made an attempt to recover the throne. Aided by a small body of French troops, which the friendship and policy of Louis placed at his disposal, he landed at Kinsale, and occupied Dublin. The catholic population of the island welcomed his return, and prepared to take the field in his favour with the ardent impulsive bravery that distinguishes the Irish character. A parliament was summoned; but dissensions speedily appeared among his councillors, and he proceeded to join his troops in Ulster. Londonderry was besieged; that town offered an unexpected resistance, and James returned to hold legal state in the capital, where he soon became involved in disputes with his parliament, while his army in the north, compelled to raise the siege of Londonderry, and defeated at Newton-Butler fell back on Sligo, which it was also forced to abandon. A series of unimportant operations followed, till at length William crossed the channel and took the command in person. The two armies met on the banks of the Boyne; the Irish suffered a disastrous defeat, and James was constrained to become once more a refugee and a pensioner at the court of France. The struggle, however, was protracted by his partisans in Ireland, till the battle of Aughrim and the capitulation of Limerick quenched the embers of the ill-fated enterprise. In 1692 the importunities of the exiled monarch induced Louis to attempt the invasion of England; an armament was collected at La Hogue, whither James