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CAMEO
XIV.

1691.

not desert, and steal home to their native hovels. Thus, before the beginning of 1692, ended the war in Ireland, to the great indignation End of the and wrath of the grasping officials, and the more fanatical Protestants, Irish War. who dreaded the slightest concession to the Romanists, and did their utmost, not without success, to overrule the wiser spirit of justice and toleration, wounds that have ever since festered and broken out again have been inflicted on either side in that sad and hopeless island of strife and debate, bloodshed and treachery.

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Habits of
William.

WHILE going forward with the Scottish, Irish, and French wars, by CAMEO XV. which William had to defend his newly-acquired throne, and the liberties he had been invited to maintain, there was a hard task at home, both in defining those liberties, and in obtaining the nerves and sinews of war.

Personally, William was a great disappointment. Whatever the former sovereigns of England had been, they had been easy of access, and leaders in all sports and diversions, holding personal intercourse with all ranks of their subjects, and admitting them to gaze at their meals, wander over their palaces and share their pleasures. They knew their nobility and their attendants intimately, and called them by their Christian names, often abbreviated. Queen Elizabeth had her Robins, James I. his Steenie, even grave Charles I. his Will and Tom, and Charles II. was one of the most winning of men, adding the wit and grace of France to the good nature of England, and both he and his brother had the special ease and friendliness of finding themselves at home again after long and weary exile.

But to William, England was the place of exile. He could scarcely breathe in London, where smoke and Thames fogs oppressed his asthmatic chest, and though he understood the language, he could not converse in it with any freedom or enjoyment. Probably if his Stewart mother had lived, he might have been different, but he had had no womanly training to overcome his awkward shyness, and absolute rudeness, for he had grown up among blunt Republicans, so that though of one of the highest families in Europe by both descents, he had the manners and almost the tastes of a private soldier, and was as little at ease when he found himself obliged to appear in the

Court of William and Mary.

CAMEO XV. midst of the brilliant troops of English ladies and gentlemen. His really free and happy moments were spent with his old Dutch friends and companions, Schomberg, Keppel, Bentinck, Zulestein, Solms, and Ginkel, when he would sit smoking, sipping, and talking Dutch about affairs that could not safely be discussed amid the wavering, treacherous, unprincipled Englishmen who had come to the surface. Of course this excited jealousies and caused great offence to those who only saw the King stand or sit, silent and grave in their midst, and were addressed by him at council only when necessary, in brief, hard, discourteous tones, implying perhaps the contempt that some of them deserved. Worst of all, was that want of domestic courtesy which showed how the remnants of chivalry had departed from Holland. However unfaithful Charles and James had been, neither had ever given his Queen reason to complain of want of deference, politeness, and even tenderness in personal intercourse, and to other women of all ranks, both had the courtesy of gentlemen. But William, with morals no better than those of his uncles, showed a rude disregard to the Queen, whom in very truth he really honoured and esteemed; and to Princess Anne, whom no doubt he disliked and despised, he did not show ordinary civility, eating up the whole of her favourite dishes before her eyes.

Probably, though his wife had given him her whole heart, he fancied it good policy to keep her down in her own eyes and in those of the nation, and therefore did not seek to control the rudeness natural to him in treating his slave, and did not see how much his rough manner to her added to his unpopularity.

Mary is somewhat of a paradox. She was a handsome, dignified, noble-looking woman, though inclined to become too stout, the greater disadvantage when her husband was unusually small and thin, and perhaps one cause of his rude self-assertion towards her. She was very religious, and had been constant to her own Church in spite of Dutch surroundings, and the sneers of her husband at even the meagre ritual of her Chapel at the Hague, where he could not understand the raised floor below the altar. Even in England, he could hardly be persuaded to take off his hat at the most solemn moments of the service, and kept it on throughout the sermon. She was staunch against both Romanism and Calvinism, but it may be feared that the constancy, though excellent, was unenlightened. Both the sisters had suffered from that strange indifference to education that set in with the Restoration. It could hardly have been caught from France, where most of the great ladies were well and deeply read, and it was probably owing to the frivolous tone of gaiety at the Court, and the association of quiet study with Puritanism. Catherine of Braganza and Mary Beatrice had been bred up in Southern ignorance, and, however it may have been, James had let the education of his motherless daughters take care of itself. Mary was intelligent and sensible, and could both read and talk well, but she seemed to consider royalty above spelling, and Anne was far

more ignorant, and a dull companion, so that the Queen soon found her CAMEO XV. very wearisome. Lampoons.

Mary's whole affections were so concentrated on her husband, that it seemed as if no room were left for any one else. The apparent want of feeling for her father had shocked every one, nor did she ever show any tokens of relenting, and with her sister there were endless petty quarrels and provocations, such as only narrow-minded women could be capable of, and aggravated by Anne's attachment to Lady Marlborough, whom Mary entirely distrusted. Jacobite rhymes hit off the family characteristics :

Again

"There's Mary the daughter, there's Willy the cheater.
There's Geordie the drinker, there's Annie the eater."

"Ken ye the rhyme to porringer?
Ken ye the rhyme to porringer?
King James he had a daughter fair,
And he gave her to an Oranger.

Ken ye how he requited him?
Ken ye how he requited him?
The dog has into England come,

And ta'en the crown in spite of him.

The rogue he sall na keep it lang.
To budge we'll mak him fain again,

We'll hang him high upon a tree,

And James shall have his own again."

Neatest of all was, however, the epigram of Dryden. He had translated the Æneid, and the publisher, Jacob Tonson, wished it to be dedicated to the King; and upon Dryden's refusal, tried to point a compliment by making the face of Æneas in every illustration a likeness of William. The poet, a good deal annoyed, wrote

"Old Jacob, in his wondrous mood

Amazing all beholders,

Hath placed old Nassau's hook-nosed head

On poor Æneas' shoulders.

To make the parallel complete,

Methinks there's something lacking,

One took his father pick-a-back,
The other sent his packing."

Never was Mary so happy, and perhaps never so much tried, as when the husband she adored was at home. This was generally only to meet his Parliament, where many a struggle took place, and important measures passed. One of these forbade the election to the House of Commons of persons holding offices of emolument under Government, but it was found necessary to modify this, and make numerous exceptions.

Another was the Triennial Bill, limiting the existence of Parliament

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The National Debt.

CAMEO XV. to three years, and making it illegal to pretermit the sessions of the Houses for more than three years. And the extreme difficulty of raising money for William's wars, suggested to Charles Montague, Chancellor of the Exchequer, to borrow from any one willing thus to invest money, a sum for the interest of which Government became responsible.

1692.

This was the origin of the National Debt, and therewith the matter was to be managed by Montague, together with the Scotch James Paterson, the first inventor of the scheme, and Michael Godfrey, brother to the unfortunate Sir Edmondbury. Thus began the Bank of England. Hitherto money had been invested by loans to goldsmiths and other tradesmen, and the security given by Government was eagerly welcomed by many, though others hesitated over it. The coinage, which had been chipped and debased during the last unprincipled reigns, was to be gradually called in and replaced, and while this was being effected, the Bank issued notes in promise of payment. The paper on which they were stamped was a monopoly of a noble Huguenot family, and so has continued ever since.

Mary did her utmost to keep up the old traditions of ease and liveliness at Court, but it was uphill work with her shy and often suffering husband, a much more veritable William the Silent than his great ancestor, and with a sister, who, at the best, was a dead weight, and at the worst a sullen, grumbling element of opposition and discontent.

To live in Whitehall was impossible for the King. He was looking extremely ill, and the physicians hardly expected him to live to the end of the year in that atmosphere. So Hampton Court and Kensington Palace became the royal residences. The beautiful and splendid Tudor architecture of Cardinal Wolsey had gone out of fashion, and Hampton Court was altered-not for the better so far as the building was concerned to suit the taste of the day. The gardens were laid out with much care and cost, and were the King's delight. The Labyrinth, which has given immense pleasure to six generations of holiday-makers, was formed; limes, thirty years old, were transplanted by Dutch skill to form the alleys, fountains were made to scatter their spray, and many fresh secrets of gardening imported. The Queen, too, brought from the Hague the taste for old china which has never entirely passed away. The Dutch, absorbing most of the Eastern trade, and guarding it jealously, were the chief importers of Japanese and Chinese cabinets, Indian curiosities and delicate porcelain, dainty and beautiful, above all, of the tea drunk from the blue or green dragon cups. Introduced by Catherine of Braganza, and sometimes called Herbe à la reine, it was beginning to make its way, though chocolate was the unnecessarily fattening beverage of the royal sisters, and as a lampoon said—

"The Queen drinks chocolat to make the King fat.
The King hunts to make the Queen lean."

Under

Meantime the whole administration was in a terrible state. the two last kings there had been such carelessness, waste and venality,

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