same time frowned upon at Kensington for not going far ther. The king was not to be moved. He had been too He had great to sink into littleness without a struggle. 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 Howes, 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. It may with confidence be affirmed that William would never have stooped to be the pensioner of France; but it was with difficulty that he was, at this conjuncture, dissuaded from throwing up the government of England. When first he threw out hints about retiring to the Continent, his ministers imagined that he was only trying to frighten them into making a desperate effort to obtain for him an efficient army. But they soon saw reason to believe that he was in earnest. That he was in earnest, indeed, can hardly be doubted; for, in a confidential letter to Heinsius, whom he could have no motive for deceiving, he intimated his intention very clearly. "I foresee," he writes, that I shall be driven to take an extreme course, and that I shall see you again in Holland sooner than I had imagined." ""* In fact, he had resolved to go down to the Lords, to send for the Commons, and to make his last speech from the throne. That speech he actually prepared, and had it translated. He meant to tell his hearers that he had come to England to rescue their religion and their liberties; that, for that end, he had been under the necessity of waging a long and cruel war; that the war had, by the blessing of God, ended in an honorable and advantageous peace; and that the nation might now be tranquil and happy, if only those precautions were adopted which he had on the first day of the session recommended as essential to the public security. Since, however, the Estates of the Realm thought fit to slight his advice, and to expose themselves to the imminent risk of ruin, he would not be the witness of calamities which he had not caused and which he could not avert. He must therefore request the houses to present to him a bill providing for the government of the realm: he would pass that bill, and withdraw from a post in which he could no longer be useful; but he should always take a deep interest in the welfare of England; and, if what he foreboded should come to pass, if in some day of danger she should again need his services, his life should be hazarded as freely as ever in her defence. When the king showed his speech to the chancellor, that wise minister forgot for a moment his habitual self-command. "This is extravagance, sir," he said, "this is madness. I implore your majesty, for the sake of your own honor, not to say to anybody else what you have said to me." He argued the matter during two hours, and no doubt lucidly and forcibly. William listened patiently, but his purpose remained unchanged. The alarm of the ministers seems to have been increased by finding that the king's intention had been confided to Marlborough, the very last man to whom such a secret would have been imparted unless William had really made up his mind to abdicate in favor of the Princess of Denmark. Somers had another audience, and again began to expostulate. But William cut him short. "We shall not agree, my lord; my mind is made up." "Then, sir," said Somers, "I have to request that I may be excused from *Dec. 8., 1698. assisting as chancellor at the fatal act which your majesty meditates. It was from my king that I received this seal, and I beg that he will take it from me while he is still my king.” In these circumstances the ministers, though with scarcely the faintest hope of success, determined to try what they could do to meet the king's wishes. A select committee had been appointed by the House of Commons to frame a bill for the disbanding of all the troops above seven thousand. A motion was made by one of the Court party that this committee should be instructed to reconsider the number of men. Vernon acquitted himself well in the debate. Montague spoke with even more than his wonted ability and energy, but in vain. So far was he from being able to rally round him such a majority as that which had supported him in the preceding Parliament, that he could not count on the support even of the placemen who sat at the same executive board with him. Thomas Pelham, who had, only a few months before, been made a Lord of the Treasury, tried to answer him.. "I own," said Pelham, "that last year I thought a large land force necessary this year I think such a force unnecessary; but I deny that I have been guilty of any inconsistency. Last year the great question of the Spanish succession was unsettled, and there was serious danger of a general war. That question has now been settled in the best possible way, and we may look forward to many years of peace." A Whig of still greater note and authority, the Marquess of Hartington, separated himself on this occasion from the Junto. The current was irresistible. At last the voices of those who tried to speak for the instruction were drowned by clamor. When the question was put, there was a great shout of No, and the minority submitted. To divide would have been merely to have exposed their weakness. 66 By this time it became clear that the relations between the executive government and the Parliament were again what they had been before the year 1695. The history of our polity at this time is closely connected with the history of one man. Hitherto Montague's career had been more splendidly and uninterruptedly successful than that of any member of the House of Commons since the House of Commons had begun to exist. And now fortune had turned. By the Tories he had long been hated as a Whig and the rapidity of his rise, the brilliancy of his fame, and the unvarying good luck which seemed to attend him, had made many Whigs his enemies. He was absurdly compared to the upstart favorites of a former age, Carr and Villiers, men whom he had resembled in nothing but in the speed with which he had mounted from an humble to a lofty position. They had, without rendering any service to the State, without showing any capacity for the conduct of great affairs, been elevated to the highest dignities, in spite of the murmurs of the whole nation, by the mere partiality of the sovereign. Montague owed every thing to his own merit and to the public opinion of his merit. With his master he appears to have had very little intercourse, and none that was not official. He was, in truth, a. living monument of what the Revolution had done for the country. The Revolution had found him a young student in a cell by the Cam, poring on the diagrams which illustrated the newly-discovered laws of centripetal and centrifugal force, writing little copies of verses, and indulging visions of parsonages with rich glebes, and of closes in old cathedral towns; had developed in him new talents; had held out to him the hope of prizes of a very different sort from a rectory or a prebend. His eloquence had gained for him the ear of the Legislature. His skill in fiscal and commercial affairs had won for him the confidence of the city. During four years he had been the undisputed leader of the majority of the House of Commons, and every one of those years he had made memorable by great parliamentary victories and by great public services. It should seem that his success ought to have been gratifying to the nation, and especially to that assembly of which he was the chief ornament, of which, indeed, he might be called the creature. The representatives of the people ought to have been well pleased to find that their approbation could, in the new order of things, do for the man whom they delighted to honor all that the mightiest of the Tudors could do for Leicester, or the most arbitrary of the Stuarts for Strafford. But, strange to say, the Commons soon began to regard with an evil eye that greatness which was their own work. The fault, indeed, was partly Montague's. With all his ability, he had not the wisdom to avert, by suavity and moderation, that curse, the inseparable concomitant of prosperity and glory, which the ancients personified under the name of Nemesis. His head, strong for all the purposes of debate and arithmetical calculation, was weak against the intoxicating influence of success and fame. He became proud even to insolence. Old companions, who, a very few years before, had punned and rhymed with him in garrets, had dined with him in cheap ordinaries, had sat with him in the pit, and had lent him some silver to pay his seamstress's bill, hardly knew their friend Charles in the great man who could not forget for one moment that he was First Lord of the Treasury, that he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, that he had been a regent of the kingdom, that he had founded the Bank of England and the new East India Company, that he had restored the currency, that he had invented the Exchequer bills, that he had planned the general mortgage, and that he had been pronounced, by a solemn vote of the Commons, to have deserved all the favors which he had received from the crown. It was said that admiration of himself and contempt of others were indicated by all his gestures, and written in all the lines of his face. The very way in which the little jackanapes, as the hostile pamphleteers loved to call him, strutted through the lobby, making the most of his small figure, rising on his toe, and perking up his chin, made him enemies. Rash and arrogant sayings were imputed to him, and perhaps invented for him. He was accused of boasting that there was nothing that he could not carry through the House of Commons - that he could turn the majority round his finger. A crowd of libellers assailed him with much more than political hatred. Boundless rapacity and corruption were laid to his charge. He was represented as selling all the places in the revenue department for three years' purchase. The opprobrious nickname of Filcher was fastened on him. His luxury, it was said, was not less inordinate than his avarice. There was indeed an attempt made at this time to raise against the leading Whig politicians and their allies, the great moneyed men of the city, a cry much resembling the cry which, seventy or eighty years later, was raised against the English nabobs. Great wealth, suddenly acquired, is not often enjoyed with moderation, dignity, and good taste. therefore not impossible that there may have been some small foundation for the extravagant, stories with which malcontent pamphleteers amused the leisure of malcontent It is |