[Sidenote: _THE KEY OF THE WEST_] Loyalty, tried for so many centuries at so great a cost, broke down finally in 1688, and the city gates were opened to the Prince of Orange. Had James been less of a bigot, and had his hell-hounds, Jeffreys and Kirke, been animated with less zeal, who knows what these Devonshire men would have done? Possibly it may be said that William’s fleet would, under such circumstances, never have found its way into Tor Bay, nor that historic landing have been consummated at Brixham. True enough; but granting the landing, the proclamation at Newton Abbot, and the advance to the gates of Exeter, how then if James had been less of the stubborn oak and more of the complaisant willow? Can it be supposed that they would have welcomed this frigid, hawk-nosed foreigner of the cold eye and silent tongue? And if the Dutchman and his mynheers had been ill-received at Exeter, what then? Take the map and study it for answer. You will see that the ‘Ever Faithful’ stands at the Gates of the West. The traveller always has had to enter these portals if he would go in either direction, and the more imperative was this necessity to those coming from West to East. Even now the traveller by railway passes through Exeter to reach further Devon and Cornwall, equally with him who fares the high-road. What chance, then, of success would a foreign expedition command were its progress barred at this point? Less mobile than a single traveller, or party of mere travellers, it could not well evade the struggle for a passage by taking another route. William and his following might, in such an event, have at great risk forced the passage of the treacherous Exe estuary, but even supposing that feat achieved, there is difficult country beyond, before the road to London is reached. To the northwards of his march from Brixham lies Dartmoor and its outlying hills, and let those who have explored those inhospitable wastes weigh the chances of a force marching through the hostile countryside in the depth of winter to outflank Exeter. But all hope for James’s cause was gone, and although the spirits of the ambitious William sank when, on entering the streets of Exeter, he was only received with a chilly curiosity, he was not to know--for how could that most stony of champions read into the hearts of these people?--that their generous enthusiasm for faith and freedom was quite crushed out of existence by the bloody work of three years before, when the peasantry saw with horror the progress of the fiendish Jeffreys marked by a line of gibbets; when they could not fare forth upon the highways and byeways without presently arriving at some Golgotha rubricated with the dishonoured remains of one or other of their fellows; and when many a cottage had its empty chair, the occupants dead or sold into a slavery worse than death.