第1182章 CHAPTER XXIV(11)

The King's indignation and vexation were extreme. He was angry with the opposition, with the ministers, with all England. The nation seemed to him to be under a judicial infatuation, blind to dangers which his sagacity perceived to be real, near and formidable, and morbidly apprehensive of dangers which his conscience told him were no dangers at all. The perverse islanders were willing to trust every thing that was most precious to them, their independence, their property, their laws, their religion, to the moderation and good faith of France, to the winds and the waves, to the steadiness and expertness of battalions of ploughmen commanded by squires; and yet they were afraid to trust him with the means of protecting them lest he should use those means for the destruction of the liberties which he had saved from extreme peril, which he had fenced with new securities, which he had defended with the hazard of his life, and which from the day of his accession he had never once violated. He was attached, and not without reason, to the Blue Dutch Foot Guards. That brigade had served under him for many years, and had been eminently distinguished by courage, discipline and fidelity. In December 1688 that brigade had been the first in his army to enter the English capital, and had been entrusted with the important duty of occupying Whitehall and guarding the person of James. Eighteen months later, that brigade had been the first to plunge into the waters of the Boyne. Nor had the conduct of these veteran soldiers been less exemplary in their quarters than in the field. The vote which required the King to discard them merely because they were what he himself was seemed to him a personal affront. All these vexations and scandals he imagined that his ministers might have averted, if they had been more solicitous for his honour and for the success of his great schemes of policy, and less solicitous about their own popularity. They, on the other hand, continued to assure him, and, as far as can now be judged, to assure him with perfect truth, that it was altogether out of their power to effect what he wished. Something they might perhaps be able to do. Many members of the House of Commons had said in private that seven thousand men was too small a number. If His Majesty would let it be understood that he should consider those who should vote for ten thousand as having done him good service, there might be hopes. But there could be no hope if gentlemen found that by voting for ten thousand they should please nobody, that they should be held up to the counties and towns which they represented as turncoats and slaves for going so far to meet his wishes, and that they should be at the same time frowned upon at Kensington for not going farther. The King was not to be moved.

He had been too great to sink into littleness without a struggle.

He had been the soul of two great coalitions, the dread of France, the hope of all oppressed nations. And was he to be degraded into a mere puppet of the Harleys and the Hooves, a petty prince who could neither help nor hurt, a less formidable enemy and less valuable ally than the Elector of Brandenburg or the Duke of Savoy? His spirit, quite as arbitrary and as impatient of control as that of any of his predecessors, Stuart, Tudor or Plantagenet, swelled high against this ignominious bondage. It was well known at Versailles that he was cruelly mortified and incensed; and, during a short time, a strange hope was cherished there that, in the heat of his resentment, he might be induced to imitate his uncles, Charles and James, to conclude another treaty of Dover, and to sell himself into vassalage for a subsidy which might make him independent of his niggardly and mutinous Parliament. Such a subsidy, it was thought, might be disguised under the name of a compensation for the little principality of Orange, which Lewis had long been desirous to purchase even at a fancy price. A despatch was drawn up containing a paragraph by which Tallard was to be apprised of his master's views, and instructed not to hazard any distinct proposition, but to try the effect of cautious and delicate insinuations, and, if possible, to draw William on to speak first. This paragraph was, on second thoughts, cancelled; but that it should ever have been written must be considered a most significant circumstance.