the nose. Let me say in parenthesis, that it was then that a certain nasal drawl came to be considered the mark of vital piety, and it was then that these northern States were colonised. As we Americans have remained more pious than the English, we have retained more of that peculiar accent.
Cromwell died; jack-boots and spurs ceased to be evangelists; nasal psalmody went out of fashion; and the Church of England was restored. Was it strange that James should persuade himself that he could make the English people turn one more somerset? But he was not the man to do it, and his friends told him so. Louis XIV. warned him to be careful. The archbishop of Rheims suggested that a mass might not be worth three kingdoms. In the meantime the pope, Innocent the eleventh, was working in a curious subterranean way against him. Louis had insulted Innocent and imprisoned his nuncio; and the pope was ready to league himself even with protestants to put on the English throne a dynasty hostile to the French king.
England had but recently escaped from under the iron heel of the saints; and she dreaded their return to power as much as the pope’s. Consequently the Church of England which James’ grandfather (James I.) said was the only church for a gentleman, was once more the strongest ecclesiastical body in the land. If James had been a little tolerant and let the bishops alone he might at least have reëstablished Roman Catholicism as the religion of the Court; but he was a fanatic and must have the whole or nothing; and he got the latter.
The English, split up into different sects which hated each other with theological hatred, lost confidence in themselves. A foreign prince and a foreign army were called in as in the days of James’ worthless ancestor King John. William of Holland with an army of Dutchmen landed at Torbay the fifth of November 1688; and England once more suffered the humiliation of an invasion. It was at this juncture that Berwick arrived in England, and took command of the king’s household troops which his uncle Marlborough had abandoned. Nobody contributed more to the overthrow of James than John Churchill who owed him everything. He and his shrew of a wife Sarah had influence enough with Anne, James’ youngest daughter, and with her husband George of Denmark, to lead them too to desert their father and to go over to William and Mary.
Anne was a stupid girl and made a stupid queen; but her stupidity was but a mild form of that lesion in comparison with that which afflicted her husband. We have King Charles’ own testimony on that point. Supping one day with James, he said to him:—Brother James I have tried our nephew George drunk and I have tried him sober, and drunk or sober there is nothing in him. George had a stolid way of exclaiming Est-il possible! When James was told that his daughter and son-in-law had abandoned him: What, cried he, has Est-il possible gone too?
James was now reminded of the day when they cut his father’s head off,[1] and he thought it time to quit. He fled and William and Mary mounted the throne. They were not the next heirs: one little life stood between and one only—that of the infant son of James and of his second wife Mary Beatrice of Esté. But though, as Macaulay himself admits, no birth was ever better attested, all England was made to believe that the child was spurious. Even Mary and Anne gave countenance to that infamous story. That child was afterwards known as the Pretender or James III.
The revolution of 1688, which drove out James and put upon the throne William and Mary, was a long step forward in the history of English liberty; but the personal share in it of the daughters and sons-in-law of James, was not commendable. King Lear’s daughters were less unfilial than Mary and Anne. Goneril and Regan did not drive their old father out into the storm: it was his own high temper that did that: he was furious that they would not entertain his hundred knights. They, the daughters, wanted him to sit by the fireside and let the housemaid bring him his slippers. He insisted on traipsing through the house at the head of a hundred stalking fellows, tracking the mud over everything; and I leave it to any good housewife if the girls were not right.
But Mary and Anne and William drove the poor old king from his throne, from his home and from his country, and he died in exile.
Mary is Macaulay’s heroine, yet to make a point he cannot help relating her untimely glee, running from room to room in the palace of Whitehall, delighted to find herself the mistress of so fine a house from which she had just expelled her own father.
James fled to France, and Berwick went with him. Among other devoted friends who left their country and joined their fortunes to those of the banished king, was an Irish gentleman named MacMahon. From him was descended Marie Edmée Patrice Maurice MacMahon whilom president of the Republic of France.
A few years later Berwick accompanied his father in his expedition to Ireland which had remained faithful to him. That expedition came to grief, as you know, at the battle of the Boyne, in which Berwick took part. In another action during that campaign, he had two horses killed under him, and was himself wounded. He says in his memoirs, that that was the only wound he ever received; but he did receive one besides, and we shall see by and by why he never mentions it.
On his return to France, Berwick became a French subject, and entered the French army for the rest of his life. Under the last two kings, Charles and James, England had been the ally of France. Louis XIV. was their first cousin, all three being grand-children of Henry IV. William’s mother a sister of Charles and James, was equally of course cousin to Louis; but there was nobody on earth that William hated as he did the French king. Nor was this hatred without a cause: Louis had invaded and desolated William’s native country, Holland, chiefly because a Dutch envoy who had not been brought up in refined society, had told a French envoy to go to—well, it is not polite to say where—and William succeeded in dragging England into a war with France. England had nothing to gain in that war, and gained nothing but defeat.
William himself took the command. In person William III. was thin, pale, dyspeptic and unwholesome, which accounts for his bad temper. He was brave and obstinate, and no series of defeats could take the conceit out of him. A good statesman, he was a bad general: it has even been said of him that he lost more battles than any other commander in history. He was now opposed in the field by a genius of high order, François de Montmorenci, Duke of Luxembourg, Marshal of France. Luxembourg like Marlborough had learnt the art of war under Condé and Turenne and would have equalled those leaders, if he had had their bodily vigor; but he was a ricketty hunchback.
The first encounter at which Berwick was present, between those two valetudinary warriors who ought both have been at home with their feet in warm water, was at Steinkerk where William came near scrambling a victory by a stratagem. He had seized one of Luxembourg’s spies and had forced him to write false intelligence to him. Luxembourg was deceived, and before he knew it the English were upon him; but so promptly did he throw his troops into order of battle that after an engagement which was surpassed in bloody obstinacy only by the one that followed, the victory remained to him.
The next year these two generals met at Landen or Neerwinden. The battle takes both names from two towns held by the English at the beginning of it. Landen, says Macaulay, was the most terrible battle of the seventeenth century. Berwick says he himself was chosen by Luxembourg to open the ball. At the head of four battalions he marched upon Neerwinden. He forced the English lines and drove them back into the town. But they rallied; Berwick’s four battalions were broken up, and he was left almost alone. He tore the trappings off his uniform, and by speaking English hoped to pass for an English officer till he could escape. But he was recognized, and gave up his sword to one of his Churchill uncles a brother of Marlborough.
The awful carnage of this awful battle then centered around Neerwinden. The French were repulsed time and again. At last the household troops of King Louis were brought up to the attack. At their head was the king’s nephew Philip duke of Chartres, afterwards duke of Orleans, afterwards Regent of France. These soldiers had turned the tide at Steinkerk, and now once more they maintained their high reputation: The English were driven out.
Macaulay says:—“At Landen two poor, sickly beings were the soul of two great armies. It is probable that among the hundred and twenty thousand soldiers marshalled around Neerwinden, the two feeblist in body were the hunchback dwarf who urged forward the fiery onset of France, and the asthmatic skeleton who covered the slow retreat of England.”
Quite picturesque, that! but the truth is William covered no retreat