SURRENDER OF TOURNAY. 213 tributions for the support of the war had been freely bestowed upon the court. Louis sent his silver plate to the mint to be coined. The rich, whether nobles or traders, followed his exam ple. There was specie to pay the forces; and recruits flocked to the army, glad to obtain that subsistence which the visitation of Providence had denied to their peaceful labours. On the 21st of June, a hundred thousand men, under the command of Marlborough and Eugene, were encamped in the plain before Lille. Marshal Villars had thrown up intrenchments between Douay and the Lys, which probably interrupted a design of penetrating into France. The Allies then commenced the siege of Tournay. The city surrendered in three weeks. The citadel held out during July and August. During this siege, four thousand of the Allies were killed and wounded. Immense slaughter was occasioned by the system of mining and countermining,-a mode of warfare which was then rarely practised to the same extent as in this siege. Service in the trenches was always faced by the English soldier with alacrity; but to burrow like a mole, whilst the sound of the enemy's pickaxe was close to his ear-to believe he was treading upon firm earth, and then in a moment to be blown into the air-these were strange dangers which required an unaccustomed exercise of courage and fortitude. 1 The Allied army, after the fall of Tournay, was proceeding to the siege of Mons, when Marshal Villars followed them, and took up a strong position at Malplaquet. His wings were protected by two thick woods. His centre. was placed on rising ground between the woods, with intrenchments thrown up in front of the camp. The Allies had about eighty thousand men; the French ten thousand less. Marlborough was encamped in the plain, fronting the opening between the woods. His determination to attack the enemy in so commanding a position has been considered rash; but he had only the alternative of a battle or the abandonment of the siege of Mons. At eight o'clock on the morning of the 11th of September that attack was made. The right of the French was covered by a morass; but this obstacle was rapidly overcome by Marlborough's left wing; and that portion of the enemy was driven back. Villars was himself commanding the left wing of the French, and was to a great extent successful, when he was wounded; and according to the French accounts, that accident was the main cause of the retreat from their position. The French were dislodged from their wooded height after a most sanguinary struggle of four hours, when the conflict was renewed in the plain. At three o'clock they retreated; and the Allies encamped on the field of battle, amidst thirty thousand of their fellow-men dead or wounded. When the British Parliament met two months afterwards, the queen was congratulated "upon the continued successes of the last campaign, particularly the victory obtained near Mons." In the year 1709, no great comet burns "In th' arctic sky, and from his horrid hair but never was war amongst civilized nations more general or more destructive. There is desperate fighting in the Netherlands; a smouldering flame of battle in Spain and Portugal; and a Northern war as terrible and more decisive than the war of the Succession. It is the year of the fatal death-struggle of Pultowa, when the old dominion of Sweden in the North was struck down by one great blow, and the czar, whose rule over hordes of half savage tribes was little heeded in the struggle for the Balance of power, first planted his foot upon the Baltic, and bequeathed to the world a new Balance to settle from generation to generation. In April, 1707, Marlborough was propitiating the victorious Charles the Twelfth with the most transparent flattery; but the wily negotiator of the Allies has seen the map of Muscovy on the young Swede's table, and he guesses to what point his ambition is directed. In 1698 Peter of Muscovy was learning the trade of a ship-builder in England. He had gone home to build ships; to discipline barbarians into soldiers; to pant for an outlet from his shut-up wastes into the great highways of the world; and so he went to war with the king of Sweden, a lad of eighteen, from whom he and other northern powers hoped to win possessions which had been wrested from them by the Sweden of Gustavus and Christina. The czar was left to fight single-handed for the provinces which had been lost. In 1700 he was signally defeated by Charles at the battle of Narva; but in 1702 he had won territory in Livonia, and in 1703 had founded St. Petersburg on the banks of the Neva. There were five or six years of very doubtful warfare, during which time Peter was forming armies and teaching them how to fight. Charles would no longer endure this teazing and obstinate rival. He had dethroned Augustus of Poland; he would march to Moscow, and treat with the czar in his capital. Five months after Marlborough's visit to the camp at Alt Ranstadt, Charles set out with his army for the invasion of Russia. He traversed Poland, and he wintered at Grodno. In June he defeated the Russians upon the Beresina; and in September, he was again victorious at Smolensko. Peter was alarmed, and made proposals of peace. The BATTLE OF PULTOWA. 245 Swede rejected them; and marched into the Ukraine, to effect a junction with the Cossack chief, Mazeppa. In the Ukraine the Swedish army sustained the severest privations. But the resolution of Charles was unshaken: "He comes, nor want nor cold his course delay ; Hide blushing glory, hide Pultowa's day.” In the spring the Swedish army invested the strong town of Pultowa, on the Vorskla. The fortifications protected the military stores of Peter. The place commanded the passes to Moscow. In June the czar advanced to the relief of Pultowa, with an army of about sixty thousand men. Charles had only twenty-four thousand, not half of whom were Swedes. He despised the security of his entrenched lines, and on the 8th of July he marched out to attack the Russian redoubts. He thought that nothing had changed since he had won the battle of Narva with a similar disparity of numbers. The two kings were in the battle; and the troops on both sides fought with desperation. In two hours ten thousand Swedes lay dead or wounded in the field; hundreds perished in the Vorskla and Borysthenes; the Swedish army was annihilated; and Charles having swum over the Borysthenes with a few hundred followers, at length reached the Turkish frontier, and for five years was a troublesome fugitive in the dominions of the sultan. Johnson, "Vanity of Human Wishes." CHAPTER XII. Impeachment of Dr. Sacheverel.-Proceedings in Westminster Hall.-Articles of the Impeachment.-Passages from the Speeches of the Managers.-Popular Manifestations.-Sentence upon Sacheverel.-Sentence regarded as a triumph of the High Church-Prosecutions of Rioters for High Treason.-Trials of Rioters.--Progress of Sacheverel. His character. THE well-known hypothesis that a deaf man, looking for the first time upon a ball-room, and hearing no note of the music which inspired the quadrille or the waltz, would think the company mad, may be paralleled by him who, reading of some mighty national ferment, and vainly endeavouring to trace the latent causes of senatorial declamation and popular fury, concludes that a general lunacy can only account for the frantic gallopade. Nevertheless, there is always the piper to direct this sort of dance-sometimes to lead it to a tragical end, as the Pied-piper of Hamelin piped the town rats into the Weser. Such a piper was Henry Sacheverel, Doctor of Divinity, who, on the 5th of November, 1709, having to preach at St. Paul's before the lord mayor and aldermen of London, laid his magic pipe to his lips, and speedily had half the nation dancing like drunken satyrs to the tune of "The king shall enjoy his own again," and breaking heads and burning conventicles amidst their pious cry of "God save the Church." The famous impeachment of Doctor Sacheverel, which for a time absorbed all other public questions, may be regarded as an inexplicable demonstration of party madness, or a grand assertion of party principle. Lord Campbell tells us, that the Whigs "probably would have continued undisturbed in their offices till their tenure had been confirmed by the accession of the House of Hanover, had it not been for their most preposterous prosecution of the contemptible sermon preached before the lord mayor of London." * In another place, the Chief Justice delivers his judgment that the Whigs "seem to have been deprived of their understanding, and they were given as a prey into the hands of their enemies." Against this authority may be cited that of one to whom the historian is bound to listen with profound respect-Edmund Life of Somers, "Chancellors," vol. iv. p. 204. ↑ Life of Cowper. Ibid., p. 317. IMPEACHMENT OF DR. SACHEVEREL. 217 Burke. The greatest of philosophical politicians says, "It rarely happens to a party to have the opportunity of a clear, authentic, recorded declaration of their political tenets upon the subject of a great constitutional event like that of the Revolution. The Whigs had that opportunity, or, to speak more properly, they made it. The impeachment of Dr. Sacheverel was undertaken by a Whig ministry and a Whig House of Commons, and carried on before a prevalent and steady majority of Whig peers. It was carried on for the express purpose of stating the true grounds and principles of the Revolution; what the Commons emphatically called their foundation. It was carried on for the purpose of condemning the principles on which the Revolution was first opposed, and afterwards calumniated, in order by a juridical sentence of the highest authority to confirm and fix Whig principles, as they had operated both in the resistance to king James, and in the subsequent settlement; and to fix them in the extent and with the limitations with which it was meant they should be understood by posterity." If this view of the matter be correct, the impeachment of Sacheverel was not the act of a party "deprived of their understanding;" although, looking at it as a mere question of expediency, it might have led to the party being "given as a prey into the hands of their enemies." The temporary removal of a ministry from power is a small question, compared with the question of the principles which were brought into conflict on this occasion. It is the business of the historical inquirer to endeavour to trace what may have a real and abiding interest in this extraordinary proceeding. One great and permanent lesson may be derived from the contemplation of this battle of opinions-a lesson which has been briefly but emphatically proclaimed by him who, thinking the ecclesiastical history of our country might advantageously be presented to view in verse," has touched on the great controversial ́ points in a truly Christian spirit:— HIGH and LOW, Watch-words of Party, on all tongues are rife; As if a Church, though sprung from Heaven, must owe To opposites and fierce extremes her life- Not to the golden mean and quiet flow Of truths that soften hatred, temper strife." t About a month after the Session of Parliament had been opened, without any very manifest signs of a party-conflict, Mr. Dolben, the member for Liskeard, son to the late archbishop of York, complained that two sermons preached by Dr. Sacheverel, one at "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs." † Wordsworth, "Ecclesiastical Sketches." |