ign, otherwise
relatively mild, pressing for the fleet was carried on with extreme
violence--a gloomy evidence that the Englishman is a subject rather than
a citizen. For centuries England suffered under that process of tyranny
which gave the lie to all the old charters of freedom, and out of which
France especially gathered a cause of triumph and indignation. What in
some degree diminishes the triumph is, that while sailors were pressed
in England, soldiers were pressed in France. In every great town of
France, any able-bodied man, going through the streets on his business,
was liable to be shoved by the crimps into a house called the oven.
There he was shut up with others in the same plight; those fit for
service were picked out, and the recruiters sold them to the officers.
In 1695 there were thirty of these ovens in Paris.

The laws against Ireland, emanating from Queen Anne, were atrocious.
Anne was born in 1664, two years before the great fire of London, on
which the astrologers (there were some left, and Louis XIV. was born
with the assistance of an astrologer, and swaddled in a horoscope)
predicted that, being the elder sister of fire, she would be queen. And
so she was, thanks to astrology and the revolution of 1688. She had the
humiliation of having only Gilbert, Archbishop of Canterbury, for
godfather. To be godchild of the Pope was no longer possible in England.
A mere primate is but a poor sort of godfather. Anne had to put up with
one, however. It was her own fault. Why was she a Protestant?

Denmark had paid for her virginity (_virginitas empta_, as the old
charters expressed it) by a dowry of L6,250 a year, secured on the
bailiwick of Wardinburg and the island of Fehmarn. Anne followed,
without conviction, and by routine, the traditions of William. The
English under that royalty born of a revolution possessed as much
liberty as they could lay hands on between the Tower of London, into
which they put orators, and the pillory, into which they put writers.
Anne spoke a little Danish in her private chats with her husband, and a
little French in her private chats with Bolingbroke. Wretched gibberish;
but the height of English fashion, especially at court, was to talk
French. There was never a _bon mot_ but in French. Anne paid a deal of
attention to her coins, especially to copper coins, which are the low
and popular ones; she wanted to cut a great figure on them. Six
farthings were struck during her reign.