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A.D. 1690.

SPIRITED CONDUCT OF QUEEN MARY.

455

James's cowardly ingratitude were far greater than the material results of the battle of the Boyne. It is remarkable that a victory so momentous in its consequences should have been attended with so small a sacrifice of life. The loss in James's army did not exceed fifteen hundred men, chiefly cavalry. On William's side the loss of men was not more than five hundred.

The departure of William for Ireland was the signal for an attack upon the English coasts, which was to be accompanied with an insurrection of the Jacobites. A fleet sailed from Brest, under the count de Tourville. The English fleet was in the Downs, under the command of the earl of Torrington, who sailed to the back of the Isle of Wight, where he was joined by a squadron of Dutch vessels under a skilful commander, Evertsen. Upon the approach of the French the English admiral quitted his position off St. Helen's, and sailed for the Straits of Dover. When the Council sent Torrington positive orders to fight, he put Evertsen in the van, and brought very few of his own squadron into action. The Dutch fought with indomitable courage and obstinacy, but were at length compelled to draw off. The British admiral left the Channel to a triumphant enemy. This humiliation roused the spirit of the people. The queen was universally beloved; and, although studiously avoiding, when the king was at hand, any interference in public affairs, she took at once a kingly part in this great crisis. She sent for the Lord Mayor of London; and inquired what the citizens would do, should the enemy effect a landing? The Lord Mayor returned to the queen with an offer of a hundred thousand pounds; of nine thousand men of the city trainbands, ready instantly to march wherever ordered; and a proposal for the Lieutenancy to provide and maintain six additional regiments of foot; and of the Mayor, Aldermen, and common council to raise a regiment of horse, and a thousand dragoons, by voluntary contributions. The same spirit was manifested throughout the land.

CHAPTER XXXV.

ON the 3rd of July, King James quitted Dublin with all speed, about five in the morning, got to Duncannon about sunrise, and the next day was secure in a French frigate, which landed him safely at Brest. On the day of James's flight from Dublin the camp of William on the Boyne was broken up. On the 6th, being Sunday, he returned thanks to God, in the cathedral of St. Patrick, for the success of his arms. When the news of the disgrace of Beachy Head reached Ireland the king, contemplating a return to England, resolved to secure Waterford, as the most important harbour of the eastern coast. On the 11th of August the army was on its march, and on the 21st, Waterford was in possession of William's troops, the garrison having capitulated. The king then determined to

return to Dublin, with the view of embarking for England. On the road, however, more accurate intelligence reached him, and he determined to remain and invest Limerick, where all the forces scattered on the 1st of July had now gathered together. The shameful discomfiture of the allied fleet at Beachy Head had not been followed up by the French so as to produce any results that should give serious alarm to William. Tourville had lost faith in the assurances of the Stuart courtiers, that all England would be up to aid in his enterprise, for all England was shouting "God bless king William and queen Mary." The French admiral contented himself with burning and ravaging Teignmouth, which Burnet calls "a miserable village." After this feat, Tourville sailed away to France; and left behind him an amount of indignation that was worth more for defence than even the troops of horse raised by the citizens of London.

On the 8th of August king William viewed the position in which the strength of the Irish Catholics was now concentrated. The French general, Lauzun, had declared that the place could not resist the attack of the advancing army, and he and Tyrconnel had marched away to Galway. The Irish, however, had an intrepid counsellor in Sarsfield, their general, who put his own resolute spirit into the twenty thousand defenders of the city. The old town-known as the English town-was entirely surrounded by the main stream and a branch of the Shannon, and was connected with another town-known as the Irish town-by a single bridge. The English town was accessible only through the lower Irish town. The Shannon, in a season of wet, overflowed its flat margin. The eye of the tactician would quickly see the capacity for defence of this position, even though its walls were not of the most scientific construction. The river approach from the sea was commanded at this time by a French squadron.

On the 9th, the main body of William's army advanced, and took up a position partly on the space between the windings of the Shannon, and partly on the south bank, near the Irish town. For several days the siege was not actively prosecuted, for the battering train had not arrived. On the night of the 10th, Sarsfield, with about five hundred horse, passed out of Limerick, and came suddenly down upon the train of artillery and a supply of military stores and provisions, which had arrived within eight miles of the English position. He killed most of the escort, the rest flying for their lives; loaded the guns to the muzzles, and half buried them; heaped up the barrels of powder around the guns, with a pile of waggons and stores; fired a train; and was safe in Limerick before the dawn. The loss of the cannon and stores was partially repaired by the arrival of two guns from Waterford. But the success of Sarsfield's exploit gave new courage to those who resolved to defend their city against an army not greatly superior in numbers to themselves. The besiegers were proportionately depressed, for they knew that the materials for a bombardment were insufficient. On the night of the 17th the forces of William entered the trenches of the besieged; and the same desperate work went forward till the 27th, when a general assault was determined upon. The attack was unsuccessful. After four hours of desperate fighting, the besiegers retired, with fearful loss on both sides. At a council of war on the 29th,

it was determined to raise the siege. There was a reason for this deter

A.D. 1691.

CONFEDERACY AGAINST FRANCE.

457

mination even more powerful than the gallant resistance of the Irish. Evelyn writes in his Diary, "The extremity of wet causes the siege of Limerick to be raised." On the 30th, king William was on his way to Waterford; and the next day the besiegers had quitted their trenches, and the camp was broken up. On the 22nd of September, an expedition, under the command of Marlborough, disembarked near Cork. These forces were soon joined by a portion of the army from Limerick, under the duke of Würtemberg. Cork capitulated, after a struggle of forty-eight hours. Marlborough then marched to Kinsale; and his cavalry arrived there in time to save the town from destruction, it having been fired by the Irish. The garrison, after a short resistance, also capitulated. Marlborough accomplished these successes with no great loss of men in action; but many perished from the diseases incident to the season and the climate.

The king opened Parliament on the 2nd of October. The Houses testified their belief that the support of the Confederacy abroad was a national object, by voting, in less than a fortnight, more than two millions and a half for maintaining an army of nearly seventy thousand men; and a further sum of eighteen hundred thousand pounds for the navy and ordnance. This supply was to be raised by a monthly assessment on land, by doubling the excise duties, and by increasing the customs duties on certain articles imported. The English people well knew that it was better that the nation should be heavily taxed for the purpose of a continental war, than that the country should have peace and dishonour under the tutelage of Louis of France. On the 5th of January, 1691, the king closed the Session of Parliament, and on the 18th he set out for the Congress at the Hague, where his reception was most enthusiastic.

The emperor of Germany, and Charles II. of Spain, were both repre sented at the Congress. These great Catholic sovereigns had not been hostile to the prince who had ejected the Papist king of England; for at the time when the Revolution of 1688 was maturing, pope Innocent the Eleventh was not indisposed to encourage any opposition to his oppressor, the French king. His successor, Alexander the Eighth, had the same disposition to make common cause with those who opposed Louis. The chief of the princes who joined the alliance with a zeal for the cause which William represented as the sovereign of Protestant England and the first magistrate of Protestant Holland, was Frederick the Third, elector of Brandenburg-subsequently king of Prussia. Of other German princes at the Congress, there were the elector of Bavaria, and the landgraves of Hesse Cassel and Hesse Darmstadt; there were princes of Luxemburg, of Holstein, of Würtemberg, of Anspach. Victor Amadeus, duke of Savoy, had already joined his fortunes to those of the Confederacy. At the period of the Congress he was defending his own dominions against the arms of France. The first military operations of this young prince were unfortunate, and many an anxious thought of William must have been turned to Piedmont. The dangerous position of the duke of Savoy enabled the English king to stipulate successfully that the Waldenses should be allowed to exercise their religion in peace.

Whilst the king of England was infusing his spirit into his allies, some eager and confident, others tardy and lukewarm, Louis suddenly appeared

in person at the head of a great army to besiege Mons, the strongly fortified capital of Hainault, and one of the chief barriers of the Netherlands against France. William, with his accustomed energy, at once broke up the Congress; got together an army of fifty thousand men; but arrived only in time to learn that the burning city had capitulated amidst the terrors of its population, after a bombardment which had destroyed one-half of its dwelling places. Louis went back to Versailles, and William ran over to England for a short visit of seventeen days.

The period had arrived when it was necessary to fill up the sees, vacant by the refusal to take the oaths, of the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops of Bath and Wells, Ely, Gloucester, Norwich, and Peterborough. Two other non-juring bishops, Worcester, and Chichester, had died in the interval since the Revolution. A discovery had been made of a correspondence of Turner, the bishop of Ely, with the court of St. Germains, in which his brethren were implicated. Endeavours had been made to conciliate the non-juring prelates, but all that they would engage to do was to live quietly. So Tillotson became archbishop of Canterbury, and Sharp archbishop of York. Patrick, Stillingfleet, Moore, Cumberland, Fowler, and Kidder, filled the other vacancies. "In two years' time the king had named fifteen bishops; and they were generally looked upon as the learnedest, the wisest, and best men that were in the church."*

On the night of the 31st of December, lord Preston, with two other agents of the Jacobites, had been seized on board a smack in the river, with letters addressed to James, containing propositions for his coming over with a small force during the absence of William. Preston and his humbler associate, Ashton, were tried for high treason in January, and were convicted upon very clear evidence. William had to occupy some portion of his short visit to England in learning the extent of the conspiracy of which Preston was the chief agent, and in determining as to the fate of some of those accused as conspirators. Preston was brought before him at the Council; and he then implicated the duke of Ormond, the earls of Devonshire, Dorset, Macclesfield, lord Brandon, lord Dartmouth and others. The accusation against these eminent persons was probably without foundation. Whether or not, William stopped the hearsay testimony of Preston. "Which method succeeded so well," says the biographer of king James, that those lords "proved in effect most bitter enemies to his Majesty's [king James's] cause ever afterwards."

Since the successes of Marlborough in the autumn of 1690, there had been no marked change in the positions of the two contending parties in Ireland. Marlborough was now chosen by William to accompany him in his continental campaign. He was entrusted to collect all the English troops, and to wait near Brussels till the king should arrive to take the command. William had much diplomatic work on his hands-to encourage the wavering, to assist the weak, and to bribe the hungry. In the interval between the king's arrival at the Hague and his taking the command of the army, Marlborough was sorely tempted to make good some of the

*Burnet.

A.D. 1691.

459

THE JACOBITES DEFEATED IN IRELAND. professions which he had secretly conveyed to James. But the opportunity was probably wanting for a decisive act of treachery in this campaign, in which nothing great on either side was accomplished or even attempted.

In the spring of 1691 Tyrconnel arrived in Ireland to assume his position as the viceroy of James; and he was followed by a French general, Saint Ruth, as commander-in-chief of the Irish army. He took the command at Limerick, and made great exertions to bring the disorganized troops into a state of efficiency. On the English side, an experienced Dutch officer, Ginkell, was appointed to the command-in-chief. His first operation was to lay siege to Athlone. On the 30th of June the town was taken by a bold attack; and Saint Ruth, who was encamped near, marched away on the road to Galway. He took up a strong position at Aghrim, resolved to risk a general engagement. On the 12th of July, at five in the evening, the two armies joined battle. The Irish fought with the most desperate resolution. The English and Dutch attacked and fell back, again and again. But at the very crisis of the engagement, the French general was killed by a cannon-ball, and his death was concealed. The other general, Sarsfield, was inactive with the reserve, waiting for orders. The Irish were overpowered, and were soon disorganized. There were few prisoners; and four thousand Irish lay dead on the actual battlefield. It is supposed that seven thousand altogether fell in the horrible carnage which accompanied the total rout of Aghrim. Ginkell followed up his victory by obtaining the capitulation of Galway; its garrison, with the French general, D'Usson, being permitted to retire to Limerick. Here the English occupied the same ground as in the previous year, but it was not in the same wet condition; and the army was now well supplied with artillery and the munitions of war. Moreover, an English fleet now rode in the Shannon. Ginkell, by a bold manoeuvre, crossed the Shannon on a bridge of boats, and scattered the Irish horse that were encamped near the city. He then succeeded in carrying a detached fort, which commanded the bridge called Thomond's; and a fearful slaughter of the garrison accompanied this success. The bombardment was terribly effective. The fall of the city was inevitable. Hostilities were suspended for some days during the progress of negotiations. On the 1st of October, two treaties were signed-one military, the other civil. The civil treaty, which was signed by the Lords Justices, who had repaired to the camp, was to the effect "that the Roman Catholics of this kingdom shall enjoy such privileges in the exercise of their religion, as are consistent with the laws of Ireland, or as they did enjoy in the reign of king Charles the Second." An entire amnesty was promised to all who should take the oath of allegiance. Limerick bears the name of "the City of the Violated Treaty." Years of unjust and vindictive penal laws, which are now happily swept away, have manifested that this reproach is not unfounded.

In 1690, the Parliament of Scotland established the synodical authority; made the signature to the Confession of Faith the test of orthodoxy; and Patronage was abolished, under certain small compensations to the patrons. A knot of turbulent and discontented men, known as The Club, entered into schemes for reversing all that had been accomplished by the Revolu

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