spirit of direct hostility to the principles on which the church had been established, they found themselves involved in difficulties which every day became more embarrassing. The trial of the bishops was the crisis of their loyalty; it was not unjustly regarded as a kind of declaration of war by the monarch against the national establishment, and all the friends of that establishment felt themselves coerced to take measures for its defence and protection. It is true that the adoption of such measures was a virtual abandonment of the doctrine of non-resistance, and so far a concession to the principles of their old adversaries the whigs; hence the first movements of the tories to join in inviting the prince of Orange to England were slow and unsteady, and the most for which they looked was that the prince might act as mediator between the king, the church, and the nation.

We have next to examine the connexion between the position of the king of England in relation to the general politics of Europe. At this period the arbitrary designs of Louis XIV. had excited universal distrust, and alliances were secretly formed to resist his designs, whether covert or avowed, to the different districts and territories over which he sought to extend his sway. England was prevented from joining in this coalition only by the strict alliance between its monarch and Louis, and hence the reign of James was odious to the princes of Germany, the houses of Spain and Austria, and even to the pope himself, who had been harshly treated by the French monarch, stripped of his territory of Avignon, and menaced with further injuries. Holland was still more deeply interested in detaching England from the French alliance : Louis had openly avowed his intentions to destroy its independence, and if he had procured the promised support of the naval power of England, the Dutch would in all probability have become subjects of France. The combination of parties by which the prince of Orange was invited into England, had little unity in itself, and might have been dissolved in a moment if James had shown a disposition to adopt conciliatory measures and regain the friendship of the tories and churchmen. William was well aware of these circumstances, and made the most vigorous exertions to take immediate advantage of the crisis. While he was thus engaged, the invasion of western Germany by Louis XIV. without the formality of a declaration of war, and the fearful ravages perpetrated by the French in the palatinate, excited universal alarm and indignation throughout Europe. The states of Holland immediately placed their fleets and armies at the disposal of William; he set sail with a powerful armament, and on the 5th of November, 1688, landed safely at Torbay.

The perplexity into which all parties were thrown by the landing of William was almost ludicrous. At first he was joined by so few partisans, that he began to think of returning; then on a sudden the nobles and leading men of England flocked to him from all quarters; the favorite officers of James, those who were solely indebted to him for rank and fortune, even his favorite daughter Anne, joined in the general defection while he, sinking at once into despondency, abandoned his army, and after a brief delay in London, fled to France. It is unfortunately true that the prince of Orange made use of many dishonorable artifices to terrify the unfortunate monarch, and induce him to seek safe

ty in flight; but James seems to have adopted the fatal resolution of abandoning his kingdom, in the belief that the complicated embarrassments of parties would lead to his recall; and that returning at the head of a French army, he might yet triumph over all his enemies. Confidence in the power of Louis XIV. had been his bane from the beginning, and his connexion with that detested monarch was the principal cause of his dying in exile.

William assumed so much of royal power as to summon a convention to regulate the affairs of the nation. Three proposals were made to this body: first, that terms should be made with James, and the chief administration intrusted to the prince of Orange as lieutenant-genera of the kingdom; secondly, that the flight of James should be taken as an abdication, and a regency proclaimed, with the prince of Orange at its head; and thirdly, that the throne should be declared vacant, and William and Mary declared king and queen of England. The first proposal was the most acceptable to the consistent tories, including the primate, Sancroft, and several of the bishops whom James had so recently prosecuted, but the great majority felt the absurdity of turning a king out for the mere purpose of calling him back, and it had already passed into a proverb that "the worst of all revolutions was a restoration."

In the consideration of the second proposition was involved the question of the legitimacy of the prince of Wales, which nobody really doubted, but almost everybody affected to deny. There were, however, great practical difficulties in recognising the infant prince as heir to the crown. It was tolerably certain that James would not consent to reside in France, and send his son to be educated as a protestant in England; the princesses Mary and Anne were naturally opposed to a plan which would have deprived them of their fondly-cherished hopes of wearing a crown, and William had taken pains to make it known that if a regency should be determined upon, somebody else must be sought to exercise the functions of regent.

In fact, the circumstances of the time rendered the third plan the only one possible to be adopted; but the majority of those who voted for conferring the crown on William and Mary did so with undisguised reluctance, as men submitting to a painful necessity. The subsequent efforts of James to recover his dominions by the aid of French armaments completed the alienation of the English people from his cause, while the cowardice and incapacity he displayed in Ireland, particularly at the battle of the Boyne, led to the utter ruin of his unfortunate partisans in that country. Louis was himself injured by his efforts in favor of the dethroned king: his futile attempts to invade England, his intrigues to provoke insurrections, and his continued menaces of conquest, provoked and kept alive against him the flame of popular indignation in Great Britain, and induced the people to bear the brunt of expensive continental wars, in which England was very remotely and indirectly concerned, for the mere purpose of restraining his ambition. It was in the same way at a later period that Napoleon's menace of invading England, excited a spirit among the people which led them similarly to fight the battle of continental Europe, and pay its sovereigns for main taining their own independence.

SECTION IV.-General History of Europe, from the League of Augsburg to the Formation of the Grand Alliance.

THE domestic history of England, during the reign of William III., is so remotely connected with the progress of the war to restrain the ambition of Louis XIV., that it will be convenient to limit our attention to the former before commencing the narrative of the latter. Several parties, as we have seen, joined in effecting the revolutiun; scarcely had they succeeded, when their old jealousies were renewed with aggravated fury. The Scottish convention made the establishment of presbyterianism an essential part of the settlement of the crown; the protestant sectarians in England were thus encouraged to hope for some modifications in the discipline of the English church; they did obtain a general toleration, to the great disgust of the tory or high-church party. Ireland remained faithful to James, though William not only offered wealth and dignity to the lord-lieutenant, Tyrconnell, but promised to secure the catholics in their civil rights, and give them one third of the churches.

But the protestants, who had so recently been secured in their lands by the acts of Settlement and Explanation, conscious that the justice of their titles would not bear a very rigid scrutiny, and dreading that, under a catholic monarch and a catholic parliament, these acts might be repealed, boldly took up arms, and atoned for their deficiency of number by martial vigor and a daring spirit. They felt that under Cromwell they had won their possessions by the sword, and by the sword they were resolved to retain them. Some of them formed guerilla bands, and scoured the country; others threw themselves into Londonderry, Enniskillen, and other garrison towns, resolved to hold out until aid could arrive from England. James, with a small French force, proceeded to Ireland, and convened a parliament in Dublin. The act of Settlement was repealed, and all the protestants who favored, or were supposed to favor, the prince of Orange, were declared guilty of high treason. But in the meantime, the adherents of the abdicated monarch had been ruined in Scotland by the loss of their leader, the brave Viscount Dundee, who fell in the arms of victory. The Highlanders who followed his standard dispersed, and the jacobite party had no person of sufficient influence to collect another army. James began his operations in Ireland by the siege of Londonderry; it was nobly defended by the inhabitants, whose religious enthusiasm more than supplied their deficiency in martial discipline. They were, however, on the point of sinking under the joint sufferings of fatigue and famine, when a reinforcement arrived from England, with provision and ammunition, upon which the besiegers abandoned their undertaking.

Ere James could recover from this disaster, the duke of Schomberg landed at Carrickfergus with ten thousand men; but as the operations of this general were too slow for the impatience of the people of England, William followed with a considerable reinforcement, and hasted to meet his father-in-law. The hostile armies met on the 1st of July, 1690, on the banks of the river Boyne; the skill of William procured him a victory, which the cowardice of James rendered decisive; he fled from the field of battle, and scarcely halting in Dublin hasted to take shipping at Waterford for France, abandoning his faithful subjects

o their fate. The Irish, though forsaken, did not despair; they threw themselves into Limerick, which William immediately invested, but was finally forced to raise the siege. This failure was, however, compensated by the success of the earl of Marlborough, in Munster, who with five thousand men reduced Cork, Kinsale, and some other places of less importance. But Ireland was not yet subdued, and William intrusted the completion of the task to Baron Ginckle, who took Athlone almost in the presence of the Irish army, chiefly through the negligence of St. Ruth, whom Louis had sent over at the request of James. Stung with remorse, St. Ruth hazarded a battle at Aughrim, but he was defeated and slain. The Irish a second time sought shelter in Limerick, which Ginckle once more besieged. All parties were now weary of the war, and a treaty was concluded at Limerick, by which it was stipulated that the catholics should enjoy the same toleration as in the reign of Charles II.; that they should be restored to the privileges of subjects, on taking the oath of allegiance; and that as many as chose to follow the fortunes of the late monarch should be transported to the continent at the expense of the government. About ten thousand men took advantage of the last article, and, under the name of the Irish brigades, were taken into the service of the king of France.

William had, in the meantime, become disgusted with the constitutional jealousy of the whigs, and had sought the friendship of the tories, who were remarkable for their zealous support of the royal prerogative. But a sanguinary act of vengeance, the massacre of the Macdonalds of Glencoe, under circumstances of great treachery, brought so much odium on the new government, that James began to entertain some hopes of a restoration. The Macdonalds had recognised the new government a day later than that named in the act of parliament, but as their allegiance was formally accepted by the authorities, they believed themselves in perfect security. A military force was received into their glens without distrust or suspicion. But in the dead hour of the night, the soldiers, pursuant to previous orders, rose upon their hosts, set fire to the houses, and shot down the wretched inhabitants as they attempted to escape from the flames.

This atrocity excited universal indignation throughout Europe; the French king hoped that it would enable him to replace James on the throne; and had he been able immediately to transport his forces across the channel, the liberties of England and the crown of William would have been exposed to serious danger. A camp was formed between Cherbourg and La Hogue; twenty thousand Irish and French soldiers were prepared to invade England, and a powerful navy was equipped to support the expedition. The whole was frustrated by the valor of the British seamen; Admiral Russell having formed a junction with a Dutch squadron, attacked the French fleet off La Hogue, burned several of their men-of-war and transports, and drove the rest into their harbors. James beheld from the shore this annihilation of his hopes, but could not forbear expressing his admiration of the valor of his former subjects.*

The death of Queen Mary revived the hopes of the jacobites, as the * When he saw the French fleet set on fire, he exclaimed, "Ah! none but my brave English tars could have performed so gallant an action !”

partisans of the Stuarts were called; but instead of open rebellion, they resolved to remove the king by assassination. The plot was discovered, and the nation was so disgusted with the intended treachery, that William was restored to all his former popularity. From this time to the accession of Queen Anne, there is little worthy of note in the domestic history of England. On the death of the duke of Gloucester, the last protestant heir to the crown, an act was passed by which the eventual succession was settled on Sophia, dutchess dowager of Hanover, and her heirs, being protestants (A. D. 1701). She was the grand-daughter of James I., by the princess Elizabeth, married to the unfortunate elector-palatine. Party animosities between the whigs and tories were occasionally violent, and William III. was not always on the best of terms with his parliament.

The emperor Leopold, the head of the league of Augsburg, was a prince of great abilities, sullied, however, too often, by cruelty and bigotry. Though the chief of a confederacy for maintaining the liberties of Europe, he trampled on the privileges of his Hungarian subjects, and persecuted the protestants. But the overthrow of the Turks at Vienna, and the subsequent capture of Belgrade, left the discontented without an ally, and they were forced to submit in silence. Louis was not daunted by the power of the league; he assembled two armies in Flanders, sent a third to check the Spaniards in Catalonia, and, to form a barrier on the side of Germany, ravaged the Palatinate with fire and sword (A. D. 1688). This barbarous policy filled Europe with horror; men, women, and children, driven from their habitations, in the inclement month of February, wandered by the light of their own burning houses over the frozen fields, and fell victims by thousands to cold and hunger. Nor did this detestable expedient produce the desired effect; the German armies, in the ensuing campaign, gained several important triumphs. Louis sought to recover his former superiority by nobler means; he intrusted hís armies to new generals of approved talent, and the fortune of the war instantly changed. Savoy was overrun by the French marshal Catinat; Marshal Luxemburg gained a brilliant victory over the allies in Flanders; the united Dutch and English fleets were defeated off Beachy Head, and the Spaniards were scarcely able to defend Catalonia (A. D. 1690). Little was done on the side of Germany, for the emperor was once more assailed by Tekeli and the Turks, whose progress threatened the ruin of his hereditary dominions. Had this course of fortune continued, Louis must have become the master of Europe, but in the following campaigns, the Turks, deprived of all their advantages, left the emperor at leisure to watch his western frontiers, and Catinat was driven from Italy by the duke of Savoy. But in Flanders the French continued to be eminently successful. Mons and Namur were taken in spite of all the efforts which the united forces of the English and Dutch could make for their relief, and the allies were defeated in two great general engagements by the duke of Luxemburg. But William III. was never daunted by ill success, and he adopted such prudent measures, that Luxemburg was unable to derive any important advantages from his victories. Similar success attended the armies of Louis in Savoy, Spain, and Germany; but the triumphs were equally unproductive. Even at sea, notwithstanding the recent loss at