The general took a couple of hundred Indian scouts, enlisted for six months' service, a troop of cavalry, and a half-dozen guides and interpreters, and followed across the border.George had, if anything, a narrower intellect than his father, but spoke English fluently, though with a foreign accenta great advantage over his predecessor. He was small of stature, and subject to fits of violent passion, neither of which qualities was conducive to royal dignity. Nor did the attributes of his mind supply any gain calculated to remedy these defects. He was possessed of courage, which he had proved at the battle of Oudenarde, and displayed again at Dettingen, and he was praised for justice. Perhaps it was a love of order and etiquette rather than justice which distinguished him. For his sort of military precision and love of soldiers he was nicknamed the "Little Captain" by the Jacobites. But the worst trait of his disposition was his avarice. He admitted, says Lord Chesterfield, that he was much more affected by little things than great onesthe certain mark of a little mind; he therefore troubled himself very little about religion, but took it as he found it, without doubt, objection, or inquiry. He hated and despised all literature and intellectual pursuit, arts and sciences, and the professors of them.
ONE:As innocent as the man I helped captureMr. Everdails friend, that man we put on the wrecking tug for five hours.
TWO:The Revolution of 1688, which overthrew absolutism in the State, overthrew it also in the Church. The political principles of William of Orange, and the Whigs who brought him in, were not more opposed to the absolutism of the Stuarts than the ecclesiastical principles of the new king and queen, and the prelates whom they introduced into the Church, were to the high-churchism of Laud, Sancroft, Atterbury, and their section of the Establishment. When Parliament, on the accession of William and Mary, presented the Oath of Allegiance to the Lords and Commons, eight of the bishops, including Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, refused it; and of these, five were of the number of the seven who had refused to sign James II.'s Declaration of Indulgence, and thus gave the immediate occasion to the outbreak ending in the Revolution. Thus a fresh faction was produced in the Establishment, that of the Non-jurors, who were,[142] after much delay and patience, finally excluded from their livings. As the existing law could not touch the non-juring bishops so long as they absented themselves from Parliament, where the oath had to be put to them, a new Act was passed, providing that all who did not take the new oaths before the 1st of August, 1689, should be suspended six months, and at the end of that time, in case of non-compliance, should be ejected from their sees. Still the Act was not rigorously complied with; they were indulged for a year longer, when, continuing obstinate, they were, on the 1st of February, 1691, excluded from their sees. Two of the eight had escaped this sentence by dying in the interimnamely, the Bishops of Worcester and Chichester. The remaining six who were expelled were Sancroft, the Primate, Ken of Bath and Wells, Turner of Ely, Frampton of Gloucester, Lloyd of Norwich, and White of Peterborough. In the room of these were appointed prelates of Whig principles, the celebrated Dr. Tillotson being made Primate. Other vacancies had recently or did soon fall out; so that, within three years of his accession, William had put in sixteen new bishops, and the whole body was thus favourable to his succession, and, more or less, to the new views of Church administration.The preparations for invasion turned the attention of the British Government to ports where it was supposed the troops would be embarked. Ostend was regarded with particular suspicion, and Sir Home Popham was sent in May with a small squadron, conveying a thousand men, under Colonel Coote, to destroy the ships and sluices of the Bruges canal there. The troops were landed, and did their work, but found themselves unable to regain the ships from the violence of the wind and the surf, and were surrounded and compelled to surrender. In the autumn of this year Admiral Duckworth sailed for Minorca, and landed eight hundred men, under Sir Charles Stuart, who readily made themselves masters of the island.
TWO:"He has caught a lioness and tricked her out in fashionable rags and taught her some capers, and now he thinks he has improved the animal," he said to himself, and raged inwardly, asking the intangible Fate, which was always opposing him, if there was not[Pg 216] enough little doll women in the world that such an one as Felipa must be whittled down to the size.
"Indeed, I am not joking," she assured him earnestly. "It is quite true. Ask any one. Only don't let them know it was I who wounded him. They have never so much as suspected it. Fortunately I thought of you and ran home all the way, and was in my tent before it occurred to any one to come for me." She burst into a low laugh at his countenance of wrath and dismay. "Oh! come, Jack dear, it is not so perfectly, unspeakably horrible after all. I was disobedient. But then I am so sorry and promise never, never to do it again."Cairness started for the salt lick, then changed his mind and his destination, and merely rode with Forbes around the parts of the ranch which were under more or less cultivation, and to one of the water troughs beneath a knot of live oaks in the direction of the foot-hills. So they returned to the home place earlier than they otherwise would have done, and that, too, by way of the spring-house.OLD NEWGATE.