A History of the Four Georges, Volume I | Page 7

if he would only consent to change his religion and become a Protestant. It was again and again pressed upon him by English adherents, and even by statesmen in power--by Oxford and by Bolingbroke--that if he could not actually become a Protestant he should at least pretend to become one, and give up all outward show of his devotion to the Catholic Church. James steadily and decisively refused to be guilty of any meanness so ignoble and detestable. His conduct in thus adhering to his convictions, even at {13} the cost of a throne, has been contrasted with that of Henry the Fourth, who declared Paris to be "well worth a mass!" But some injustice has been done to Henry the Fourth in regard to his conversion. Henry's great Protestant minister, Sully, urged him to become an open and professing Catholic, on the ground that he had always been a Catholic more or less consciously and in his heart. Sully gave Henry several evidences, drawn from his observation of Henry's own demeanor, to prove to him that his natural inclinations and the turn of his intellect always led him towards the Catholic faith, commenting shrewdly on the fact that he had seen Henry cross himself more than once on the field of battle in the presence of danger. Thus, according to Sully, Henry the Fourth, in professing himself a Catholic, would be only following the bent of his own natural inclinations. However that may be, it is still the fact that Henry the Fourth, by changing his profession of religion, succeeded in obtaining a crown, and that James the Pretender, by refusing to hear of such a change, lost his best chance of a throne.
What were Anne's own inclinations with regard to the succession? There cannot be much doubt as to the way her personal feelings went. There is a history of the reign of Queen Anne, written by Dr. Thomas Somerville, "one of His Majesty's Chaplains in Ordinary," and published in 1798, with a dedication "by permission" to the King. It is called on its title-page "The History of Great Britain during the Reign of Queen Anne, with a Dissertation Concerning the Danger of the Protestant Succession." Such an author, writing comparatively soon after the events, and in a book dedicated to the reigning king, was not likely to do any conscious injustice to the memory of Queen Anne, and was especially likely to take a fair view of the influence which her personal inclinations were calculated to have on the succession. Dr. Somerville declares with great justice that "mildness, timidity, and anxiety were constitutional ingredients in the temper" of Queen Anne. This very timidity, this very anxiety, {14} appears, according to Dr. Somerville's judgment, to have worked favorably for the Hanoverian succession. [Sidenote: 1714--James the Third] The Queen herself, by sentiment, and by what may be called a sort of superstition, leaned much towards the Stuarts. "The loss," says Dr. Somerville, "of all her children bore the aspect of an angry Providence adjusting punishment to the nature and quality of her offence." Her offence, of course, was the part she had taken in helping to dethrone her father. "Wounded in spirit, and prone to superstition, she naturally thought of the restitution of the crown to her brother as the only atonement she could make to the memory of her injured father." This feeling might have ripened into action with her but for that constitutional timidity and anxiety of which Somerville speaks. There would undoubtedly have been dangers, obvious to even the bravest or the most reckless, in an attempt just then to alter the succession; but Anne saw those dangers "in the most terrific form, and recoiled with horror from the sight." Moreover, she had a constitutional objection, as strong as that of Queen Elizabeth herself, to the presence of an intended successor near her throne. "She trembled," says Somerville, "at the idea of the presence of a successor, whoever he might be; and the residence of her own brother in England was not less dreadful to her than that of the electoral prince." But it is probable that had she lived longer she would have found herself constrained to put up with the presence either of one claimant or the other. Her ministers, whoever they might be, would surely have seen the imperative necessity of bringing over to England the man whom the Queen and they had determined to present to the English people as the destined heir of the throne. In such an event as that, and most assuredly if men like Bolingbroke had been in power, it may be taken for granted that the Queen would have preferred her own brother, a Stuart, to the Electoral Prince of Hanover. "What the consequence might have been,