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  England; Part 4

England; Part 4

No doubt Englishmen ought to have been grateful for the benefits of the Revolution, but perhaps their want of loyalty to William and Mary is not altogether surprising. The king himself was interested in foreign politics alone. England was to him merely a factor in his war with France; "he had", as a contemporary said, "to take England on his way to France ". His individual opinions, moreover, were not likely to make him popular. In religion he was a Calvinist, and he was therefore distrusted by that very powerful party, the High Church party in the Church of England. In politics, though the Tory opposition to the war compelled him in 1695 to depend for a time upon a Whig ministry-the Whig Junto, as it was called-yet for the greater part of his reign he tried to ignore parties, and to rule with ministries drawn impartially from Whigs and Tories; as a consequence, he obtained the hearty support of neither party. Nor was William's personality an attractive one. Diminutive in stature, thin and fragile-looking, his appearance was only redeemed by the brightness and keenness of his eyes. His manner was cold and repellent, and his habits unsociable (He spoke little and very shortly," said a contemporary, "and most commonly with a disgusting dryness." Long and solitary hunting expeditions in the New Forest were his only recreation, and he disliked conversation and all indoor games); and the few friends that he possessed were all Dutchmen. Moreover, his health was wretched, and inclined to make him irascible and peevish. William had none of the outwardly attractive qualities which would have secured the affection of his English subjects; and they failed to do justice to the magnanimity which he showed in dealing with his enemies, his patience and calmness in times of crisis, or the unwearying industry which he displayed in public affairs. Mary, on the other hand, was an affable, kind-hearted, genial queen; it was a saying at the time that "she talked as much as William thought, or her sister, the Princess Anne, ate" (Pepys, the Diarist, saw Mary as " a little child in hanging sleeves dance most finely, so as almost to ravish one". When only fifteen and a half years old the announcement was made to her that she was to marry William, "whereupon she wept all that afternoon and the following day "; but she proved herself a most devoted wife). Mary's death, in 1694, was consequently a great blow to William's position, and after that his unpopularity steadily increased.

After the conclusion of the war with France, in 1697, opposition to William's policy came to a head. A Tory Parliament attacked-with some reason - the enormous tracts of land which the king had granted to his Dutch favourites in Ireland. Moreover, a standing army was Still very unpopular, and Parliament insisted-with great stupidity -upon reducing the armed forces in England to seven thousand men. Then, again, Parliament was jealous of his foreign policy, and consequently passed those clauses in the Act of Settlement to which reference has already been made. William, indeed, was so worried by the Opposition that he seriously thought of resigning his crown, and had even drafted a proclamation for that purpose. Englishmen, in truth, were somewhat ignorant of foreign politics; and the greatness of the work accomplished by William, not only for England, but for Europe, was never realized. The king, however, had the satisfaction before his death of feeling that the nation was strongly supporting him in the War of the Spanish Succession, the opening of which he just lived to see (1702).

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