n whispered their
sarcasms loud enough to call up the haughty blood of the Guelphs in
the cheeks of Mary of Modena. But the insensibility of James was of no
common kind. It had long been found proof against reason and against
pity. It now sustained a still harder trial, and was found proof even
against contempt, [719]

While he was enduring with ignominious fortitude the polite scorn of
the French aristocracy, and doing his best to weary out his benefactor's
patience and good breeding by repeating that this was the very moment
for an invasion of England, and that the whole island was impatiently
expecting its foreign deliverers, events were passing which signally
proved how little the banished oppressor understood the character of his
countrymen.

Tourville had, since the battle of Beachy Head, ranged the Channel
unopposed. On the twenty-first of July his masts were seen from the
rocks of Portland. On the twenty-second he anchored in the harbour
of Torbay, under the same heights which had, not many months before,
sheltered the armament of William. The French fleet, which now had
a considerable number of troops on board, consisted of a hundred and
eleven sail. The galleys, which formed a large part of this force,
resembled rather those ships with which Alcibiades and Lysander disputed
the sovereignty of the Aegean than those which contended at the Nile
and at Trafalgar. The galley was very long and very narrow, the deck
not more than two feet from the water edge. Each galley was propelled by
fifty or sixty huge oars, and each oar was tugged by five or six
slaves. The full complement of slaves to a vessel was three hundred and
thirty-six; the full complement of officers and soldiers a hundred and
fifty. Of the unhappy rowers some were criminals who had been justly
condemned to a life of hardship and danger; a few had been guilty only
of adhering obstinately to the Huguenot worship; the great majority
were purchased bondsmen, generally Turks and Moors. They were of course
always forming plans for massacring their tyrants and escaping from
servitude, and could be kept in order only by constant stripes and by
the frequent infliction of death in horrible forms. An Englishman, who
happened to fall in with about twelve hundred of these most miserable
and most desperate of human beings on their road from Marseilles to join
Tourville's squadron, heard them vowing that, if they came near a man
of war bearing the cross of Saint G