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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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