last a foreigner in speech, tastes, and habits.

His

Under his dexterous management the hereditary enemies of his house had helped him to mount a throne; and the One of the chief functions of our persecutors of his religion had helped Sovereigns had long been to preside him to rescue his religion from perse- over the society of the capital. That cution. Fleets and armies, collected to function Charles the Second had perwithstand him, had, without a struggle, formed with immense success. submitted to his orders. Factions and easy bow, his good stories, his style of sects, divided by mortal antipathies, dancing and playing tennis, the sound had recognised him as their common of his cordial laugh, were familiar to head. Without carnage, without de-all London. One day he was seen vastation, he had won a victory compared with which all the victories of Gustavus and Turenne were insignificant. In a few weeks he had changed the relative position of all the states in Europe, and had restored the equilibrium which the preponderance of one power had destroyed. Foreign nations did ample justice to his great qualities. In every Continental country where Protestant congregations met, fervent thanks were offered to God, who, from among the progeny of His servants, Maurice, the deliverer of Germany, and William, the deliverer of Holland, had raised up a third deliverer, the wisest and mightiest of all. At Vienna, at Madrid, nay, at Rome, the valiant and sagacious heretic was held in honour as the chief of the great confederacy against the House of Bourbon; and even at Versailles the hatred which he inspired was largely mingled with admiration.

Here he was less favourably judged. In truth, our ancestors saw him in the worst of all lights. By the French, the Germans, and the Italians, he was contemplated at such a distance that only what was great could be discerned, and that small blemishes were invisible. To the Dutch he was brought close: but he was himself a Dutchman. In his intercourse with them he was seen to the best advantage: he was perfectly at his ease with them; and from among them he had chosen his earliest and dearest friends. But to the English he appeared in a most unfortunate point of view. He was at once too near to them and too far from them. He lived among them, so that the smallest peculiarity of temper or manner could not escape their notice. Yet he lived apart from them, and was to the

among the elms of Saint James's Park chatting with Dryden about poetry.* Another day his arm was on Tom Durfey's shoulder; and his Majesty was taking a second, while his companion sang "Phillida, Phillida,” or “To horse, brave boys, to Newmarket, to horse."† James, with much less vivacity and good nature, was accessible, and, to people who did not cross him, civil. But of this sociableness William was entirely destitute. He seldom came forth from his closet; and, when he appeared in the public rooms, he stood among the crowd of courtiers and ladies, stern and abstracted, making no jest and smiling at none. His freezing look, his silence, the dry and concise answers which he uttered when he could keep silence no longer, disgusted noblemen and gentlemen who had been accustomed to be slapped on the back by their royal masters, called Jack or Harry, congratulated about race cups or rallied about actresses. The women missed the homage due to their sex. They observed that the King spoke in a somewhat imperious tone even to the wife to whom he owed so much, and whom he sincerely loved and esteemed. They were

* See the account given in Spence's Anecdotes of the Origin of Dryden's Medal. † Guardian, No. 67.

though a very affectionate, was not always a There is abundant proof that William, polite husband. But no credit is due to the story contained in the letter which Dalrymple in 1773, and wise enough to omit in the ediwas foolish enough to publish as Nottingham's tion of 1790. How any person who knew any thing of the history of those times could be so strangely deceived, it is not easy to understand, particularly as the handwriting bears no resemblance to Nottingham's, with which Dalrymple was familiar. The letter is evidently a common newsletter, written by a scribbler, who had never seen the King and Queen except at some public place, and whose

amused and shocked to see him, when | tivated, was quick. There was no want the Princess Anne dined with him, and of feminine wit and shrewdness in her when the first green peas of the year conversation; and her letters were so were put on the table, devour the whole dish without offering a spoonful to Her Royal Highness; and they pronounced that this great soldier and politician was no better than a Low Dutch bear.* One misfortune, which was imputed to him as a crime, was his bad English. He spoke our language, but not well. His accent was foreign: his diction was inelegant; and his vocabulary seems to have been no larger than was necessary for the transaction of business. To the difficulty which he felt in expressing himself, and to his consciousness that his pronunciation was bad, must be partly ascribed the taciturnity and the short answers which gave so much offence. Our literature he was incapable of enjoying or of understanding. He never once, during his whole reign, showed himself at the theatre. The poets who wrote Pindaric verses in his praise, complained that their flights of sublimity were beyond his comprehension. Those who are acquainted with the panegyrical odes of that age will perhaps be of opinion that he did not lose much by his igno

rance.

Popularity of Mary.

well expressed that they deserved to be well spelt. She took much pleasure in the lighter kinds of literature, and did something towards bringing books into fashion among ladies of quality. The stainless purity of her private life and the strict attention which she paid to her religious duties were the more respectable, because she was singularly free from censoriousness, and discouraged scandal as much as vice. In dislike of backbiting indeed she and her husband cordially agreed: but they showed that dislike in different and in very characteristic ways. William preserved profound silence, and gave the talebearer a look which, as was said by a person who had once encountered it, and who took good care never to encounter it again, made your story go back down your throat.* Mary had a way of interrupting tattle about elopements, duels, and playdebts, by asking the tattlers, very quietly yet significantly, whether they had ever read her favourite sermon, Doctor Tillotson's on Evil Speaking. Her charities were munificent and judicious; and, though she made no ostentatious display of them, it was known that she retrenched from her own state in order to relieve Protestants whom persecution had driven from France and Ireland, and

It is true that his wife did her best to supply what was wanting, and that she was excellently qualified to be the head of the Court. She was English by birth, and English also in her tastes and feelings. Her * Mémoires originaux sur le règne et la face was handsome, her port majestic, Christophe Comte de Dohna. Berlin, 1833. It cour de Frédéric I., Roi de Prusse, écrits par her temper sweet and lively, her man-is strange that this interesting volume should ners affable and graceful. Her understanding, though very imperfectly cul

be almost unknown in England. The only copy that I have ever seen of it was kindly

given to me by Sir Robert Adair. "Le Roi," Dohna says, "avoit une autre qualité très estimable, qui est celle de n'aimer point qu'on rendit de mauvais offices à personne par des railleries." The Marquis de La Forêt tried to entertain His Majesty at the expense of an English nobleman. "Ce prince," says Dohna, "prit son air sévère, et, le regardant sans mot dire, lui fit rentrer les paroles dans le ventre. Le Marquis m'en fit ses plaintes quelques heures après. J'ai mal pris ma bisque,' dit-il; 'j'ai cru faire l'agréable sur le chapitre de Milord. . . mais j'ai trouvé à qui parler, et j'ai attrapé un regard du roi qui m'a fait passer l'envie de rire."" Dohna supposed that William might be less sensitive about the character of a Frenchman, and tried the experiment. But, says he, "j'eus à peu près le même sort que M. de la Forêt."

to Hamp

who were starving in the garrets of ness and courtesy would have done London. So amiable was her conduct, much to efface the unfavourable imthat she was generally spoken of with pression made by his stern and frigid esteem and tenderness by the most demeanour. Unhappily his The Court respectable of those who disapproved physical infirmities made it removed of the manner in which she had been impossible for him to reside at Whitehall raised to the throne, and even of those Whitehall. The air of West- ton Court who refused to acknowledge her as minster, mingled with the fog of the Queen. In the Jacobite lampoons of river which in spring tides overflowed that time, lampoons which, in virulence the courts of his palace, with the and malignity, far exceed any thing smoke of seacoal from two hundred that our age has produced, she was not thousand chimneys, and with the fumes often mentioned with severity. Indeed of all the filth which was then suffered she sometimes expressed her surprise to accumulate in the streets, was inat finding that libellers who respected supportable to him; for his lungs were nothing else respected her name. God, weak, and his sense of smell exquisitely she said, knew where her weakness keen. His constitutional asthma made lay. She was too sensitive to abuse rapid progress. His physicians proand calumny: He had mercifully spared nounced it impossible that he could her a trial which was beyond her live to the end of the year. His face strength; and the best return which was so ghastly that he could hardly be she could make to Him was to dis-recognised. Those who had to transact countenance all malicious reflections on business with him were shocked to the characters of others. Assured that she possessed her husband's entire confidence and affection, she turned the edge of his sharp speeches sometimes by soft and sometimes by playful answers, and employed all the influence which she derived from her many pleasing qualities to gain the hearts of the people for him.*

If she had long continued to assemble round her the best society of London, it is probable that her kind

*Compare the account of Mary by the Whig Burnet with the mention of her by the Tory Evelyn in his Diary, March 8, 169, and with what is said of her by the Nonjuror who wrote the Letter to Archbishop Tennison on her death in 1695. The impression which the bluntness and reserve of William and the grace and gentleness of Mary had made on the populace may be traced in the remains of the street poetry of that time. The following conjugal dialogue may still be seen on the original broadside.

"Then bespoke Mary, our most royal Queen,

My gracious King William, where are you going?' He answered her quickly, I count him no man That telleth his secret unto a woman.' The Queen with a modest behaviour replied, I wish that kind Providence may be thy guide, To keep thee from danger, my sovereign Lord, The which will the greatest of comfort afford."" These lines are in an excellent collection formed by Mr. Richard Heber, and now the property of Mr. Broderip, by whom it was kindly lent to me. In one of the most savage Jacobite pasquinades of 1689, William is described as

"A churle to his wife, which she makes but a jest."

hear him gasping for breath, and coughing till the tears ran down his cheeks. His mind, strong as it was, sympathised with his body. His judg ment was indeed as clear as ever. But there was, during some months, a perceptible relaxation of that energy by which he had been distinguished. Even his Dutch friends whispered that he was not the man that he had been at the Hague.† It was absolutely necessary that he should quit London. He accordingly took up his residence in the purer air of Hampton Court. That mansion, begun by the magnificent Wolsey, was a fine specimen of the architecture which flourished in England under the first Tudors: but the apartments were not, according to

*Burnet, ii. 2.: Burnet, MS. Harl. 6584. But Ronquillo's account is much more cir cumstantial. "Nada se ha visto mas desfignrado; y, quantas veces he estado con el, le he visto toser tanto que se le saltaban las lagri mas, y se ponia moxado y arrancando; y confiesan los medicos que es una asma incurable." Mar. 1689. Avaux wrote to the same effect from Ireland. "La santé de l'usurpateur est fort mauvaise. L'on ne croit pas qu'il vive un an.' April

8

18'

"Hasta decir los mismos Hollandeses que lo desconozcan," says Ronquillo. "Il est absolument mal propre pour le rôle qu'il a à jouer à l'heure qu'il est," says Avaux. "Slothful and sickly," says Evelyn. March 29.1689.

and mandarins were depicted in outrageous defiance of all the laws of perspective. The fashion, a frivolous and inelegant fashion it must be owned, which was thus set by the amiable Queen, spread fast and wide. In a few years almost every great house in the kingdom contained a museum of these grotesque baubles. Even statesmen and generals were not ashamed to be renowned as judges of teapots and dragons; and satirists long continued to repeat that a fine lady valued her mottled green pottery quite as much as she valued her monkey, and much more than she valued her husband.*

the notions of the seventeenth century, well fitted for purposes of state. Our princes therefore had, since the Restoration, repaired thither seldom, and only when they wished to live for a time in retirement. As William purposed to make the deserted edifice his chief palace, it was necessary for him to build and to plant; nor was the necessity disagreeable to him. For he had, like most of his countrymen, a pleasure in decorating a country house; and next to hunting, though at a great interval, his favourite amusements were architecture and gardening. He had already created on a sandy heath in Guelders a paradise, which attracted But the new palace was embellished multitudes of the curious from Holland with works of art of a very different and Westphalia. Mary had laid the kind. A gallery was erected for the first stone of the house. Bentinck had cartoons of Raphael. Those great picsuperintended the digging of the fish-tures, then and still the finest on our ponds. There were cascades and grot-side of the Alps, had been preserved toes, a spacious orangery, and an by Cromwell from the fate which befell aviary which furnished Hondekoeter most of the other masterpieces in the with numerous specimens of manycoloured plumage. The King, in his splendid banishment, pined for this favourite seat, and found some consolation in creating another Loo on the banks of the Thames. Soon a wide extent of ground was laid out in formal walks and parterres. Much idle ingenuity was employed in forming that intricate labyrinth of verdure which has puzzled and amused five generations of holiday visitors from London. Limes thirty years old were transplanted from neighbouring woods to shade the alleys. Artificial foun-nished, the dwelling of the Duchess of tains spouted among the flower beds. A new court, not designed with the purest taste, but stately, spacious, and commodious, rose under the direction of Wren. The wainscots were adorned with the rich and delicate carvings of Gibbons. The staircases were in a blaze with the glaring frescoes of Verrio. In every corner of the mansion appeared a profusion of gewgaws, not yet familiar to English eyes. Mary had acquired at the Hague a taste for the porcelain of China, and amused herself by forming at Hampton a vast collection of hideous images, and of vases on which houses, trees, bridges,

* See Harris's description of Loo, 1699.

collection of Charles the First, but had been suffered to lie during many years nailed up in deal boxes. Peter, raising the cripple at the Beautiful Gate, and Paul, proclaiming the unknown God to the philosophers of Athens, were now brought forth from obscurity to be contemplated by artists with admiration and despair. The expense of the works at Hampton was a subject of bitter complaint to many Tories, who had very gently blamed the boundless profusion with which Charles the Second had built and rebuilt, furnished and refur

Portsmouth. The expense, however, was not the chief cause of the discontent which William's change of residence

* Every person who is well acquainted with Pope and Addison will remember their sarcasms on this taste. Lady Mary Wortley Mon"Old China," she tague took the other side. says, "is below nobody's taste, since it has been the Duke of Argyle's, whose understanding has never been doubted either by his friends

or enemies."

As to the works at Hampton Court, see Evelyn's Diary, July 16. 1689; the Tour through Great Britain, 1724; the British Apelles; Horace Walpole on Modern Gardening; Burnet, ii. 2, 3.

When Evelyn was at Hampton Court, in 1662, the cartoons were not to be seen. The supposed to be the finest pictures in the Triumphs of Andrea Mantegna were then

palace.

excited. There was no longer a court | the suburban residence of the Earl of at Westminster. Whitehall, once the Nottingham. The purchase was made daily resort of the noble and the for eighteen thousand guineas, and powerful, the beautiful and the gay, was followed by more building, more the place to which fops came to show planting, more expense, and more discontheir new peruques, men of gallantry tent.* At present Kensington House to exchange glances with fine ladies, is considered as a part of London. It politicians to push their fortunes, was then a rural mansion, and could loungers to hear the news, country not, in those days of highwaymen and gentlemen to see the royal family, was scourers, of roads deep in mire and now, in the busiest season of the year, nights without lamps, be the rallying when London was full, when Parliament point of fashionable society. was sitting, left desolate. A solitary It was well known that the King, sentinel paced the grassgrown pave- who treated the English nobiment before that door which had once lity and gentry so ungraciously, foreign is been too narrow for the opposite streams could, in a small circle of his of entering and departing courtiers. own countrymen, be easy, friendly, The services which the metropolis had even jovial, could pour out his feelings rendered to the King were great and garrulously, could fill his glass, perhaps recent; and it was thought that he too often; and this was, in the view of might have requited those services our forefathers, an aggravation of his better than by treating it as Lewis offences. Yet our forefathers should had treated Paris. Halifax ventured to hint this, but was silenced by a few words which admitted of no reply. "Do you wish," said William peevishly, "to see me dead?"*

The Court at Ken

sington. 1

In a short time it was found that Hampton Court was too far from the Houses of Lords and Commons, and from the public offices, to be the ordinary abode of the Sovereign. Instead, however, of returning to Whitehall, William determined to have another dwelling, near enough to his capital for the transaction of business, but not near enough to be within that atmosphere in which he could not pass a night without risk of suffocation. At one time he thought of Holland House, the villa of the noble family of Rich; and he actually resided there some weeks. But he at length fixed his choice on Kensington House,

* Burnet, ii. 2.; Reresby's Memoirs. Ronquillo wrote repeatedly to the same effect. For example, " Bien quisiera que el Rey fuese mas comunicable, y se acomodase un poco mas al humor sociable de los Ingleses, y que estubiera en Londres: pero es cierto que sus achaques no se lo permiten." July 1689. Avaux, about the same time, wrote thus to Croissy from Ireland: "Le Prince d'Orange est toujours à Hampton Court, et jamais à la ville et le peuple est fort mal satisfait de cette manière bizarre et retirée."

† Several of his letters to Heinsius are dated from Holland House.

William's

vourites.

have had the sense and the justice to acknowledge that the patriotism, which they considered as a virtue in themselves, could not be a fault in him. It was unjust to blame him for not at once transferring to our island the love which he bore to the country of his birth. If, in essentials, he did his duty towards England, he might well be suffered to feel at heart an affectionate preference for Holland. Nor is it a reproach to him that he did not, in this season of his greatness, discard companions who had played with him in his childhood, who had stood by him firmly through all the vicissitudes of his youth and manhood, who had, in defiance of the most loathsome and deadly forms of infection, kept watch by his sick bed, who had, in the thickest of the battle, thrust themselves between him and the French swords, and whose attachment was, not to the Stadtholder or to the King, but to plain William of Nassau. It may be added that his old friends could not but rise in his estimation by comparison with his new courtiers. To the end of his life all his Dutch comrades, without exception, continued to deserve his confidence. They could be out of humour with him,

*Luttrell's Diary; Evelyn's Diary, Feb. 25. 1689

1690