Lord Ailesbury had no great reason to chamberlain. He also apologized to love James, for Rochester at once ousted Ailesbury for his rudeness, admitting that him from his place at court. Neverthe- he had been prejudiced against him by less he used his influence to return Tory false tales. From his private affairs members, and was well received therefore Ailesbury turns again to Monmouth's forby the king. His character of James lays tunes. He had lived at Brussels "with stress on the king's affection for the that unfortunate lady whom I lament to navy. "Our fleet is our bulwark,” the king this hour," and had told the Marquis of said, "and therefore every true English- Grana that she was his wife. The marman ought to wish the prosperity of it." quis, then governor of the Low Countries, He applauds James's confidence in "my sent his daughter to visit Lady Henrietta. good and ancient friend, Mr. Samuel Afterwards, learning that Monmouth had Pepys, and England never produced such lied, he took the duke by the button, and another in his station." Readers of Ma- said, "My lord, you have deceived me, caulay will scarcely believe that "the king and whenever I am recalled from this stahad a true English spirit, and looked on tion, I will cut your throat, or you shall the French ambassador, M. Barillon, very mine." Monmouth was at a ball on the coldly. . . . He had not the least influ-night of his father's death. In all respects ence. Barillon's own memoirs hardly he caused scandals, which did not distress corroborate this bold statement. What the conscience of William of Orange, to pleased Lord Ailesbury most was James's whom he divulged all his plans, "agreedislike of the land-tax later imposed by able to his very weak head." William William of Orange. “Lay it on luxury,' promptly sent Bentinck with the news to the king said, as chocolate, tea, coffee, James,"not out of affection, but to and' (with warmth) 'as wine' (for he was have the duke sacrificed, who was his a most sober prince). Who obliges peo- rival, and personally much more beloved ple to make themselves drunk? But, if in the nation generally." The story of they will drink, let them pay for it!"" the conference between William and MonFor his part, Ailesbury called the Tories mouth was told to Ailesbury by "a page, together, before Parliament met, at the who attended without." The evidence is Fountain Tavern, and there announced the not particularly excellent. Another story king's wishes, and proposed Sir John Lord Ailesbury tells on Ferguson's eviTrevor as speaker. In the House, to re-dence. Before Monmouth landed at Lyme, lieve the West India trade from heavy he informed Ferguson that he had already taxes, he proposed a tax on new groundrents in London. Macaulay denounces this idea as "aristocratic," but who can defend the prodigious "spreading of the hideous town," which the tax was intended to check. The king was prepossessed against Lord Ailesbury, and treated him rudely "on which I told one, and, God forgive me, with an oath, that it was too much." Ailesbury retired to his lands, and did not return to court till he was "in a manner sent for." He now passes to Monmouth's landing. Ailesbury was sent from the Commons to the Lords, to pray them to sit while a bill of attainder against Monmouth was passed. He left the House to avoid carrying the bill to the Lords, "I loving the duke so much as my king's natural son, but not as my own king and sovereign." Ailesbury, in dudgeon with James, and in grief for his own son's death, stayed inactive in the country, while an army against Monmouth was being raised. The king, however, was won over, and made his father lord entered on them, they usually withdrew." Ferhaps he had not exhausted his collection in Lord Ailesbury's presence. promised the place of prime minister "to the same person who then was at court dignified with the same employment" that is, Sunderland! Lord Ailesbury's story of Sunderland's complicity in_Monmouth's plot, though told only on Ferguson's evidence, agrees with the very remarkable anecdote in Singers's "Clarendon Correspondence" (i. 144). Monmouth, when in the Tower, gave Colonel Scott a letter for James. In this letter he probably denounced Sunderland as his accomplice. Colonel Scott took it to court, where Sunderland informed him that he could not see the king, who was in his shirt, but that he, Sunderland, would leave the bedroom door open, and give the letter into the king's hands. At St. Germains, after the Revolution, James told Colonel Scott that "as I am a living man, I never saw that letter." If we can accept Lord Ailesbury's theory, Sunderland was at once responsible for Monmouth's rebellion and for James's refusal to pardon Monmouth. Sunderland gave the Jacobites good cause to hate him, and to invent legends against him. Yet he was emphatically capable de tout, and the anecdotes of Ferguson and of Colonel | and succeeded." "On which," says Lord Scott bear each other out, as far as they Ailesbury, "Sir John told me that he was go. Lord Ailesbury seemed fated to meet Monmouth in strange circumstances. He landed at the same moment as Monmouth was taken to the privy stairs at Whitehall. "I saw him led up the other stairs on the Westminster side, lean and pale, and with a disconsolate physiognomy, with soldiers with pistols in their hands. The yeomen of the guard were posted, and I got behind one of them that he should not perceive me, and I wished heartily and often since that I had not seen him, for I could never get him out of my mind for years, I so loved him personally." Monmouth wept at James's feet, "insomuch that the king's heart was melted; and had it not been for the minister, who certainly had been tossed over in the room of the duke, he had been pardoned. ... The minister finding the king's heart melted, he told his Majesty he ought not to converse with traitors." Monmouth, at the last, maintained that Lady Henrietta was his wife before heaven. He sent to her a small parcel by the Bishop of Ely. The poor lady swooned, and recovering, exclaimed, "Good God! had that poor man nothing to think of but of me?" "And what was in the paper was a charm; he was so weak as to have many found about him." Concerning the cruelties in the suppression of Monmouth's rebellion, Lord Ailesbury speaks with natural indignation. Kirke, he says, died the death of Herod, "eaten up alive by vermin." As for Jeffreys, "the king protested to me that he abhorred what had passed in that commission." But he did nothing to prevent it, and Ailesbury, knowing his temper, dared not offer the advice that was "on the tip of his tongue." In October, 1685, Lord Ailesbury's father died. His last words were: "Dear son, you will see melancholy days. God be thanked, I shall not." The days sensibly darkened when James met his Parliament with the announcement that he wanted a standing army, and that he had appointed some eighty Catholic officers, who refused the tests. Lord Ailesbury attributes this illegal action, and this most impolitic speech, which at once turned a subservient into a hostile Parliament, to Sunderland. After the Revolution, Sir John Cochrane asked Sunderland why he had given such evil advice? "He replied, with a sneer, that but for those counsels the Prince of Orange had never landed struck dumb with abhorrence." Macaulay remarks that this view of Sunderland's policy "rests on no evidence whatever." His reply to Cochrane, if Macaulay is right, was probably a mere piece of cynicism. Lord Ailesbury also mentions the well-known scandal about Sunderland's intrigues with William of Orange, through Lady Sunderland and her lover, Henry Sydney. Whether James acted "agreeable to his very weak head," or in obedience to Sunderland, his speech staggered the loyal and landed Catholics. Old Lord Bellasis said to Ailesbury, "My dear lord, who could be the framer of this speech? I date my ruin and that of all my persuasion from this day." The Commons sent an address of remonstrance to the king, who replied, "What I have done I will stand by." Lord Ailesbury carried the sword on this occasion, and he writes: "I was so struck that, the sword being heavy, I could scarce keep it up." As every one knows, the Parliament was prorogued, then dissolved, "and we had no more during the king's being in the kingdom." As for James's later follies and misdeeds, his claim of power to dispense with laws, his filling ecclesiastical and military posts with Catholics, Lord Ailesbury puts all down to Sunderland and the Jesuit Petre. The king he calls "the most honest and sincere man that I ever knew," but admits his lack of kingcraft, his amorousness, and his indisposition for "the genteel part of love-making." Lord Ailes. bury sees, as the respectable Catholics saw, the violence and perfidy of James's policy. But he shuts his eyes to this, as well as he may, and makes Sunderland the king's whipping-boy. The queen tried to convert Lord Ailesbury, who gratefully and respectfully declined. "God be praised, during the whole course of my life I never did one action but according to a principle of conscience." "In wretched hands that good and well-meaning king was, and so they brought him to his ruin,' is, on the whole, the burden of Lord Ailesbury's meditations. As for the king's new president of Magdalene, Farmer," he was dead drunk at Banbury when the news came there of his being nominated president of that noble college." "I humbly (bending on my knee) besought the king not to touch the freehold of the clergy, for that priests of all religions were the same * Compare Macaulay, ii, 47. " - as to matters of interest, and if you pinch them they will return it fourfold as was found in the sequel. Sir, if you will have a Romish college, found one, although it will be against the laws, rather than take the bread out of the mouths of the others in possession." Ailesbury himself offered £1,000 towards such a new foundation, but to my grief I found my representations to little purpose. And now to come to the finishing stroke. The bishops must be the victims." James's illegal proclamation "was infused into him" by Sunderland and Petre. The same excuse covers the famous "Three Questions " which Lord Ailesbury placed before the gentry of his county, without disguising his disapprobation. The insolences and iniquities of James might have been endured, in the expectation that he would be succeeded by a Protestant queen. But his son was born, and the country had made up its mind that the birth would be a Jesuit farce, that a child would be imposed on them. "None but rogues invented that calumny, and fools came into that vile and calumnious belief," says Lord Ailesbury. Still, rogues and fools poll a very heavy vote. "From the month of November until few days before the delivery," says Lord Ailesbury, "I had the honor to play at cards with the queen every night; ... and for her physiognomy I defy any one to counterfeit it." The princess Anne was absent at Bath when the child was born. James was said to have sent her there to keep her out of the way. Lord Ailesbury maintains that she really left London and went to Bath on the advice of Lady Churchill and Lady Fitzhardinge, "that she might not be an eye-witness of the birth of her brother," and they circulated a false tale that she was urged to go thither by the king. Disgusted by the course of affairs, Ailesbury went to resign his commission as lord lieutenant. The king, however, under oath of secrecy, told Ailesbury of the great preparations being made against him in Holland, and asked if he would desert him in such a peril. The loyal Ailesbury, kneeling, swore he would die for the king, and, of course, retained his commission. What other course was open to a man of honor? He never regretted that moment, for, had he resigned, he would have been suspected of complicity with the Dutch party. "I could not change my king as one does a suit of clothes." The Duke of Ormond, indeed, sent for Ailesbury, and was on the point of asking him to join "the Orange party," but was dissuaded, almost in the act of speaking, by Mr. Maule. The Dutch expedition was equipped, the French king offered that aid which James was foolish enough to refuse. And why did he refuse that which his son and his grandson so often prayed for in vain? Sunderland, as usual," was in the bottom of this: it was by his treacherous advice that the offered aid of Louis was declined." This Lord Ailesbury gives on the author. ity of Mr. Skeltan or Skelton - that is, Colonel Skelton, James's agent at the Hague; he adds that Sunderland was disgraced because the king had discovered his villany. Meanwhile the storm grew blacker, and James did nothing practical. Ailesbury and Feversham, on their knees, implored him to "clap up seven or eight of the heads of the conspirators"-the Prince of Denmark, Ormond, Grafton, Lord Churchill, Kirke, and others. "But it was found, and fatally, that the king could not resolve." At last he set out for Salisbury. Here a very sad circumstance occurred. He did not take Lord Ailesbury in the royal coach! Our hero was ousted by Peterborough. Lord Ailesbury displayed a fine spirit, and when he arrived in Salisbury the day after the king, was embraced by all the gentlemen of the bedchamber, "for my firmity in the support of our undoubted privilege." Here, indeed, is ancient loyalty. This gentleman, though deprived of a seat in the royal coach, never dreamed of going over to William. He should have been made groom of the posset. Less honorable was Churchill. The royal nose chanced to bleed freely on the day when Ailesbury joined him. The doctor put a cold key down the back of his Majesty's neck, and forbade him to lead his army to Warminster next day, when "it was designed by a general that afterwards made much noise in the world for to have delivered him up to the Prince of Orange. . . . All this is on my own certain knowledge." Next day Churchill and Grafton went over to the Dutch. The king returned to London. Peterborough went in his coach and Lord Ailesbury got wet. But he never deserted his sovereign. At Andover the Prince of Denmark and Ormond forsook him. Then Anne, with Lady Churchill and Lady Hardinge, rushed off, and Left a man undone, To his fate, as Burns advises. The king dallied in town for a fortnight, and then sent the queen with her child to France, on a Sun. was day, at midnight. On Monday Mr. Charles | Dutch guards arrived in town. At midBertie came, and offered to raise three or night Count Solmes came from William four thousand horsemen that would strike to the king, and told him he was posting for the king. Ailesbury, who carried Dutch soldiers in all places of importance. Bertie's proposal to James, had heard that | The king offered to retire to Rochester. the king meditated flight. James declared | Ailesbury was driven thither by the king's that it was "a coffee-house report." coachman, who exclaimed, "God damn Ailesbury replied that he knew the king Father Petre! But for him we had not to ride Bay Ailesbury; that his been here." On the night of December equerry, page, and Dick Smith, his groom, 21, 1688, the king sent for Ailesbury, in were ready. Then the king equivocated, formed him that he was about to fly, and and Ailesbury actually reproached him bade his loyal servant go to the Prince of with that business of the coach. He then Orange. "If I do not retire I shall cerimplored James to mount and march, with tainly be sent to the Tower, and no king four thousand faithful troops, to Notting-ever went out of that place but to his ham, where Anne was. If not, march to grave. . . . Can you advise me to stay?" York, seize Berwick, and secure Scotland, Ailesbury declined to offer an opinion. where Claverhouse would have been at his James sneaked off through the back garside. Later, Danby, who was lying at den, where he took ship, and Ailesbury York with a rough levy of Orangeists, went to St. James's, where he waited on asked Ailesbury in later years "what the William. "He received me most courdevil he had meant by this advice?" teously, and I knew after that he esteemed "To knock you on the head in the first me in his heart, and as little those that place, if you had resisted. And what had deserted their royal master." He course would you have taken?" "What course! to submit ourselves and crave pardon." Ailesbury's advice was spirited, Charles Edward would not have needed it. But James fled like a thief in the night. He might have fought, and might have fallen by the side of Dundee, but he ran away. There was a meeting at the Guildhall. Even Ailesbury signed a request to William to advance. The king had left no regency. Then came the Irish alarm. Next day it was known that James had been stopped at Feversham. There was silence in the Council for a quarter of an hour when this news arrived. Then Ailesbury moved that the king should be invited to return. With this message Ailesbury, in advance of Middleton, Yarmouth, and Feversham, rode through excited but not ill-humored mobs to Feversham. He found the wretched king, "his hat on and his beard much grown." The king received him with displeasure; he averred that James, by his flight, might| have caused London to be in a blaze. James was surrounded by a mob, he was dirty and unkempt, his life was probably in great hazard. Many who were loyal to his person arrived, with Feversham's cavalry. Near the town of Feversham the Horse Guards received him with enthusiasm, "the tears for joy running down their faces" a few of the men who would have followed the king to the North. As he approached London, James was received in a kind of triumph. "The joy was great and general." Next day the ... dined with William, and called twice on Bentinck, but was not received. Ailesbury sent Bentinck a message that, "by God, it was for the last time, and we never spoke after; a grave bow might pass from one to the other, but that was all." If ever a king abdicated and deserted, that king was James. But in the House of Lords, Ailesbury openly maintained the opposite, quoting what the king had said about his fear of being sent to the Tower and to his grave. Ailesbury took the oaths, as a mere "garrison oath" and provisionally. He had no scruples at all about this. The oath was purely provisional. In old age Lord Ailesbury, an exile, refused to take the oaths to George I., whom he knew and had entertained at Brussels. There might yet be a Stuart restoration, though he deemed it next to impossible, and, once sworn to the Hanoverian monarch, Ailesbury could not have served a Stuart. Such was his view of this question of conscience. Can we call it dishonorable? The oath was framed by the Bishop of Peterborough, who, presenting the form to Lord Nottingham, said, "I regard it as like a plate of cucumbers, dressed with oil and vinegar, yet fit for nothing but to throw out of the window."* The bishop would not take the oath. Ailesbury swallowed that cucumber. "The prince being proclaimed king "And when she's dressed cut in her best, Beggar's Opera Of what passed in Scotland Ailesbury says little. The message which James sent from Ireland to the Convention "was very far from being gracious or sweet, and to cut his own throat (the expression is a little harsh) he could find out nobody to countersign but my Lord Melford, a person abominated in that kingdom." He merely mentions the valor of Dundee. He carried the sword before William at his coronation. "Did you not wish it in his body," said Lady Dorchester. Ailesbury was very angry. "I hold it a most damnable sin even to hope it," much more, of course, to be accomplice to William's assassination. In later years the lady quarrelled with Ailesbury, and said that he "had wished the sword in the guts of William." Her ladyship also swore a good deal, but apparently she carried her lie to William, who, from being gracious to Ailesbury, turned to "a personal hatred." 66 (although I did in Parliament do all that | Ailesbury's own plan was never to write. lay in my power to obstruct it), he was to He had not to burn a single paper before protect the kingdom, and those that de- he was, in a later year, sent to the Tower. sired some protection ought to take the He approached Louvois in his king's inoaths." terest, and successfully, but Louvois died, and nothing was done. Of the intended invasion of 1691 Ailesbury knew nothing, "having made it my request not to be gratified with secrets of this nature, and I knew but too well the babbling spirit of the greater part of the Jacobites, and, which was worse, if possible, their envious temper." A cousin of his own, a son of Lord Delamere, had revealed the plot of the drunken dullard, Lord Preston'very ungentlemanlike," says Lord Ailesbury. He was determined not to commit himself to a similar chance. Therefore, while he had no official knowledge of the intended invasion, he had made himself acquainted with it. A warrant, as he believed, was out against him, but he sent his wife to warn the Princess Anne, and advise her to be ready to meet her father when he landed. He had arranged a guard for her safety and taken all precautions. "Well, madame," said Anne, "tell your lord that I am ready to do what he can advise me to." Ailesbury, in doubt if he were to be arrested or not, went home, and "always had his nose in the air," watching the weather-cocks for a good Jacobite wind. It came, he hurried to town, only to hear the bells ring for the defeat of La Hogue, and the ruin of his master's hopes. Anne, too, was disappointed, and showed "a melancholy face." Long afterwards Ailesbury learned that Queen Mary had secured his freedom from arrest. example." In 1690 a warrant was issued against Ailesbury, on general suspicion. He offered to surrender on bail; the queen aided him, he was bailed, and was asked to play basset by this kind lady. Two days before any one might have arrested him in the street, and now he was at cards with the queen! He praises her "great judgment and compassion." He defends James's conduct at the Boyne, maintaining that no prince need stay when his army runs. In a sea-fight, his captain's brains had been blown into James's face, which he wiped calmly, saying, "He was a brave and honest man, and I pity his wife and children, for he had a numerous family." But the Boyne was not James's day. No man is brave at all hours, perhaps, as no man is wise. The king had lost his nerve, probably from age and sorrow. From evidence given by Pepys, it is certain that he had once been valiant, and always most cool when in greatest peril. Her humanity was without Speaking of the queen, and of Richard Steele's poem on her funeral, Ailesbury irreverently calls our friend Dick "a twopenny poet, whose head was as empty of religion as his pockets of money." Christian Hero is thus mournfully misjudged. The Omitting some trifling matters, and Sunderland's endeavor to win over Ailesbury, we reach our hero's conference with Admiral Sir Ralph Delaval. Together with Admiral Killigrew, they plotted to carry the fleet over to James, or, rather, to keep it out of the path of the French fleet, and they did not mean to let the life of Sir Cloudesley Shovel stand in the way. "If he would not consent, they knew what to do in that case." The leading admiral was to sail off to a station two hundred For Preston's conspiracy, see Macaulay, iii. 764. |
