Even when the wind lulled,and it did sail,it was dispersed by a storm,and was obliged to put back to refit.At last,on the first of November,one thousand six hundred and eighty-eight,the Protestant east wind,as it was long called,began to blow;and on the third,the people of Dover and the people of Calais saw a fleet twenty miles long sailing gallantly by,between the two places.On Monday,the fifth,it anchored at Torbay in Devonshire,and the Prince,with a splendid retinue of officers and men,marched into Exeter.But the people in that western part of the country had suffered so much in The Bloody Assize,that they had lost heart.
Few people joined him;and he began to think of returning,and publishing the invitation he had received from those lords,as his justification for having come at all.At this crisis,some of the gentry joined him;the Royal army began to falter;an engagement was signed,by which all who set their hand to it declared that they would support one another in defence of the laws and liberties of the three Kingdoms,of the Protestant religion,and of the Prince of Orange.From that time,the cause received no check;the greatest towns in England began,one after another,to declare for the Prince;and he knew that it was all safe with him when the University of Oxford offered to melt down its plate,if he wanted any money.
By this time the King was running about in a pitiable way,touching people for the King's evil in one place,reviewing his troops in another,and bleeding from the nose in a third.The young Prince was sent to Portsmouth,Father Petre went off like a shot to France,and there was a general and swift dispersal of all the priests and friars.One after another,the King's most important officers and friends deserted him and went over to the Prince.In the night,his daughter Anne fled from Whitehall Palace;and the Bishop of London,who had once been a soldier,rode before her with a drawn sword in his hand,and pistols at his saddle.'God help me,'cried the miserable King:'my very children have forsaken me!'In his wildness,after debating with such lords as were in London,whether he should or should not call a Parliament,and after naming three of them to negotiate with the Prince,he resolved to fly to France.He had the little Prince of Wales brought back from Portsmouth;and the child and the Queen crossed the river to Lambeth in an open boat,on a miserable wet night,and got safely away.This was on the night of the ninth of December.
At one o'clock on the morning of the eleventh,the King,who had,in the meantime,received a letter from the Prince of Orange,stating his objects,got out of bed,told LORD NORTHUMBERLAND who lay in his room not to open the door until the usual hour in the morning,and went down the back stairs (the same,I suppose,by which the priest in the wig and gown had come up to his brother)and crossed the river in a small boat:sinking the great seal of England by the way.Horses having been provided,he rode,accompanied by SIR EDWARD HALES,to Feversham,where he embarked in a Custom House Hoy.The master of this Hoy,wanting more ballast,ran into the Isle of Sheppy to get it,where the fishermen and smugglers crowded about the boat,and informed the King of their suspicions that he was a 'hatchet-faced Jesuit.'As they took his money and would not let him go,he told them who he was,and that the Prince of Orange wanted to take his life;and he began to scream for a boat-and then to cry,because he had lost a piece of wood on his ride which he called a fragment of Our Saviour's cross.