a leader. It
still remained with him to decide whether he would leave the road open
for the head to join the waiting body, and to bring Holland and
England, the two sea powers, under one rule. If he attacked Holland by
land, and sent his superior navy into the Channel, he might well keep
William in his own country; the more so as the English navy, beloved
and petted by the king, was likely to have more than the usual loyalty
of seamen to their chief. Faithful to the bias of his life, perhaps
unable to free himself from it, he turned toward the continent, and
September 24, 1688, declared war against Germany and moved his armies
toward the Rhine. William, overjoyed, saw removed the last obstacle to
his ambition. Delayed for some weeks by contrary winds, he finally
set sail from Holland on the 30th of October. More than five hundred
transports, with fifteen thousand troops, escorted by fifty
men-of-war, formed the expedition; and it is typical of its mingled
political and religious character, that the larger part of the army
officers were French Protestants who had been driven from France since
the last war, the commander-in-chief under William being the Huguenot
Schomberg, late a marshal of France. The first start was foiled by a
violent storm; but sailing again on the 10th of November, a fresh,
fair breeze carried the ships through the Straits and the Channel, and
William landed on the 15th at Torbay. Before the end of the year,
James had fled from his kingdom. On the 21st of the following April,
William and Mary were proclaimed sovereigns of Great Britain, and
England and Holland were united for the war, which Louis had declared
against the United Provinces as soon as he heard of William's
invasion. During all the weeks that the expedition was preparing and
delayed, the French ambassador at the Hague and the minister of the
navy were praying the king to stop it with his great sea power,--a
power so great that the French fleet in the first years of the war
outnumbered those of England and Holland combined; but Louis would
not. Blindness seems to have struck the kings of England and France
alike; for James, amid all his apprehensions, steadily refused any
assistance from the French fleet, trusting to the fidelity of the
English seamen to his person, although his attempts to have Mass
celebrated on board the ships had occasioned an uproar and mutiny
which nearly ended in the crews throwing the priests overboard.

France