ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.

XXIX.—WILLIAM AND MARY.

THE general intellectual ability of William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, has never been questioned, nor the great influence which he exercised over the course of European as well as Eng- lish affairs from the time when he first entered on the public arena. But a considerable difference of opinion exists as to the rank which should be assigned to him as an English Sovereign, not merely morally, but also intellectually. lie was undoubtedly the

originator and, during his lifetime, the very soul of that European combination which first checked Louis XIV. in his progress to- wards an autocracy over Europe, and which, after William's own death, through the instrumentality of higher military ability than be possessed, completely destroyed the ascendancy of France. It is to his enterprise and firm judgment, far more than to any courage or capacity in Englishmen themselves, that we are in- debted for the speedy and comparatively bloodless overthrow of all James Stuart's long-cherished and mature schemes for the imme- diate destruction of the civil liberties of England, and the even- tual deprivation of her liberty of religious thought. Yet, on the other hand, there is scarcely a reign in our annals which is less satisfactory or agreeable than that of William III. as an illustra- tion of the relations between a king and his people, or any king who achieved less personal popularity than ho did. The explanation of this seeming anomaly appears to lie partly in the peculiarities of his own character, and partly in the exceptional circumstances of his position.

'William was the descendant of a line of princes, the greatest of whom, William, the heroic leader of the Low Countries in their revolt against the oppression of Spain, obtained the epithet of " The Silent," from his discreet reticence at a particular crisis of his life and general cautiousness, rather than from any marked uncommunicativeness in his social demeanour. In his son Maurice, his immediate successor, as the head of the Protestant and Dutch House of Orange, this cautious temperament degenerated frequently into craft and duplicity, while at other times it was superseded by an impetuous and reck- less violence in domestic affairs which probably in some degree sprang from the impatience of a greater military genius, and of a more egotistic ambition at the delays and restraints of a complicated State machinery. His younger brother, Henry Frederick, with loss absolute genius than either of his predecessors, reproduced the temperament and disposition of his father in a softened and purer form, and during his government the struggle between the aristocratic Republicans of Amsterdam and the Stadtholders Of the Netherlands was virtually suspended. It broke out again with fresh virulence during the short and stormy life of William U., whose temperament was, in some degree, a. repro- duction of that of his uncle Maurice ; and at his premature death an evil legacy of intestine discord and mutual jealousies was bequeathed to his infant son, of whose character we are now speak- ing. In this third William the wise discretion of his great-grand- father appeared to be revived, but in a somewhat different and less favourable form. His early years had unfortunately been attended by circumstances which stiffened a naturally proud and reserved disposition into repelling coldness and brooding uncom- municativenesa. His physical constitution, which is said to have been singularly poor-blooded, had no doubt much to do with this demeanour ; but there was also a natural irritability—usually displaying itself in a morose and sullen demeanour, or a rough and inconsiderate mode of expression, but sometimes surging up into violent explosions of passion—and there were an ardour and an intemperance in his few but deep personal attachments, which show that the frozen surface of his nature was not incompatible with the existence underneath of the boiling springs of a deeply sensitive and passionate spirit. That the rough and seemingly uufeeling manner to which he some- times gave way was not an index of a real want of warm feeling, or of his actual sentiments towards those to whom it was displayed, is evident from the fact that his wife, to whom he was devotedly attached, and whose death nearly brought his own along with it, and for the time actually unhinged his mind, was yet the not un- frequent sufferer from these ebullitions. There can be little doubt, therefore, that these outbreaks were chiefly indications of physical disorder, and not necessarily connected with the essentials of his disposition. There was in his bearing much of the frigid and forbidding haughtiness of his grandfather, Charles I., on occa- sions when his wishes were crossed and his prejudices and tastes offended ; but just as he was much more honest than that King, so he could not, like him, assume, when it served his purpose and when his temper was under control, the winning yet stately con-

descension which has given a false varnish to Charles's manners as well as his character in the eyes of posterity. At the same time, without the somewhat selfish ambition of Maurice, William

had much of the same impatient sense of ability and desire of untrammelled command. With nothing of the self-centred ambi-

tion and heartlessness of the House of Stuart, William had in no slight degree the sense of a princely birth and its absolute rights which was so prominent a feature in both Stuarts and Tudors, and was the parent of the characteristic self-will of both families. William the Silent had loved civil freedom and constitu- tional forms of government in themselves, and was ever eager to preserve and assert them, even against his own family interests. But his great-grandson had seen civil virtues chiefly in the form of antagonism to himself, and an attempt to degrade him from his own natural position, and to deprive him of his natu- ral career in life, while in the forms of constitutional govern- ment he had been compelled, by the unhappy condition of his country, to recognize only hindrances in his plans for saving her from a foreign enemy and virtual auxiliaries to her national enslavement. There was another circumstance which dis- qualified the younger William from estimating constitutional matters in their true light. The first deliverer of the Dutch Pro- vinces had had ample time and opportunity before he assumed the conduct of public affairs, to cultivate his mind carefully, and to gather up the lessons of ancient and modern history, in aid of a proper interpretation of men and institutions. Bat the second deliverer of the Provinces had but an imperfect and narrow education, and was left very much to gather his political philo- sophy from his own personal experiences. Such a training, while it may cultivate a greater self-reliance and self-possessed readiness, confines the materials of judgment to the narrow limits of personal circumstance; and tends to the identification of special and excep- tional developments of political ideas with their necessary and essential characteristics. William must have always found it difficult to think of a watchful guardian of constitutional privileges without mixing him up with the memories of Do Witt and the Anti-Orange party, or to estimate the motives of an economical obstruction to his plans for resisting the Dictator of Europe, with- out some tacit imputation of insane or treacherous indifference to national honour and safety.

And if this very limited and purely experimental education deferred and modified the general popularity which he ulti- mately achieved in the Dutch Confederation, still more would It operate disadvantageously in the case of England. It must be remembered that from his first years of intelligence down to his expedition to England at the end of the year 1688, William had known that country only as the Eng- land of Charles II. and James IL, and had based his estimate of Englishmen and English politics on the peculiar circumstances of that one period. Deeply interested, as from his near relation to the English Throne, as well as the weight attaching to the national power of England in the great European struggle, he necessarily was in all that went on on that side of the water, he was shut out by circumstances from any but the briefest and most imperfect oppor- tunities of making himself acquainted with the rationale of English affairs and of Englishmen by personal observation, and had to rely for his information on diplomatic reports from the Dutch agents, or on the interested -representations of English political exiles. And as far as we can judge, he had not any marked natural insight into character to enable him to dispense with a prolonged personal observation. If he never gave his unreserved con- fidence to persons unworthy of trust, the gap between this inner circle and the outer one of his general acquaintances was so great as to warrant the suspicion that he distrusted his own powers of insight too much to venture beyond the well-assured ground of a long-testing experience. If beyond this, as in the case of Shrewsbury, his sympathies were drawn towards individuals by that almost physical instinct of intrinsic goodness of disposition which sometimes is an incident of true nobility of character in the observer himself, his friendship was limited, and all real familiarity was rendered impossible by a rooted, and too often well-founded, distrust. His wife, who might have told him something reliable, was too young when she quitted her home for the Hague to have had the means of forming a correct judgment on men and measures. She must have seen them only from within one very narrow circle, just as her husband saw them too much from a more foreign point of view. And if it is difficult even for an Englishman, who knows that the heart of England was still substantially sound, notwithstanding the wide-spread corruption, to regard the aspect of his country, politically and socially during these years, with anything but shame and disgust, what must have been the impression left on the mind of a foreigner who regarded it chiefly in relation to its foreign policy, and estimated its sense of national honour as it was presented through the actions of a Stuart King? Nor was it likely that 'William would stop to discriminate between those who perverted and abused the national sentiment, and that national sentiment as it might have been under nobler exponents. From his own position in early life, and indeed throughout life, William had learned to regard nations as indivisible units in the calculations of European policy, and to pronounce a judgment on them accord-

ing to the predominant power which determined their action. That predominant power during the reign of Charles II. was that King himself, and in another sense the same was the case with James II. Charles II., as we have seen, was not much more dis- posed to be the mere tool of France than the most anti-Gallican of the Whig Opposition in that reign, though both endeavoured to make use of the French King, and partook of his bounty, to serve their own political ends. Such was the character with which William in his heart must have endowed Englishmen generally, as men not without strong opinions and prejudices, but too unprin- cipled and too changeable to be reliable agents in any great enter- prise except when controlled within the strong grasp of a high- principled autocrat. On the Whigs, as allies in his European policy, he had but a very limited reliance ; with the Whigs as professed patriots and constitutionalists he had no sympathies at all.

And such a type of character was really repulsive to William. Though the school of diplomacy in which he had been trained had exercised a certain unfavourable influence on his own veracity and the spotlessness of his honour, yet he was substantiaily and, for these days, distinctively an honest and honourable man, with whom honour and high principle were the most congenial policy. Not only Louis XIV., but his uncle, Charles II., tried in vain to tempt him from the perilous and, it seemed then, desperate path of honour in the defence of the United Provinces, by offers of safe though dishonourable authority and wealth. Burnet and the diplomatic correspondence quoted by Sir James Mackintosh in his " History of the Revolution," inform us that Charles seized the occasion of his nephew's visit to England in October, 1670, when he was still a mere lad, though already a recognized statesman, to sound him as to participation in his own infamous policy. " All the Protestants," said the King, "are a factious body, broken among themselves since they have been broken from the main stock. Look into these things better ; do not be misled by your Dutch blockheads." The advice was not taken, and Charles, in recording his failure to the French Ambassador, said, " I am satisfied with the Prince's abilities, but I find him too zealous a Dutchman and a Protestant to be trusted with the secret." In fact, it was this Protestantism of William's in its Calvinistic form which braced up his moral integrity on this and similar occasions, and nerved him to that undaunted perseverance which ultimately proved more than a match for the craft and resources of Louis and the genius of his marshals and statesmen. The Calvinistic system of theology, although, as in William's own case, it has not always proved a security against private immorality in its professors, has always been the guardian of public honour and national morality. The Dutch House of Orange were deeply imbued with this system, in the form in which it is held by thoughtful and strong men, and it was as an embodiment of its spirit, quite as much as through his individual self-reliance and natural abilities, that William III. was enabled to conduct so long and so undespairingly his very chequered contest with the power of France. There was much in this Calvinistic tone of religious thought which might under other circumstances have formed a strong bond between William and the people he was destined ultimately to govern. But the Calvinism of the Prince was cast in such a mould as belonged to a statesman and a man of European experience, while the Calvinism of England, which, in the person of the Protector Oliver, had presented an ideal, however imperfect, of a Christian governor, had degenerated, through the deteriorat- ing influences of succeeding years, into a rabid antipathy to Romanism, and a narrow Church creed. The Calvinistic William had not missed the lessons of Toleration which a European platform of action had impressed on his great namesake William the Silent, while Calvinistic England was much more busied in finding out inquisitorial tests and political disqualifications for avowed or concealed " Papists and Socinians," than in applying to the larger questions of the day the manly principles of public action and private self-respect which may be deduced from that emphati- cally personal religious system with which the name of Calvin has been associated. Thus, with similar religious dogmas, king and people had no common religious field of action, and that which might have cemented their union, and covered a host of incon- gruities on other points, became only practically a source of discord. With an irreproachable orthodox system of divinity, William became in the eyes of the English zealots in practice little better than a Latitudinarian.

The point as to the sincerity and truthfulness of William's cha- racter is undoubtedly not one which can be settled quite satisfac- torily or without some reserve. His conduct during the reigns of his uncles Charles and James has been subjected to severe

criticism, and he has been accused of playing a selfishly ambitious and double part. Without going so far as to acquit him of all underhand intrigue and dissimulation, we may say that, considering the extraordinary difficulties of his position as son-in- law to the heir to the Crown, and yet by his religious sympathies, if not by his political position, himself bound up with a cause to which his father-in-law had generally shown marked hostility, it tells in favour of the general truthfulness and honour of his char- acter that, with the loose views then and still held respecting the moral canons of diplomacy, there should be so little evidence against him of positive falsehood. During the reign of Charles II. it was his difficult part to endeavour to detach that king from a French alliance, by exhibiting himself in the most friendly light towards Charles personally, and yet at the same time not to alienate the Whig party in England, who on religious and political grounds were his natural allies. He had to humour the King's affection for the Duke of Monmouth by sedulous attentions to that prince in exile, and yet not to strengthen Monmouth's pretensions to the succession to the Crown, to the detriment of his own wife's right and prospects. He had, at the beginning of the succeeding reign, the still more difficult task of guarding against the ruin of the party which supported Monmouth's pretensions, and which formed an important and active element in the Protestant forces of England, without aiding the Duke in the subversion of the throne of James. To have assisted Monmouth to his ends would have been suicidal on William's part, particularly at a time when William's own wife stood in the position of heiress to the Crown. The manner in which William endeavoured to meet this dilemma seems to have been as follows. Ho complied at once with James's requests for the return of the Scotch and English regiments which were in the Dutch service, and ho accompanied this compliance with a private offer, through Ben tinck, to come over himself and take a command in England against the Duke. Had ho done so, he could by his influence have defeated the Duke's projects, and by the moral and material position he would thus acquire, would have been able to compel the King to come to such terms with his subjects as might secure their liberties, and without degrading the Crown, protect James against his own wilfulness. This the husband of the heiress to the Crown could alone do. It must be remembered also that after becoming a pensioner of France James had begun to exhibit airs of independence of the French King which inspired hopes that he might be won over to the anti- Gallican alliance. If James then could be reconciled with the dis- affected part of his subjects, there would he little danger of his being thrown back for support on the subsidies of France. But this loophole of escape from revolution was closed by James's non- acceptance of the offer of William. The fitting out of the expedi- tion of Monmouth in a Dutch port might possibly have been pre- vented, notwithstanding the sympathies of Amsterdam with the Duke, if William had not desired to present to James the danger of his position in a tangible form. Its actual sailing appears to have been the work of the authorities of Amsterdam, who besides their sympathies with Monmouth's cause, might well wish to set up a rival against the House of Orange, in the prospect of his succession to the Government of England. Probably William over-finessed in this instance, and the result of Sedgmoor fight, although he would gladly have prevented the conflict, must have been a real relief to him. But the conduct of James, intoxicated by his victory, and in his self-delusion identifying the abstinence of influential Englishmen from active support of the personal interests of Monmouth with an indifference to the cause under cover of which the Duke put forward those interests, became at last such that there seemed to be uo alternative between a revol u- tion which might ruin the prospects of the whole family, or the establishment of a despotic government in England, under the protectorate of France. The birth of a Prince of Wales, besides severing the immediate personal interests of James and William, seemed to shut out conclusively the future possible accession of England to the cause of European independence. Then, urged by every consideration that could move a statesman, William resolved to carry out his former idea in another shape, and as he could no longer save the King, to save his wife's rights, and protect Holland and Europe from a great impending danger.

The result of the expedition of William to England was his election to the throne of that kingdom, nominally in conjunction with his wife, but with the sole administration of the Government in his own hands ; and the new King found himself at once face to face with dangers and difficulties even greater than those which he had already successfully encountered. Independently of the dis- appointed reaction which is certain to follow such a groat change,

the perplexities which must attend the position and measures of any sovereign the basis of whose government is a successful revolution must be always very considerable, for however much disposed he may be to respect and guard the liberties of his new subjects, he must necessarily be the organ of settled order and lawful authority, and the occasions are rare indeed on which he can escape from the autocratic associations of such an office, and become the em- bodiment and exponent of the sympathies and aspirations of the governed masses. He may temper and compose the spirit of irregular liberty, but in so doing he must frequently also curb and oppose it. On the other hand, the very men whose resistance to the fallen dynasty laid the foundations of his present authority are usually, by the traditions of their party principles, rather the natural guardians of the liberties of the subject than the cham- pions of the Executive, however constitutional may be its course, just as the assertion of the Royal prerogative to some extent appears to be almost inseparable from the possession of the Royal office. Both William and the Whig leaders were called upon to break with the Past and accommodate themselves as they best could to the awkward and anomalous conditions of the Present, and both were consequently always in an uneasy and ill-defined relation to one another, which could hardly fail, whatever might be the individual characters of the persons concerned, to produce embarrassment and discord. Thera was this additional complication, too, that William was more nearly bound up with the Whig party, by the fact that they had supported his personal pretensions to the Crown against the projects of the High Church and the Pro- testant Tories, which involved a Regency in the name of James, or the sole election of his wife to the throne. In William himself the love of power and impatience of external resistance to his plans, to which we have already adverted, and which must have always rendered it difficult for him to endure the criticism and delays of a popular system of government, were combined with a proud spirit which was always disposed to give way most when concession was asked rather than demanded, and optional instead of obligatory, and to comply and co-operate with those who had no ostensible claim on his compliance, rather than with those who might claim his favour by a sort of moral right. There can be little doubt that he fretted under the sense of owing his throne to any set of men, however eminent and deserving, and felt a temptation to employ his scarcely-reclaimed opponents in their stead, from the mere fact that with them he felt a greater freedom of will and action. This is probably the explanation of the calumnious reports cast against him by his enemies, and retailed in some of the gossiping and uncritical biographies of the present day, that he never forgave a personal service that had been rendered him, but always bore a grudge to his benefactor. The name of Bentincle is sufficient to refute this statement in the gross and injurious form in which it is usually presented, but it is probably so far true that William found it more easy to forgive an injury than to sustain the weight of a personal obligation.

Partly from some such considerations as those we have just referred to, partly from a higher conception of his duties as the King, not of one party, but of a whole nation, William was led to employ men whose principles and whose antece- dents and convictions were Tory, if not Jacobite. By several of these, as well as by not a few of those who boasted of the

name of Whig, but had been disappointed, either personally or politically, in the results of the Revolution, William was betrayed in a greater or less degree—the treachery varying from a friendly and deprecatory correspondence with the exiled Court of St. Ger- mains, to a disclosure of projected enterprises of William's govern- ment which involved a loss of the lives of Englishmen and a lowering of the national honour. Can it bo wondered at that, narrowed in his confidences by the uncompromising principles of a few and the treason of many, William fell back more and more on Holland and on Favouritism? The general national prejudice against Dutchmen, and the popular intolerance of the associations and friendships which he had formed under other circumstances, and which would naturally always be more to him than any more English associations, seemed to William gross ingratitude on the part of those for whose deliverance lie had done so much, and he felt authorized and even driven to protect the future positiou of those who encountered with him the storm of popular dislike against the consequences of their invidious eminence. The very sense that what he was doing was perilous to himself and pre- judicial to his personal interests served only with a man of his temperament to render his proceedings more trenchant and reck- less; and the disclosure of the enormous grants made out of the forfeited lauds in Ireland and the Crown lands elsewhere to his favourites and his mistress, scandalized even those who had been the most uncompromising vindicators of his conduct. The dismissal of his Dutch Guards, which was wrung from him about the same time, if it showed a great want of consideration on the part of Englishmen for the feelings of oue to whom they owed so much, and whose great merits they were compelled to admit, also de- monstrated most painfully a want of comprehension as well as adroitness in William himself in dealing with National sentiment. But for this, the dismissal of the Guards would never have been demanded, or would have been volunteered by the King himself before the national desire assumed the form of a demand. But William laboured under the delusion that national confidence and sympathy could bo commanded simply by the pursuit of a noble line of policy, and by a general regard to justice and legality. He never learnt how much more depends on a careful attention to little arts of personal demeanour and complaisance in trifles, and how by these social qualifications a bad man and an unprincipled king such as Charles II. may be able to achieve a popularity which was denied to himself. He was too proud to bend his mind to such lower means of appealing to public sentiment, and he found some colour for his want of effort in this direction in his unfamiliarity with the English language, and his foreign education and tastes. He was, in fact, the Coriolanus of English Kings in this respect, and thoroughly despised popular judgment. Nor were his public services to Europe such as would recommend themselves immediately or forcibly to the popular English mind. To begin with, though an experienced General, William was not a successful one, and with oonsummate presence of mind and considerable mili- tary skill, he could lay no claim to the character of a great military genus. his struggle against the power of France, though persistent, and in theend to agreat degree successful, was not a brilliant one, and was marked rather by the capacity of retrieving military disasters than of exciting the popular enthusiasm by great victories. His very courage, though heroic in fact, had nothing of the romantic in its fashion, and the romantic and sentimental, after all, have the most powerful hold, next to the religious, over the popular mind.

William's romance and William's sentiment were confined to and concentrated in two directions, his few intimate friends and his wife. With the former his coldness and his formal reserve alto- gether disappeared, and be was the warm-hearted sympathizer and unceremonious companion. Here the rebound of his character took place, and carried him to an excess in a direction quite opposite to that of his ordinary self-restraint. His relations with his wife were so peculiar that, even with our tolerably complete knowledge of the character of both husband and wife, it is difficult fully to realize them. Mary Stuart, or, as she may be more distinctively called, Mary of Orange, was one of those self-suppressed characters whose life is voluntarily sunk in that of another, and yet whose own personal features well deserve a separate recognition. Not possessed of commanding abilities, and, though lively and affable,with no pre- tensions to those brilliant drawing-room accomplishments which have made Frenchwomen the autocrats of a world of their own, Mary possessed that most valuable quality, thorough good sense, in its most refined and engaging form. Her perceptions were clear and generally correct, her power of discrimination was unusually keen, and her reasonableness was as marked as it is uncommon. But the great beauty of her character lay in the sweet and well- ordered harmony of her mind, in which there was room for no disorder, except when its serenity was ruffled by the outbreaks of one ruling passion,—her intense devotion to her husband, and resentment of any injury or affront to him. This feeling con- trolled every thought and regulated every word and act of Mary. Admiration, a sense of protection, and a self-identifying sympathy were the main ingredients of this womanly devotion. The self- sacrifice tendered by such a nature was intelligent and unobtrusive, and before its influence the natural jealousies and most painful circumstances of their relative positions vanished. She convinced William that she had, with simple unconsciousness of any other possible course, renounced in his favour all the distinctive privileges and authority of her personal right to the Crown, and by her eager self-identification with his cause she guarded him against the self-reproach of having compelled her to sacrifice to him her secondary duties as a daughter. That she herself should escape reproach and calumny on this latter point was impossible, but when we remembei the early age at which she lost sight of her father and became part of the life of her husband, and the little tenderness which was ever exhibited by that father towards her, and still less towards him in whom her very existence was wrapt up, we shall not be much inclined to estimate the offence against family ties very highly. That there always remained a respectful and kindly consideration for her father in his misfor-

tunes and exile, Burnet and others who had personal opportu- nities of watching her closely strongly testify, and their evidence is confirmed by the unaffected testimony of her own pen. In one of her letters to William, written while the latter was on his Irish campaign, whioh have happily been preserved to us, there is a quiet reference to this mutually recognized feeling which speaks for itself. In acknowledging the news of the battle of the Boyne Mary writes, "He [Lord Nottingham] brought me your letter yesterday, and I could not hold, so he saw me cry, which I have hindered myself from before everybody till then that it was impos- sible ; and this morning, when I heard the joyful news from Mr. Butler, I was in pain to know what was become of the late King, and durst not ask him ; but when Lord Nottingham came, I did venture to do it, and I had the satisfaction to know he• was safe. I know I need not beg you to let him be taken care of, for I am confident you will for your own sake ; yet add that to all your kindness, and for my sake, let people know you would have no hurt come to his person. Forgive me this." Her strange and seemingly unfeeling conduct when she first entered Whitehall Palace after the light of James, is explained by Burnet on her own authority as a piece of over-acting on her part, in conse- quence of an intimation from William that if she seemed melancholy people would think she disapproved of his expedi- tion. A passage in one of her letters to her husband seems to confirm this explanation I never did anything without• thinking, now, it may be, you are in the greatest dangers, and yet I must see company upon my set days ; I must play twice a week ; nay, I must laegh and talk, tho' never so much against my will : I believe I dissemble very ill to those who know me, at least 'tie a great constraint to myself, yet I must endure it. All my notions are so wretched, and all I do. so observed, that if I eat less, or speak less, or look more grave, all is lost in the opinion of the world ; so that I have this misery added to that of your ab- sence, and my fears of your dear person, that I must grin when my heart is ready to break, and talk when my heart is so op- pressed I can scarce breathe." On one point the devotion of the wife to the husband was sorely tried in the case of Mary, and her conduct here also has been looked upon as a proof of her coldness, if not coarseness of temperament. William, though in reality her passionate devotion to him scarcely surpassed his deep rooted attachment to her, was an unfaithful husband, and though decorous in his indulgence in vice, did not conceal hie faithlessness from his wife. As far as we know, she, true to her canon of never acknowledging to herself or in the eyes of the world an injury from her husband, ignored the matter, and tolerated the mistress in her train. Whatever she may have felt in the secret heart, Mary had obliterated from her canon all rights of her own as against her husband, and sensitive as her nature was in many points, it had also a certain matter- of-fact unsentimentality which permitted her to weigh in the balance conflicting feelings and duties where most women would have abandoned themselves unreservedly to natural impulses. If she complained to William, the public never heard the echo of her remonstrance ; and she combatted the rival iufluences of mistress• and favourites by a redoubled self-devotion to him, which was, there can be no doubt, one great ingredient in the bitterness of his agony when she was taken from him by death. The key, perhaps to her passive endurance in this extreme case, and of her control of her natural emotion in the case of her filial responsibilities, lay in the fact that the faintness of her imaginativeness in comparison with her practical good sense, except where her husband's safety was concerned, prevented her from exaggerating to her own mind the gravity of this conflict of duties, and enabled her to decide on her proper line of action or inaction from a comparatively calm survey of actual facts. Her untutored piety taught her that there must be a right path which she might pursue, and having ascertained it to her own satisfaction, she performed her supposed duty with- out further misgivings, and perhaps even with little trouble of mind. William, who did justice to her high qualities, observed to Lord Shrewsbury when he left her as Regent during his absence, that she would know better how to suit the English people than, he did, and the result proved the truth of his judgment, for the occasional glimpses which Englishmen had of the distinct regal personality of Mary, added to the popularity which her pleasing and courteous manners and her piety and charities as a woman had already secured, gave her a hold on their affection and devotion which was never once shaken.

It would be doing injustice to the memory of William to esti mate his humanity and clemency by such exceptional events as the massacre of Glencoe, which he certainly countenanced, if he did not expressly order it ; or by his implacable resentment in the ease of a few individuals, such as Sir John Fenwick. He was not in himself either bloodthirsty or revengeful ; he again and again moderated the severity of victorious retribution, and there are few kings who have forgiven more often or more personal injuries than he. But where his judgment or prejudices decided that severity was the course demanded from him, the iron discipline to which he had subjected his own mind seemed to deaden for the time any perception of cruelty and feeling of compassion. The narrow and intolerant enthusiasm of one section of the Scotch people did not more offend his reason as a thinking man, than the ill-regulated imperium in imperio of the Clan system irritated and alarmed his sensibilities as a ruler. He saw in the bloody retribution at Glencoe a fortunate blow and a necessary warning to this insubordinate spirit, and with this consideration the actual slaughter affected him very faintly, even when pressed on his attention by public outcry. In the case of individuals, if he were not convinced in his mind that the individual was rather culpable than intrinsically criminal, he saw no reason to interfere with the sword of justice, unless the individual and the occasion were alike unworthy of so grave an act. In his forgiveness he was just and magnanimous rather than generous and compassionate.

Perhaps, after all, the defect in William's nature, which lay at the bottom of his mal-adroitness in conciliating popular feeling, and of the unattractiveness of his demeanour, was hie almost absolute want of the faculty of imagination. Every one has felt on a consideration of his character that, whatever its merits, it presented a most complete contrast to that of such a man as Sir Philip Sidney ; and the contrast, if pushed into detail, would elucidate considerably the character of each. Sir Philip lived in an ideal world, apart from the hard and morally forbidding world of reality presented by that age, but which yet reflected a certain glow of external beauty and romance over even this hard reality. But beyond this his life was purposeless and disappointing. This is 'Chivalry in its very essence. William, though high-minded and armed with a noble purpose in life, was essentially unchivalrous. His energetic and unfaltering pursuit of a great end was not the realization of an imaginative ideal, but an act of reason and duty and religious faith. Men and events presented themselves to his mind iu their sober and unattractive reality. He could not conceive of and therefore was nimble to appeal to that hidden world of sentiment and undefined emotion which underlies not only the individual mind, but the self-consciousness of a nation, and which from time to time, by its intervention, confounds the most careful calculations of

• events. He appealed only to bare facts and to cold reason and latent duty, while the nation was longing for a trumpet-call, however wildly blown, which might summon them away from the lower calculations of worldly wisdom to the higher enthusiasm of -emotional loyalty and patriotism. Mary possessed the instincts of a woman to supply partially the want of imagination which was com- mon to herself and her husband, but which in his masculine nature was the source of much of that forbidding and sometimes almost brutal moroseness of demeanour which deprived him of the love of his people, though it could not wholly rob him of their scarcely self-acknowledged admiration and reliance. The same mental peculiarity which made him despise poetry and literature, which recognized the fine arts only in their stiffest and most realistic developments, which delighted in a stately uniformity of courts and walks and avenues, that left nothing to the imagination and, like his own policy, was impressive rather than attractive to the common mind, crippled his endeavours to reconstitute English society and consolidate the English Constitution, and made him, with all his acknowledged merits, an unpopular king.

Yet with all his drawbacks, moral and intellectual, William was not only a high-minded and able statesman, but essentially a noble man. Insensibly, under the influence of his high purpose and persevering faith in its realization, the general standard, as distinct from that of individuals and courtiers, was elevated from the degradation of the preceding period ; and the first symptoms of a future amendment in political morals appeared in the attention excited by acts of corruption. Corruption was still dominant, but it was recognized in its true colours. There was great mismanagement in the processes of government, but the ends of the administration were no longer evil. There was still a struggle between Prerogative and Constitutional Rights, but it was a misunderstanding between purposes equally praiseworthy, and no longer a conflict against selfish misrule and a low-toned despotism. The Ruler was not loved, but he was respected, and if England was uneasy and dissatisfied at home, she had regained

her natural weight in the scale of European nations. He who could achieve all this under such disadvantageous conditions, and in so brief a time, could not have been a bad man, and cannot be estimated as a wholly unsuccessful Ruler.