Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

thing. When he saw the headstrong monarch break through all bonds, and openly trample on the liberties, while he shocked the religious feelings of his people, he wrote to him to point out, in firm but respectful terms, the danger of his conduct. He declared to Lord Galway, when James's innovations began, that if he persisted in his design of overturning the constitution and religion of his country, he would leave his service. So far his conduct was perfectly unexceptionable. Our first duty is to our country, our second only to our benefactor. If they are brought into collision, as they often are during the melancholy vicissitudes of a civil war, an honorable man, whatever it may cost him, has but one part to take. He must not abandon his public duty for his private feelings, but he must never betray official duty. If Churchill, perceiving the frantic course of his master, had withdrawn from his service, and then either taken no part in the revolution which followed, or even appeared in arms against him, the most scrupulous moralist could have discovered nothing reprehensible in his conduct. History has in every age applauded the virtue, while it has commiserated the anguish, of the elder Brutus, who sacrificed his sons to the perhaps too rigorous laws of his country.

He deserts

the invasion

But Churchill did not do this, and thence has arisen an ineffaceable blot on his memory. He did not relin- 8. quish the service of the infatuated monarch; he re- James II. on tained his office and commands; but he employed of the Prince the influence and authority thence derived to ruin of Orange. his benefactor. Information was sent to James that he was not to be trusted; but so far were those representations from having inspired any doubts of his fidelity, that that deluded monarch, when the Prince of Orange landed, confided to him the command of a corps of five thousand men destined to oppose his progress, and raised him to the rank of lieutenantgeneral. He led this force in person as far as Salisbury to meet William, who was advancing through Devonshire. And yet he had before that written to William a letter, still extant,

in which he expressed entire devotion to his cause.* Nay, he at this time, if we may believe his panegyrist Ledyard, signed a letter, along with several other peers, addressed to the Prince of Orange, inviting him to come over, and had actually concluded with Major-general Kirk, who commanded at Axminster, a convention for the seizure of the king and giving him up to his hostile son-in-law. James was secretly warned that Churchill was about to betray him, but he refused to believe it of one from whom he had hitherto experienced such devotion, and was only awakened from his dream of security by learning that his favorite had gone over, with the Duke of Grafton and the principal officers of his regiment, to the Prince of Orange. Not content with this, he shortly after employed his influence with his own regiment, and others stationed near London, to induce them to desert James and join the invading candidate for the throne.† Nay, it was his arguments, joined to those of his wife, which induced James's own daughter, the Princess Anne, and Prince George of Denmark, to detach themselves from the cause of the falling monarch, and drew from that unhappy sovereign the mournful exclamation, "My God! my very children have forsaken me." Thus his example was the signal for a general defec

* "SIR, Mr. Sidney will let you know how I intend to behave myself. I think it is what I owe to God and my country. My honor take leave to put into your highness's hands, where I think it is safe. If you think there is any thing which I ought to do, you have but to command me. I shall pay an entire obedience to it, being resolved to die in that religion that it hath pleased God to give you both the will and the power to protect."-Lord Churchill to the Prince of Orange, Aug. 4, 1688. William landed at Torbay on Nov. 5, 1688, so that three months before Marlborough accepted the command of the forces destined to oppose, he had secretly agreed to join him. -See GLEIG's Military Commanders, i., 332.

On the approach of William to the capital, and the flight of James to Feversham, Lord Churchill was sent forward to reassemble his own troop of Horse Guards, and to bring over the soldiers quartered in and about the metropolis. He executed the commission with equal prudence and activity, and carried back so favorable a report concerning the disposition of the people and army as induced the prince to hasten to the capital. After the discomfiture of James, Lord Churchill assisted in the convention of Parliament. -COXE, v., 42.

tion, not only of those who were openly hostile to James, but even of those who were connected with him by blood.

9.

Parallel be

tween his treachery and that of Ney.

In what does this conduct differ from that of Labedoyère, who, at the head of the garrison of Grenoble, deserted to Napoleon when sent out to oppose him? or Lavalette, who employed his influence, as postmaster under Louis XVIII., to forward the imperial conspiracy? or Marshal Ney, who, after promising at the Tuileries to bring the ex-emperor back in an iron cage, no sooner reached the royal camp at Melun, than he issued a proclamation calling on the troops to desert the Bourbons, and mount the tricolor cockade? Nay, is not Churchill's conduct, in a moral point of view, worse than that of Ney? for the latter abandoned the trust reposed in him by a new master, forced upon an unwilling nation, to rejoin his old benefactor and companion in arms; but the former betrayed the trust reposed in him by his old master and tried benefactor, to range himself under the banner of a competitor for the throne to whom he was bound neither by duty nor obligation. And yet, such is often the inequality of crimes and punishments in this world, that Churchill was raised to the pinnacle of greatness by the very conduct which consigned Ney, with justice, so far as his conduct is concerned, to an ignominious death.

"Treason ne'er prospers; for when it does,
None dare call it treason."

History forgets its first and noblest duty when it fails, by its distribution of praise and blame, to counterbalance, so far as its verdict can, this inequality, which, for inscrutable but doubtless wise purposes, Providence has permitted in this transient scene. Charity forbids us to scrutinize such conduct too severely. It is the deplorable consequence of a successful revolution, even when commenced for the most necessary purposes, to obliterate the ideas of man on right and wrong, and to leave no other test in the general case for public conduct but success its first effect, to place men in such trying circumstances that nothing but the most confirmed and resolute

virtue can pass unscathed through the ordeal. He knew the human heart well who commanded us in our daily prayers to supplicate not to be led into temptation, even before asking for deliverance from evil. Let no man be sure, however much, on a calm survey, he may condemn the conduct of Marlborough and Ney, that in similar circumstances he would not have done the same.*

Honors and

stowed on

in favor of

The magnitude of the service rendered by Churchill to the 10. Prince of Orange immediately appeared in the commands be commands conferred upon him. Hardly was he Churchill. He settled at William's headquarters when he was dissigns the Act of Association patched to London to assume the command of the Horse Guards; and, while there, he signed, on the 20th of December, 1688, the famous Act of Association in favor of the Prince of Orange. Shortly after, he was named lieutenant-general of the armies of William, and immediately made a new organization of the troops, under officers whom he could trust, which proved of the utmost service to William

William.

* Marlborough, on leaving the king, sent the following letter to him: "SIR,-Since men are seldom suspected of sincerity when they act contrary to their interests, and though my dutiful behavior to your majesty in the worst of times (for which I acknowledge my poor services much overpaid) may not be sufficient to incline you to a charitable interpretation of my actions, yet I hope the great advantage I enjoy under your majesty, which I can not expect to enjoy under any other government, may reasonably convince your majesty and the world that I am actuated by a higher principle when I offer that violence to my inclination and interest as to desert your majesty at a time when your affairs seem to challenge the strictest obedience from all your subjects, much more from one who lies under such obligations to your majesty. This, sir, could proceed from nothing but the inviolable dictates of my conscience, and a necessary concern for my religion (which no good man can oppose), and with which, I am instructed, nothing can come in competition. Heaven knows with what partiality my dutiful regard for your majesty has hitherto represented those unhappy dangers which inconsiderate and self-interested men have framed against your majesty's true interest and the Protestant religion; but as I can no longer join with such to give a pretense by conduct to bring them to effect, so I will always, with the hazard of my life and fortune (so much your majesty's due), endeavor to preserve your royal person and lawful rights with all the tender concern and dutiful respect that becomes me."-Lord Churchill to James IL, Nov. 12, 1688. Ledyard, i., 75.

on the unstable throne on which he was soon after seated. He was present at most of the long and momentous debates which took place in the House of Peers on the question on whom the crown should be conferred, and at first inclined to a regency; but with a commendable delicacy he absented himself on the night of the decisive vote on the vacancy of the throne. He voted, however, on the 6th of February for the resolution which settled the crown on William and Mary; and he assisted at their coronation, under the title of Earl of Marlborough, to which he had shortly before been elevated by William.

England having, on the accession of the new monarch, joined the continental league against France, Marlbor- 11. ough received the command of the British auxilia

His first serv.

ices in for

eign war un

der William.

ry force in the Netherlands, and by his courage and ability contributed in a remarkable manner to the victory of Walcourt. In 1690 he received orders to return from Flanders in order to assume a command in Ireland, then agitated by a general insurrection in favor of James; but, actuated by some remnant of attachment to his old benefactor, he eluded on various pretenses complying with the order till the battle of the Boyne had extinguished the hopes of the dethroned monarch, when he came over and made himself master of Cork and Kinsale. In 1691 he was sent again into Flanders, in order to act under the immediate orders of William, who was then, with heroic constancy, contending with the still superior forces of France; but hardly had he landed there when he was arrested, deprived of all his commands, and sent to the Tower of London, along with several of the noblemen of distinction in the British Senate.

Discreditable

Upon this part of the history of Marlborough there hangs a veil of mystery, which all the papers brought to 12. light in more recent times have not entirely remov- intrigues soon ed. At the time, his disgrace was by many attrib- after with the uted to some cutting sarcasms in which he had in- family.

exiled royal

dulged on the predilection of William for the continental troops,

« ElőzőTovább »