CAMEO Toleration of Jansenists. 1715. bed of justice on the 12th of September, he appointed six councils, for foreign affairs, finance, conscience, war, naval affairs and interior affairs, to which one for commerce was added. It sounded well, but the members were chiefly his dissipated friends, or men who got in by bribing his confidants. However, his kindness of heart led to a great release of prisoners, especially Jansenists. In the Bastille were persons who had been there so long that their very crime was forgotten. One Italian, who had been arrested thirty-five years before on his arrival at Paris, only begged to stay there, for he had no home, no relations, no resources ! In fact, though the Bastille was the emblem of tyranny, the captives seem to have lived a fairly comfortable life, and to have enjoyed one another's society, and visits of friends. After this great gaol delivery, it was very little used. The Regent wished to give some relief to the Protestants, but his counsellors prevented him, though their condition was much less wretched than before during his government. The Jansenists were no longer molested, indeed Cardinal de Noailles was put at the head of the ecclesiastical council of conscience, while Père le Tellier was sent away with a pension of 6,000 livres, though the will had appointed him confessor to the young Louis. Marshal Villars was very properly at the head of the War Department, the Count of Toulouse over the Naval, Marshal d'Huxelles had foreign affairs, the Duke d'Antin Domestic. Orleans himself had no unkind feeling towards the boy, whose protector he knew himself to be, but he was too much steeped in dissipation to attend to the duties of his position more than he could help. The sub-preceptor of his boyhood, the Abbé Dubois had been his great corruptor, ministering to his excesses from boyhood upwards, and thus acquiring great ascendancy over him, and so over public affairs; it is hard to say who was the most shameless person in Europe, the Abbé Dubois, the Regent, or his widowed daughter, the Duchess of Berri. "Woe to the land whose king is a child, and whose princes drink in the morning," is a sacred saying often verified, and never more completely than in the days of the young Louis XV., when as Guizot says: “the long agony of France was beginning.” The little king was thus far in kindly hands. Madame de Ventadour loved him, and the Abbé de Fleury, his tutor, was a good and pious man; but there was no spirit of Fénelon to guide them, and instead of being taught his responsibilities, the shy boy was coaxed to show himself at the window by the call, “Come, sire, look at these people, they are all your Majesty's." He was a gentle, docile boy, with no signs of ability or of strength of will like his father, but more like his uncles, pleasant to his tutors, but with little substance or promise of spirit. Outside his nursery, the Court was in a state unparalleled, except by that of heathen Emperors of old, with the one exception that there were no cruelties, except that the persecutions of the Huguenots still had their course; but that was in the south, beyond the ken of the good-natured Regent. Indulgence of all kinds, shared freely and shamefully by his daughter, the Duchess of Berri, scandalised all that was respectable, while the affairs of the kingdom were chiefly guided by the Abbé Dubois. This man was the son of an apothecary in a little town in the Limousin, and by considerable cleverness had become tutor to the Duke of Orleans, and then his boon companion in his wildest dissipation, as well as in scientific experiments, and from boyhood upwards the duke had depended on him for saving trouble. Dubois was sixty years old with a face like a fox under his blonde wig, when the Regent made him a Minister of State. A very good Chancellor was however appointed on the sudden death of the former one, M. d'Aguesseau, who was taken quite by surprise. He was at church when a messenger summoned him to the Palais Royal, but he would not move till the Mass was finished. Then the Regent received him by giving him the seals, and presenting him as Chancellor to those present, then taking him to pay homage to the little king. Half dizzy with surprise, he went to his brother, who was clever, idle and a philosopher, and whom he found sitting by the fire in his dressing-gown, smoking his pipe. CAMEO XXIV. Dubois. 1715. CAMEO XXV. Jacobite Schemes. 1715. England. 1714. George I. France. Germany. 1711. Charles VI. THE unpopularity of the House of Hanover was an encouragement to the Jacobites, and the deposition of the Earl of Mar from the Government of Scotland, as well as the prosecution of Lord Bolingbroke, gave fresh impulse to their schemes, though there was little direct movement on the part of James Stewart himself. But in contrast to the rude, clumsy, middle-aged German George, he was handsome, graceful, young, and well-mannered, and the very thought of him and of his misfortunes caused an enthusiastic feeling in the Roman Catholic gentry of northern England, and among the Scots, who had none of the John Bull distaste to French breeding. The French Court, however, was adverse. Orleans disliked Queen Mary Beatrice as belonging to the Maintenon clique, and, moreover, the finances of France were in such a state that it would have been most imprudent to do what could not but result in a fresh war. The Earl of Stair had his ear, and persuaded him of the improbability of the success of a Jacobite rising, and he therefore would not raise a finger for the attempt, giving neither money nor troops. The only chance of prosperity would have been to have had such a general as the Duke of Berwick at the head of the expedition; but as a Marshal in the French army, he, as one of the most loyal of men, could not stir without the consent of his Government, though he did what he could by council. Mary Beatrice placed all her confidence in him, and this excited jealousy on Bolingbroke's part. Indeed, he soon found that there was little, save confusion and chatter, among the Jacobite counsellors, and that nothing could be easier than for Lord Stair to discover their plans. There was one wild proposal of obtaining the hand of Mademoiselle de Valois, the Regent's unmarried daughter, for the Chevalier de St. George, whom she admired enough to make her desirous of the match, but she could get no answer from her father but, "Nous verrons, ma fille, nous verrons. Bolingbroke was sure that there would be no success in Scotland without co-operation in England, and sent forth orders to the Earl of Mar, in the name of "King James," not to stir without a rising south as well as north of the Tweed; but these instructions seem to have come too late, for James had actually been foolish enough to send him a commission without the knowledge of either Berwick or Bolingbroke. On the 1st of August, 1715, Mar went to King George's levée; on the 2nd, he started for Scotland in a collier with General Hamilton and Colonel Hay, and it is even said that he worked his passage. Arrived at Newcastle, he made his way to his own Castle of Braemar in Aberdeenshire, and there invited the Jacobite gentlemen to a great hunting match on the 27th. Lords Huntley and Tullibardine, being the eldest sons of the Dukes of Gordon and Athol, the Earl of Southesk, the Chief of Glengarry, and some others came, and it was agreed to overthrow the Union, raise the standard of James, and summon their retainers. There was a strong box in which Mar was supposed to have 800,000 guineas, but if £8,000 was there, it was the utmost sum. With sixty men around him, Mar raised the standard on the 6th of September at Kirk Machael. The gilt ball fell off the top of the pole, and this was viewed by the Highlanders as an evil omen; but he gathered 500 men of his own vassals, and all the mounted gentlemen were formed into a Royal Squadron under the Earl of Linlithgow, and had the standard confided to them. The clans eagerly rose, and James was proclaimed by the Earl of Panmure at Brechin, the Earl Marshal at Aberdeen, by Lord Huntley at Gordon, and by Claverhouse's brother at Dundee. A letter was despatched to the Chevalier in Lorraine, entreating him to come and put himself at the head of his loyal subjects, and another to the Regent of France, begging that if he would not assist their Sovereign he would at least not prevent his joining them. Orleans had, however, already made up his mind to be on the side of the House of Hanover, and had laid an embargo on twelve ships of weapons and stores, which had been collected by the connivance, if not the assistance, of the old King, and on which all the available money of the Jacobites had been spent, so that James had nothing to send but a Duke's patent and a commission as Commander-in-Chief. At Edinburgh, Lord Drummond, a Roman Catholic, with about eighty more gentlemen, laid a plot for scaling the castle at nine o'clock on the night of the 9th of September, and had even gained over three soldiers of the guard. Scaling ladders were prepared, which these men were to secure on the top of the wall, surmounting a very steep part of the rock up which the assailants were to climb. Having thus surprised the castle, they were to fire three cannon, and then on the coast of Fife a CAMEO XXV. Standard raised. 1715. CAMEO Abortive plans. 1715. beacon should be lighted and carried on from hill to hill, so as to warn Mar and his army to push forward to Edinburgh. Far too many people knew the secret. In one house, where eighteen of the gentlemen were drinking, the hostess told some one that they were powdering their hair before taking the castle, and a lady, Mrs. Arthur, heard the whole scheme from her husband, a physician, whose brother was one of the conspirators. She quietly sent off a letter to the Lord Justice Clerk, but it did not reach him till ten o'clock, nor did his despatch arrive at the castle till eleven, so that if the surprise had been made at the time appointed, the warning would have come too late; but the carousing and powdering had delayed the party so long that the ladders were not brought till two hours after the time fixed, just when the guard was being changed, and the express had put the garrison on the alert. The sentinel, seeing his comrades coming up, fired his musket, and called out that they were ruined, the rope ladders were let go, and away went the conspirators, so fast that only four were made prisoners. Government summoned to Edinburgh a good many suspected persons, and imprisoned those it could lay hands on ; but the others, if wavering, were thus impelled to join the rebels. The Duke of Argyle had come to take the command, but he brought with him no troops, and at Stirling found only 1,000 infantry and 500 dragoons. It seems insanity in Mar, who had 8,000 men, not to have moved at this time, but he was waiting for news from the English Jacobites and for the arrival of the Chevalier, and he was trying to have Perth fortified, but it was said that the person employed in this was a French dancing master! James, who was at Commercy, actually set forth for Scotland, intending to traverse France incognito, but nobody belonging to him had the power of keeping a secret, least of all his mother, and Lord Stair was informed at once. He obtained an order from the Regent for stopping him. This was confided to M. de Contades, but Stairs, truly suspecting that gentleman of being resolved not to find the unlucky traveller, had charged a Scot, named Douglas, to seize or even assassinate James. So it is said, and it can hardly be doing an injustice to the promoter of the massacre of Glencoe to think him capable of the crime, which he might justify to himself as saving his country from a civil war. However, when the Chevalier de St. George and these emissaries of Douglas were actually in the same hotel at Nonamcourt, the postmistress, suspecting the matter, intoxicated one of the Scots, locked up the other, and sent the Chevalier safely on his way to St. Malo; but that port was watched by the English ships, and he had to make for Dunkirk, where he only arrived in December. The Duke of Ormond had already tried a landing in Devonshire, but nobody had attempted to join him, and he had to sail away again. The Act of Habeas Corpus was suspended, and various of the most influential Jacobite gentlemen in England were arrested, among them Sir William Wyndham, son-in-law to the Duke of Somerset, and likewise sundry |