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The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 1 by
Thomas Babington Macaulay.
THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND
FROM THE
ACCESSION OF JAMES II.
BY THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY.
VOL. I.
PHILADELPHIA
PORTER & COATES
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
Introduction
Britain under the Romans
Britain under the Saxons
Conversion of the Saxons to Christianity
Danish Invasions; The Normans
The Norman Conquest
Separation of England and Normandy
Amalgamation of Races
English Conquests on the Continent
Wars of the Roses
Extinction of Villenage
Beneficial Operation of the Roman Catholic Religion
The early English Polity often misrepresented, and why?
Nature of the Limited Monarchies of the Middle Ages
Prerogatives of the early English Kings
Limitations of the Prerogative
Resistance an ordinary Check on Tyranny in the Middle Ages
Peculiar Character of the English Aristocracy
Government of the Tudors
Limited Monarchies of the Middle Ages generally turned into
Absolute Monarchies
The English Monarchy a singular Exception
The Reformation and its Effects
Origin of the Church of England
Her peculiar Character7
Relation in which she stood to the Crown
The Puritans
Their Republican Spirit
No systematic parliamentary Opposition offered to the Government
of Elizabeth
Question of the Monopolies
Scotland and Ireland become Parts of the same Empire with England
Diminution of the Importance of England after the Accession of
James I
Doctrine of Divine Right
The Separation between the Church and the Puritans becomes wider
Accession and Character of Charles I
Tactics of the Opposition in the House of Commons
Petition of Right
Petition of Right violated; Character and Designs of Wentworth
Character of Laud
Star Chamber and High Commission
Ship-Money
Resistance to the Liturgy in Scotland
A Parliament called and dissolved
The Long Parliament
First Appearance of the Two great English Parties
The Remonstrance
Impeachment of the Five Members
Departure of Charles from London
Commencement of the Civil War
Successes of the Royalists
Rise of the Independents
Oliver Cromwell
Selfdenying Ordinance; Victory of the Parliament
Domination and Character of the Army
Rising against the Military Government suppressed
Proceedings against the King
His Execution
Subjugation of Ireland and Scotland
Expulsion of the Long Parliament
The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell
Oliver succeeded by Richard
Fall of Richard and Revival of the Long Parliament
Second Expulsion of the Long Parliament
The Army of Scotland marches into England
Monk declares for a Free Parliament
General Election of 1660
The Restoration
CHAPTER II.
Conduct of those who restored the House of Stuart unjustly
censured
Abolition of Tenures by Knight Service; Disbandment of the Army
Disputes between the Roundheads and Cavaliers renewed
Religious Dissension
Unpopularity of the Puritans
Character of Charles II
Character of the Duke of York and Earl of Clarendon
General Election of 1661
Violence of the Cavaliers in the new Parliament
Persecution of the Puritans
Zeal of the Church for Hereditary Monarchy
Change in the Morals of the Community
Profligacy of Politicians
State of Scotland
State of Ireland
The Government become unpopular in England
War with the Dutch
Opposition in the House of Commons
Fall of Clarendon
State of European Politics, and Ascendancy of France
Character of Lewis XIV
The Triple Alliance
The Country Party
Connection between Charles II. and France
Views of Lewis with respect to England
Treaty of Dover
Nature of the English Cabinet
The Cabal
Shutting of the Exchequer
War with the United Provinces, and their extreme Danger
William, Prince of Orange
Meeting of the Parliament; Declaration of Indulgence
It is cancelled, and the Test Act passed
The Cabal dissolved
Peace with the United Provinces; Administration of Danby
Embarrassing Situation of the Country Party
Dealings of that Party with the French Embassy
Peace of Nimeguen
Violent Discontents in England
Fall of Danby; the Popish Plot
Violence of the new House of Commons
Temple's Plan of Government
Character of Halifax
Character of Sunderland
Prorogation of the Parliament; Habeas Corpus Act; Second General
Election of 1679
Popularity of Monmouth
Lawrence Hyde
Sidney Godolphin
Violence of Factions on the Subject of the Exclusion Bill
Names of Whig and Tory
Meeting of Parliament; The Exclusion Bill passes the Commons;
Exclusion Bill rejected by the Lords
Execution of Stafford; General Election of 1681
Parliament held at Oxford, and dissolved
Tory Reaction
Persecution of the Whigs
Charter of the City confiscated; Whig Conspiracies
Detection of the Whig Conspiracies
Severity of the Government; Seizure of Charters
Influence of the Duke of York
He is opposed by Halifax
Lord Guildford
Policy of Lewis
State of Factions in the Court of Charles at the time of his
Death
CHAPTER III.
Great Change in the State of England since 1685
Population of England in 1685
Increase of Population greater in the North than in the South
Revenue in 1685
Military System
The Navy
The Ordnance
Noneffective Charge; Charge of Civil Government
Great Gains of Ministers and Courtiers
State of Agriculture5
Mineral Wealth of the Country
Increase of Rent
The Country Gentlemen
The Clergy
The Yeomanry; Growth of the Towns; Bristol
Norwich
Other Country Towns
Manchester; Leeds; Sheffield
Birmingham
Liverpool
Watering-places; Cheltenham; Brighton; Buxton; Tunbridge Wells
Bath
London
The City
Fashionable Part of the Capital
Lighting of London
Police of London
Whitefriars; The Court
The Coffee Houses
Difficulty of Travelling
Badness of the Roads
Stage Coaches
Highwaymen
Inns
Post Office
Newspapers
News-letters
The Observator
Scarcity of Books in Country Places; Female Education
Literary Attainments of Gentlemen
Influence of French Literature
Immorality of the Polite Literature of England
State of Science in England
State of the Fine Arts
State of the Common People; Agricultural Wages
Wages of Manufacturers
Labour of Children in Factories
Wages of different Classes of Artisans
Number of Paupers
Benefits derived by the Common People from the Progress of
Civilisation
Delusion which leads Men to overrate the Happiness of preceding
Generations
CHAPTER IV.
Death of Charles II
Suspicions of Poison
Speech of James II. to the Privy Council
James proclaimed
State of the Administration
New Arrangements
Sir George Jeffreys
The Revenue collected without an Act of Parliament
A Parliament called
Transactions between James and the French King
Churchill sent Ambassador to France; His History
Feelings of the Continental Governments towards England
Policy of the Court of Rome
Struggle in the Mind of James; Fluctuations in his Policy
Public Celebration of the Roman Catholic Rites in the Palace
His Coronation
Enthusiasm of the Tories; Addresses
The Elections
Proceedings against Oates
Proceedings against Dangerfield
Proceedings against Baxter
Meeting of the Parliament of Scotland
Feeling of James towards the Puritans
Cruel Treatment of the Scotch Covenanters
Feeling of James towards the Quakers
William Penn
Peculiar Favour shown to Roman Catholics and Quakers
Meeting of the English Parliament; Trevor chosen Speaker;
Character of Seymour
The King's Speech to the Parliament
Debate in the Commons; Speech of Seymour
The Revenue voted; Proceedings of the Commons concerning Religion
Additional Taxes voted; Sir Dudley North
Proceedings of the Lords
Bill for reversing the Attainder of Stafford
CHAPTER V.
Whig Refugees on the Continent
Their Correspondents in England
Characters of the leading Refugees; Ayloffe; Wade
Goodenough; Rumbold
Lord Grey
Monmouth
Ferguson
Scotch Refugees; Earl of Argyle
Sir Patrick Hume; Sir John Cochrane; Fletcher of Saltoun
Unreasonable Conduct of the Scotch Refugees
Arrangement for an Attempt on England and Scotland
John Locke
Preparations made by Government for the Defence of Scotland
Conversation of James with the Dutch Ambassadors; Ineffectual
Attempts to prevent Argyle from sailing
Departure of Argyle from Holland; He lands in Scotland
His Disputes with his Followers
Temper of the Scotch Nation
Argyle's Forces dispersed
Argyle a Prisoner
His Execution.
Execution of Rumbold
Death of Ayloffe
Devastation of Argyleshire
Ineffectual Attempts to prevent Monmouth from leaving Holland
His Arrival at Lyme
His Declaration
His Popularity in the West of England
Encounter of the Rebels with the Militia at Bridport
Encounter of the Rebels with the Militia at Axminster; News of
the Rebellion carried to London; Loyalty of the Parliament
Reception of Monmouth at Taunton
He takes the Title of King
His Reception at Bridgewater
Preparations of the Government to oppose him
His Design on Bristol
He relinquishes that Design
Skirmish at Philip's Norton; Despondence of Monmouth
He returns to Bridgewater; The Royal Army encamps at Sedgemoor
Battle of Sedgemoor
Pursuit of the Rebels
Military Executions; Flight of Monmouth
His Capture
His Letter to the King; He is carried to London
His Interview with the King
His Execution
His Memory cherished by the Common People
Cruelties of the Soldiers in the West; Kirke
Jeffreys sets out on the Western Circuit
Trial of Alice Lisle
The Bloody Assizes
Abraham Holmes
Christopher Battiseombe; The Hewlings
Punishment of Tutchin
Rebels Transported
Confiscation and Extortion
Rapacity of the Queen and her Ladies
Grey; Cochrane; Storey
Wade, Goodenough, and Ferguson
Jeffreys made Lord Chancellor
Trial and Execution of Cornish
Trials and Executions of Fernley and Elizabeth Gaunt
Trial and Execution of Bateman
Persecution of the Protestant Dissenters
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER I.
I PURPOSE to write the history of England from the accession of
King James the Second down to a time which is within the memory
of men still living. I shall recount the errors which, in a few
months, alienated a loyal gentry and priesthood from the House of
Stuart. I shall trace the course of that revolution which
terminated the long struggle between our sovereigns and their
parliaments, and bound up together the rights of the people and
the title of the reigning dynasty. I shall relate how the new
settlement was, during many troubled years, successfully defended
against foreign and domestic enemies; how, under that settlement,
the authority of law and the security of property were found to
be compatible with a liberty of discussion and of individual
action never before known; how, from the auspicious union of
order and freedom, sprang a prosperity of which the annals of
human affairs had furnished no example; how our country, from a
state of ignominious vassalage, rapidly rose to the place of
umpire among European powers; how her opulence and her martial
glory grew together; how, by wise and resolute good faith, was
gradually established a public credit fruitful of marvels which
to the statesmen of any former age would have seemed incredible;
how a gigantic commerce gave birth to a maritime power, compared
with which every other maritime power, ancient or modern, sinks
into insignificance; how Scotland, after ages of enmity, was at
length united to England, not merely by legal bonds, but by
indissoluble ties of interest and affection; how, in America, the
British colonies rapidly became far mightier and wealthier than
the realms which Cortes and Pizarro had added to the dominions of
Charles the Fifth; how in Asia, British adventurers founded an
empire not less splendid and more durable than that of Alexander.
Nor will it be less my duty faithfully to record disasters
mingled with triumphs, and great national crimes and follies far
more humiliating than any disaster. It will be seen that even
what we justly account our chief blessings were not without
alloy. It will be seen that the system which effectually secured
our liberties against the encroachments of kingly power gave
birth to a new class of abuses from which absolute monarchies are
exempt. It will be seen that, in consequence partly of unwise
interference, and partly of unwise neglect, the increase of
wealth and the extension of trade produced, together with immense
good, some evils from which poor and rude societies are free. It
will be seen how, in two important dependencies of the crown,
wrong was followed by just retribution; how imprudence and
obstinacy broke the ties which bound the North American colonies
to the parent state; how Ireland, cursed by the domination of
race over race, and of religion over religion, remained indeed a
member of the empire, but a withered and distorted member, adding
no strength to the body politic, and reproachfully pointed at by
all who feared or envied the greatness of England.
Yet, unless I greatly deceive myself, the general effect of this
chequered narrative will be to excite thankfulness in all
religious minds, and hope in the breasts of all patriots. For the
history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is
eminently the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual
improvement. Those who compare the age on which their lot has
fallen with a golden age which exists only in their imagination
may talk of degeneracy and decay: but no man who is correctly
informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or
desponding view of the present.
I should very imperfectly execute the task which I have
undertaken if I were merely to treat of battles and sieges, of
the rise and fall of administrations, of intrigues in the palace,
and of debates in the parliament. It will be my endeavour to
relate the history of the people as well as the history of the
government, to trace the progress of useful and ornamental arts,
to describe the rise of religious sects and the changes of
literary taste, to portray the manners of successive generations
and not to pass by with neglect even the revolutions which have
taken place in dress, furniture, repasts, and public amusements.
I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below
the dignity of history, if I can succeed in placing before the
English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of
their ancestors.
The events which I propose to relate form only a single act of a
great and eventful drama extending through ages, and must be very
imperfectly understood unless the plot of the preceding acts be
well known. I shall therefore introduce my narrative by a slight
sketch of the history of our country from the earliest times. I
shall pass very rapidly over many centuries: but I shall dwell at
some length on the vicissitudes of that contest which the
administration of King James the Second brought to a decisive
crisis.1
Nothing in the early existence of Britain indicated the greatness
which she was destined to attain. Her inhabitants when first they
became known to the Tyrian mariners, were little superior to the
natives of the Sandwich Islands. She was subjugated by the Roman
arms; but she received only a faint tincture of Roman arts and
letters. Of the western provinces which obeyed the Caesars, she
was the last that was conquered, and the first that was flung
away. No magnificent remains of Latin porches and aqueducts are
to be found in Britain. No writer of British birth is reckoned
among the masters of Latin poetry and eloquence. It is not
probable that the islanders were at any time generally familiar
with the tongue of their Italian rulers. From the Atlantic to the
vicinity of the Rhine the Latin has, during many centuries, been
predominant. It drove out the Celtic; it was not driven out by
the Teutonic; and it is at this day the basis of the French,
Spanish and Portuguese languages. In our island the Latin appears
never to have superseded the old Gaelic speech, and could not
stand its ground against the German.
The scanty and superficial civilisation which the Britons had
derived from their southern masters was effaced by the calamities
of the fifth century. In the continental kingdoms into which the
Roman empire was then dissolved, the conquerors learned much from
the conquered race. In Britain the conquered race became as
barbarous as the conquerors.
All the chiefs who founded Teutonic dynasties in the continental
provinces of the Roman empire, Alaric, Theodoric, Clovis, Alboin,
were zealous Christians. The followers of Ida and Cerdic, on the
other hand, brought to their settlements in Britain all the
superstitions of the Elbe. While the German princes who reigned
at Paris, Toledo, Arles, and Ravenna listened with reverence to
the instructions of bishops, adored the relics of martyrs, and
took part eagerly in disputes touching the Nicene theology, the
rulers of Wessex and Mercia were still performing savage rites in
the temples of Thor and Woden.
The continental kingdoms which had risen on the ruins of the
Western Empire kept up some intercourse with those eastern
provinces where the ancient civilisation, though slowly fading
away under the influence of misgovernment, might still astonish
and instruct barbarians, where the court still exhibited the
splendour of Diocletian and Constantine, where the public
buildings were still adorned with the sculptures of Polycletus
and the paintings of Apelles, and where laborious pedants,
themselves destitute of taste, sense, and spirit, could still
read and interpret the masterpieces of Sophocles, of Demosthenes,
and of Plato. From this communion Britain was cut off. Her shores
were, to the polished race which dwelt by the Bosphorus, objects
of a mysterious horror, such as that with which the Ionians of
the age of Homer had regarded the Straits of Scylla and the city
of the Laestrygonian cannibals. There was one province of our
island in which, as Procopius had been told, the ground was
covered with serpents, and the air was such that no man could
inhale it and live. To this desolate region the spirits of the
departed were ferried over from the land of the Franks at
midnight. A strange race of fishermen performed the ghastly
office. The speech of the dead was distinctly heard by the
boatmen, their weight made the keel sink deep in the water; but
their forms were invisible to mortal eye. Such were the marvels
which an able historian, the contemporary of Belisarius, of
Simplicius, and of Tribonian, gravely related in the rich and
polite Constantinople, touching the country in which the founder
of Constantinople had assumed the imperial purple. Concerning all
the other provinces of the Western Empire we have continuous
information. It is only in Britain that an age of fable
completely separates two ages of truth. Odoacer and Totila, Euric
and Thrasimund, Clovis, Fredegunda, and Brunechild, are
historical men and women. But Hengist and Horsa, Vortigern and
Rowena, Arthur and Mordred are mythical persons, whose very
existence may be questioned, and whose adventures must be classed
with those of Hercules and Romulus
At length the darkness begins to break; and the country which had
been lost to view as Britain reappears as England. The conversion
of the Saxon colonists to Christianity was the first of a long
series of salutary revolutions. It is true that the Church had
been deeply corrupted both by that superstition and by that
philosophy against which she had long contended, and over which
she had at last triumphed. She had given a too easy admission to
doctrines borrowed from the ancient schools, and to rites
borrowed from the ancient temples. Roman policy and Gothic
ignorance, Grecian ingenuity and Syrian asceticism, had
contributed to deprave her. Yet she retained enough of the
sublime theology and benevolent morality of her earlier days to
elevate many intellects, and to purify many hearts. Some things
also which at a later period were justly regarded as among her
chief blemishes were, in the seventh century, and long
afterwards, among her chief merits. That the sacerdotal order
should encroach on the functions of the civil magistrate would,
in our time, be a great evil. But that which in an age of good
government is an evil may, in an ago of grossly bad government,
be a blessing. It is better that mankind should be governed by
wise laws well administered, and by an enlightened public
opinion, than by priestcraft: but it is better that men should be
governed by priestcraft than by brute violence, by such a prelate
as Dunstan than by such a warrior as Penda. A society sunk in
ignorance, and ruled by mere physical force, has great reason to
rejoice when a class, of which the influence is intellectual and
moral, rises to ascendancy. Such a class will doubtless abuse its
power: but mental power, even when abused, is still a nobler and
better power than that which consists merely in corporeal
strength. We read in our Saxon chronicles of tyrants, who, when
at the height of greatness, were smitten with remorse, who
abhorred the pleasures and dignities which they had purchased by
guilt, who abdicated their crowns, and who sought to atone for
their offences by cruel penances and incessant prayers. These
stories have drawn forth bitter expressions of contempt from some
writers who, while they boasted of liberality, were in truth as
narrow-minded as any monk of the dark ages, and whose habit was
to apply to all events in the history of the world the standard
received in the Parisian society of the eighteenth century. Yet
surely a system which, however deformed by superstition,
introduced strong moral restraints into communities previously
governed only by vigour of muscle and by audacity of spirit, a
system which taught the fiercest and mightiest ruler that he was,
like his meanest bondman, a responsible being, might have seemed
to deserve a more respectful mention from philosophers and
philanthropists.
The same observations will apply to the contempt with which, in
the last century, it was fashionable to speak of the pilgrimages,
the sanctuaries, the crusades, and the monastic institutions of
the middle ages. In times when men were scarcely ever induced to
travel by liberal curiosity, or by the pursuit of gain, it was
better that the rude inhabitant of the North should visit Italy
and the East as a pilgrim, than that he should never see anything
but those squalid cabins and uncleared woods amidst which he was
born. In times when life and when female honour were exposed to
daily risk from tyrants and marauders, it was better that the
precinct of a shrine should be regarded with an irrational awe,
than that there should be no refuge inaccessible to cruelty and
licentiousness. In times when statesmen were incapable of forming
extensive political combinations, it was better that the
Christian nations should be roused and united for the recovery of
the Holy Sepulchre, than that they should, one by one, be
overwhelmed by the Mahometan power. Whatever reproach may, at a
later period, have been justly thrown on the indolence and luxury
of religious orders, it was surely good that, in an age of
ignorance and violence, there should be quiet cloisters and
gardens, in which the arts of peace could be safely cultivated,
in which gentle and contemplative natures could find an asylum,
in which one brother could employ himself in transcribing the
Æneid of Virgil, and another in meditating the Analytics of
Aristotle, in which he who had a genius for art might illuminate
a martyrology or carve a crucifix, and in which he who had a turn
for natural philosophy might make experiments on the properties
of plants and minerals. Had not such retreats been scattered here
and there, among the huts of a miserable peasantry, and the
castles of a ferocious aristocracy, European society would have
consisted merely of beasts of burden and beasts of prey. The
Church has many times been compared by divines to the ark of
which we read in the Book of Genesis: but never was the
resemblance more perfect than during that evil time when she
alone rode, amidst darkness and tempest, on the deluge beneath
which all the great works of ancient power and wisdom lay
entombed, bearing within her that feeble germ from which a Second
and more glorious civilisation was to spring.
Even the spiritual supremacy arrogated by the Pope was, in the
dark ages, productive of far more good than evil. Its effect was
to unite the nations of Western Europe in one great commonwealth.
What the Olympian chariot course and the Pythian oracle were to
all the Greek cities, from Trebizond to Marseilles, Rome and her
Bishop were to all Christians of the Latin communion, from
Calabria to the Hebrides. Thus grew up sentiments of enlarged
benevolence. Races separated from each other by seas and
mountains acknowledged a fraternal tie and a common code of
public law. Even in war, the cruelty of the conqueror was not
seldom mitigated by the recollection that he and his vanquished
enemies were all members of one great federation.
Into this federation our Saxon ancestors were now admitted. A
regular communication was opened between our shores and that part
of Europe in which the traces of ancient power and policy were
yet discernible. Many noble monuments which have since been
destroyed or defaced still retained their pristine magnificence;
and travellers, to whom Livy and Sallust were unintelligible,
might gain from the Roman aqueducts and temples some faint notion
of Roman history. The dome of Agrippa, still glittering with
bronze, the mausoleum of Adrian, not yet deprived of its columns
and statues, the Flavian amphitheatre, not yet degraded into a
quarry, told to the rude English pilgrims some part of the story
of that great civilised world which had passed away. The
islanders returned, with awe deeply impressed on their half
opened minds, and told the wondering inhabitants of the hovels of
London and York that, near the grave of Saint Peter, a mighty
race, now extinct, had piled up buildings which would never be
dissolved till the judgment day. Learning followed in the train
of Christianity. The poetry and eloquence of the Augustan age was
assiduously studied in Mercian and Northumbrian monasteries. The
names of Bede and Alcuin were justly celebrated throughout
Europe. Such was the state of our country when, in the ninth
century, began the last great migration of the northern
barbarians
During many years Denmark and Scandinavia continued to pour forth
innumerable pirates, distinguished by strength, by valour, by
merciless ferocity, and by hatred of the Christian name. No
country suffered so much from these invaders as England. Her
coast lay near to the ports whence they sailed; nor was any shire
so far distant from the sea as to be secure from attack. The same
atrocities which had attended the victory of the Saxon over the
Celt were now, after the lapse of ages, suffered by the Saxon at
the hand of the Dane. Civilization,--just as it began to rise,
was met by this blow, and sank down once more. Large colonies of
adventurers from the Baltic established themselves on the eastern
shores of our island, spread gradually westward, and, supported
by constant reinforcements from beyond the sea, aspired to the
dominion of the whole realm. The struggle between the two fierce
Teutonic breeds lasted through six generations. Each was
alternately paramount. Cruel massacres followed by cruel
retribution, provinces wasted, convents plundered, and cities
rased to the ground, make up the greater part of the history of
those evil days. At length the North ceased to send forth a
constant stream of fresh depredators; and from that time the
mutual aversion of the races began to subside. Intermarriage
became frequent. The Danes learned the religion of the Saxons;
and thus one cause of deadly animosity was removed. The Danish
and Saxon tongues, both dialects of one widespread language, were
blended together. But the distinction between the two nations was
by no means effaced, when an event took place which prostrated
both, in common slavery and degradation, at the feet of a third
people.
The Normans were then the foremost race of Christendom. Their
valour and ferocity had made them conspicuous among the rovers
whom Scandinavia had sent forth to ravage Western Europe. Their
sails were long the terror of both coasts of the Channel. Their
arms were repeatedly carried far into the heart of: the
Carlovingian empire, and were victorious under the walls of
Maestricht and Paris. At length one of the feeble heirs of
Charlemagne ceded to the strangers a fertile province, watered by
a noble river, and contiguous to the sea which was their
favourite element. In that province they founded a mighty state,
which gradually extended its influence over the neighbouring
principalities of Britanny and Maine. Without laying aside that
dauntless valour which had been the terror of every land from the
Elbe to the Pyrenees, the Normans rapidly acquired all, and more
than all, the knowledge and refinement which they found in the
country where they settled. Their courage secured their territory
against foreign invasion. They established internal order, such
as had long been unknown in the Frank empire. They embraced
Christianity; and with Christianity they learned a great part of
what the clergy had to teach. They abandoned their native speech,
and adopted the French tongue, in which the Latin was the
predominant element. They speedily raised their new language to a
dignity and importance which it had never before possessed. They
found it a barbarous jargon; they fixed it in writing; and they
employed it in legislation, in poetry, and in romance. They
renounced that brutal intemperance to which all the other
branches of the great German family were too much inclined. The
polite luxury of the Norman presented a striking contrast to the
coarse voracity and drunkenness of his Saxon and Danish
neighbours. He loved to display his magnificence, not in huge
piles of food and hogsheads of strong drink, but in large and
stately edifices, rich armour, gallant horses, choice falcons,
well ordered tournaments, banquets delicate rather than abundant,
and wines remarkable rather for their exquisite flavour than for
their intoxicating power. That chivalrous spirit, which has
exercised so powerful an influence on the politics, morals, and
manners of all the European nations, was found in the highest
exaltation among the Norman nobles. Those nobles were
distinguished by their graceful bearing and insinuating address.
They were distinguished also by their skill in negotiation, and
by a natural eloquence which they assiduously cultivated. It was
the boast of one of their historians that the Norman gentlemen
were orators from the cradle. But their chief fame was derived
from their military exploits. Every country, from the Atlantic
Ocean to the Dead Sea, witnessed the prodigies of their
discipline and valour. One Norman knight, at the head of a
handful of warriors, scattered the Celts of Connaught. Another
founded the monarchy of the Two Sicilies, and saw the emperors
both of the East and of the West fly before his arms. A third,
the Ulysses of the first crusade, was invested by his fellow
soldiers with the sovereignty of Antioch; and a fourth, the
Tancred whose name lives in the great poem of Tasso, was
celebrated through Christendom as the bravest and most generous
of the deliverers of the Holy Sepulchre.
The vicinity of so remarkable a people early began to produce an
effect on the public mind of England. Before the Conquest,
English princes received their education in Normandy. English
sees and English estates were bestowed on Normans. The French of
Normandy was familiarly spoken in the palace of Westminster. The
court of Rouen seems to have been to the court of Edward the
Confessor what the court of Versailles long afterwards was to the
court of Charles the Second.
The battle of Hastings, and the events which followed it, not
only placed a Duke of Normandy on the English throne, but gave up
the whole population of England to the tyranny of the Norman
race. The subjugation of a nation by a nation has seldom, even in
Asia, been more complete. The country was portioned out among the
captains of the invaders. Strong military institutions, closely
connected with the institution of property, enabled the foreign
conquerors to oppress the children of the soil. A cruel penal
code, cruelly enforced, guarded the privileges, and even the
sports, of the alien tyrants. Yet the subject race, though beaten
down and trodden underfoot, still made its sting felt. Some bold
men, the favourite heroes of our oldest ballads, betook
themselves to the woods, and there, in defiance of curfew laws
and forest laws, waged a predatory war against their oppressors.
Assassination was an event of daily occurrence. Many Normans
suddenly disappeared leaving no trace. The corpses of many were
found bearing the marks of violence. Death by torture was
denounced against the murderers, and strict search was made for
them, but generally in vain; for the whole nation was in a
conspiracy to screen them. It was at length thought necessary to
lay a heavy fine on every Hundred in which a person of French
extraction should be found slain; and this regulation was
followed up by another regulation, providing that every person
who was found slain should be supposed to be a Frenchman, unless
he was proved to be a Saxon.
During the century and a half which followed the Conquest, there
is, to speak strictly, no English history. The French Kings of
England rose, indeed, to an eminence which was the wonder and
dread of all neighbouring nations. They conquered Ireland. They
received the homage of Scotland. By their valour, by their
policy, by their fortunate matrimonial alliances, they became far
more popular on the Continent than their liege lords the Kings of
France. Asia, as well as Europe, was dazzled by the power and
glory of our tyrants. Arabian chroniclers recorded with unwilling
admiration the fall of Acre, the defence of Joppa, and the
victorious march to Ascalon; and Arabian mothers long awed their
infants to silence with the name of the lionhearted Plantagenet.
At one time it seemed that the line of Hugh Capet was about to
end as the Merovingian and Carlovingian lines had ended, and that
a single great monarchy would spread from the Orkneys to the
Pyrenees. So strong an association is established in most minds
between the greatness of a sovereign and the greatness of the
nation which he rules, that almost every historian of England has
expatiated with a sentiment of exultation on the power and
splendour of her foreign masters, and has lamented the decay of
that power and splendour as a calamity to our country. This is,
in truth, as absurd as it would be in a Haytian negro of our time
to dwell with national pride on the greatness of Lewis the
Fourteenth, and to speak of Blenheim and Ramilies with patriotic
regret and shame. The Conqueror and his descendants to the fourth
generation were not Englishmen: most of them were born in France:
they spent the greater part of their lives in France: their
ordinary speech was French: almost every high office in their
gift was filled by a Frenchman: every acquisition which they made
on the Continent estranged them more and more from the population
of our island. One of the ablest among them indeed attempted to
win the hearts of his English subjects by espousing an English
princess. But, by many of his barons, this marriage was regarded
as a marriage between a white planter and a quadroon girl would
now be regarded in Virginia. In history he is known by the
honourable surname of Beauclerc; but, in his own time, his own
countrymen called him by a Saxon nickname, in contemptuous
allusion to his Saxon connection.
Had the Plantagenets, as at one time seemed likely, succeeded in
uniting all France under their government, it is probable that
England would never have had an independent existence. Her
princes, her lords, her prelates, would have been men differing
in race and language from the artisans and the tillers of the
earth. The revenues of her great proprietors would have been
spent in festivities and diversions on the banks of the Seine.
The noble language of Milton and Burke would have remained a
rustic dialect, without a literature, a fixed grammar, or a fixed
orthography, and would have been contemptuously abandoned to the
use of boors. No man of English extraction would have risen to
eminence, except by becoming in speech and habits a Frenchman.
England owes her escape from such calamities to an event which
her historians have generally represented as disastrous. Her
interest was so directly opposed to the interests of her rulers
that she had no hope but in their errors and misfortunes. The
talents and even the virtues of her first six French Kings were a
curse to her. The follies and vices of the seventh were her
salvation. Had John inherited the great qualities of his father,
of Henry Beauclerc, or of the Conqueror, nay, had he even
possessed the martial courage of Stephen or of Richard, and had
the King of France at the same time been as incapable as all the
other successors of Hugh Capet had been, the House of Plantagenet
must have risen to unrivalled ascendancy in Europe. But, just at
this conjuncture, France, for the first time since the death of
Charlemagne, was governed by a prince of great firmness and
ability. On the other hand England, which, since the battle of
Hastings, had been ruled generally by wise statesmen, always by
brave soldiers, fell under the dominion of a trifler and a
coward. From that moment her prospects brightened. John was
driven from Normandy. The Norman nobles were compelled to make
their election between the island and the continent. Shut up by
the sea with the people whom they had hitherto oppressed and
despised, they gradually came to regard England as their country,
and the English as their countrymen. The two races, so long
hostile, soon found that they had common interests and common
enemies. Both were alike aggrieved by the tyranny of a bad king.
Both were alike indignant at the favour shown by the court to the
natives of Poitou and Aquitaine. The great grandsons of those who
had fought under William and the great grandsons of those who had
fought under Harold began to draw near to each other in
friendship; and the first pledge of their reconciliation was the
Great Charter, won by their united exertions, and framed for
their common benefit.
Here commences the history of the English nation. The history of
the preceding events is the history of wrongs inflicted and
sustained by various tribes, which indeed all dwelt on English
ground, but which regarded each other with aversion such as has
scarcely ever existed between communities separated by physical
barriers. For even the mutual animosity of countries at war with
each other is languid when compared with the animosity of nations
which, morally separated, are yet locally intermingled. In no
country has the enmity of race been carried farther than in
England. In no country has that enmity been more completely
effaced. The stages of the process by which the hostile elements
were melted down into one homogeneous mass are not accurately
known to us. But it is certain that, when John became King, the
distinction between Saxons and Normans was strongly marked, and
that before the end of the reign of his grandson it had almost
disappeared. In the time of Richard the First, the ordinary
imprecation of a Norman gentleman was "May I become an
Englishman!" His ordinary form of indignant denial was "Do you
take me for an Englishman?" The descendant of such a gentleman a
hundred years later was proud of the English name.
The sources of the noblest rivers which spread fertility over
continents, and bear richly laden fleets to the sea, are to be
sought in wild and barren mountain tracts, incorrectly laid down
in maps, and rarely explored by travellers. To such a tract the
history of our country during the thirteenth century may not
unaptly be compared. Sterile and obscure as is that portion of
our annals, it is there that we must seek for the origin of our
freedom, our prosperity, and our glory. Then it was that the
great English people was formed, that the national character
began to exhibit those peculiarities which it has ever since
retained, and that our fathers became emphatically islanders,
islanders not merely in geographical position, but in their
politics, their feelings, and their manners. Then first appeared
with distinctness that constitution which has ever since, through
all changes, preserved its identity; that constitution of which
all the other free constitutions in the world are copies, and
which, in spite of some defects, deserves to be regarded as the
best under which any great society has ever yet existed during
many ages. Then it was that the House of Commons, the archetype
of all the representative assemblies which now meet, either in
the old or in the new world, held its first sittings. Then it was
that the common law rose to the dignity of a science, and rapidly
became a not unworthy rival of the imperial jurisprudence. Then
it was that the courage of those sailors who manned the rude
barks of the Cinque Ports first made the flag of England terrible
on the seas. Then it was that the most ancient colleges which
still exist at both the great national seats of learning were
founded. Then was formed that language, less musical indeed than
the languages of the south, but in force, in richness, in
aptitude for all the highest purposes of the poet, the
philosopher, and the orator, inferior to the tongue of Greece
alone. Then too appeared the first faint dawn of that noble
literature, the most splendid and the most durable of the many
glories of England.
Early in the fourteenth century the amalgamation of the races was
all but complete; and it was soon made manifest, by signs not to
be mistaken, that a people inferior to none existing in the world
had been formed by the mixture of three branches of the great
Teutonic family with each other, and with the aboriginal Britons.
There was, indeed, scarcely anything in common between the
England to which John had been chased by Philip Augustus, and the
England from which the armies of Edward the Third went forth to
conquer France.
A period of more than a hundred years followed, during which the
chief object of the English was to establish, by force of arms, a
great empire on the Continent. The claim of Edward to the
inheritance occupied by the House of Valois was a claim in which
it might seem that his subjects were little interested. But the
passion for conquest spread fast from the prince to the people.
The war differed widely from the wars which the Plantagenets of
the twelfth century had waged against the descendants of Hugh
Capet. For the success of Henry the Second, or of Richard the
First, would have made England a province of France. The effect
of the successes of Edward the Third and Henry the Fifth was to
make France, for a time, a province of England. The disdain with
which, in the twelfth century, the conquerors from the Continent
had regarded the islanders, was now retorted by the islanders on
the people of the Continent. Every yeoman from Kent to
Northumberland valued himself as one of a race born for victory
and dominion, and looked down with scorn on the nation before
which his ancestors had trembled. Even those knights of Gascony
and Guienne who had fought gallantly under the Black Prince were
regarded by the English as men of an inferior breed, and were
contemptuously excluded from honourable and lucrative commands.
In no long time our ancestors altogether lost sight of the
original ground of quarrel. They began to consider the crown of
France as a mere appendage to the crown of England; and, when in
violation of the ordinary law of succession, they transferred the
crown of England to the House of Lancaster, they seem to have
thought that the right of Richard the Second to the crown of
France passed, as of course, to that house. The zeal and vigour
which they displayed present a remarkable contrast to the torpor
of the French, who were far more deeply interested in the event
of the struggle. The most splendid victories recorded in the
history of the middle ages were gained at this time, against
great odds, by the English armies. Victories indeed they were of
which a nation may justly be proud; for they are to be attributed
to the moral superiority of the victors, a superiority which was
most striking in the lowest ranks. The knights of England found
worthy rivals in the knights of France. Chandos encountered an
equal foe in Du Guesclin. But France had no infantry that dared
to face the English bows and bills. A French King was brought
prisoner to London. An English King was crowned at Paris. The
banner of St. George was carried far beyond the Pyrenees and the
Alps. On the south of the Ebro the English won a great battle,
which for a time decided the fate of Leon and Castile; and the
English Companies obtained a terrible preeminence among the bands
of warriors who let out their weapons for hire to the princes and
commonwealths of Italy.
Nor were the arts of peace neglected by our fathers during that
stirring period. While France was wasted by war, till she at
length found in her own desolation a miserable defence against
invaders, the English gathered in their harvests, adorned their
cities, pleaded, traded, and studied in security. Many of our
noblest architectural monuments belong to that age. Then rose
the fair chapels of New College and of Saint George, the nave of
Winchester and the choir of York, the spire of Salisbury and the
majestic towers of Lincoln. A copious and forcible language,
formed by an infusion of French into German, was now the common
property of the aristocracy and of the people. Nor was it long
before genius began to apply that admirable machine to worthy
purposes. While English warriors, leaving behind them the
devastated provinces of France, entered Valladolid in triumph,
and spread terror to the gates of Florence, English poets
depicted in vivid tints all the wide variety of human manners and
fortunes, and English thinkers aspired to know, or dared to
doubt, where bigots had been content to wonder and to believe.
The same age which produced the Black Prince and Derby, Chandos
and Hawkwood, produced also Geoffrey Chaucer and John Wycliffe.
In so splendid and imperial a manner did the English people,
properly so called, first take place among the nations of the
world. Yet while we contemplate with pleasure the high and
commanding qualities which our forefathers displayed, we cannot
but admit that the end which they pursued was an end condemned
both by humanity and by enlightened policy, and that the reverses
which compelled them, after a long and bloody struggle, to
relinquish the hope of establishing a great continental empire,
were really blessings in the guise of disasters. The spirit of
the French was at last aroused: they began to oppose a vigorous
national resistance to the foreign conquerors; and from that time
the skill of the English captains and the courage of the English
soldiers were, happily for mankind, exerted in vain. After many
desperate struggles, and with many bitter regrets, our ancestors
gave up the contest. Since that age no British government has
ever seriously and steadily pursued the design of making great
conquests on the Continent. The people, indeed, continued to
cherish with pride the recollection of Cressy, of Poitiers, and
of Agincourt. Even after the lapse of many years it was easy to
fire their blood and to draw forth their subsidies by promising
them an expedition for the conquest of France. But happily the
energies of our country have been directed to better objects; and
she now occupies in the history of mankind a place far more
glorious than if she had, as at one time seemed not improbable,
acquired by the sword an ascendancy similar to that which
formerly belonged to the Roman republic.
Cooped up once more within the limits of the island, the warlike
people employed in civil strife those arms which had been the
terror of Europe. The means of profuse expenditure had long been
drawn by the English barons from the oppressed provinces of
France. That source of supply was gone: but the ostentatious and
luxurious habits which prosperity had engendered still remained;
and the great lords, unable to gratify their tastes by plundering
the French, were eager to plunder each other. The realm to which
they were now confined would not, in the phrase of Comines, the
most judicious observer of that time, suffice for them all. Two
aristocratical factions, headed by two branches of the royal
family, engaged in a long and fierce struggle for supremacy. As
the animosity of those factions did not really arise from the
dispute about the succession it lasted long after all ground of
dispute about the succession was removed. The party of the Red
Rose survived the last prince who claimed the crown in right of
Henry the Fourth. The party of the White Rose survived the
marriage of Richmond and Elizabeth. Left without chiefs who had
any decent show of right, the adherents of Lancaster rallied
round a line of bastards, and the adherents of York set up a
succession of impostors. When, at length, many aspiring nobles
had perished on the field of battle or by the hands of the
executioner, when many illustrious houses had disappeared forever
from history, when those great families which remained had been
exhausted and sobered by calamities, it was universally
acknowledged that the claims of all the contending Plantagenets
were united in the house of Tudor.
Meanwhile a change was proceeding infinitely more momentous than
the acquisition or loss of any province, than the rise or fall of
any dynasty. Slavery and the evils by which slavery is everywhere
accompanied were fast disappearing.
It is remarkable that the two greatest and most salutary social
revolutions which have taken place in England, that revolution
which, in the thirteenth century, put an end to the tyranny of
nation over nation, and that revolution which, a few generations
later, put an end to the property of man in man, were silently
and imperceptibly effected. They struck contemporary observers
with no surprise, and have received from historians a very scanty
measure of attention. They were brought about neither by
legislative regulations nor by physical force. Moral causes
noiselessly effaced first the distinction between Norman and
Saxon, and then the distinction between master and slave. None
can venture to fix the precise moment at which either distinction
ceased. Some faint traces of the old Norman feeling might perhaps
have been found late in the fourteenth century. Some faint traces
of the institution of villenage were detected by the curious so
late as the days of the Stuarts; nor has that institution ever,
to this hour, been abolished by statute.
It would be most unjust not to acknowledge that the chief agent
in these two great deliverances was religion; and it may perhaps
be doubted whether a purer religion might not have been found a
less efficient agent. The benevolent spirit of the Christian
morality is undoubtedly adverse to distinctions of caste. But to
the Church of Rome such distinctions are peculiarly odious; for
they are incompatible with other distinctions which are essential
to her system. She ascribes to every priest a mysterious dignity
which entitles him to the reverence of every layman; and she does
not consider any man as disqualified, by reason of his nation or
of his family, for the priesthood. Her doctrines respecting the
sacerdotal character, however erroneous they may be, have
repeatedly mitigated some of the worst evils which can afflict
society. That superstition cannot be regarded as unmixedly
noxious which, in regions cursed by the tyranny of race over
race, creates an aristocracy altogether independent of race,
inverts the relation between the oppressor and the oppressed, and
compels the hereditary master to kneel before the spiritual
tribunal of the hereditary bondman. To this day, in some
countries where negro slavery exists, Popery appears in
advantageous contrast to other forms of Christianity. It is
notorious that the antipathy between the European and African
races is by no means so strong at Rio Janerio as at Washington.
In our own country this peculiarity of the Roman Catholic system
produced, during the middle ages, many salutary effects. It is
true that, shortly after the battle of Hastings, Saxon prelates
and abbots were violently deposed, and that ecclesiastical
adventurers from the Continent were intruded by hundreds into
lucrative benefices. Yet even then pious divines of Norman blood
raised their voices against such a violation of the constitution
of the Church, refused to accept mitres from the hands of
William, and charged him, on the peril of his soul, not to forget
that the vanquished islanders were his fellow Christians. The
first protector whom the English found among the dominant caste
was Archbishop Anselm. At a time when the English name was a
reproach, and when all the civil and military dignities of the
kingdom were supposed to belong exclusively to the countrymen of
the Conqueror, the despised race learned, with transports of
delight, that one of themselves, Nicholas Breakspear, had been
elevated to the papal throne, and had held out his foot to be
kissed by ambassadors sprung from the noblest houses of Normandy.
It was a national as well as a religious feeling that drew great
multitudes to the shrine of Becket, whom they regarded as the
enemy of their enemies. Whether he was a Norman or a Saxon may be
doubted: but there is no doubt that he perished by Norman hands,
and that the Saxons cherished his memory with peculiar tenderness
and veneration, and, in their popular poetry, represented him as
one of their own race. A successor of Becket was foremost among
the refractory magnates who obtained that charter which secured
the privileges both of the Norman barons and of the Saxon
yeomanry. How great a part the Roman Catholic ecclesiastics
subsequently had in the abolition of villenage we learn from the
unexceptionable testimony of Sir Thomas Smith, one of the ablest
Protestant counsellors of Elizabeth. When the dying slaveholder
asked for the last sacraments, his spiritual attendants regularly
adjured him, as he loved his soul, to emancipate his brethren for
whom Christ had died. So successfully had the Church used her
formidable machinery that, before the Reformation came, she had
enfranchised almost all the bondmen in the kingdom except her
own, who, to do her justice, seem to have been very tenderly
treated.
There can be no doubt that, when these two great revolutions had
been effected, our forefathers were by far the best governed
people in Europe. During three hundred years the social system
had been in a constant course of improvement. Under the first
Plantagenets there had been barons able to bid defiance to the
sovereign, and peasants degraded to the level of the swine and
oxen which they tended. The exorbitant power of the baron had
been gradually reduced. The condition of the peasant had been
gradually elevated. Between the aristocracy and the working
people had sprung up a middle class, agricultural and commercial.
There was still, it may be, more inequality than is favourable to
the happiness and virtue of our species: but no man was
altogether above the restraints of law; and no man was altogether
below its protection.
That the political institutions of England were, at this early
period, regarded by the English with pride and affection, and by
the most enlightened men of neighbouring nations with admiration
and envy, is proved by the clearest evidence. But touching the
nature of these institutions there has been much dishonest and
acrimonious controversy.
The historical literature of England has indeed suffered
grievously from a circumstance which has not a little contributed
to her prosperity. The change, great as it is, which her polity
has undergone during the last six centuries, has been the effect
of gradual development, not of demolition and reconstruction. The
present constitution of our country is, to the constitution under
which she flourished five hundred years ago, what the tree is to
the sapling, what the man is to the boy. The alteration has been
great. Yet there never was a moment at which the chief part of
what existed was not old. A polity thus formed must abound in
anomalies. But for the evils arising from mere anomalies we have
ample compensation. Other societies possess written constitutions
more symmetrical. But no other society has yet succeeded in
uniting revolution with prescription, progress with stability,
the energy of youth with the majesty of immemorial antiquity.
This great blessing, however, has its drawbacks: and one of those
drawbacks is that every source of information as to our early
history has been poisoned by party spirit. As there is no country
where statesmen have been so much under the influence of the
past, so there is no country where historians have been so much
under the influence of the present. Between these two things,
indeed, there is a natural connection. Where history is regarded
merely as a picture of life and manners, or as a collection of
experiments from which general maxims of civil wisdom may be
drawn, a writer lies under no very pressing temptation to
misrepresent transactions of ancient date. But where history is
regarded as a repository of titledeeds, on which the rights of
governments and nations depend, the motive to falsification
becomes almost irresistible. A Frenchman is not now impelled by
any strong interest either to exaggerate or to underrate the
power of the Kings of the house of Valois. The privileges of the
States General, of the States of Britanny, of the States of
Burgundy, are to him matters of as little practical importance as
the constitution of the Jewish Sanhedrim or of the Amphictyonic
Council. The gulph of a great revolution completely separates the
new from the old system. No such chasm divides the existence of
the English nation into two distinct parts. Our laws and customs
have never been lost in general and irreparable ruin. With us the
precedents of the middle ages are still valid precedents, and are
still cited, on the gravest occasions, by the most eminent
Statesmen. For example, when King George the Third was attacked
by the malady which made him incapable of performing his regal
functions, and when the most distinguished lawyers and
politicians differed widely as to the course which ought, in such
circumstances, to be pursued, the Houses of Parliament would not
proceed to discuss any plan of regency till all the precedents
which were to be found in our annals, from the earliest times,
had been collected and arranged. Committees were appointed to
examine the ancient records of the realm. The first case reported
was that of the year 1217: much importance was attached to the
cases of 1326, of 1377, and of 1422: but the case which was
justly considered as most in point was that of 1455. Thus in our
country the dearest interests of parties have frequently been on
the results of the researches of antiquaries. The inevitable
consequence was that our antiquaries conducted their researches
in the spirit of partisans.
It is therefore not surprising that those who have written,
concerning the limits of prerogative and liberty in the old
polity of England should generally have shown the temper, not of
judges, but of angry and uncandid advocates. For they were
discussing, not a speculative matter, but a matter which had a
direct and practical connection with the most momentous and
exciting disputes of their own day. From the commencement of the
long contest between the Parliament and the Stuarts down to the
time when the pretensions of the Stuarts ceased to be
formidable, few questions were practically more important than
the question whether the administration of that family had or had
not been in accordance with the ancient constitution of the
kingdom. This question could be decided only by reference to the
records of preceding reigns. Bracton and Fleta, the Mirror of
Justice and the Rolls of Parliament, were ransacked to find
pretexts for the excesses of the Star Chamber on one side, and of
the High Court of Justice on the other. During a long course of
years every Whig historian was anxious to prove that the old
English government was all but republican, every Tory historian
to prove that it was all but despotic.
With such feelings, both parties looked into the chronicles of
the middle ages. Both readily found what they sought; and both
obstinately refused to see anything but what they sought. The
champions of the Stuarts could easily point out instances of
oppression exercised on the subject. The defenders of the
Roundheads could as easily produce instances of determined and
successful resistance offered to the Crown. The Tories quoted,
from ancient writings, expressions almost as servile as were
heard from the pulpit of Mainwaring. The Whigs discovered
expressions as bold and severe as any that resounded from the
judgment seat of Bradshaw. One set of writers adduced numerous
instances in which Kings had extorted money without the authority
of Parliament. Another set cited cases in which the Parliament
had assumed to itself the power of inflicting punishment on
Kings. Those who saw only one half of the evidence would have
concluded that the Plantagenets were as absolute as the Sultans
of Turkey: those who saw only the other half would have concluded
that the Plantagenets had as little real power as the Doges of
Venice; and both conclusions would have been equally remote from
the truth.
The old English government was one of a class of limited
monarchies which sprang up in Western Europe during the middle
ages, and which, notwithstanding many diversities, bore to one
another a strong family likeness. That there should have been
such a likeness is not strange The countries in which those
monarchies arose had been provinces of the same great civilised
empire, and had been overrun and conquered, about the same time,
by tribes of the same rude and warlike nation. They were members
of the same great coalition against Islam. They were in communion
with the same superb and ambitious Church. Their polity naturally
took the same form. They had institutions derived partly from
imperial Rome, partly from papal Rome, partly from the old
Germany. All had Kings; and in all the kingly office became by
degrees strictly hereditary. All had nobles bearing titles which
had originally indicated military rank. The dignity of
knighthood, the rules of heraldry, were common to all. All had
richly endowed ecclesiastical establishments, municipal
corporations enjoying large franchises, and senates whose consent
was necessary to the validity of some public acts.
Of these kindred constitutions the English was, from an early
period, justly reputed the best. The prerogatives of the
sovereign were undoubtedly extensive. The spirit of religion and
the spirit of chivalry concurred to exalt his dignity. The sacred
oil had been poured on his head. It was no disparagement to the
bravest and noblest knights to kneel at his feet. His person was
inviolable. He alone was entitled to convoke the Estates of the
realm: he could at his pleasure dismiss them; and his assent was
necessary to all their legislative acts. He was the chief of the
executive administration, the sole organ of communication with
foreign powers, the captain of the military and naval forces of
the state, the fountain of justice, of mercy, and of honour. He
had large powers for the regulation of trade. It was by him that
money was coined, that weights and measures were fixed, that
marts and havens were appointed. His ecclesiastical patronage was
immense. His hereditary revenues, economically administered,
sufficed to meet the ordinary charges of government. His own
domains were of vast extent. He was also feudal lord paramount of
the whole soil of his kingdom, and, in that capacity, possessed
many lucrative and many formidable rights, which enabled him to
annoy and depress those who thwarted him, and to enrich and
aggrandise, without any cost to himself, those who enjoyed his
favour.
But his power, though ample, was limited by three great
constitutional principles, so ancient that none can say when they
began to exist, so potent that their natural development,
continued through many generations, has produced the order of
things under which we now live.
First, the King could not legislate without the consent of his
Parliament. Secondly, he could impose no tax without the consent
of his Parliament. Thirdly, he was bound to conduct the executive
administration according to the laws of the land, and, if he
broke those laws, his advisers and his agents were responsible.
No candid Tory will deny that these principles had, five hundred
years ago, acquired the authority of fundamental rules. On the
other hand, no candid Whig will affirm that they were, till a
later period, cleared from all ambiguity, or followed out to all
their consequences. A constitution of the middle ages was not,
like a constitution of the eighteenth or nineteenth century,
created entire by a single act, and fully set forth in a single
document. It is only in a refined and speculative age that a
polity is constructed on system. In rude societies the progress
of government resembles the progress of language and of
versification. Rude societies have language, and often copious
and energetic language: but they have no scientific grammar, no
definitions of nouns and verbs, no names for declensions, moods,
tenses, and voices. Rude societies have versification, and often
versification of great power and sweetness: but they have no
metrical canons; and the minstrel whose numbers, regulated solely
by his ear, are the delight of his audience, would himself be
unable to say of how many dactyls and trochees each of his lines
consists. As eloquence exists before syntax, and song before
prosody, so government may exist in a high degree of excellence
long before the limits of legislative, executive, and judicial
power have been traced with precision.
It was thus in our country. The line which bounded the royal
prerogative, though in general sufficiently clear, had not
everywhere been drawn with accuracy and distinctness. There was,
therefore, near the border some debatable ground on which
incursions and reprisals continued to take place, till, after
ages of strife, plain and durable landmarks were at length set
up. It may be instructive to note in what way, and to what
extent, our ancient sovereigns were in the habit of violating the
three great principles by which the liberties of the nation were
protected.
No English King has ever laid claim to the general legislative
power. The most violent and imperious Plantagenet never fancied
himself competent to enact, without the consent of his great
council, that a jury should consist of ten persons instead of
twelve, that a widow's dower should be a fourth part instead of a
third, that perjury should be a felony, or that the custom of
gavelkind should be introduced into Yorkshire.2 But the King had
the power of pardoning offenders; and there is one point at which
the power of pardoning and the power of legislating seem to fade
into each other, and may easily, at least in a simple age, be
confounded. A penal statute is virtually annulled if the
penalties which it imposes are regularly remitted as often as
they are incurred. The sovereign was undoubtedly competent to
remit penalties without limit. He was therefore competent to
annul virtually a penal statute. It might seem that there could
be no serious objection to his doing formally what he might do
virtually. Thus, with the help of subtle and courtly lawyers,
grew up, on the doubtful frontier which separates executive from
legislative functions, that great anomaly known as the dispensing
power.
That the King could not impose taxes without the consent of
Parliament is admitted to have been, from time immemorial, a
fundamental law of England. It was among the articles which John
was compelled by the Barons to sign. Edward the First ventured to
break through the rule: but, able, powerful, and popular as he
was, he encountered an opposition to which he found it expedient
to yield. He covenanted accordingly in express terms, for himself
and his heirs, that they would never again levy any aid without
the assent and goodwill of the Estates of the realm. His powerful
and victorious grandson attempted to violate this solemn compact:
but the attempt was strenuously withstood. At length the
Plantagenets gave up the point in despair: but, though they
ceased to infringe the law openly, they occasionally contrived,
by evading it, to procure an extraordinary supply for a temporary
purpose. They were interdicted from taxing; but they claimed the
right of begging and borrowing. They therefore sometimes begged
in a tone not easily to be distinguished from that of command,
and sometimes borrowed with small thought of repaying. But the
fact that they thought it necessary to disguise their exactions
under the names of benevolences and loans sufficiently proves
that the authority of the great constitutional rule was
universally recognised.
The principle that the King of England was bound to conduct the
administration according to law, and that, if he did anything
against law, his advisers and agents were answerable, was
established at a very early period, as the severe judgments
pronounced and executed on many royal favourites sufficiently
prove. It is, however, certain that the rights of individuals
were often violated by the Plantagenets, and that the injured
parties were often unable to obtain redress. According to law no
Englishman could be arrested or detained in confinement merely by
the mandate of the sovereign. In fact, persons obnoxious to the
government were frequently imprisoned without any other authority
than a royal order. According to law, torture, the disgrace of
the Roman jurisprudence, could not, in any circumstances, be
inflicted on an English subject. Nevertheless, during the
troubles of the fifteenth century, a rack was introduced into the
Tower, and was occasionally used under the plea of political
necessity. But it would be a great error to infer from such
irregularities that the English monarchs were, either in theory
or in practice, absolute. We live in a highly civilised society,
through which intelligence is so rapidly diffused by means of the
press and of the post office that any gross act of oppression
committed in any part of our island is, in a few hours, discussed
by millions. If the sovereign were now to immure a subject in
defiance of the writ of Habeas Corpus, or to put a conspirator to
the torture, the whole nation would be instantly electrified by
the news. In the middle ages the state of society was widely
different. Rarely and with great difficulty did the wrongs of
individuals come to the knowledge of the public. A man might be
illegally confined during many months in the castle of Carlisle
or Norwich; and no whisper of the transaction might reach London.
It is highly probable that the rack had been many years in use
before the great majority of the nation had the least suspicion
that it was ever employed. Nor were our ancestors by any means so
much alive as we are to the importance of maintaining great
general rules. We have been taught by long experience that we
cannot without danger suffer any breach of the constitution to
pass unnoticed. It is therefore now universally held that a
government which unnecessarily exceeds its powers ought to be
visited with severe parliamentary censure, and that a government
which, under the pressure of a great exigency, and with pure
intentions, has exceeded its powers, ought without delay to apply
to Parliament for an act of indemnity. But such were not the
feelings of the Englishmen of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. They were little disposed to contend for a principle
merely as a principle, or to cry out against an irregularity
which was not also felt to be a grievance. As long as the general
spirit of the administration was mild and popular, they were
willing to allow some latitude to their sovereign. If, for ends
generally acknowledged to be good, he exerted a vigour beyond the
law, they not only forgave, but applauded him, and while they
enjoyed security and prosperity under his rule, were but too
ready to believe that whoever had incurred his displeasure had
deserved it. But to this indulgence there was a limit; nor was
that King wise who presumed far on the forbearance of the English
people. They might sometimes allow him to overstep the
constitutional line: but they also claimed the privilege of
overstepping that line themselves, whenever his encroachments
were so serious as to excite alarm. If, not content with
occasionally oppressing individuals, he cared to oppress great
masses, his subjects promptly appealed to the laws, and, that
appeal failing, appealed as promptly to the God of battles.
Our forefathers might indeed safely tolerate a king in a few
excesses; for they had in reserve a check which soon brought the
fiercest and proudest king to reason, the check of physical
force. It is difficult for an Englishman of the nineteenth
century to imagine to himself the facility and rapidity with
which, four hundred years ago, this check was applied. The people
have long unlearned the use of arms. The art of war has been
carried to a perfection unknown to former ages; and the knowledge
of that art is confined to a particular class. A hundred thousand
soldiers, well disciplined and commanded, will keep down ten
millions of ploughmen and artisans. A few regiments of household
troops are sufficient to overawe all the discontented spirits of
a large capital. In the meantime the effect of the constant
progress of wealth has been to make insurrection far more
terrible to thinking men than maladministration. Immense sums
have been expended on works which, if a rebellion broke out,
might perish in a few hours. The mass of movable wealth collected
in the shops and warehouses of London alone exceeds five
hundredfold that which the whole island contained in the days of
the Plantagenets; and, if the government were subverted by
physical force, all this movable wealth would be exposed to
imminent risk of spoliation and destruction. Still greater would
be the risk to public credit, on which thousands of families
directly depend for subsistence, and with which the credit of the
whole commercial world is inseparably connected. It is no
exaggeration to say that a civil war of a week on English ground
would now produce disasters which would be felt from the Hoang-ho
to the Missouri, and of which the traces would be discernible at
the distance of a century. In such a state of society resistance
must be regarded as a cure more desperate than almost any malady
which can afflict the state. In the middle ages, on the contrary,
resistance was an ordinary remedy for political distempers, a
remedy which was always at hand, and which, though doubtless
sharp at the moment, produced no deep or lasting ill effects. If
a popular chief raised his standard in a popular cause, an
irregular army could be assembled in a day. Regular army there
was none. Every man had a slight tincture of soldiership, and
scarcely any man more than a slight tincture. The national wealth
consisted chiefly in flocks and herds, in the harvest of the
year, and in the simple buildings inhabited by the people. All
the furniture, the stock of shops, the machinery which could be
found in the realm was of less value than the property which some
single parishes now contain. Manufactures were rude; credit was
almost unknown. Society, therefore, recovered from the shock as
soon as the actual conflict was over. The calamities of civil war
were confined to the slaughter on the field of battle, and to a
few subsequent executions and confiscations. In a week the
peasant was driving his team and the esquire flying his hawks
over the field of Towton or of Bosworth, as if no extraordinary
event had interrupted the regular course of human life.
More than a hundred and sixty years have now elapsed since the
English people have by force subverted a government. During the
hundred and sixty years which preceded the union of the Roses,
nine Kings reigned in England. Six of these nine Kings were
deposed. Five lost their lives as well as their crowns. It is
evident, therefore, that any comparison between our ancient and
our modern polity must lead to most erroneous conclusions, unless
large allowance be made for the effect of that restraint which
resistance and the fear of resistance constantly imposed on the
Plantagenets. As our ancestors had against tyranny a most
important security which we want, they might safely dispense with
some securities to which we justly attach the highest importance.
As we cannot, without the risk of evils from which the
imagination recoils, employ physical force as a check on
misgovernment, it is evidently our wisdom to keep all the
constitutional checks on misgovernment in the highest state of
efficiency, to watch with jealousy the first beginnings of
encroachment, and never to suffer irregularities, even when
harmless in themselves, to pass unchallenged, lest they acquire
the force of precedents. Four hundred years ago such minute
vigilance might well seem unnecessary. A nation of hardy archers
and spearmen might, with small risk to its liberties, connive at
some illegal acts on the part of a prince whose general
administration was good, and whose throne was not defended by a
single company of regular soldiers.
Under this system, rude as it may appear when compared with those
elaborate constitutions of which the last seventy years have been
fruitful, the English long enjoyed a large measure of freedom and
happiness. Though, during the feeble reign of Henry the Sixth,
the state was torn, first by factions, and at length by civil
war; though Edward the Fourth was a prince of dissolute and
imperious character; though Richard the Third has generally been
represented as a monster of depravity; though the exactions of
Henry the Seventh caused great repining; it is certain that our
ancestors, under those Kings, were far better governed than the
Belgians under Philip, surnamed the Good, or the French under
that Lewis who was styled the Father of his people. Even while
the wars of the Roses were actually raging, our country appears
to have been in a happier condition than the neighbouring realms
during years of profound peace. Comines was one of the most
enlightened statesmen of his time. He had seen all the richest
and most highly civilised parts of the Continent. He had lived in
the opulent towns of Flanders, the Manchesters and Liverpools of
the fifteenth century. He had visited Florence, recently adorned
by the magnificence of Lorenzo, and Venice, not yet bumbled by
the Confederates of Cambray. This eminent man deliberately
pronounced England to be the best governed country of which he
had any knowledge. Her constitution he emphatically designated as
a just and holy thing, which, while it protected the people,
really strengthened the hands of a prince who respected it. In no
other country were men so effectually secured from wrong. The
calamities produced by our intestine wars seemed to him to be
confined to the nobles and the fighting men, and to leave no
traces such as he had been accustomed to see elsewhere, no ruined
dwellings, no depopulated cities.
It was not only by the efficiency of the restraints imposed on
the royal prerogative that England was advantageously
distinguished from most of the neighbouring countries. A:
peculiarity equally important, though less noticed, was the
relation in which the nobility stood here to the commonalty.
There was a strong hereditary aristocracy: but it was of all
hereditary aristocracies the least insolent and exclusive. It had
none of the invidious character of a caste. It was constantly
receiving members from the people, and constantly sending down
members to mingle with the people. Any gentleman might become a
peer. The younger son of a peer was but a gentleman. Grandsons of
peers yielded precedence to newly made knights. The dignity of
knighthood was not beyond the reach of any man who could by
diligence and thrift realise a good estate, or who could attract
notice by his valour in a battle or a siege. It was regarded as
no disparagement for the daughter of a Duke, nay of a royal Duke,
to espouse a distinguished commoner. Thus, Sir John Howard
married the daughter of Thomas Mowbray Duke of Norfolk. Sir
Richard Pole married the Countess of Salisbury, daughter of
George, Duke of Clarence. Good blood was indeed held in high
respect: but between good blood and the privileges of peerage
there was, most fortunately for our country, no necessary
connection. Pedigrees as long, and scutcheons as old, were to be
found out of the House of Lords as in it. There were new men who
bore the highest titles. There were untitled men well known to be
descended from knights who had broken the Saxon ranks at
Hastings, and scaled the walls of Jerusalem. There were Bohuns,
Mowbrays, DeVeres, nay, kinsmen of the House of Plantagenet, with
no higher addition than that of Esquire, and with no civil
privileges beyond those enjoyed by every farmer and shopkeeper.
There was therefore here no line like that which in some other
countries divided the patrician from the plebeian. The yeoman was
not inclined to murmur at dignities to which his own children
might rise. The grandee was not inclined to insult a class into
which his own children must descend.
After the wars of York and Lancaster, the links which connected
the nobility and commonalty became closer and more numerous than
ever. The extent of destruction which had fallen on the old
aristocracy may be inferred from a single circumstance. In the
year 1451 Henry the Sixth summoned fifty-three temporal Lords to
parliament. The temporal Lords summoned by Henry the Seventh to
the parliament of 1485 were only twenty-nine, and of these
several had recently been elevated to the peerage. During the
following century the ranks of the nobility were largely
recruited from among the gentry. The constitution of the House of
Commons tended greatly to promote the salutary intermixture of
classes. The knight of the shire was the connecting link between
the baron and the shopkeeper. On the same benches on which sate
the goldsmiths, drapers, and grocers, who had been returned to
parliament by the commercial towns, sate also members who, in any
other country, would have been called noblemen, hereditary lords
of manors, entitled to hold courts and to bear coat armour, and
able to trace back an honourable descent through many
generations. Some of them were younger sons and brothers of
lords. Others could boast of even royal blood. At length the
eldest son of an Earl of Bedford, called in courtesy by the
second title of his father, offered himself as candidate for a
seat in the House of Commons, and his example was followed by
others. Seated in that house, the heirs of the great peers
naturally became as zealous for its privileges as any of the
humble burgesses with whom they were mingled. Thus our democracy
was, from an early period, the most aristocratic, and our
aristocracy the most democratic in the world; a peculiarity which
has lasted down to the present day, and which has produced many
important moral and political effects.
The government of Henry the Seventh, of his son, and of his
grandchildren was, on the whole, more arbitrary than that of the
Plantagenets. Personal character may in some degree explain the
difference; for courage and force of will were common to all the
men and women of the House of Tudor. They exercised their power
during a period of a hundred and twenty years, always with
vigour, often with violence, sometimes with cruelty. They, in
imitation of the dynasty which had preceded them, occasionally
invaded the rights of the subject, occasionally exacted taxes
under the name of loans and gifts, and occasionally dispensed
with penal statutes: nay, though they never presumed to enact any
permanent law by their own authority, they occasionally took upon
themselves, when Parliament was not sitting, to meet temporary
exigencies by temporary edicts. It was, however, impossible for
the Tudors to carry oppression beyond a certain point: for they
had no armed force, and they were surrounded by an armed people.
Their palace was guarded by a few domestics, whom the array of a
single shire, or of a single ward of London, could with ease have
overpowered. These haughty princes were therefore under a
restraint stronger than any that mere law can impose, under a
restraint which did not, indeed, prevent them from sometimes
treating an individual in an arbitrary and even in a barbarous
manner, but which effectually secured the nation against general
and long continued oppression. They might safely be tyrants,
within the precinct of the court: but it was necessary for them
to watch with constant anxiety the temper of the country. Henry
the Eighth, for example, encountered no opposition when he wished
to send Buckingham and Surrey, Anne Boleyn and Lady Salisbury, to
the scaffold. But when, without the consent of Parliament, he
demanded of his subjects a contribution amounting to one sixth of
their goods, he soon found it necessary to retract. The cry of
hundreds of thousands was that they were English and not French,
freemen and not slaves. In Kent the royal commissioners fled for
their lives. In Suffolk four thousand men appeared in arms. The
King's lieutenants in that county vainly exerted themselves to
raise an army. Those who did not join in the insurrection
declared that they would not fight against their brethren in such
a quarrel. Henry, proud and selfwilled as he was, shrank, not
without reason from a conflict with the roused spirit of the
nation. He had before his eyes the fate of his predecessors who
had perished at Berkeley and Pomfret. He not only cancelled his
illegal commissions; he not only granted a general pardon to all
the malecontents; but he publicly and solemnly apologised for his
infraction of the laws.
His conduct, on this occasion, well illustrates the whole policy
of his house. The temper of the princes of that line was hot, and
their spirits high, but they understood the character of the
nation that they governed, and never once, like some of their
predecessors, and some of their successors, carried obstinacy to
a fatal point. The discretion of the Tudors was such, that their
power, though it was often resisted, was never subverted. The
reign of every one of them was disturbed by formidable
discontents: but the government was always able either to soothe
the mutineers or to conquer and punish them. Sometimes, by timely
concessions, it succeeded in averting civil hostilities; but in
general it stood firm, and called for help on the nation. The
nation obeyed the call, rallied round the sovereign, and enabled
him to quell the disaffected minority.
Thus, from the age of Henry the Third to the age of Elizabeth,
England grew and flourished under a polity which contained the
germ of our present institutions, and which, though not very
exactly defined, or very exactly observed, was yet effectually
prevented from degenerating into despotism, by the awe in which
the governors stood of the spirit and strength of the governed.
But such a polity is suited only to a particular stage in the
progress of society. The same causes which produce a division of
labour in the peaceful arts must at length make war a distinct
science and a distinct trade. A time arrives when the use of arms
begins to occupy the entire attention of a separate class. It
soon appears that peasants and burghers, however brave, are
unable to stand their ground against veteran soldiers, whose
whole life is a preparation for the day of battle, whose nerves
have been braced by long familiarity with danger, and whose
movements have all the precision of clockwork. It is found that
the defence of nations can no longer be safely entrusted to
warriors taken from the plough or the loom for a campaign of
forty days. If any state forms a great regular army, the
bordering states must imitate the example, or must submit to a
foreign yoke. But, where a great regular army exists, limited
monarchy, such as it was in the middle ages, can exist no longer.
The sovereign is at once emancipated from what had been the chief
restraint on his power; and he inevitably becomes absolute,
unless he is subjected to checks such as would be superfluous in
a society where all are soldiers occasionally, and none
permanently.
With the danger came also the means of escape. In the monarchies
of the middle ages the power of the sword belonged to the prince;
but the power of the purse belonged to the nation; and the
progress of civilisation, as it made the sword of the prince more
and more formidable to the nation, made the purse of the nation
more and more necessary to the prince. His hereditary revenues
would no longer suffice, even for the expenses of civil
government. It was utterly impossible that, without a regular and
extensive system of taxation, he could keep in constant
efficiency a great body of disciplined troops. The policy which
the parliamentary assemblies of Europe ought to have adopted was
to take their stand firmly on their constitutional right to give
or withhold money, and resolutely to refuse funds for the support
of armies, till ample securities had been provided against
despotism.
This wise policy was followed in our country alone. In the
neighbouring kingdoms great military establishments were formed;
no new safeguards for public liberty were devised; and the
consequence was, that the old parliamentary institutions
everywhere ceased to exist. In France, where they had always been
feeble, they languished, and at length died of mere weakness. In
Spain, where they had been as strong as in any part of Europe,
they struggled fiercely for life, but struggled too late. The
mechanics of Toledo and Valladolid vainly defended the privileges
of the Castilian Cortes against the veteran battalions of Charles
the Fifth. As vainly, in the next generation, did the citizens of
Saragossa stand up against Philip the Second, for the old
constitution of Aragon. One after another, the great national
councils of the continental monarchies, councils once scarcely
less proud and powerful than those which sate at Westminster,
sank into utter insignificance. If they met, they met merely as
our Convocation now meets, to go through some venerable forms.
In England events took a different course. This singular felicity
she owed chiefly to her insular situation. Before the end of the
fifteenth century great military establishments were
indispensable to the dignity, and even to the safety, of the
French and Castilian monarchies. If either of those two powers
had disarmed, it would soon have been compelled to submit to the
dictation of the other. But England, protected by the sea against
invasion, and rarely engaged in warlike operations on the
Continent, was not, as yet, under the necessity of employing
regular troops. The sixteenth century, the seventeenth century,
found her still without a standing army. At the commencement of
the seventeenth century political science had made considerable
progress. The fate of the Spanish Cortes and of the French States
General had given solemn warning to our Parliaments; and our
Parliaments, fully aware of the nature and magnitude of the
danger, adopted, in good time, a system of tactics which, after a
contest protracted through three generations, was at length
successful
Almost every writer who has treated of that contest has been
desirous to show that his own party was the party which was
struggling to preserve the old constitution unaltered. The truth
however is that the old constitution could not be preserved
unaltered. A law, beyond the control of human wisdom, had decreed
that there should no longer be governments of that peculiar class
which, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, had been common
throughout Europe. The question, therefore, was not whether our
polity should undergo a change, but what the nature of the change
should be. The introduction of a new and mighty force had
disturbed the old equilibrium, and had turned one limited
monarchy after another into an absolute monarchy. What had
happened elsewhere would assuredly have happened here, unless the
balance had been redressed by a great transfer of power from the
crown to the parliament. Our princes were about to have at their
command means of coercion such as no Plantagenet or Tudor had
ever possessed. They must inevitably have become despots, unless
they had been, at the same time, placed under restraints to which
no Plantagenet or Tudor had ever been subject.
It seems certain, therefore, that, had none but political causes
been at work, the seventeenth century would not have passed away
without a fierce conflict between our Kings and their
Parliaments. But other causes of perhaps greater potency
contributed to produce the same effect. While the government of
the Tudors was in its highest vigour an event took place which
has coloured the destinies of all Christian nations, and in an
especial manner the destinies of England. Twice during the middle
ages the mind of Europe had risen up against the domination of
Rome. The first insurrection broke out in the south of France.
The energy of Innocent the Third, the zeal of the young orders of
Francis and Dominic, and the ferocity of the Crusaders whom the
priesthood let loose on an unwarlike population, crushed the
Albigensian churches. The second reformation had its origin in
England, and spread to Bohemia. The Council of Constance, by
removing some ecclesiastical disorders which had given scandal to
Christendom, and the princes of Europe, by unsparingly using fire
and sword against the heretics, succeeded in arresting and
turning back the movement. Nor is this much to be lamented. The
sympathies of a Protestant, it is true, will naturally be on the
side of the Albigensians and of the Lollards. Yet an enlightened
and temperate Protestant will perhaps be disposed to doubt
whether the success, either of the Albigensians or of the
Lollards, would, on the whole, have promoted the happiness and
virtue of mankind. Corrupt as the Church of Rome was, there is
reason to believe that, if that Church had been overthrown in the
twelfth or even in the fourteenth century, the vacant space would
have been occupied by some system more corrupt still. There was
then, through the greater part of Europe, very little knowledge;
and that little was confined to the clergy. Not one man in five
hundred could have spelled his way through a psalm. Books were
few and costly. The art of printing was unknown. Copies of the
Bible, inferior in beauty and clearness to those which every
cottager may now command, sold for prices which many priests
could not afford to give. It was obviously impossible that the
laity should search the Scriptures for themselves. It is probable
therefore, that, as soon as they had put off one spiritual yoke,
they would have put on another, and that the power lately
exercised by the clergy of the Church of Rome would have passed
to a far worse class of teachers. The sixteenth century was
comparatively a time of light. Yet even in the sixteenth century
a considerable number of those who quitted the old religion
followed the first confident and plausible guide who offered
himself, and were soon led into errors far more serious than
those which they had renounced. Thus Matthias and Kniperdoling,
apostles of lust, robbery, and murder, were able for a time to
rule great cities. In a darker age such false prophets might have
founded empires; and Christianity might have been distorted into
a cruel and licentious superstition, more noxious, not only than
Popery, but even than Islamism.
About a hundred years after the rising of the Council of
Constance, that great change emphatically called the Reformation
began. The fulness of time was now come. The clergy were no
longer the sole or the chief depositories of knowledge The
invention of printing had furnished the assailants of the Church
with a mighty weapon which had been wanting to their
predecessors. The study of the ancient writers, the rapid
development of the powers of the modern languages, the
unprecedented activity which was displayed in every department of
literature, the political state of Europe, the vices of the Roman
court, the exactions of the Roman chancery, the jealousy with
which the wealth and privileges of the clergy were naturally
regarded by laymen, the jealousy with which the Italian
ascendency was naturally regarded by men born on our side of the
Alps, all these things gave to the teachers of the new theology
an advantage which they perfectly understood how to use.
Those who hold that the influence of the Church of Rome in the
dark ages was, on the whole, beneficial to mankind, may yet with
perfect consistency regard the Reformation as an inestimable
blessing. The leading strings, which preserve and uphold the
infant, would impede the fullgrown man. And so the very means by
which the human mind is, in one stage of its progress, supported
and propelled, may, in another stage, be mere hindrances. There
is a season in the life both of an individual and of a society,
at which submission and faith, such as at a later period would be
justly called servility and credulity, are useful qualities. The
child who teachably and undoubtingly listens to the instructions
of his elders is likely to improve rapidly. But the man who
should receive with childlike docility every assertion and dogma
uttered by another man no wiser than himself would become
contemptible. It is the same with communities. The childhood of
the European nations was passed under the tutelage of the clergy.
The ascendancy of the sacerdotal order was long the ascendancy
which naturally and properly belongs to intellectual superiority.
The priests, with all their faults, were by far the wisest
portion of society. It was, therefore, on the whole, good that
they should be respected and obeyed. The encroachments of the
ecclesiastical power on the province of the civil power produced
much more happiness than misery, while the ecclesiastical power
was in the hands of the only class that had studied history,
philosophy, and public law, and while the civil power was in the
hands of savage chiefs, who could not read their own grants and
edicts. But a change took place. Knowledge gradually spread among
laymen. At the commencement of the sixteenth century many of them
were in every intellectual attainment fully equal to the most
enlightened of their spiritual pastors. Thenceforward that
dominion, which, during the dark ages, had been, in spite of many
abuses, a legitimate and salutary guardianship, became an unjust
and noxious tyranny.
From the time when the barbarians overran the Western Empire to
the time of the revival of letters, the influence of the Church
of Rome had been generally favourable to science to civilisation,
and to good government. But, during the last three centuries, to
stunt the growth of the human mind has been her chief object.
Throughout Christendom, whatever advance has been made in
knowledge, in freedom, in wealth, and in the arts of life, has
been made in spite of her, and has everywhere been in inverse
proportion to her power. The loveliest and most fertile provinces
of Europe have, under her rule, been sunk in poverty, in
political servitude, and in intellectual torpor, while Protestant
countries, once proverbial for sterility and barbarism, have been
turned by skill and industry into gardens, and can boast of a
long list of heroes and statesmen, philosophers and poets.
Whoever, knowing what Italy and Scotland naturally are, and what,
four hundred years ago, they actually were, shall now compare the
country round Rome with the country round Edinburgh, will be able
to form some judgment as to the tendency of Papal domination. The
descent of Spain, once the first among monarchies, to the lowest
depths of degradation, the elevation of Holland, in spite of many
natural disadvantages, to a position such as no commonwealth so
small has ever reached, teach the same lesson. Whoever passes in
Germany from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant principality, in
Switzerland from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant canton, in
Ireland from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant county, finds that
he has passed from a lower to a higher grade of civilisation. On
the other side of the Atlantic the same law prevails. The
Protestants of the United States have left far behind them the
Roman Catholics of Mexico, Peru, and Brazil. The Roman Catholics
of Lower Canada remain inert, while the whole continent round
them is in a ferment with Protestant activity and enterprise. The
French have doubtless shown an energy and an intelligence which,
even when misdirected, have justly entitled them to be called a
great people. But this apparent exception, when examined, will be
found to confirm. the rule; for in no country that is called
Roman Catholic, has the Roman Catholic Church, during several
generations, possessed so little authority as in France. The
literature of France is justly held in high esteem throughout the
world. But if we deduct from that literature all that belongs to
four parties which have been, on different grounds, in rebellion
against the Papal domination, all that belongs to the
Protestants, all that belongs to the assertors of the Gallican
liberties, all that belongs to the Jansenists, and all that
belongs to the philosophers, how much will be left?
It is difficult to say whether England owes more to the Roman
Catholic religion or to the Reformation. For the amalgamation of
races and for the abolition of villenage, she is chiefly indebted
to the influence which the priesthood in the middle ages
exercised over the laity. For political and intellectual freedom,
and for all the blessings which political and intellectual
freedom have brought in their train, she is chiefly indebted to
the great rebellion of the laity against the priesthood.
The struggle between the old and the new theology in our country
was long, and the event sometimes seemed doubtful. There were two
extreme parties, prepared to act with violence or to suffer with
stubborn resolution. Between them lay, during a considerable
time, a middle party, which blended, very illogically, but by no
means unnaturally, lessons learned in the nursery with the
sermons of the modern evangelists, and, while clinging with
fondness to all observances, yet detested abuses with which those
observances were closely connected. Men in such a frame of mind
were willing to obey, almost with thankfulness, the dictation of
an able ruler who spared them the trouble of judging for
themselves, and, raising a firm and commanding voice above the
uproar of controversy, told them how to worship and what to
believe. It is not strange, therefore, that the Tudors should
have been able to exercise a great influence on ecclesiastical
affairs; nor is it strange that their influence should, for the
most part, have been exercised with a view to their own interest.
Henry the Eighth attempted to constitute an Anglican Church
differing from the Roman Catholic Church on the point of the
supremacy, and on that point alone. His success in this attempt
was extraordinary. The force of his character, the singularly
favourable situation in which he stood with respect to foreign
powers, the immense wealth which the spoliation of the abbeys
placed at his disposal, and the support of that class which still
halted between two Opinions, enabled him to bid defiance to both
the extreme parties, to burn as heretics those who avowed the
tenets of the Reformers, and to hang as traitors those who owned
the authority of the Pope. But Henry's system died with him. Had
his life been prolonged, he would have found it difficult to
maintain a position assailed with equal fury by all who were
zealous either for the new or for the old opinions. The ministers
who held the royal prerogatives in trust for his infant son could
not venture to persist in so hazardous a policy; nor could
Elizabeth venture to return to it. It was necessary to make a
choice. The government must either submit to Rome, or must obtain
the aid of the Protestants. The government and the Protestants
had only one thing in common, hatred of the Papal power. The
English Reformers were eager to go as far as their brethren on
the Continent. They unanimously condemned as Antichristian
numerous dogmas and practices to which Henry had stubbornly
adhered, and which Elizabeth reluctantly abandoned. Many felt a
strong repugnance even to things indifferent which had formed
part of the polity or ritual of the mystical Babylon. Thus Bishop
Hooper, who died manfully at Gloucester for his religion, long
refused to wear the episcopal vestments. Bishop Ridley, a martyr
of still greater renown, pulled down the ancient altars of his
diocese, and ordered the Eucharist to be administered in the
middle of churches, at tables which the Papists irreverently
termed oyster boards. Bishop Jewel pronounced the clerical garb
to be a stage dress, a fool's coat, a relique of the Amorites,
and promised that he would spare no labour to extirpate such
degrading absurdities. Archbishop Grindal long hesitated about
accepting a mitre from dislike of what he regarded as the mummery
of consecration. Bishop Parkhurst uttered a fervent prayer that
the Church of England would propose to herself the Church of
Zurich as the absolute pattern of a Christian community. Bishop
Ponet was of opinion that the word Bishop should be abandoned to
the Papists, and that the chief officers of the purified church
should be called Superintendents. When it is considered that none
of these prelates belonged to the extreme section of the
Protestant party, it cannot be doubted that, if the general sense
of that party had been followed. the work of reform would have
been carried on as unsparingly in England as in Scotland.
But, as the government needed the support of the protestants, so
the Protestants needed the protection of the government. Much was
therefore given up on both sides: an union was effected; and the
fruit of that union was the Church of England.
To the peculiarities of this great institution, and to the strong
passions which it has called forth in the minds both of friends
and of enemies, are to be attributed many of the most important
events which have, since the Reformation, taken place in our
country; nor can the secular history of England be at all
understood by us, unless we study it in constant connection with
the history of her ecclesiastical polity.
The man who took the chief part in settling the condition, of the
alliance which produced the Anglican Church was Archbishop
Cranmer. He was the representative of both the parties which, at
that time, needed each other's assistance. He was at once a
divine and a courtier. In his character of divine he was
perfectly ready to go as far in the way of change as any Swiss or
Scottish Reformer. In his character of courtier he was desirous
to preserve that organisation which had, during many ages,
admirably served the purposes of the Bishops of Rome, and might
be expected now to serve equally well the purposes of the English
Kings and of their ministers. His temper and his understanding,
eminently fitted him to act as mediator. Saintly in his
professions, unscrupulous in his dealings, zealous for nothing,
bold in speculation, a coward and a timeserver in action, a
placable enemy and a lukewarm friend, he was in every way
qualified to arrange the terms of the coalition between the
religious and the worldly enemies of Popery.
To this day the constitution, the doctrines, and the services of
the Church, retain the visible marks of the compromise from which
she sprang. She occupies a middle position between the Churches
of Rome and Geneva. Her doctrinal confessions and discourses,
composed by Protestants, set forth principles of theology in
which Calvin or Knox would have found scarcely a word to
disapprove. Her prayers and thanksgivings, derived from the
ancient Breviaries, are very generally such that Cardinal Fisher
or Cardinal Pole might have heartily joined in them. A
controversialist who puts an Arminian sense on her Articles and
Homilies will be pronounced by candid men to be as unreasonable
as a controversialist who denies that the doctrine of baptismal
regeneration can be discovered in her Liturgy.
The Church of Rome held that episcopacy was of divine
institution, and that certain supernatural graces of a high order
had been transmitted by the imposition of hands through fifty
generations, from the Eleven who received their commission on the
Galilean mount, to the bishops who met at Trent. A large body of
Protestants, on the other hand, regarded prelacy as positively
unlawful, and persuaded themselves that they found a very
different form of ecclesiastical government prescribed in
Scripture. The founders of the Anglican Church took a middle
course. They retained episcopacy; but they did not declare it to
be an institution essential to the welfare of a Christian
society, or to the efficacy of the sacraments. Cranmer, indeed,
on one important occasion, plainly avowed his conviction that, in
the primitive times, there was no distinction between bishops and
priests, and that the laying on of hands was altogether
superfluous.
Among the Presbyterians the conduct of public worship is, to a
great extent, left to the minister. Their prayers, therefore, are
not exactly the same in any two assemblies on the same day, or on
any two days in the same assembly. In one parish they are
fervent, eloquent, and full of meaning. In the next parish they
may be languid or absurd. The priests of the Roman Catholic
Church, on the other hand, have, during many generations, daily
chanted the same ancient confessions, supplications, and
thanksgivings, in India and Lithuania, in Ireland and Peru. The
service, being in a dead language, is intelligible only to the
learned; and the great majority of the congregation may be said
to assist as spectators rather than as auditors. Here, again, the
Church of England took a middle course. She copied the Roman
Catholic forms of prayer, but translated them into the vulgar
tongue, and invited the illiterate multitude to join its voice to
that of the minister.
In every part of her system the same policy may be traced.
Utterly rejecting the doctrine of transubstantiation, and
condemning as idolatrous all adoration paid to the sacramental
bread and wine, she yet, to the disgust of the Puritan, required
her children to receive the memorials of divine love, meekly
kneeling upon their knees. Discarding many rich vestments which
surrounded the altars of the ancient faith, she yet retained, to
the horror of weak minds, a robe of white linen, typical of the
purity which belonged to her as the mystical spouse of Christ.
Discarding a crowd of pantomimic gestures which, in the Roman
Catholic worship, are substituted for intelligible words, she yet
shocked many rigid Protestants by marking the infant just
sprinkled from the font with the sign of the cross. The Roman
Catholic addressed his prayers to a multitude of Saints, among
whom were numbered many men of doubtful, and some of hateful,
character. The Puritan refused the addition of Saint even to the
apostle of the Gentiles, and to the disciple whom Jesus loved.
The Church of England, though she asked for the intercession of
no created being, still set apart days for the commemoration of
some who had done and suffered great things for the faith. She
retained confirmation and ordination as edifying rites; but she
degraded them from the rank of sacraments. Shrift was no part of
her system. Yet she gently invited the dying penitent to confess
his sins to a divine, and empowered her ministers to soothe the
departing soul by an absolution which breathes the very spirit of
the old religion. In general it may be said that she appeals more
to the understanding , and less to the senses and the
imagination, than the Church of Rome, and that she appeals less
to the understanding, and more to the senses and imagination,
than the Protestant Churches of Scotland, France, and
Switzerland.
Nothing, however, so strongly distinguished the Church of England
from other Churches as the relation in which she stood to the
monarchy. The King was her head. The limits of the authority
which he possessed, as such, were not traced, and indeed have
never yet been traced with precision. The laws which declared
him supreme in ecclesiastical matters were drawn rudely and in
general terms. If, for the purpose of ascertaining the sense of
those laws, we examine the books and lives of those who founded
the English Church, our perplexity will be increased. For the
founders of the English Church wrote and acted in an age of
violent intellectual fermentation, and of constant action and
reaction. They therefore often contradicted each other and
sometimes contradicted themselves. That the King was, under
Christ, sole head of the Church was a doctrine which they all
with one voice affirmed: but those words had very different
significations in different mouths, and in the same mouth at
different conjunctures. Sometimes an authority which would have
satisfied Hildebrand was ascribed to the sovereign: then it
dwindled down to an authority little more than that which had
been claimed by many ancient English princes who had been in
constant communion with the Church of Rome. What Henry and his
favourite counsellors meant, at one time, by the supremacy, was
certainly nothing less than the whole power of the keys. The King
was to be the Pope of his kingdom, the vicar of God, the
expositor of Catholic verity, the channel of sacramental graces.
He arrogated to himself the right of deciding dogmatically what
was orthodox doctrine and what was heresy, of drawing up and
imposing confessions of faith, and of giving religious
instruction to his people. He proclaimed that all jurisdiction,
spiritual as well as temporal, was derived from him alone, and
that it was in his power to confer episcopal authority, and to
take it away. He actually ordered his seal to be put to
commissions by which bishops were appointed, who were to exercise
their functions as his deputies, and during his pleasure.
According to this system, as expounded by Cranmer, the King was
the spiritual as well as the temporal chief of the nation. In
both capacities His Highness must have lieutenants. As he
appointed civil officers to keep his seal, to collect his
revenues, and to dispense justice in his name, so he appointed
divines of various ranks to preach the gospel, and to administer
the sacraments. It was unnecessary that there should be any
imposition of hands. The King,--such was the opinion of Cranmer
given in the plainest words,--might in virtue of authority
derived from God, make a priest; and the priest so made needed no
ordination whatever. These opinions the Archbishop, in spite of
the opposition of less courtly divines, followed out to every
legitimate consequence. He held that his own spiritual functions,
like the secular functions of the Chancellor and Treasurer, were
at once determined by a demise of the crown. When Henry died,
therefore, the Primate and his suffragans took out fresh
commissions, empowering them to ordain and to govern the Church
till the new sovereign should think fit to order otherwise. When
it was objected that a power to bind and to loose, altogether
distinct from temporal power, had been given by our Lord to his
apostles, some theologians of this school replied that the power
to bind and to loose had descended, not to the clergy, but to the
whole body of Christian men, and ought to be exercised by the
chief magistrate as the representative of the society. When it
was objected that Saint Paul had spoken of certain persons whom
the Holy Ghost had made overseers and shepherds of the faithful,
it was answered that King Henry was the very overseer, the very
shepherd whom the Holy Ghost had appointed, and to whom the
expressions of Saint Paul applied.3
These high pretensions gave scandal to Protestants as well as to
Catholics; and the scandal was greatly increased when the
supremacy, which Mary had resigned back to the Pope, was again
annexed to the crown, on the accession of Elizabeth. It seemed
monstrous that a woman should be the chief bishop of a Church in
which an apostle had forbidden her even to let her voice be
heard. The Queen, therefore, found it necessary expressly to
disclaim that sacerdotal character which her father had assumed,
and which, according to Cranmer, had been inseparably joined, by
divine ordinance, to the regal function. When the Anglican
confession of faith was revised in her reign, the supremacy was
explained in a manner somewhat different from that which had been
fashionable at the court of Henry. Cranmer had declared, in
emphatic terms, that God had immediately committed to Christian
princes the whole cure of all their subjects, as well concerning
the administration of God's word for the cure of souls, as
concerning the administration of things political.4 The
thirty-seventh article of religion, framed under Elizabeth,
declares, in terms as emphatic, that the ministering of God's
word does not belong to princes. The Queen, however, still had
over the Church a visitatorial power of vast and undefined
extent. She was entrusted by Parliament with the office of
restraining and punishing heresy and every sort of ecclesiastical
abuse, and was permitted to delegate her authority to
commissioners. The Bishops were little more than her ministers.
Rather than grant to the civil magistrate the absolute power of
nominating spiritual pastors, the Church of Rome, in the eleventh
century, set all Europe on fire. Rather than grant to the civil
magistrate the absolute power of nominating spiritual pastors,
the ministers of the Church of Scotland, in our time, resigned
their livings by hundreds. The Church of England had no such
scruples. By the royal authority alone her prelates were
appointed. By the royal authority alone her Convocations were
summoned, regulated, prorogued, and dissolved. Without the royal
sanction her canons had no force. One of the articles of her
faith was that without the royal consent no ecclesiastical
council could lawfully assemble. From all her judicatures an
appeal lay, in the last resort, to the sovereign, even when the
question was whether an opinion ought to be accounted heretical,
or whether the administration of a sacrament had been valid. Nor
did the Church grudge this extensive power to our princes. By
them she had been called into existence, nursed through a feeble
infancy, guarded from Papists on one side and from Puritans on
the other, protected against Parliaments which bore her no good
will, and avenged on literary assailants whom she found it hard
to answer. Thus gratitude, hope, fear, common attachments, common
enmities, bound her to the throne. All her traditions, all her
tastes, were monarchical. Loyalty became a point of professional
honour among her clergy, the peculiar badge which distinguished
them at once from Calvinists and from Papists. Both the
Calvinists and the Papists, widely as they differed in other
respects, regarded with extreme jealousy all encroachments of the
temporal power on the domain of the spiritual power. Both
Calvinists and Papists maintained that subjects might justifiably
draw the sword against ungodly rulers. In France Calvinists
resisted Charles the Ninth: Papists resisted Henry the Fourth:
both Papists and Calvinists resisted Henry the Third. In Scotland
Calvinists led Mary captive. On the north of the Trent Papists
took arms against the English throne. The Church of England
meantime condemned both Calvinists and Papists, and loudly
boasted that no duty was more constantly or earnestly inculcated
by her than that of submission to princes.
The advantages which the crown derived from this close alliance
with the Established Church were great; but they were not without
serious drawbacks. The compromise arranged by Cranmer had from
the first been considered by a large body of Protestants as a
scheme for serving two masters, as an attempt to unite the
worship of the Lord with the worship of Baal. In the days of
Edward the Sixth the scruples of this party had repeatedly thrown
great difficulties in the way of the government. When Elizabeth
came to the throne, those difficulties were much increased.
Violence naturally engenders violence. The spirit of
Protestantism was therefore far fiercer and more intolerant after
the cruelties of Mary than before them. Many persons who were
warmly attached to the new opinions had, during the evil days,
taken refuge in Switzerland and Germany. They had been hospitably
received by their brethren in the faith, had sate at the feet of
the great doctors of Strasburg, Zurich, and Geneva, and had been,
during, some years, accustomed to a more simple worship, and to a
more democratical form of church government, than England had yet
seen. These men returned to their country convinced that the
reform which had been effected under King Edward had been far
less searching and extensive than the interests of pure religion
required. But it was in vain that they attempted to obtain any
concession from Elizabeth. Indeed her system, wherever it
differed from her brother's, seemed to them to differ for the
worse. They were little disposed to submit, in matters of faith,
to any human authority. They had recently, in reliance on their
own interpretation of Scripture, risen up against a Church strong
in immemorial antiquity and catholic consent. It was by no common
exertion of intellectual energy that they had thrown off the yoke
of that gorgeous and imperial superstition; and it was vain to
expect that, immediately after such an emancipation, they would
patiently submit to a new spiritual tyranny. Long accustomed,
when the priest lifted up the host, to bow down with their faces
to the earth, as before a present God, they had learned to treat
the mass as an idolatrous mummery. Long accustomed to regard the
Pope as the successor of the chief of the apostles, as the bearer
of the keys of earth and heaven, they had learned to regard him
as the Beast, the Antichrist, the Man of Sin. It was not to be
expected that they would immediately transfer to an upstart
authority the homage which they had withdrawn from the Vatican;
that they would submit their private judgment to the authority of
a Church founded on private judgment alone; that they would be
afraid to dissent from teachers who themselves dissented from
what had lately been the universal faith of western Christendom.
It is easy to conceive the indignation which must have been felt
by bold and inquisitive spirits, glorying in newly acquired
freedom, when an institution younger by many years than
themselves, an institution which had, under their own eyes,
gradually received its form from the passions and interest of a
court, began to mimic the lofty style of Rome.
Since these men could not be convinced, it was determined that
they should be persecuted. Persecution produced its natural
effect on them. It found them a sect: it made them a faction. To
their hatred of the Church was now added hatred of the Crown. The
two sentiments were intermingled; and each embittered the other.
The opinions of the Puritan concerning the relation of ruler and
subject were widely different from those which were inculcated in
the Homilies. His favourite divines had, both by precept and by
example, encouraged resistance to tyrants and persecutors. His
fellow Calvinists in France, in Holland, and in Scotland, were in
arms against idolatrous and cruel princes. His notions, too,
respecting, the government of the state took a tinge from his
notions respecting the government of the Church. Some of the
sarcasms which were popularly thrown on episcopacy might, without
much difficulty, be turned against royalty; and many of the
arguments which were used to prove that spiritual power was best
lodged in a synod seemed to lead to the conclusion that temporal
power was best lodged in a parliament.
Thus, as the priest of the Established Church was, from interest,
from principle, and from passion, zealous for the royal
prerogatives, the Puritan was, from interest, from principle, and
from passion, hostile to them. The power of the discontented
sectaries was great. They were found in every rank; but they were
strongest among the mercantile classes in the towns, and among
the small proprietors in the country. Early in the reign of
Elizabeth they began to return a majority of the House of
Commons. And doubtless had our ancestors been then at liberty to
fix their attention entirely on domestic questions, the strife
between the Crown and the Parliament would instantly have
commenced. But that was no season for internal dissensions. It
might, indeed, well be doubted whether the firmest union among
all the orders of the state could avert the common danger by
which all were threatened. Roman Catholic Europe and reformed
Europe were struggling for death or life. France divided against
herself, had, for a time, ceased to be of any account in
Christendom. The English Government was at the head of the
Protestant interest, and, while persecuting Presbyterians at
home, extended a powerful protection to Presbyterian Churches
abroad. At the head of the opposite party was the mightiest
prince of the age, a prince who ruled Spain, Portugal, Italy, the
East and the West Indies, whose armies repeatedly marched to
Paris, and whose fleets kept the coasts of Devonshire and Sussex
in alarm. It long seemed probable that Englishmen would have to
fight desperately on English ground for their religion and
independence. Nor were they ever for a moment free from
apprehensions of some great treason at home. For in that age it
had become a point of conscience and of honour with many men of
generous natures to sacrifice their country to their religion. A
succession of dark plots, formed by Roman Catholics against the
life of the Queen and the existence of the nation, kept society
in constant alarm. Whatever might be the faults of Elizabeth, it
was plain that, to speak humanly, the fate of the realm and of
all reformed Churches was staked on the security of her person
and on the success of her administration. To strengthen her hands
was, therefore, the first duty of a patriot and a Protestant; and
that duty was well performed. The Puritans, even in the depths of
the prisons to which she had sent them, prayed, and with no
simulated fervour, that she might be kept from the dagger of the
assassin, that rebellion might be put down under her feet, and
that her arms might be victorious by sea and land. One of the
most stubborn of the stubborn sect, immediately after his hand
had been lopped off for an offence into which he had been hurried
by his intemperate zeal, waved his hat with the hand which was
still left him, and shouted "God save the Queen!" The sentiment
with which these men regarded her has descended to their
posterity. The Nonconformists, rigorously as she treated them,
have, as a body, always venerated her memory.5
During the greater part of her reign, therefore, the Puritans in
the House of Commons, though sometimes mutinous, felt no
disposition to array themselves in systematic opposition to the
government. But, when the defeat of the Armada, the successful
resistance of the United Provinces to the Spanish power, the firm
establishment of Henry the Fourth on the throne of France, and
the death of Philip the Second, had secured the State and the
Church against all danger from abroad, an obstinate struggle,
destined to last during several generations, instantly began at
home.
It was in the Parliament of 1601 that the opposition which had,
during forty years, been silently gathering and husbanding
strength, fought its first great battle and won its first
victory. The ground was well chosen. The English Sovereigns had
always been entrusted with the supreme direction of commercial
police. It was their undoubted prerogative to regulate coin,
weights, and measures, and to appoint fairs, markets, and ports.
The line which bounded their authority over trade had, as usual,
been but loosely drawn. They therefore, as usual, encroached on
the province which rightfully belonged to the legislature. The
encroachment was, as usual, patiently borne, till it became
serious. But at length the Queen took upon herself to grant
patents of monopoly by scores. There was scarcely a family in the
realm which did not feel itself aggrieved by the oppression and
extortion which this abuse naturally caused. Iron, oil, vinegar,
coal, saltpetre, lead, starch, yarn, skins, leather, glass, could
be bought only at exorbitant prices. The House of Commons met in
an angry and determined mood. It was in vain that a courtly
minority blamed the Speaker for suffering the acts of the Queen's
Highness to be called in question. The language of the
discontented party was high and menacing, and was echoed by the
voice of the whole nation. The coach of the chief minister of the
crown was surrounded by an indignant populace, who cursed the
monopolies, and exclaimed that the prerogative should not be
suffered to touch the old liberties of England. There seemed for
a moment to be some danger that the long and glorious reign of
Elizabeth would have a shameful and disastrous end. She, however,
with admirable judgment and temper, declined the contest, put
herself at the head of the reforming party, redressed the
grievance, thanked the Commons, in touching and dignified
language, for their tender care of the general weal, brought back
to herself the hearts of the people, and left to her successors a
memorable example of the way in which it behoves a ruler to deal
with public movements which he has not the means of resisting.
In the year 1603 the great Queen died. That year is, on many
accounts, one of the most important epochs in our history. It was
then that both Scotland and Ireland became parts of the same
empire with England. Both Scotland and Ireland, indeed, had been
subjugated by the Plantagenets; but neither country had been
patient under the yoke. Scotland had, with heroic energy,
vindicated her independence, had, from the time of Robert Bruce,
been a separate kingdom, and was now joined to the southern part
of the island in a manner which rather gratified than wounded her
national pride. Ireland had never, since the days of Henry the
Second, been able to expel the foreign invaders; but she had
struggled against them long and fiercely. During, the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries the English power in that island was
constantly declining, and in the days of Henry the Seventh, sank
to the lowest point. The Irish dominions of that prince consisted
only of the counties of Dublin and Louth, of some parts of Meath
and Kildare, and of a few seaports scattered along the coast. A
large portion even of Leinster was not yet divided into counties.
Munster, Ulster, and Connaught were ruled by petty sovereigns,
partly Celts, and partly degenerate Normans, who had forgotten
their origin and had adopted the Celtic language and manners. But
during the sixteenth century, the English power had made great
progress. The half savage chieftains who reigned beyond the pale
had submitted one after another to the lieutenants of the Tudors.
At length, a few weeks before the death of Elizabeth, the
conquest, which had been begun more than four hundred years
before by Strongbow, was completed by Mountjoy. Scarcely had
James the First mounted the English throne when the last O'Donnel
and O'Neil who have held the rank of independent princes kissed
his hand at Whitehall. Thenceforward his writs ran and his judges
held assizes in every part of Ireland; and the English law
superseded the customs which had prevailed among the aboriginal
tribes.
In extent Scotland and Ireland were nearly equal to each other,
and were together nearly equal to England, but were much less
thickly peopled than England, and were very far behind England in
wealth and civilisation. Scotland had been kept back by the
sterility of her soil; and, in the midst of light, the thick
darkness of the middle ages still rested on Ireland.
The population of Scotland, with the exception of the Celtic
tribes which were thinly scattered over the Hebrides and over the
mountainous parts of the northern shires, was of the same blood
with the population of England, and spoke a tongue which did not
differ from the purest English more than the dialects of
Somersetshire and Lancashire differed from each other. In
Ireland, on the contrary, the population, with the exception of
the small English colony near the coast, was Celtic, and still
kept the Celtic speech and manners.
In natural courage and intelligence both the nations which now
became connected with England ranked high. In perseverance, in
selfcommand, in forethought, in all the virtues which conduce to
success in life, the Scots have never been surpassed. The Irish,
on the other hand, were distinguished by qualities which tend to
make men interesting rather than prosperous. They were an ardent
and impetuous race, easily moved to tears or to laughter, to fury
or to love. Alone among the nations of northern Europe they had
the susceptibility, the vivacity, the natural turn for acting and
rhetoric, which are indigenous on the shores of the Mediterranean
Sea. In mental cultivation Scotland had an indisputable
superiority. Though that kingdom was then the poorest in
Christendom, it already vied in every branch of learning with the
most favoured countries. Scotsmen, whose dwellings and whose food
were as wretched as those of the Icelanders of our time, wrote
Latin verse with more than the delicacy of Vida, and made
discoveries in science which would have added to the renown of
Galileo. Ireland could boast of no Buchanan or Napier. The
genius, with which her aboriginal inhabitants were largely
endowed' showed itself as yet only in ballads which wild and
rugged as they were, seemed to the judging eye of Spenser to
contain a portion of the pure gold of poetry.
Scotland, in becoming part of the British monarchy, preserved her
dignity. Having, during many generations, courageously withstood
the English arms, she was now joined to her stronger neighbour on
the most honourable terms. She gave a King instead of receiving
one. She retained her own constitution and laws. Her tribunals
and parliaments remained entirely independent of the tribunals
and parliaments which sate at Westminster. The administration of
Scotland was in Scottish hands; for no Englishman had any motive
to emigrate northward, and to contend with the shrewdest and most
pertinacious of all races for what was to be scraped together in
the poorest of all treasuries. Nevertheless Scotland by no means
escaped the fate ordained for every country which is connected,
but not incorporated, with another country of greater resources.
Though in name an independent kingdom, she was, during more than
a century, really treated, in many respects, as a subject
province.
Ireland was undisguisedly governed as a dependency won by the
sword. Her rude national institutions had perished. The English
colonists submitted to the dictation of the mother country,
without whose support they could not exist, and indemnified
themselves by trampling on the people among whom they had
settled. The parliaments which met at Dublin could pass no law
which had not been previously approved by the English Privy
Council. The authority of the English legislature extended over
Ireland. The executive administration was entrusted to men taken
either from England or from the English pale, and, in either
case, regarded as foreigners, and even as enemies, by the Celtic
population.
But the circumstance which, more than any other, has made Ireland
to differ from Scotland remains to be noticed. Scotland was
Protestant. In no part of Europe had the movement of the popular
mind against the Roman Catholic Church been so rapid and violent.
The Reformers had vanquished, deposed, and imprisoned their
idolatrous sovereign. They would not endure even such a
compromise as had been effected in England. They had established
the Calvinistic doctrine, discipline, and worship; and they made
little distinction between Popery and Prelacy, between the Mass
and the Book of Common Prayer. Unfortunately for Scotland, the
prince whom she sent to govern a fairer inheritance had been so
much annoyed by the pertinacity with which her theologians had
asserted against him the privileges of the synod and the pulpit
that he hated the ecclesiastical polity to which she was fondly
attached as much as it was in his effeminate nature to hate
anything, and had no sooner mounted the English throne than he
began to show an intolerant zeal for the government and ritual of
the English Church.
The Irish were the only people of northern Europe who had
remained true to the old religion. This is to be partly ascribed
to the circumstance that they were some centuries behind their
neighbours in knowledge. But other causes had cooperated. The
Reformation had been a national as well as a moral revolt. It had
been, not only an insurrection of the laity against the clergy,
but also an insurrection of all the branches of the great German
race against an alien domination. It is a most significant
circumstance that no large society of which the tongue is not
Teutonic has ever turned Protestant, and that, wherever a
language derived from that of ancient Rome is spoken, the
religion of modern Rome to this day prevails. The patriotism of
the Irish had taken a peculiar direction. The object of their
animosity was not Rome, but England; and they had especial reason
to abhor those English sovereigns who had been the chiefs of the
great schism, Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth. During the vain
struggle which two generations of Milesian princes maintained
against the Tudors, religious enthusiasm and national enthusiasm
became inseparably blended in the minds of the vanquished race.
The new feud of Protestant and Papist inflamed the old feud of
Saxon and Celt. The English conquerors. meanwhile, neglected all
legitimate means of conversion. No care was taken to provide the
vanquished nation with instructors capable of making themselves
understood. No translation of the Bible was put forth in the
Irish language. The government contented itself with setting up a
vast hierarchy of Protestant archbishops, bishops, and rectors,
who did nothing, and who, for doing nothing, were paid out of the
spoils of a Church loved and revered by the great body of the
people.
There was much in the state both of Scotland and of Ireland which
might well excite the painful apprehensions of a farsighted
statesman. As yet, however, there was the appearance of
tranquillity. For the first time all the British isles were
peaceably united under one sceptre.
It should seem that the weight of England among European nations
ought, from this epoch, to have greatly increased. The territory
which her new King governed was, in extent, nearly double that
which Elizabeth had inherited. His empire was the most complete
within itself and the most secure from attack that was to be
found in the world. The Plantagenets and Tudors had been
repeatedly under the necessity of defending themselves against
Scotland while they were engaged in continental war. The long
conflict in Ireland had been a severe and perpetual drain on
their resources. Yet even under such disadvantages those
sovereigns had been highly considered throughout Christendom. It
might, therefore, not unreasonably be expected that England,
Scotland, and Ireland combined would form a state second to none
that then existed.
All such expectations were strangely disappointed. On the day of
the accession of James the First, England descended from the rank
which she had hitherto held, and began to he regarded as a power
hardly of the second order. During many years the great British
monarchy, under four successive princes of the House of Stuart,
was scarcely a more important member of the European system than
the little kingdom of Scotland had previously been. This,
however, is little to be regretted. Of James the First, as of
John, it may be said that, if his administration had been able
and splendid, it would probably have been fatal to our country,
and that we owe more to his weakness and meanness than to the
wisdom and courage of much better sovereigns. He came to the
throne at a critical moment. The time was fast approaching when
either the King must become absolute, or the parliament must
control the whole executive administration. Had James been, like
Henry the Fourth, like Maurice of Nassau, or like Gustavus
Adolphus, a valiant, active, and politic ruler, had he put
himself at the head of the Protestants of Europe, had he gained
great victories over Tilly and Spinola, had he adorned
Westminster with the spoils of Bavarian monasteries and Flemish
cathedrals, had he hung Austrian and Castilian banners in Saint
Paul's, and had he found himself, after great achievements, at
the head of fifty thousand troops, brave, well disciplined, and
devotedly attached to his person, the English Parliament would
soon have been nothing more than a name. Happily he was not a man
to play such a part. He began his administration by putting an
end to the war which had raged during many years between England
and Spain; and from that time he shunned hostilities with a
caution which was proof against the insults of his neighbours and
the clamours of his subjects. Not till the last year of his life
could the influence of his son, his favourite, his Parliament,
and his people combined, induce him to strike one feeble blow in
defence of his family and of his religion. It was well for those
whom he governed that he in this matter disregarded their wishes.
The effect of his pacific policy was that, in his time, no
regular troops were needed, and that, while France, Spain, Italy,
Belgium, and Germany swarmed with mercenary soldiers, the defence
of our island was still confided to the militia.
As the King had no standing army, and did not even attempt to
form one, it would have been wise in him to avoid any conflict
with his people. But such was his indiscretion that, while he
altogether neglected the means which alone could make him really
absolute, he constantly put forward, in the most offensive form,
claims of which none of his predecessors had ever dreamed. It was
at this time that those strange theories which Filmer afterwards
formed into a system and which became the badge of the most
violent class of Tories and high churchmen, first emerged into
notice. It was gravely maintained that the Supreme Being regarded
hereditary monarchy, as opposed to other forms of government,
with peculiar favour; that the rule of succession in order of
primogeniture was a divine institution, anterior to the
Christian, and even to the Mosaic dispensation; that no human
power, not even that of the whole legislature, no length of
adverse possession, though it extended to ten centuries, could
deprive a legitimate prince of his rights, that the authority of
such a prince was necessarily always despotic; that the laws, by
which, in England and in other countries, the prerogative was
limited, were to be regarded merely as concessions which the
sovereign had freely made and might at his pleasure resume; and
that any treaty which a king might conclude with his people was
merely a declaration of his present intentions, and not a
contract of which the performance could be demanded. It is
evident that this theory, though intended to strengthen the
foundations of government, altogether unsettles them. Does the
divine and immutable law of primogeniture admit females, or
exclude them? On either supposition half the sovereigns of Europe
must be usurpers, reigning in defiance of the law of God, and
liable to be dispossessed by the rightful heirs. The doctrine
that kingly government is peculiarly favoured by Heaven receives
no countenance from the Old Testament; for in the Old Testament
we read that the chosen people were blamed and punished for
desiring a king, and that they were afterwards commanded to
withdraw their allegiance from him. Their whole history, far from
countenancing the notion that succession in order of
primogeniture is of divine institution, would rather seem to
indicate that younger brothers are under the especial protection
of heaven. Isaac was not the eldest son of Abraham, nor Jacob of
Isaac, nor Judah of Jacob, nor David of Jesse nor Solomon of
David Nor does the system of Filmer receive any countenance from
those passages of the New Testament which describe government as
an ordinance of God: for the government under which the writers
of the New Testament lived was not a hereditary monarchy. The
Roman Emperors were republican magistrates, named by the senate.
None of them pretended to rule by right of birth; and, in fact,
both Tiberius, to whom Christ commanded that tribute should be
given, and Nero, whom Paul directed the Romans to obey, were,
according to the patriarchal theory of government, usurpers. In
the middle ages the doctrine of indefeasible hereditary right
would have been regarded as heretical: for it was altogether
incompatible with the high pretensions of the Church of Rome. It
was a doctrine unknown to the founders of the Church of England.
The Homily on Wilful Rebellion had strongly, and indeed too
strongly, inculcated submission to constituted authority, but had
made no distinction between hereditary end elective monarchies,
or between monarchies and republics. Indeed most of the
predecessors of James would, from personal motives, have regarded
the patriarchal theory of government with aversion. William
Rufus, Henry the First, Stephen, John, Henry the Fourth, Henry
the Fifth, Henry the Sixth, Richard the Third, and Henry the
Seventh, had all reigned in defiance of the strict rule of
descent. A grave doubt hung over the legitimacy both of Mary and
of Elizabeth. It was impossible that both Catharine of Aragon and
Anne Boleyn could have been lawfully married to Henry the Eighth;
and the highest authority in the realm had pronounced that
neither was so. The Tudors, far from considering the law of
succession as a divine and unchangeable institution, were
constantly tampering with it. Henry the Eighth obtained an act of
parliament, giving him power to leave the crown by will, and
actually made a will to the prejudice of the royal family of
Scotland. Edward the Sixth, unauthorised by Parliament, assumed a
similar power, with the full approbation of the most eminent
Reformers. Elizabeth, conscious that her own title was open to
grave objection, and unwilling to admit even a reversionary right
in her rival and enemy the Queen of Scots, induced the Parliament
to pass a law, enacting that whoever should deny the competency
of the reigning sovereign, with the assent of the Estates of the
realm, to alter the succession, should suffer death as a traitor:
But the situation of James was widely different from that of
Elizabeth. Far inferior to her in abilities and in popularity,
regarded by the English as an alien, and excluded from the throne
by the testament of Henry the Eighth, the King of Scots was yet
the undoubted heir of William the Conqueror and of Egbert. He
had, therefore, an obvious interest in inculcating the
superstitions notion that birth confers rights anterior to law,
and unalterable by law. It was a notion, moreover, well suited to
his intellect and temper. It soon found many advocates among
those who aspired to his favour, and made rapid progress among
the clergy of the Established Church.
Thus, at the very moment at which a republican spirit began to
manifest itself strongly in the Parliament and in the country,
the claims of the monarch took a monstrous form which would have
disgusted the proudest and most arbitrary of those who had
preceded him on the throne.
James was always boasting of his skill in what he called
kingcraft; and yet it is hardly possible even to imagine a course
more directly opposed to all the rules of kingcraft, than that
which he followed. The policy of wise rulers has always been to
disguise strong acts under popular forms. It was thus that
Augustus and Napoleon established absolute monarchies, while the
public regarded them merely as eminent citizens invested with
temporary magistracies. The policy of James was the direct
reverse of theirs. He enraged and alarmed his Parliament by
constantly telling them that they held their privileges merely
during his pleasure and that they had no more business to inquire
what he might lawfully do than what the Deity might lawfully do.
Yet he quailed before them, abandoned minister after minister to
their vengeance, and suffered them to tease him into acts
directly opposed to his strongest inclinations. Thus the
indignation excited by his claims and the scorn excited by his
concessions went on growing together. By his fondness for
worthless minions, and by the sanction which he gave to their
tyranny and rapacity, he kept discontent constantly alive. His
cowardice, his childishness, his pedantry, his ungainly person,
his provincial accent, made him an object of derision. Even in
his virtues and accomplishments there was something eminently
unkingly. Throughout the whole course of his reign, all the
venerable associations by which the throng had long been fenced
were gradually losing their strength. During two hundred years
all the sovereigns who had ruled England, with the exception of
Henry the Sixth, had been strongminded, highspirited, courageous,
and of princely bearing. Almost all had possessed abilities above
the ordinary level. It was no light thing that on the very eve of
the decisive struggle between our Kings and their Parliaments,
royalty should be exhibited to the world stammering, slobbering,
shedding unmanly tears, trembling at a drawn sword, and talking
in the style alternately of a buffoon and of a pedagogue.
In the meantime the religious dissensions, by which, from the
days of Edward the Sixth, the Protestant body had been
distracted, had become more formidable than ever. The interval
which had separated the first generation of Puritans from Cranmer
and Jewel was small indeed when compared with the interval which
separated the third generation of Puritans from Laud and Hammond.
While the recollection of Mary's cruelties was still fresh, while
the powers of the Roman Catholic party still inspired
apprehension, while Spain still retained ascendency and aspired
to universal dominion, all the reformed sects knew that they had
a strong common interest and a deadly common enemy. The animosity
which they felt towards each other was languid when compared with
the animosity which they all felt towards Rome. Conformists and
Nonconformists had heartily joined in enacting penal laws of
extreme severity against the Papists. But when more than half a
century of undisturbed possession had given confidence to the
Established Church, when nine tenths of the nation had become
heartily Protestant, when England was at peace with all the
world, when there was no danger that Popery would be forced by
foreign arms on the nation, when the last confessors who had
stood before Bonner had passed away, a change took place in the
feeling of the Anglican clergy. Their hostility to the Roman
Catholic doctrine and discipline was considerably mitigated.
Their dislike of the Puritans, on the other hand, increased
daily. The controversies which had from the beginning divided the
Protestant party took such a form as made reconciliation
hopeless; and new controversies of still greater importance were
added to the old subjects of dispute.
The founders of the Anglican Church had retained episcopacy as an
ancient, a decent, and a convenient ecclesiastical polity, but
had not declared that form of church government to be of divine
institution. We have already seen how low an estimate Cranmer had
formed of the office of a Bishop. In the reign of Elizabeth,
Jewel, Cooper, Whitgift, and other eminent doctors defended
prelacy, as innocent, as useful, as what the state might lawfully
establish, as what, when established by the state, was entitled
to the respect of every citizen. But they never denied that a
Christian community without a Bishop might be a pure Church.6 On
the contrary, they regarded the Protestants of the Continent as
of the same household of faith with themselves. Englishmen in
England were indeed bound to acknowledge the authority of the
Bishop, as they were bound to acknowledge the authority of the
Sheriff and of the Coroner: but the obligation was purely local.
An English churchman, nay even an English prelate, if he went to
Holland, conformed without scruple to the established religion of
Holland. Abroad the ambassadors of Elizabeth and James went in
state to the very worship which Elizabeth and James persecuted at
home, and carefully abstained from decorating their private
chapels after the Anglican fashion, lest scandal should be given
to weaker brethren. An instrument is still extant by which the
Primate of all England, in the year 1582, authorised a Scotch
minister, ordained, according to the laudable forms of the Scotch
Church, by the Synod of East Lothian, to preach and administer
the sacraments in any part of the province of Canterbury.7 In the
year 1603, the Convocation solemnly recognised the Church of
Scotland, a Church in which episcopal control and episcopal
ordination were then unknown, as a branch of the Holy Catholic
Church of Christ.8 It was even held that Presbyterian ministers
were entitled to place and voice in oecumenical councils. When
the States General of the United Provinces convoked at Dort a
synod of doctors not episcopally ordained, an English Bishop and
an English Dean, commissioned by the head of the English Church,
sate with those doctors, preached to them, and voted with them on
the gravest questions of theology.9 Nay, many English benefices
were held by divines who had been admitted to the ministry in the
Calvinistic form used on the Continent; nor was reordination by a
Bishop in such cases then thought necessary, or even lawful.10
But a new race of divines was already rising in the Church of
England. In their view the episcopal office was essential to the
welfare of a Christian society and to the efficacy of the most
solemn ordinances of religion. To that office belonged certain
high and sacred privileges, which no human power could give or
take away. A church might as well be without the doctrine of the
Trinity, or the doctrine of the Incarnation, as without the
apostolical orders; and the Church of Rome, which, in the midst
of all her corruptions, had retained the apostolical orders, was
nearer to primitive purity than those reformed societies which
had rashly set up, in opposition to the divine model, a system
invented by men.
In the days of Edward the Sixth and of Elizabeth, the defenders
of the Anglican ritual had generally contented themselves with
saying that it might be used without sin, and that, therefore,
none but a perverse and undutiful subject would refuse to use it
when enjoined to do so by the magistrate. Now, however, that
rising party which claimed for the polity of the Church a
celestial origin began to ascribe to her services a new dignity
and importance. It was hinted that, if the established worship
had any fault, that fault was extreme simplicity, and that the
Reformers had, in the heat of their quarrel with Rome, abolished
many ancient ceremonies which might with advantage have been
retained. Days and places were again held in mysterious
veneration. Some practices which had long been disused, and which
were commonly regarded as superstitious mummeries, were revived.
Paintings and carvings, which had escaped the fury of the first
generation of Protestants, became the objects of a respect such
as to many seemed idolatrous.
No part of the system of the old Church had been more detested by
the Reformers than the honour paid to celibacy. They held that
the doctrine of Rome on this subject had been prophetically
condemned by the apostle Paul, as a doctrine of devils; and they
dwelt much on the crimes and scandals which seemed to prove the
justice of this awful denunciation. Luther had evinced his own
opinion in the clearest manner, by espousing a nun. Some of the
most illustrious bishops and priests who had died by fire during
the reign of Mary had left wives and children. Now, however, it
began to be rumoured that the old monastic spirit had reappeared
in the Church of England; that there was in high quarters a
prejudice against married priests; that even laymen, who called
themselves Protestants, had made resolutions of celibacy which
almost amounted to vows; nay, that a minister of the established
religion had set up a nunnery, in which the psalms were chaunted
at midnight, by a company of virgins dedicated to God.11
Nor was this all. A class of questions, as to which the founders
of the Anglican Church and the first generation of Puritans had
differed little or not at all, began to furnish matter for fierce
disputes. The controversies which had divided the Protestant body
in its infancy had related almost exclusively to Church
government and to ceremonies. There had been no serious quarrel
between the contending parties on points of metaphysical
theology. The doctrines held by the chiefs of the hierarchy
touching original sin, faith, grace, predestination, and
election, were those which are popularly called Calvinistic.
Towards the close of Elizabeth's reign her favourite prelate,
Archbishop Whitgift, drew up, in concert with the Bishop of
London and other theologians, the celebrated instrument known by
the name of the Lambeth Articles. In that instrument the most
startling of the Calvinistic doctrines are affirmed with a
distinctness which would shock many who, in our age, are reputed
Calvinists. One clergyman, who took the opposite side, and spoke
harshly of Calvin, was arraigned for his presumption by the
University of Cambridge, and escaped punishment only by
expressing his firm belief in the tenets of reprobation and final
perseverance, and his sorrow for the offence which he had given
to pious men by reflecting on the great French reformer. The
school of divinity of which Hooker was the chief occupies a
middle place between the school of Cranmer and the school of
Laud; and Hooker has, in modern times, been claimed by the
Arminians as an ally. Yet Hooker pronounced Calvin to have been a
man superior in wisdom to any other divine that France had
produced, a man to whom thousands were indebted for the knowledge
of divine truth, but who was himself indebted to God alone. When
the Arminian controversy arose in Holland, the English government
and the English Church lent strong support to the Calvinistic
party; nor is the English name altogether free from the stain
which has been left on that party by the imprisonment of Grocius
and the judicial murder of Barneveldt.
But, even before the meeting of the Dutch synod, that part of the
Anglican clergy which was peculiarly hostile to the Calvinistic
Church government and to the Calvinistic worship had begun to
regard with dislike the Calvinistic metaphysics; and this feeling
was very naturally strengthened by the gross injustice,
insolence, and cruelty of the party which was prevalent at Dort.
The Arminian doctrine, a doctrine less austerely logical than
that of the early Reformers, but more agreeable to the popular
notions of the divine justice and benevolence, spread fast and
wide. The infection soon reached the court. Opinions which at the
time of the accession of James, no clergyman could have avowed
without imminent risk of being stripped of his gown, were now the
best title to preferment. A divine of that age, who was asked by
a simple country gentleman what the Arminians held, answered,
with as much truth as wit, that they held all the best bishoprics
and deaneries in England.
While the majority of the Anglican clergy quitted, in one
direction, the position which they had originally occupied, the
majority of the Puritan body departed, in a direction
diametrically opposite, from the principles and practices of
their fathers. The persecution which the separatists had
undergone had been severe enough to irritate, but not severe
enough to destroy. They had been, not tamed into submission, but
baited into savageness and stubborness. After the fashion of
oppressed sects, they mistook their own vindictive feelings for
emotions of piety, encouraged in themselves by reading and
meditation, a disposition to brood over their wrongs, and, when
they had worked themselves up into hating their enemies, imagined
that they were only hating the enemies of heaven. In the New
Testament there was little indeed which, even when perverted by
the most disingenuous exposition, could seem to countenance the
indulgence of malevolent passions. But the Old Testament
contained the history of a race selected by God to be witnesses
of his unity and ministers of his vengeance, and specially
commanded by him to do many things which, if done without his
special command, would have been atrocious crimes. In such a
history it was not difficult for fierce and gloomy spirits to
find much that might be distorted to suit their wishes. The
extreme Puritans therefore began to feel for the Old Testament a
preference, which, perhaps, they did not distinctly avow even to
themselves; but which showed itself in all their sentiments and
habits. They paid to the Hebrew language a respect which they
refused to that tongue in which the discourses of Jesus and the
epistles of Paul have come down to us. They baptized their
children by the names, not of Christian saints, but of Hebrew
patriarchs and warriors. In defiance of the express and
reiterated declarations of Luther and Calvin, they turned the
weekly festival by which the Church had, from the primitive
times, commemorated the resurrection of her Lord, into a Jewish
Sabbath. They sought for principles of jurisprudence in the
Mosaic law, and for precedents to guide their ordinary conduct in
the books of Judges and Kings. Their thoughts and discourse ran
much on acts which were assuredly not recorded as examples for
our imitation. The prophet who hewed in pieces a captive king,
the rebel general who gave the blood of a queen to the dogs, the
matron who, in defiance of plighted faith, and of the laws of
eastern hospitality, drove the nail into the brain of the
fugitive ally who had just fed at her board, and who was sleeping
under the shadow of her tent, were proposed as models to
Christians suffering under the tyranny of princes and prelates.
Morals and manners were subjected to a code resembling that of
the synagogue, when the synagogue was in its worst state. The
dress, the deportment, the language, the studies, the amusements
of the rigid sect were regulated on principles not unlike those
of the Pharisees who, proud of their washed hands and broad
phylacteries, taunted the Redeemer as a sabbath-breaker and a
winebibber. It was a sin to hang garlands on a Maypole, to drink
a friend's health, to fly a hawk, to hunt a stag, to play at
chess, to wear love-locks, to put starch into a ruff, to touch
the virginals, to read the Fairy Queen. Rules such as these,
rules which would have appeared insupportable to the free and
joyous spirit of Luther, and contemptible to the serene and
philosophical intellect of Zwingle, threw over all life a more
than monastic gloom. The learning and eloquence by which the
great Reformers had been eminently distinguished, and to which
they had been, in no small measure, indebted for their success,
were regarded by the new school of Protestants with suspicion, if
not with aversion. Some precisians had scruples about teaching
the Latin grammar, because the names of Mars, Bacchus, and Apollo
occurred in it. The fine arts were all but proscribed. The solemn
peal of the organ was superstitious. The light music of Ben
Jonson's masques was dissolute. Half the fine paintings in
England were idolatrous, and the other half indecent. The extreme
Puritan was at once known from other men by his gait, his garb,
his lank hair, the sour solemnity of his face, the upturned white
of his eyes, the nasal twang with which he spoke, and above all,
by his peculiar dialect. He employed, on every occasion, the
imagery and style of Scripture. Hebraisms violently introduced
into the English language, and metaphors borrowed from the
boldest lyric poetry of a remote age and country, and applied to
the common concerns of English life, were the most striking
peculiarities of this cant, which moved, not without cause, the
derision both of Prelatists and libertines.
Thus the political and religious schism which had originated in
the sixteenth century was, during the first quarter of the
seventeenth century, constantly widening. Theories tending to
Turkish despotism were in fashion at Whitehall. Theories tending
to republicanism were in favour with a large portion of the House
of Commons. The violent Prelatists who were, to a man, zealous
for prerogative, and the violent Puritans who were, to a man,
zealous for the privileges of Parliament, regarded each other
with animosity more intense than that which, in the preceding
generation, had existed between Catholics and Protestants.
While the minds of men were in this state, the country, after a
peace of many years, at length engaged in a war which required
strenuous exertions. This war hastened the approach of the great
constitutional crisis. It was necessary that the King should have
a large military force. He could not have such a force without
money. He could not legally raise money without the consent of
Parliament. It followed, therefore, that he either must
administer the government in conformity with the sense of the
House of Commons, or must venture on such a violation of the
fundamental laws of the land as had been unknown during several
centuries. The Plantagenets and the Tudors had, it is true,
occasionally supplied a deficiency in their revenue by a
benevolence or a forced loan: but these expedients were always of
a temporary nature. To meet the regular charge of a long war by
regular taxation, imposed without the consent of the Estates of
the realm, was a course which Henry the Eighth himself would not
have dared to take. It seemed, therefore, that the decisive hour
was approaching, and that the English Parliament would soon
either share the fate of the senates of the Continent, or obtain
supreme ascendency in the state.
Just at this conjuncture James died. Charles the First succeeded
to the throne. He had received from nature a far better
understanding, a far stronger will, and a far keener and firmer
temper than his father's. He had inherited his father's political
theories, and was much more disposed than his father to carry
them into practice. He was, like his father, a zealous
Episcopalian. He was, moreover, what his father had never been, a
zealous Arminian, and, though no Papist, liked a Papist much
better than a Puritan. It would be unjust to deny that Charles
had some of the qualities of a good, and even of a great prince.
He wrote and spoke, not, like his father, with the exactness of a
professor, but after the fashion of intelligent and well educated
gentlemen. His taste in literature and art was excellent, his
manner dignified, though not gracious, his domestic life without
blemish. Faithlessness was the chief cause of his disasters, and
is the chief stain on his memory. He was, in truth, impelled by
an incurable propensity to dark and crooked ways. It may seem
strange that his conscience, which, on occasions of little
moment, was sufficiently sensitive, should never have reproached
him with this great vice. But there is reason to believe that he
was perfidious, not only from constitution and from habit, but
also on principle. He seems to have learned from the theologians
whom he most esteemed that between him and his subjects there
could be nothing of the nature of mutual contract; that he could
not, even if he would, divest himself of his despotic authority;
and that, in every promise which he made, there was an implied
reservation that such promise might be broken in case of
necessity, and that of the necessity he was the sole judge.
And now began that hazardous game on which were staked the
destinies of the English people. It was played on the side of the
House of Commons with keenness, but with admirable dexterity,
coolness, and perseverance. Great statesmen who looked far behind
them and far before them were at the head of that assembly. They
were resolved to place the King in such a situation that he must
either conduct the administration in conformity with the wishes
of his Parliament, or make outrageous attacks on the most sacred
principles of the constitution. They accordingly doled out
supplies to him very sparingly. He found that he must govern
either in harmony with the House of Commons or in defiance of all
law. His choice was soon made. He dissolved his first Parliament,
and levied taxes by his own authority. He convoked a second
Parliament, and found it more intractable than the first. He
again resorted to the expedient of dissolution, raised fresh
taxes without any show of legal right, and threw the chiefs of
the opposition into prison At the same time a new grievance,
which the peculiar feelings and habits of the English nation made
insupportably painful, and which seemed to all discerning men to
be of fearful augury, excited general discontent and alarm.
Companies of soldiers were billeted on the people; and martial
law was, in some places, substituted for the ancient
jurisprudence of the realm.
The King called a third Parliament, and soon perceived that the
opposition was stronger and fiercer than ever. He now determined
on a change of tactics. Instead of opposing an inflexible
resistance to the demands of the Commons, he, after much
altercation and many evasions, agreed to a compromise which, if
he had faithfully adhered to it, would have averted a long series
of calamities. The Parliament granted an ample supply. The King
ratified, in the most solemn manner, that celebrated law, which
is known by the name of the Petition of Right, and which is the
second Great Charter of the liberties of England. By ratifying
that law he bound himself never again to raise. money without the
consent of the Houses, never again to imprison any person, except
in due course of law, and never again to subject his people to
the jurisdiction of courts martial.
The day on which the royal sanction was, after many delays,
solemnly given to this great Act, was a day of joy and hope. The
Commons, who crowded the bar of the House of Lords, broke forth
into loud acclamations as soon as the clerk had pronounced the
ancient form of words by which our princes have, during many
ages, signified their assent to the wishes of the Estates of the
realm. Those acclamations were reechoed by the voice of the
capital and of the nation; but within three weeks it became
manifest that Charles had no intention of observing the compact
into which he had entered. The supply given by the
representatives of the nation was collected. The promise by which
that supply had been obtained was broken. A violent contest
followed. The Parliament was dissolved with every mark of royal
displeasure. Some of the most distinguished members were
imprisoned; and one of them, Sir John Eliot, after years of
suffering, died in confinement.
Charles, however, could not venture to raise, by his own
authority, taxes sufficient for carrying on war. He accordingly
hastened to make peace with his neighbours, and thenceforth gave
his whole mind to British politics.
Now commenced a new era. Many English Kings had occasionally
committed unconstitutional acts: but none had ever systematically
attempted to make himself a despot, and to reduce the Parliament
to a nullity. Such was the end which Charles distinctly proposed
to himself. From March 1629 to April 1640, the Houses were not
convoked. Never in our history had there been an interval of
eleven years between Parliament and Parliament. Only once had
there been an interval of even half that length. This fact alone
is sufficient to refute those who represent Charles as having
merely trodden in the footsteps of the Plantagenets and Tudors.
It is proved, by the testimony of the King's most strenuous
supporters, that, during this part of his reign, the provisions
of the Petition of Right were violated by him, not occasionally,
but constantly, and on system; that a large part of the revenue
was raised without any legal authority; and that persons
obnoxious to the government languished for years in prison,
without being ever called upon to plead before any tribunal.
For these things history must hold the King himself chiefly
responsible. From the time of his third Parliament he was his own
prime minister. Several persons, however, whose temper and
talents were suited to his purposes, were at the head of
different departments of the administration.
Thomas Wentworth, successively created Lord Wentworth and Earl of
Strafford, a man of great abilities, eloquence, and courage, but
of a cruel and imperious nature, was the counsellor most trusted
in political and military affairs. He had been one of the most
distinguished members of the opposition, and felt towards those
whom he had deserted that peculiar malignity which has, in all
ages, been characteristic of apostates. He perfectly understood
the feelings, the resources, and the policy of the party to which
he had lately belonged, and had formed a vast and deeply
meditated scheme which very nearly confounded even the able
tactics of the statesmen by whom the House of Commons had been
directed. To this scheme, in his confidential correspondence, he
gave the expressive name of Thorough. His object was to do in
England all, and more than all, that Richelieu was doing in
France; to make Charles a monarch as absolute as any on the
Continent; to put the estates and the personal liberty of the
whole people at the disposal of the crown; to deprive the courts
of law of all independent authority, even in ordinary questions
of civil right between man and man; and to punish with merciless
rigour all who murmured at the acts of the government, or who
applied, even in the most decent and regular manner, to any
tribunal for relief against those acts.12
This was his end; and he distinctly saw in what manner alone this
end could be attained. There was, in truth, about all his notions
a clearness, a coherence, a precision, which, if he had not been
pursuing an object pernicious to his country and to his kind,
would have justly entitled him to high admiration. He saw that
there was one instrument, and only one, by which his vast and
daring projects could be carried into execution. That instrument
was a standing army. To the forming of such an army, therefore,
he directed all the energy of his strong mind. In Ireland, where
he was viceroy, he actually succeeded in establishing a military
despotism, not only over the aboriginal population, but also over
the English colonists, and was able to boast that, in that
island, the King was as absolute as any prince in the whole world
could be.13
The ecclesiastical administration was, in the meantime,
principally directed by William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury.
Of all the prelates of the Anglican Church, Laud had departed
farthest from the principles of the Reformation, and had drawn
nearest to Rome. His theology was more remote than even that of
the Dutch Arminians from the theology of the Calvinists. His
passion for ceremonies, his reverence for holidays, vigils, and
sacred places, his ill concealed dislike of the marriage of
ecclesiastics, the ardent and not altogether disinterested zeal
with which he asserted the claims of the clergy to the reverence
of the laity, would have made him an object of aversion to the
Puritans, even if he had used only legal and gentle means for the
attainment of his ends. But his understanding was narrow; and his
commerce with the world had been small. He was by nature rash,
irritable, quick to feel for his own dignity, slow to sympathise
with the sufferings of others, and prone to the error, common in
superstitious men, of mistaking his own peevish and malignant
moods for emotions of pious zeal. Under his direction every
corner of the realm was subjected to a constant and minute
inspection. Every little congregation of separatists was tracked
out and broken up. Even the devotions of private families could
not escape the vigilance of his spies. Such fear did his rigour
inspire that the deadly hatred of the Church, which festered in
innumerable bosoms, was generally disguised under an outward show
of conformity. On the very eve of troubles, fatal to himself and
to his order, the Bishops of several extensive dioceses were able
to report to him that not a single dissenter was to be found
within their jurisdiction.14
The tribunals afforded no protection to the subject against the
civil and ecclesiastical tyranny of that period. The judges of
the common law, holding their situations during the pleasure of
the King, were scandalously obsequious. Yet, obsequious as they
were, they were less ready and less efficient instruments of
arbitrary power than a class of courts, the memory of which is
still, after the lapse of more than two centuries, held in deep
abhorrence by the nation. Foremost among these courts in power
and in infamy were the Star Chamber and the High Commission, the
former a political, the latter a religious inquisition. Neither
was a part of the old constitution of England. The Star Chamber
had been remodelled, and the High Commission created, by the
Tudors. The power which these boards had possessed before the
accession of Charles had been extensive and formidable, but had
been small indeed when compared with that which they now usurped.
Guided chiefly by the violent spirit of the primate, and free
from the control of Parliament, they displayed a rapacity, a
violence, a malignant energy, which had been unknown to any
former age. The government was able through their
instrumentality, to fine, imprison, pillory, and mutilate without
restraint. A separate council which sate at York, under the
presidency of Wentworth, was armed, in defiance of law, by a pure
act of prerogative, with almost boundless power over the northern
counties. All these tribunals insulted and defied the authority
of Westminster Hall, and daily committed excesses which the most
distinguished Royalists have warmly condemned. We are informed by
Clarendon that there was hardly a man of note in the realm who
had not personal experience of the harshness and greediness of
the Star Chamber, that the High Commission had so conducted
itself that it had scarce a friend left in the kingdom, and that
the tyranny of the Council of York had made the Great Charter a
dead letter on the north of the Trent.
The government of England was now, in all points but one, as
despotic as that of France. But that one point was all important.
There was still no standing army. There was therefore, no
security that the whole fabric of tyranny might not be subverted
in a single day; and, if taxes were imposed by the royal
authority for the support of an army, it was probable that there
would be an immediate and irresistible explosion. This was the
difficulty which more than any other perplexed Wentworth. The
Lord Keeper Finch, in concert with other lawyers who were
employed by the government, recommended an expedient which was
eagerly adopted. The ancient princes of England, as they called
on the inhabitants of the counties near Scotland to arm and array
themselves for the defence of the border, had sometimes called on
the maritime counties to furnish ships for the defence of the
coast. In the room of ships money had sometimes been accepted.
This old practice it was now determined, after a long interval,
not only to revive but to extend. Former princes had raised
shipmoney only in time of war: it was now exacted in a time of
profound peace. Former princes, even in the most perilous wars,
had raised shipmoney only along the coasts: it was now exacted
from the inland shires. Former princes had raised shipmoney only
for the maritime defence of the country: It was now exacted, by
the admission of the Royalists themselves. With the object, not
of maintaining a navy, but of furnishing the King with supplies
which might be increased at his discretion to any amount, and
expended at his discretion for any purpose.
The whole nation was alarmed and incensed. John Hampden, an
opulent and well born gentleman of Buckinghamshire, highly
considered in his own neighbourhood, but as yet little known to
the kingdom generally, had the courage to step forward, to
confront the whole power of the government, and take on himself
the cost and the risk of disputing the prerogative to which the
King laid claim. The case was argued before the judges in the
Exchequer Chamber. So strong were the arguments against the
pretensions of the crown that, dependent and servile as the
judges were, the majority against Hampden was the smallest
possible. Still there was a majority. The interpreters of the law
had pronounced that one great and productive tax might be imposed
by the royal authority. Wentworth justly observed that it was
impossible to vindicate their judgment except by reasons directly
leading to a conclusion which they had not ventured to draw. If
money might legally be raised without the consent of Parliament
for the support of a fleet, it was not easy to deny that money
might, without consent of Parliament, be legally raised for the
support of an army.
The decision of the judges increased the irritation of the
people. A century earlier, irritation less serious would have
produced a general rising. But discontent did not now so readily
as in an earlier age take the form of rebellion. The nation had
been long steadily advancing in wealth and in civilisation. Since
the great northern Earls took up arms against Elizabeth seventy
years had elapsed; and during those seventy years there had been
no civil war. Never, during the whole existence of the English
nation, had so long a period passed without intestine
hostilities. Men had become accustomed to the pursuits of
peaceful industry, and, exasperated as they were, hesitated long
before they drew the sword.
This was the conjuncture at which the liberties of the nation
were in the greatest peril. The opponents of the government began
to despair of the destiny of their country; and many looked to
the American wilderness as the only asylum in which they could
enjoy civil and spiritual freedom. There a few resolute Puritans,
who, in the cause of their religion, feared neither the rage of
the ocean nor the hardships of uncivilised life, neither the
fangs of savage beasts nor the tomahawks of more savage men, had
built, amidst the primeval forests, villages which are now great
and opulent cities, but which have, through every change,
retained some trace of the character derived from their founders.
The government regarded these infant colonies with aversion, and
attempted violently to stop the stream of emigration, but could
not prevent the population of New England from being largely
recruited by stouthearted and Godfearing men from every part of
the old England. And now Wentworth exulted in the near prospect
of Thorough. A few years might probably suffice for the execution
of his great design. If strict economy were observed, if all
collision with foreign powers were carefully avoided, the debts
of the crown would be cleared off: there would be funds available
for the support of a large military force; and that force would
soon break the refractory spirit of the nation.
At this crisis an act of insane bigotry suddenly changed the
whole face of public affairs. Had the King been wise, he would
have pursued a cautious and soothing policy towards Scotland till
he was master in the South. For Scotland was of all his kingdoms
that in which there was the greatest risk that a spark might
produce a flame, and that a flame might become a conflagration.
Constitutional opposition, indeed, such as he had encountered at
Westminster, he had not to apprehend at Edinburgh. The Parliament
of his northern kingdom was a very different body from that which
bore the same name in England. It was ill constituted: it was
little considered; and it had never imposed any serious restraint
on any of his predecessors. The three Estates sate in one house.
The commissioners of the burghs were considered merely as
retainers of the great nobles. No act could be introduced till it
had been approved by the Lords of Articles. a committee which was
really, though not in form, nominated by the crown. But, though
the Scottish Parliament was obsequious, the Scottish people had
always been singularly turbulent and ungovernable. They had
butchered their first James in his bedchamber: they had
repeatedly arrayed themselves in arms against James the Second;
they had slain James the Third on the field of battle: their
disobedience had broken the heart of James the Fifth: they had
deposed and imprisoned Mary: they had led her son captive; and
their temper was still as intractable as ever. Their habits were
rude and martial. All along the southern border, and all along
the line between the highlands and the lowlands, raged an
incessant predatory war. In every part of the country men were
accustomed to redress their wrongs by the strong hand. Whatever
loyalty the nation had anciently felt to the Stuarts had cooled
during their long absence. The supreme influence over the public
mind was divided between two classes of malecontents, the lords
of the soil and the preachers; lords animated by the same spirit
which had often impelled the old Douglasses to withstand the
royal house, and preachers who had inherited the republican
opinions and the unconquerable spirit of Knox. Both the national
and religious feelings of the population had been wounded. All
orders of men complained that their country, that country which
had, with so much glory, defended her independence against the
ablest and bravest Plantagenets, had, through the instrumentality
of her native princes, become in effect, though not in name, a
province of England. In no part of Europe had the Calvinistic
doctrine and discipline taken so strong a hold on the public
mind. The Church of Rome was regarded by the great body of the
people with a hatred which might justly be called ferocious; and
the Church of England, which seemed to be every day becoming more
and more like the Church of Rome, was an object of scarcely less
aversion.
The government had long wished to extend the Anglican system over
the whole island, and had already, with this view, made several
changes highly distasteful to every Presbyterian. One innovation,
however, the most hazardous of all, because it was directly
cognisable by the senses of the common people, had not yet been
attempted. The public worship of God was still conducted in the
manner acceptable to the nation. Now, however, Charles and Laud
determined to force on the Scots the English liturgy, or rather a
liturgy which, wherever it differed from that of England,
differed, in the judgment of all rigid Protestants, for the
worse.
To this step, taken in the mere wantonness of tyranny, and in
criminal ignorance or more criminal contempt of public feeling,
our country owes her freedom. The first performance of the
foreign ceremonies produced a riot. The riot rapidly became a
revolution. Ambition, patriotism, fanaticism, were mingled in one
headlong torrent. The whole nation was in arms. The power of
England was indeed, as appeared some years later, sufficient to
coerce Scotland: but a large part of the English people
sympathised with the religious feelings of the insurgents; and
many Englishmen who had no scruple about antiphonies and
genuflexions, altars and surplices, saw with pleasure the
progress of a rebellion which seemed likely to confound the
arbitrary projects of the court, and to make the calling of a
Parliament necessary.
For the senseless freak which had produced these effects
Wentworth is not responsible.15 It had, in fact, thrown all his
plans into confusion. To counsel submission, however, was not in
his nature. An attempt was made to put down the insurrection by
the sword: but the King's military means and military talents
were unequal to the task. To impose fresh taxes on England in
defiance of law, would, at this conjuncture, have been madness.
No resource was left but a Parliament; and in the spring of 1640
a Parliament was convoked.
The nation had been put into good humour by the prospect of
seeing constitutional government restored, and grievances
redressed. The new House of Commons was more temperate and more
respectful to the throne than any which had sate since the death
of Elizabeth. The moderation of this assembly has been highly
extolled by the most distinguished Royalists and seems to have
caused no small vexation and disappointment to the chiefs of the
opposition: but it was the uniform practice of Charles, a
practice equally impolitic and ungenerous, to refuse all
compliance with the desires of his people, till those desires
were expressed in a menacing tone. As soon as the Commons showed
a disposition to take into consideration the grievances under
which the country had suffered during eleven years, the King
dissolved the Parliament with every mark of displeasure.
Between the dissolution of this shortlived assembly and the
meeting of that ever memorable body known by the name of the Long
Parliament, intervened a few months, during which the yoke was
pressed down more severely than ever on the nation, while the
spirit of the nation rose up more angrily than ever against the
yoke. Members of the House of Commons were questioned by the
Privy Council touching their parliamentary conduct, and thrown
into prison for refusing to reply. Shipmoney was levied with
increased rigour. The Lord Mayor and the Sheriffs of London were
threatened with imprisonment for remissness in collecting the
payments. Soldiers were enlisted by force. Money for their
support was exacted from their counties. Torture, which had
always been illegal, and which had recently been declared illegal
even by the servile judges of that age, was inflicted for the
last time in England in the month of May, 1610.
Everything now depended on the event of the King's military
operations against the Scots. Among his troops there was little
of that feeling which separates professional soldiers from the
mass of a nation, and attaches them to their leaders. His army,
composed for the most part of recruits, who regretted the plough
from which they had been violently taken, and who were imbued
with the religious and political sentiments then prevalent
throughout the country, was more formidable to himself than to
the enemy. The Scots, encouraged by the heads of the English
opposition, and feebly resisted by the English forces, marched
across the Tweed and the Tyne, and encamped on the borders of
Yorkshire. And now the murmurs of discontent swelled into an
uproar by which all spirits save one were overawed.
But the voice of Strafford was still for Thorough; and he even,
in this extremity, showed a nature so cruel and despotic, that
his own pikemen were ready to tear him in pieces.
There was yet one last expedient which, as the King flattered
himself, might save him from the misery of facing another House
of Commons. To the House of Lords he was less averse. The Bishops
were devoted to him; and though the temporal peers were generally
dissatisfied with his administration, they were, as a class, so
deeply interested in the maintenance of order, and in the
stability of ancient institutions, that they were not likely to
call for extensive reforms. Departing from the uninterrupted
practice of centuries, he called a Great Council consisting of
Lords alone. But the Lords were too prudent to assume the
unconstitutional functions with which he wished to invest them.
Without money, without credit, without authority even in his own
camp, he yielded to the pressure of necessity. The Houses were
convoked; and the elections proved that, since the spring, the
distrust and hatred with which the government was regarded had
made fearful progress.
In November, 1640, met that renowned Parliament which, in spite
of many errors and disasters, is justly entitled to the reverence
and gratitude of all who, in any part of the world. enjoy the
blessings of constitutional government.
During the year which followed, no very important division of
opinion appeared in the Houses. The civil and ecclesiastical
administration had, through a period of nearly twelve years, been
so oppressive and so unconstitutional that even those classes of
which the inclinations are generally on the side of order and
authority were eager to promote popular reforms and to bring the
instruments of tyranny to justice. It was enacted that no
interval of more than three years should ever elapse between
Parliament and Parliament, and that, if writs under the Great
Seal were not issued at the proper time, the returning officers
should, without such writs, call the constituent bodies together
for the choice of representatives. The Star Chamber, the High
Commission, the Council of York were swept away. Men who, after
suffering cruel mutilations, had been confined in remote
dungeons, regained their liberty. On the chief ministers of the
crown the vengeance of the nation was unsparingly wreaked. The
Lord Keeper, the Primate, the Lord Lieutenant were impeached.
Finch saved himself by flight. Laud was flung into the Tower.
Strafford was put to death by act of attainder. On the day on
which this act passed, the King gave his assent to a law by which
he bound himself not to adjourn, prorogue, or dissolve the
existing Parliament without its own consent.
After ten months of assiduous toil, the Houses, in September
1641, adjourned for a short vacation; and the King visited
Scotland. He with difficulty pacified that kingdom by consenting,
not only to relinquish his plans of ecclesiastical reform, but
even to pass, with a very bad grace, an act declaring that
episcopacy was contrary to the word of God.
The recess of the English Parliament lasted six weeks. The day on
which the Houses met again is one of the most remarkable epochs
in our history. From that day dates the corporate existence of
the two great parties which have ever since alternately governed
the country. In one sense, indeed, the distinction which then
became obvious had always existed, and always must exist. For it
has its origin in diversities of temper, of understanding, and of
interest, which are found in all societies, and which will be
found till the human mind ceases to be drawn in opposite
directions by the charm of habit and by the charm of novelty. Not
only in politics but in literature, in art, in science, in
surgery and mechanics, in navigation and agriculture, nay, even
in mathematics, we find this distinction. Everywhere there is a
class of men who cling with fondness to whatever is ancient, and
who, even when convinced by overpowering reasons that innovation
would be beneficial, consent to it with many misgivings and
forebodings. We find also everywhere another class of men,
sanguine in hope, bold in speculation, always pressing forward,
quick to discern the imperfections of whatever exists, disposed
to think lightly of the risks and inconveniences which attend
improvements and disposed to give every change credit for being
an improvement. In the sentiments of both classes there is
something to approve. But of both the best specimens will be
found not far from the common frontier. The extreme section of
one class consists of bigoted dotards: the extreme section of the
other consists of shallow and reckless empirics.
There can be no doubt that in our very first Parliaments might
have been discerned a body of members anxious to preserve, and a
body eager to reform. But, while the sessions of the legislature
were short, these bodies did not take definite and permanent
forms, array themselves under recognised leaders, or assume
distinguishing names, badges, and war cries. During the first
months of the Long Parliament, the indignation excited by many
years of lawless oppression was so strong and general that the
House of Commons acted as one man. Abuse after abuse disappeared
without a struggle. If a small minority of the representative
body wished to retain the Star Chamber and the High Commission,
that minority, overawed by the enthusiasm and by the numerical
superiority of the reformers, contented itself with secretly
regretting institutions which could not, with any hope of
success, be openly defended. At a later period the Royalists
found it convenient to antedate the separation between themselves
and their opponents, and to attribute the Act which restrained
the King from dissolving or proroguing the Parliament, the
Triennial Act, the impeachment of the ministers, and the
attainder of Strafford, to the faction which afterwards made war
on the King. But no artifice could be more disingenuous. Every
one of those strong measures was actively promoted by the men who
were afterward foremost among the Cavaliers. No republican spoke
of the long misgovernment of Charles more severely than
Colepepper. The most remarkable speech in favour of the Triennial
Bill was made by Digby. The impeachment of the Lord Keeper was
moved by Falkland. The demand that the Lord Lieutenant should be
kept close prisoner was made at the bar of the Lords by Hyde. Not
till the law attainting Strafford was proposed did the signs of
serious disunion become visible. Even against that law, a law
which nothing but extreme necessity could justify, only about
sixty members of the House of Commons voted. It is certain that
Hyde was not in the minority, and that Falkland not only voted
with the majority, but spoke strongly for the bill. Even the few
who entertained a scruple about inflicting death by a
retrospective enactment thought it necessary to express the
utmost abhorrence of Strafford's character and administration.
But under this apparent concord a great schism was latent; and
when, in October, 1641, the Parliament reassembled after a short
recess, two hostile parties, essentially the same with those
which, under different names, have ever since contended, and are
still contending, for the direction of public affairs, appeared
confronting each other. During some years they were designated as
Cavaliers and Roundheads. They were subsequently called Tories
and Whigs; nor does it seem that these appellations are likely
soon to become obsolete.
It would not be difficult to compose a lampoon or panegyric on
either of these renowned factions. For no man not utterly
destitute of judgment and candor will deny that there are many
deep stains on the fame of the party to which he belongs, or that
the party to which he is opposed may justly boast of many
illustrious names, of many heroic actions, and of many great
services rendered to the state. The truth is that, though both
parties have often seriously erred, England could have spared
neither. If, in her institutions, freedom and order, the
advantages arising from innovation and the advantages arising
from prescription, have been combined to an extent elsewhere
unknown, we may attribute this happy peculiarity to the strenuous
conflicts and alternate victories of two rival confederacies of
statesmen, a confederacy zealous for authority and antiquity, and
a confederacy zealous for liberty and progress.
It ought to be remembered that the difference between the two
great sections of English politicians has always been a
difference rather of degree than of principle. There were certain
limits on the right and on the left, which were very rarely
overstepped. A few enthusiasts on one side were ready to lay all
our laws and franchises at the feet of our Kings. A few
enthusiasts on the other side were bent on pursuing, through
endless civil troubles, their darling phantom of a republic. But
the great majority of those who fought for the crown were averse
to despotism; and the great majority of the champions of popular
rights were averse to anarchy. Twice, in the course of the
seventeenth century, the two parties suspended their dissensions,
and united their strength in a common cause. Their first
coalition restored hereditary monarchy. Their second coalition
rescued constitutional freedom.
It is also to be noted that these two parties have never been the
whole nation, nay, that they have never, taken together, made up
a majority of the nation. Between them has always been a great
mass, which has not steadfastly adhered to either, which has
sometimes remained inertly neutral, and which has sometimes
oscillated to and fro. That mass has more than once passed in a
few years from one extreme to the other, and back again.
Sometimes it has changed sides, merely because it was tired of
supporting the same men, sometimes because it was dismayed by its
own excesses, sometimes because it had expected impossibilities,
and had been disappointed. But whenever it has leaned with its
whole weight in either direction, that weight has, for the time,
been irresistible.
When the rival parties first appeared in a distinct form, they
seemed to be not unequally matched. On the side of the government
was a large majority of the nobles, and of those opulent and well
descended gentlemen to whom nothing was wanting of nobility but
the name. These, with the dependents whose support they could
command, were no small power. in the state. On the same side were
the great body of the clergy, both the Universities, and all
those laymen who were strongly attached to episcopal government
and to the Anglican ritual. These respectable classes found
themselves in the company of some allies much less decorous than
themselves. The Puritan austerity drove to the king's faction all
who made pleasure their business, who affected gallantry,
splendour of dress, or taste in the higher arts. With these went
all who live by amusing the leisure of others, from the painter
and the comic poet, down to the ropedancer and the Merry Andrew.
For these artists well knew that they might thrive under a superb
and luxurious despotism, but must starve under the rigid rule of
the precisians. In the same interest were the Roman Catholics to
a man. The Queen, a daughter of France, was of their own faith.
Her husband was known to be strongly attached to her, and not a
little in awe of her. Though undoubtedly a Protestant on
conviction, he regarded the professors of the old religion with
no ill-will, and would gladly have granted them a much larger
toleration than he was disposed to concede to the Presbyterians.
If the opposition obtained the mastery, it was probable that the
sanguinary laws enacted against Papists in the reign of
Elizabeth, would be severely enforced. The Roman Catholics were
therefore induced by the strongest motives to espouse the cause
of the court. They in general acted with a caution which brought
on them the reproach of cowardice and lukewarmness; but it is
probable that, in maintaining great reserve, they consulted the
King's interest as well as their own. It was not for his service
that they should be conspicuous among his friends.
The main strength of the opposition lay among the small
freeholders in the country, and among the merchants and
shopkeepers of the towns. But these were headed by a formidable
minority of the aristocracy, a minority which included the rich
and powerful Earls of Northumberland, Bedford, Warwick, Stamford,
and Essex, and several other Lords of great wealth and influence.
In the same ranks was found the whole body of Protestant
Nonconformists, and most of those members of the Established
Church who still adhered to the Calvinistic opinions which, forty
years before, had been generally held by the prelates and clergy.
The municipal corporations took, with few exceptions, the same
side. In the House of Commons the opposition preponderated, but
not very decidedly.
Neither party wanted strong arguments for the course which it was
disposed to take. The reasonings of the most enlightened
Royalists may be summed up thus:--"It is true that great abuses
have existed; but they have been redressed. It is true that
precious rights have been invaded; but they have been vindicated
and surrounded with new securities. The sittings of the Estates
of the realm have been, in defiance of all precedent and of the
spirit of the constitution, intermitted during eleven years; but
it has now been provided that henceforth three years shall never
elapse without a Parliament. The Star Chamber the High
Commission, the Council of York, oppressed end plundered us; but
those hateful courts have now ceased to exist. The Lord
Lieutenant aimed at establishing military despotism; but he has
answered for his treason with his head. The Primate tainted our
worship with Popish rites and punished our scruples with Popish
cruelty; but he is awaiting in the Tower the judgment of his
peers. The Lord Keeper sanctioned a plan by which the property of
every man in England was placed at the mercy of the Crown; but he
has been disgraced, ruined, and compelled to take refuge in a
foreign land. The ministers of tyranny have expiated their
crimes. The victims of tyranny have been compensated for their
sufferings. It would therefore be most unwise to persevere
further in that course which was justifiable and necessary when
we first met, after a long interval, and found the whole
administration one mass of abuses. It is time to take heed that
we do not so pursue our victory over despotism as to run into
anarchy. It was not in our power to overturn the bad institutions
which lately afflicted our country, without shocks which have
loosened the foundations of government. Now that those
institutions have fallen, we must hasten to prop the edifice
which it was lately our duty to batter. Henceforth it will be our
wisdom to look with jealousy on schemes of innovation, and to
guard from encroachment all the prerogatives with which the law
has, for the public good, armed the sovereign."
Such were the views of those men of whom the excellent Falkland
may be regarded as the leader. It was contended on the other side
with not less force, by men of not less ability and virtue, that
the safety which the liberties of the English people enjoyed was
rather apparent than real, and that the arbitrary projects of the
court would be resumed as soon as the vigilance of the Commons
was relaxed. True it was,--such was the reasoning of Pym, of
Hollis, and of Hampden--that many good laws had been passed: but,
if good laws had been sufficient to restrain the King, his
subjects would have had little reason ever to complain of his
administration. The recent statutes were surely not of more
authority than the Great Charter or the Petition of Right. Yet
neither the Great Charter, hallowed by the veneration of four
centuries, nor the Petition of Right, sanctioned, after mature
reflection, and for valuable consideration, by Charles himself,
had been found effectual for the protection of the people. If
once the check of fear were withdrawn, if once the spirit of
opposition were suffered to slumber, all the securities for
English freedom resolved themselves into a single one, the royal
word; and it had been proved by a long and severe experience that
the royal word could not be trusted.
The two parties were still regarding each other with cautious
hostility, and had not yet measured their strength, when news
arrived which inflamed the passions and confirmed the opinions of
both. The great chieftains of Ulster, who, at the time of the
accession of James, had, after a long struggle, submitted to the
royal authority, had not long brooked the humiliation of
dependence. They had conspired against the English government,
and had been attainted of treason. Their immense domains had been
forfeited to the crown, and had soon been peopled by thousands of
English and Scotch emigrants. The new settlers were, in
civilisation and intelligence, far superior to the native
population, and sometimes abused their superiority. The animosity
produced by difference of race was increased by difference of
religion. Under the iron rule of Wentworth, scarcely a murmur was
heard: but, when that strong pressure was withdrawn, when
Scotland had set the example of successful resistance, when
England was distracted by internal quarrels, the smothered rage
of the Irish broke forth into acts of fearful violence. On a
sudden, the aboriginal population rose on the colonists. A war,
to which national and theological hatred gave a character of
peculiar ferocity, desolated Ulster, and spread to the
neighbouring provinces. The castle of Dublin was scarcely thought
secure. Every post brought to London exaggerated accounts of
outrages which, without any exaggeration. were sufficient to move
pity end horror. These evil tidings roused to the height the zeal
of both the great parties which were marshalled against each
other at Westminster. The Royalists maintained that it was the
first duty of every good Englishman and Protestant, at such a
crisis, to strengthen the hands of the sovereign. To the
opposition it seemed that there were now stronger reasons than
ever for thwarting and restraining him. That the commonwealth was
in danger was undoubtedly a good reason for giving large powers
to a trustworthy magistrate: but it was a good reason for taking
away powers from a magistrate who was at heart a public enemy. To
raise a great army had always been the King's first object. A
great army must now be raised. It was to be feared that, unless
some new securities were devised, the forces levied for the
reduction of Ireland would be employed against the liberties of
England. Nor was this all. A horrible suspicion, unjust indeed,
but not altogether unnatural, had arisen in many minds. The Queen
was an avowed Roman Catholic: the King was not regarded by the
Puritans, whom he had mercilessly persecuted, as a sincere
Protestant; and so notorious was his duplicity, that there was no
treachery of which his subjects might not, with some show of
reason, believe him capable. It was soon whispered that the
rebellion of the Roman Catholics of Ulster was part of a vast
work of darkness which had been planned at Whitehall.
After some weeks of prelude, the first great parliamentary
conflict between the parties, which have ever since contended,
and are still contending, for the government of the nation, took
place on the twenty-second of November, 1641. It was moved by the
opposition, that the House of Commons should present to the King
a remonstrance, enumerating the faults of his administration from
the time of his accession, and expressing the distrust with which
his policy was still regarded by his people. That assembly, which
a few months before had been unanimous in calling for the reform
of abuses, was now divided into two fierce and eager factions of
nearly equal strength. After a hot debate of many hours, the
remonstrance was carried by only eleven votes.
The result of this struggle was highly favourable to the
conservative party. It could not be doubted that only some great
indiscretion could prevent them from shortly obtaining the
predominance in the Lower House. The Upper House was already
their own. Nothing was wanting to ensure their success, but that
the King should, in all his conduct, show respect for the laws
and scrupulous good faith towards his subjects.
His first measures promised well. He had, it seemed, at last
discovered that an entire change of system was necessary, and had
wisely made up his mind to what could no longer be avoided. He
declared his determination to govern in harmony with the Commons,
and, for that end, to call to his councils men in whose talents
and character the Commons might place confidence. Nor was the
selection ill made. Falkland, Hyde, and Colepepper, all three
distinguished by the part which they had taken in reforming
abuses and in punishing evil ministers, were invited to become
the confidential advisers of the Crown, and were solemnly assured
by Charles that he would take no step in any way affecting the
Lower House of Parliament without their privity.
Had he kept this promise, it cannot be doubted that the reaction
which was already in progress would very soon have become quite
as strong as the most respectable Royalists would have desired.
Already the violent members of the opposition had begun to
despair of the fortunes of their party, to tremble for their own
safety, and to talk of selling their estates and emigrating to
America. That the fair prospects which had begun to open before
the King were suddenly overcast, that his life was darkened by
adversity, and at length shortened by violence, is to be
attributed to his own faithlessness and contempt of law.
The truth seems to be that he detested both the parties into
which the House of Commons was divided: nor is this strange; for
in both those parties the love of liberty and the love of order
were mingled, though in different proportions. The advisers whom
necessity had compelled him to call round him were by no means
after his own heart. They had joined in condemning his tyranny,
in abridging his power, and in punishing his instruments. They
were now indeed prepared to defend in a strictly legal way his
strictly legal prerogative; but they would have recoiled with
horror from the thought of reviving Wentworth's projects of
Thorough. They were, therefore, in the King's opinion, traitors,
who differed only in the degree of their seditious malignity from
Pym and Hampden.
He accordingly, a few days after he had promised the chiefs of
the constitutional Royalists that no step of importance should be
taken without their knowledge, formed a resolution the most
momentous of his whole life, carefully concealed that resolution
from them, and executed it in a manner which overwhelmed them
with shame and dismay. He sent the Attorney General to impeach
Pym, Hollis, Hampden, and other members of the House of Commons
of high treason at the bar of the House of Lords. Not content
with this flagrant violation of the Great Charter and of the
uninterrupted practice of centuries, he went in person,
accompanied by armed men, to seize the leaders of the opposition
within the walls of Parliament.
The attempt failed. The accused members had left the House a
short time before Charles entered it. A sudden and violent
revulsion of feeling, both in the Parliament and in the country,
followed. The most favourable view that has ever been taken of
the King's conduct on this occasion by his most partial advocates
is that he had weakly suffered himself to be hurried into a gross
indiscretion by the evil counsels of his wife and of his
courtiers. But the general voice loudly charged him with far
deeper guilt. At the very moment at which his subjects, after a
long estrangement produced by his maladministration, were
returning to him with feelings of confidence and affection, he
had aimed a deadly blow at all their dearest rights, at the
privileges of Parliament, at the very principle of trial by jury.
He had shown that he considered opposition to his arbitrary
designs as a crime to be expiated only by blood. He had broken
faith, not only with his Great Council and with his people, but
with his own adherents. He had done what, but for an unforeseen
accident, would probably have produced a bloody conflict round
the Speaker's chair. Those who had the chief sway in the Lower
House now felt that not only their power and popularity, but
their lands and their necks, were staked on the event of the
struggle in which they were engaged. The flagging zeal of the
party opposed to the court revived in an instant. During the
night which followed the outrage the whole city of London was in
arms. In a few hours the roads leading to the capital were
covered with multitudes of yeomen spurring hard to Westminster
with the badges of the parliamentary cause in their hats. In the
House of Commons the opposition became at once irresistible, and
carried, by more than two votes to one, resolutions of
unprecedented violence. Strong bodies of the trainbands,
regularly relieved, mounted guard round Westminster Hall. The
gates of the King's palace were daily besieged by a furious
multitude whose taunts and execrations were heard even in the
presence chamber, and who could scarcely be kept out of the royal
apartments by the gentlemen of the household. Had Charles
remained much longer in his stormy capital, it is probable that
the Commons would have found a plea for making him, under outward
forms of respect, a state prisoner.
He quitted London, never to return till the day of a terrible and
memorable reckoning had arrived. A negotiation began which
occupied many months. Accusations and recriminations passed
backward and forward between the contending parties. All
accommodation had become impossible. The sure punishment which
waits on habitual perfidy had at length overtaken the King. It
was to no purpose that he now pawned his royal word, and invoked
heaven to witness the sincerity of his professions. The distrust
with which his adversaries regarded him was not to be removed by
oaths or treaties. They were convinced that they could be safe
only when he was utterly helpless. Their demand, therefore, was,
that he should surrender, not only those prerogatives which he
had usurped in violation of ancient laws and of his own recent
promises, but also other prerogatives which the English Kings had
always possessed, and continue to possess at the present day. No
minister must be appointed, no peer created, without the consent
of the Houses. Above all, the sovereign must resign that supreme
military authority which, from time beyond all memory, had
appertained to the regal office.
That Charles would comply with such demands while he had any
means of resistance, was not to be expected. Yet it will be
difficult to show that the Houses could safely have exacted less.
They were truly in a most embarrassing position. The great
majority of the nation was firmly attached to hereditary
monarchy. Those who held republican opinions were as yet few, and
did not venture to speak out. It was therefore impossible to
abolish kingly government. Yet it was plain that no confidence
could be placed in the King. It would have been absurd in those
who knew, by recent proof, that he was bent on destroying them,
to content themselves with presenting to him another Petition of
Right, and receiving from him fresh promises similar to those
which he had repeatedly made and broken. Nothing but the want of
an army had prevented him from entirely subverting the old
constitution of the realm. It was now necessary to levy a great
regular army for the conquest of Ireland; and it would therefore
have been mere insanity to leave him in possession of that
plenitude of military authority which his ancestors had enjoyed.
When a country is in the situation in which England then was,
when the kingly office is regarded with love and veneration, but
the person who fills that office is hated and distrusted, it
should seem that the course which ought to be taken is obvious.
The dignity of the office should be preserved: the person should
be discarded. Thus our ancestors acted in 1399 and in 1689. Had
there been, in 1642, any man occupying a position similar to that
which Henry of Lancaster occupied at the time of the deposition
of Richard the Second, and which William of Orange occupied at
the time of the deposition of James the Second, it is probable
that the Houses would have changed the dynasty, and would have
made no formal change in the constitution. The new King, called
to the throne by their choice, and dependent on their support,
would have been under the necessity of governing in conformity
with their wishes and opinions. But there was no prince of the
blood royal in the parliamentary party; and, though that party
contained many men of high rank and many men of eminent ability,
there was none who towered so conspicously above the rest that he
could be proposed as a candidate for the crown. As there was to
be a King, and as no new King could be found, it was necessary to
leave the regal title to Charles. Only one course, therefore, was
left: and that was to disjoin the regal title from the regal
prerogatives.
The change which the Houses proposed to make in our institutions,
though it seems exorbitant, when distinctly set forth and
digested into articles of capitulation, really amounts to little
more than the change which, in the next generation, was effected
by the Revolution. It is true that, at the Revolution, the
sovereign was not deprived by law of the power of naming his
ministers: but it is equally true that, since the Revolution, no
minister has been able to retain office six months in opposition
to the sense of the House of Commons. It is true that the
sovereign still possesses the power of creating peers, and the
more important power of the sword: but it is equally true that in
the exercise of these powers the sovereign has, ever since the
Revolution, been guided by advisers who possess the confidence of
the representatives of the nation. In fact, the leaders of the
Roundhead party in 1642, and the statesmen who, about half a
century later, effected the Revolution, had exactly the same
object in view. That object was to terminate the contest between
the Crown and the Parliament, by giving to the Parliament a
supreme control over the executive administration. The statesmen
of the Revolution effected this indirectly by changing the
dynasty. The Roundheads of 1642, being unable to change the
dynasty, were compelled to take a direct course towards their
end.
We cannot, however, wonder that the demands of the opposition,
importing as they did a complete and formal transfer to the
Parliament of powers which had always belonged to the Crown,
should have shocked that great party of which the characteristics
are respect for constitutional authority and dread of violent
innovation. That party had recently been in hopes of obtaining by
peaceable means the ascendency in the House of Commons; but every
such hope had been blighted. The duplicity of Charles had made
his old enemies irreconcileable, had driven back into the ranks
of the disaffected a crowd of moderate men who were in the very
act of coming over to his side, and had so cruelly mortified his
best friends that they had for a time stood aloof in silent shame
and resentment. Now, however, the constitutional Royalists were
forced to make their choice between two dangers; and they thought
it their duty rather to rally round a prince whose past conduct
they condemned, and whose word inspired them with little
confidence, than to suffer the regal office to be degraded, and
the polity of the realm to be entirely remodelled. With such
feelings, many men whose virtues and abilities would have done
honour to any cause, ranged themselves on the side of the King.
In August 1642 the sword was at length drawn; and soon, in almost
every shire of the kingdom, two hostile factions appeared in arms
against each other. It is not easy to say which of the contending
parties was at first the more formidable. The Houses commanded
London and the counties round London, the fleet, the navigation
of the Thames, and most of the large towns and seaports. They had
at their disposal almost all the military stores of the kingdom,
and were able to raise duties, both on goods imported from
foreign countries, and on some important products of domestic
industry. The King was ill provided with artillery and
ammunition. The taxes which he laid on the rural districts
occupied by his troops produced, it is probable, a sum far less
than that which the Parliament drew from the city of London
alone. He relied, indeed, chiefly, for pecuniary aid, on the
munificence of his opulent adherents. Many of these mortgaged
their land, pawned their jewels, and broke up their silver
chargers and christening bowls, in order to assist him. But
experience has fully proved that the voluntary liberality of
individuals, even in times of the greatest excitement, is a poor
financial resource when compared with severe and methodical
taxation, which presses on the willing and unwilling alike.
Charles, however, had one advantage, which, if he had used it
well, would have more than compensated for the want of stores and
money, and which, notwithstanding his mismanagement, gave him,
during some months, a superiority in the war. His troops at first
fought much better than those of the Parliament. Both armies, it
is true, were almost entirely composed of men who had never seen
a field of battle. Nevertheless, the difference was great. The
Parliamentary ranks were filled with hirelings whom want and
idleness had induced to enlist. Hampden's regiment was regarded
as one of the best; and even Hampden's regiment was described by
Cromwell as a mere rabble of tapsters and serving men out of
place. The royal army, on the other hand, consisted in great part
of gentlemen, high spirited, ardent, accustomed to consider
dishonour as more terrible than death, accustomed to fencing, to
the use of fire arms, to bold riding, and to manly and perilous
sport, which has been well called the image of war. Such
gentlemen, mounted on their favourite horses, and commanding
little bands composed of their younger brothers, grooms,
gamekeepers, and huntsmen, were, from the very first day on which
they took the field, qualified to play their part with credit in
a skirmish. The steadiness, the prompt obedience, the mechanical
precision of movement, which are characteristic of the regular
soldier, these gallant volunteers never attained. But they were
at first opposed to enemies as undisciplined as themselves, and
far less active, athletic, and daring. For a time, therefore, the
Cavaliers were successful in almost every encounter.
The Houses had also been unfortunate in the choice of a general.
The rank and wealth of the Earl of Essex made him one of the most
important members of the parliamentary party. He had borne arms
on the Continent with credit, and, when the war began, had as
high a military reputation as any man in the country. But it soon
appeared that he was unfit for the post of Commander in Chief. He
had little energy and no originality. The methodical tactics
which he had learned in the war of the Palatinate did not save
him from the disgrace of being surprised and baffled by such a
Captain as Rupert, who could claim no higher fame than that of an
enterprising partisan.
Nor were the officers who held the chief commissions under Essex
qualified to supply what was wanting in him. For this, indeed,
the Houses are scarcely to be blamed. In a country which had not,
within the memory of the oldest person living, made war on a
great scale by land, generals of tried skill and valour were not
to be found. It was necessary, therefore, in the first instance,
to trust untried men; and the preference was naturally given to
men distinguished either by their station, or by the abilities
which they had displayed in Parliament. In scarcely a single
instance, however, was the selection fortunate. Neither the
grandees nor the orators proved good soldiers. The Earl of
Stamford, one of the greatest nobles of England, was routed by
the Royalists at Stratton. Nathaniel Fiennes, inferior to none of
his contemporaries in talents for civil business, disgraced
himself by the pusillanimous surrender of Bristol. Indeed, of all
the statesmen who at this juncture accepted high military
commands, Hampden alone appears to have carried into the camp the
capacity and strength of mind which had made him eminent in
politics.
When the war had lasted a year, the advantage was decidedly with
the Royalists. They were victorious, both in the western and in
the northern counties. They had wrested Bristol, the second city
in the kingdom, from the Parliament. They had won several
battles, and had not sustained a single serious or ignominious
defeat. Among the Roundheads adversity had begun to produce
dissension and discontent. The Parliament was kept in alarm,
sometimes by plots, and sometimes by riots. It was thought
necessary to fortify London against the royal army, and to hang
some disaffected citizens at their own doors. Several of the most
distinguished peers who had hitherto remained at Westminster fled
to the court at Oxford; nor can it be doubted that, if the
operations of the Cavaliers had, at this season, been directed by
a sagacious and powerful mind, Charles would soon have marched in
triumph to Whitehall.
But the King suffered the auspicious moment to pass away; and it
never returned. In August 1643 he sate down before the city of
Gloucester. That city was defended by the inhabitants and by the
garrison, with a determination such as had not, since the
commencement of the war, been shown by the adherents of the
Parliament. The emulation of London was excited. The trainbands
of the City volunteered to march wherever their services might be
required. A great force was speedily collected, and began to move
westward. The siege of Gloucester was raised: the Royalists in
every part of the kingdom were disheartened: the spirit of the
parliamentary party revived: and the apostate Lords, who had
lately fled from Westminster to Oxford, hastened back from Oxford
to Westminster.
And now a new and alarming class of symptoms began to appear in
the distempered body politic. There had been, from the first, in
the parliamentary party, some men whose minds were set on objects
from which the majority of that party would have shrunk with
horror. These men were, in religion, Independents. They conceived
that every Christian congregation had, under Christ, supreme
jurisdiction in things spiritual; that appeals to provincial and
national synods were scarcely less unscriptural than appeals to
the Court of Arches, or to the Vatican; and that Popery, Prelacy,
and Presbyterianism were merely three forms of one great
apostasy. In politics, the Independents were, to use the phrase
of their time, root and branch men, or, to use the kindred phrase
of our own time, radicals. Not content with limiting the power of
the monarch, they were desirous to erect a commonwealth on the
ruins of the old English polity. At first they had been
inconsiderable, both in numbers and in weight; but before the war
had lasted two years they became, not indeed the largest, but the
most powerful faction in the country. Some of the old
parliamentary leaders had been removed by death; and others had
forfeited the public confidence. Pym had been borne, with
princely honours, to a grave among the Plantagenets. Hampden had
fallen, as became him, while vainly endeavouring, by his heroic
example, to inspire his followers with courage to face the fiery
cavalry of Rupert. Bedford had been untrue to the cause.
Northumberland was known to be lukewarm. Essex and his
lieutenants had shown little vigour and ability in the conduct of
military operations. At such a conjuncture it was that the
Independent party, ardent, resolute, and uncompromising, began to
raise its head, both in the camp and in the House of Commons.
The soul of that party was Oliver Cromwell. Bred to peaceful
occupations, he had, at more than forty years of age, accepted a
commission in the parliamentary army. No sooner had he become a
soldier than he discerned, with the keen glance of genius, what
Essex, and men like Essex, with all their experience, were unable
to perceive. He saw precisely where the strength of the Royalists
lay, and by what means alone that strength could be overpowered.
He saw that it was necessary to reconstruct the army of the
Parliament. He saw also that there were abundant and excellent
materials for the purpose, materials less showy, indeed, but more
solid, than those of which the gallant squadrons of the King were
composed. It was necessary to look for recruits who were not mere
mercenaries, for recruits of decent station and grave character,
fearing God and zealous for public liberty. With such men he
filled his own regiment, and, while he subjected them to a
discipline more rigid than had ever before been known in England,
he administered to their intellectual and moral nature stimulants
of fearful potency.
The events of the year 1644 fully proved the superiority of his
abilities. In the south, where Essex held the command, the
parliamentary forces underwent a succession of shameful
disasters; but in the north the victory of Marston Moor fully
compensated for all that had been lost elsewhere. That victory
was not a more serious blow to the Royalists than to the party
which had hitherto been dominant at Westminster, for it was
notorious that the day, disgracefully lost by the Presbyterians,
had been retrieved by the energy of Cromwell, and by the steady
valour of the warriors whom he had trained.
These events produced the Selfdenying Ordinance and the new model
of the army. Under decorous pretexts, and with every mark of
respect, Essex and most of those who had held high posts under
him were removed; and the conduct of the war was intrusted to
very different hands. Fairfax, a brave soldier, but of mean
understanding and irresolute temper, was the nominal Lord General
of the forces; but Cromwell was their real head.
Cromwell made haste to organise the whole army on the same
principles on which he had organised his own regiment. As soon as
this process was complete, the event of the war was decided. The
Cavaliers had now to encounter natural courage equal to their
own, enthusiasm stronger than their own, and discipline such as
was utterly wanting to them. It soon became a proverb that the
soldiers of Fairfax and Cromwell were men of a different breed
from the soldiers of Essex. At Naseby took place the first great
encounter between the Royalists and the remodelled army of the
Houses. The victory of the Roundheads was complete and decisive.
It was followed by other triumphs in rapid succession. In a few
months the authority of the Parliament was fully established over
the whole kingdom. Charles fled to the Scots, and was by them, in
a manner which did not much exalt their national character,
delivered up to his English subjects.
While the event of the war was still doubtful, the Houses had put
the Primate to death, had interdicted, within the sphere of their
authority, the use of the Liturgy, and had required all men to
subscribe that renowned instrument known by the name of the
Solemn League and Covenant. Covenanting work, as it was called,
went on fast. Hundreds of thousands affixed their names to the
rolls, and, with hands lifted up towards heaven, swore to
endeavour, without respect of persons, the extirpation of Popery
and Prelacy, heresy and schism, and to bring to public trial and
condign punishment all who should hinder the reformation of
religion. When the struggle was over, the work of innovation and
revenge was pushed on with increased ardour. The ecclesiastical
polity of the kingdom was remodelled. Most of the old clergy were
ejected from their benefices. Fines, often of ruinous amount,
were laid on the Royalists, already impoverished by large aids
furnished to the King. Many estates were confiscated. Many
proscribed Cavaliers found it expedient to purchase, at an
enormous cost, the projection of eminent members of the
victorious party. Large domains, belonging to the crown, to the
bishops, and to the chapters, were seized, and either granted
away or put up to auction. In consequence of these spoliations, a
great part of the soil of England was at once offered for sale.
As money was scarce, as the market was glutted, as the title was
insecure and as the awe inspired by powerful bidders prevented
free competition, the prices were often merely nominal. Thus many
old and honourable families disappeared and were heard of no
more; and many new men rose rapidly to affluence.
But, while the Houses were employing their authority thus, it
suddenly passed out of their hands. It had been obtained by
calling into existence a power which could not be controlled. In
the summer of 1647, about twelve months after the last fortress
of the Cavaliers had submitted to the Parliament, the Parliament
was compelled to submit to its own soldiers.
Thirteen years followed, during which England was, under various
names and forms, really governed by the sword. Never before that
time, or since that time, was the civil power in our country
subjected to military dictation.
The army which now became supreme in the state was an army very
different from any that has since been seen among us. At present
the pay of the common soldier is not such as can seduce any but
the humblest class of English labourers from their calling. A
barrier almost impassable separates him from the commissioned
officer. The great majority of those who rise high in the service
rise by purchase. So numerous and extensive are the remote
dependencies of England, that every man who enlists in the line
must expect to pass many years in exile, and some years in
climates unfavourable to the health and vigour of the European
race. The army of the Long Parliament was raised for home
service. The pay of the private soldier was much above the wages
earned by the great body of the people; and, if he distinguished
himself by intelligence and courage, he might hope to attain high
commands. The ranks were accordingly composed of persons superior
in station and education to the multitude. These persons, sober,
moral, diligent, and accustomed to reflect, had been induced to
take up arms, not by the pressure of want, not by the love of
novelty and license, not by the arts of recruiting officers, but
by religious and political zeal, mingled with the desire of
distinction and promotion. The boast of the soldiers, as we find
it recorded in their solemn resolutions, was that they had not
been forced into the service, nor had enlisted chiefly for the
sake of lucre. That they were no janissaries, but freeborn
Englishmen, who had, of their own accord, put their lives in
jeopardy for the liberties and religion of England, and whose
right and duty it was to watch over the welfare of the nation
which they had saved.
A force thus composed might, without injury to its efficiency, be
indulged in some liberties which, if allowed to any other troops,
would have proved subversive of all discipline. In general,
soldiers who should form themselves into political clubs, elect
delegates, and pass resolutions on high questions of state, would
soon break loose from all control, would cease to form an army,
and would become the worst and most dangerous of mobs. Nor would
it be safe, in our time, to tolerate in any regiment religious
meetings, at which a corporal versed in Scripture should lead the
devotions of his less gifted colonel, and admonish a backsliding
major. But such was the intelligence, the gravity, and the
selfcommand of the warriors whom Cromwell had trained, that in
their camp a political organisation and a religious organisation
could exist without destroying military organisation. The same
men, who, off duty, were noted as demagogues and field preachers,
were distinguished by steadiness, by the spirit of order, and by
prompt obedience on watch, on drill, and on the field of battle.
In war this strange force was irresistible. The stubborn courage
characteristic of the English people was, by the system of
Cromwell, at once regulated and stimulated. Other leaders have
maintained orders as strict. Other leaders have inspired their
followers with zeal as ardent. But in his camp alone the most
rigid discipline was found in company with the fiercest
enthusiasm. His troops moved to victory with the precision of
machines, while burning with the wildest fanaticism of Crusaders.
From the time when the army was remodelled to the time when it
was disbanded, it never found, either in the British islands or
on the Continent, an enemy who could stand its onset. In England,
Scotland, Ireland, Flanders, the Puritan warriors, often
surrounded by difficulties, sometimes contending against
threefold odds, not only never failed to conquer, but never
failed to destroy and break in pieces whatever force was opposed
to them. They at length came to regard the day of battle as a day
of certain triumph, and marched against the most renowned
battalions of Europe with disdainful confidence. Turenne was
startled by the shout of stern exultation with which his English
allies advanced to the combat, and expressed the delight of a
true soldier, when he learned that it was ever the fashion of
Cromwell's pikemen to rejoice greatly when they beheld the enemy;
and the banished Cavaliers felt an emotion of national pride,
when they saw a brigade of their countrymen, outnumbered by foes
and abandoned by friends, drive before it in headlong rout the
finest infantry of Spain, and force a passage into a counterscarp
which had just been pronounced impregnable by the ablest of the
Marshals of France.
But that which chiefly distinguished the army of Cromwell from
other armies was the austere morality and the fear of God which
pervaded all ranks. It is acknowledged by the most zealous
Royalists that, in that singular camp, no oath was heard, no
drunkenness or gambling was seen, and that, during the long
dominion of the soldiery, the property of the peaceable citizen
and the honour of woman were held sacred. If outrages were
committed, they were outrages of a very different kind from those
of which a victorious army is generally guilty. No servant girl
complained of the rough gallantry of the redcoats. Not an ounce
of plate was taken from the shops of the goldsmiths. But a
Pelagian sermon, or a window on which the Virgin and Child were
painted, produced in the Puritan ranks an excitement which it
required the utmost exertions of the officers to quell. One of
Cromwell's chief difficulties was to restrain his musketeers and
dragoons from invading by main force the pulpits of ministers
whose discourses, to use the language of that time, were not
savoury; and too many of our cathedrals still bear the marks of
the hatred with which those stern spirits regarded every vestige
of Popery.
To keep down the English people was no light task even for that
army. No sooner was the first pressure of military tyranny felt,
than the nation, unbroken to such servitude, began to struggle
fiercely. Insurrections broke out even in those counties which,
during the recent war, had been the most submissive to the
Parliament. Indeed, the Parliament itself abhorred its old
defenders more than its old enemies, and was desirous to come to
terms of accommodation with Charles at the expense of the troops.
In Scotland at the same time, a coalition was formed between the
Royalists and a large body of Presbyterians who regarded the
doctrines of the Independents with detestation. At length the
storm burst. There were risings in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Kent,
Wales. The fleet in the Thames suddenly hoisted the royal
colours, stood out to sea, and menaced the southern coast. A
great Scottish force crossed the frontier and advanced into
Lancashire. It might well be suspected that these movements were
contemplated with secret complacency by a majority both of the
Lords and of the Commons.
But the yoke of the army was not to be so shaken off. While
Fairfax suppressed the risings in the neighbourhood of the
capital, Oliver routed the Welsh insurgents, and, leaving their
castles in ruins, marched against the Scots. His troops were few,
when compared with the invaders; but he was little in the habit
of counting his enemies. The Scottish army was utterly destroyed.
A change in the Scottish government followed. An administration,
hostile to the King, was formed at Edinburgh; and Cromwell, more
than ever the darling of his soldiers, returned in triumph to
London.
And now a design, to which, at the commencement of the civil war,
no man would have dared to allude, and which was not less
inconsistent with the Solemn League and Covenant than with the
old law of England, began to take a distinct form. The austere
warriors who ruled the nation had, during some months, meditated
a fearful vengeance on the captive King. When and how the scheme
originated; whether it spread from the general to the ranks, or
from the ranks to the general; whether it is to be ascribed to
policy using fanaticism as a tool, or to fanaticism bearing down
policy with headlong impulse, are questions which, even at this
day, cannot be answered with perfect confidence. It seems,
however, on the whole, probable that he who seemed to lead was
really forced to follow, and that, on this occasion, as on
another great occasion a few years later, he sacrificed his own
judgment and his own inclinations to the wishes of the army. For
the power which he had called into existence was a power which
even he could not always control; and, that he might ordinarily
command, it was necessary that he should sometimes obey. He
publicly protested that he was no mover in the matter, that the
first steps had been taken without his privity, that he could not
advise the Parliament to strike the blow, but that he submitted
his own feelings to the force of circumstances which seemed to
him to indicate the purposes of Providence. It has been the
fashion to consider these professions as instances of the
hypocrisy which is vulgarly imputed to him. But even those who
pronounce him a hypocrite will scarcely venture to call him a
fool. They are therefore bound to show that he had some purpose
to serve by secretly stimulating the army to take that course
which he did not venture openly to recommend. It would be absurd
to suppose that he who was never by his respectable enemies
represented as wantonly cruel or implacably vindictive, would
have taken the most important step of his life under the
influence of mere malevolence. He was far too wise a man not to
know, when he consented to shed that august blood, that he was
doing a deed which was inexpiable, and which would move the grief
and horror, not only of the Royalists, but of nine tenths of
those who had stood by the Parliament. Whatever visions may have
deluded others, he was assuredly dreaming neither of a republic
on the antique pattern, nor of the millennial reign of the
Saints. If he already aspired to be himself the founder of a new
dynasty, it was plain that Charles the First was a less
formidable competitor than Charles the Second would be. At the
moment of the death of Charles the First the loyalty of every
Cavalier would be transferred, unimpaired, to Charles the Second.
Charles the First was a captive: Charles the Second would be at
liberty. Charles the First was an object of suspicion and dislike
to a large proportion of those who yet shuddered at the thought
of slaying him: Charles the Second would excite all the interest
which belongs to distressed youth and innocence. It is impossible
to believe that considerations so obvious, and so important,
escaped the most profound politician of that age. The truth is
that Cromwell had, at one time, meant to mediate between the
throne and the Parliament, and to reorganise the distracted State
by the power of the sword, under the sanction of the royal name.
In this design he persisted till he was compelled to abandon it
by the refractory temper of the soldiers, and by the incurable
duplicity of the King. A party in the camp began to clamour for
the head of the traitor, who was for treating with Agag.
Conspiracies were formed. Threats of impeachment were loudly
uttered. A mutiny broke out, which all the vigour and resolution
of Oliver could hardly quell. And though, by a judicious mixture
of severity and kindness, he succeeded in restoring order, he saw
that it would be in the highest degree difficult and perilous to
contend against the rage of warriors, who regarded the fallen
tyrant as their foe, and as the foe of their God. At the same
time it became more evident than ever that the King could not be
trusted. The vices of Charles had grown upon him. They were,
indeed, vices which difficulties and perplexities generally bring
out in the strongest light. Cunning is the natural defence of the
weak. A prince, therefore, who is habitually a deceiver when at
the height of power, is not likely to learn frankness in the
midst of embarrassments and distresses. Charles was not only a
most unscrupulous but a most unlucky dissembler. There never was
a politician to whom so many frauds and falsehoods were brought
home by undeniable evidence. He publicly recognised the Houses at
Westminster as a legal Parliament, and, at the same time, made a
private minute in council declaring the recognition null. He
publicly disclaimed all thought of calling in foreign aid against
his people: he privately solicited aid from France, from Denmark,
and from Lorraine. He publicly denied that he employed Papists:
at the same time he privately sent to his generals directions to
employ every Papist that would serve. He publicly took the
sacrament at Oxford, as a pledge that he never would even connive
at Popery. He privately assured his wife, that he intended to
tolerate Popery in England; and he authorised Lord Glamorgan to
promise that Popery should be established in Ireland. Then he
attempted to clear himself at his agent's expense. Glamorgan
received, in the Royal handwriting, reprimands intended to be
read by others, and eulogies which were to be seen only by
himself. To such an extent, indeed, had insincerity now tainted
the King's whole nature, that his most devoted friends could not
refrain from complaining to each other, with bitter grief and
shame, of his crooked politics. His defeats, they said, gave them
less pain than his intrigues. Since he had been a prisoner, there
was no section of the victorious party which had not been the
object both of his flatteries and of his machinations; but never
was he more unfortunate than when he attempted at once to cajole
and to undermine Cromwell.
Cromwell had to determine whether he would put to hazard the
attachment of his party, the attachment of his army, his own
greatness, nay his own life, in an attempt which would probably
have been vain, to save a prince whom no engagement could bind.
With many struggles and misgivings, and probably not without many
prayers, the decision was made. Charles was left to his fate. The
military saints resolved that, in defiance of the old laws of the
realm, and of the almost universal sentiment of the nation, the
King should expiate his crimes with his blood. He for a time
expected a death like that of his unhappy predecessors, Edward
the Second and Richard the Second. But he was in no danger of
such treason. Those who had him in their gripe were not midnight
stabbers. What they did they did in order that it might be a
spectacle to heaven and earth, and that it might be held in
everlasting remembrance. They enjoyed keenly the very scandal
which they gave. That the ancient constitution and the public
opinion of England were directly opposed to regicide made
regicide seem strangely fascinating to a party bent on effecting
a complete political and social revolution. In order to
accomplish their purpose, it was necessary that they should first
break in pieces every part of the machinery of the government;
and this necessity was rather agreeable than painful to them. The
Commons passed a vote tending to accommodation with the King. The
soldiers excluded the majority by force. The Lords unanimously
rejected the proposition that the King should be brought to
trial. Their house was instantly closed. No court, known to the
law, would take on itself the office of judging the fountain of
justice. A revolutionary tribunal was created. That tribunal
pronounced Charles a tyrant, a traitor, a murderer, and a public
enemy; and his head was severed from his shoulders, before
thousands of spectators, in front of the banqueting hall of his
own palace.
In no long time it became manifest that those political and
religious zealots, to whom this deed is to be ascribed, had
committed, not only a crime, but an error. They had given to a
prince, hitherto known to his people chiefly by his faults, an
opportunity of displaying, on a great theatre, before the eyes of
all nations and all ages, some qualities which irresistibly call
forth the admiration and love of mankind, the high spirit of a
gallant gentleman, the patience and meekness of a penitent
Christian. Nay, they had so contrived their revenge that the very
man whose life had been a series of attacks on the liberties of
England now seemed to die a martyr in the cause of those
liberties. No demagogue ever produced such an impression on the
public mind as the captive King, who, retaining in that extremity
all his regal dignity, and confronting death with dauntless
courage, gave utterance to the feelings of his oppressed people,
manfully refused to plead before a court unknown to the law,
appealed from military violence to the principles of the
constitution, asked by what right the House of Commons had been
purged of its most respectable members and the House of Lords
deprived of its legislative functions, and told his weeping
hearers that he was defending, not only his own cause, but
theirs. His long misgovernment, his innumerable perfidies, were
forgotten. His memory was, in the minds of the great majority of
his subjects, associated with those free institutions which he
had, during many years, laboured to destroy: for those free
institutions had perished with him, and, amidst the mournful
silence of a community kept down by arms, had been defended by
his voice alone. From that day began a reaction in favour of
monarchy and of the exiled house, reaction which never ceased
till the throne had again been set up in all its old dignity.
At first, however, the slayers of the King seemed to have derived
new energy from that sacrament of blood by which they had bound
themselves closely together, and separated themselves for ever
from the great body of their countrymen. England was declared a
commonwealth. The House of Commons, reduced to a small number of
members, was nominally the supreme power in the state. In fact,
the army and its great chief governed everything. Oliver had made
his choice. He had kept the hearts of his soldiers, and had
broken with almost every other class of his fellow citizens.
Beyond the limits of his camps and fortresses he could scarcely
be said to have a party. Those elements of force which, when the
civil war broke out, had appeared arrayed against each other,
were combined against him; all the Cavaliers, the great majority
of the Roundheads, the Anglican Church, the Presbyterian Church,
the Roman Catholic Church, England, Scotland, Ireland. Yet such,
was his genius and resolution that he was able to overpower and
crush everything that crossed his path, to make himself more
absolute master of his country than any of her legitimate Kings
had been, and to make his country more dreaded and respected than
she had been during many generations under the rule of her
legitimate Kings.
England had already ceased to struggle. But the two other
kingdoms which had been governed by the Stuarts were hostile to
the new republic. The Independent party was equally odious to the
Roman Catholics of Ireland and to the Presbyterians of Scotland.
Both those countries, lately in rebellion against Charles the
First, now acknowledged the authority of Charles the Second.
But everything yielded to the vigour and ability of Cromwell. In
a few months he subjugated Ireland, as Ireland had never been
subjugated during the five centuries of slaughter which had
elapsed since the landing of the first Norman settlers. He
resolved to put an end to that conflict of races and religions
which had so long distracted the island, by making the English
and Protestant population decidedly predominant. For this end he
gave the rein to the fierce enthusiasm of his followers, waged
war resembling that which Israel waged on the Canaanites, smote
the idolaters with the edge of the sword, so that great cities
were left without inhabitants, drove many thousands to the
Continent, shipped off many thousands to the West Indies, and
supplied the void thus made by pouring in numerous colonists, of
Saxon blood, and of Calvinistic faith. Strange to say, under that
iron rule, the conquered country began to wear an outward face of
prosperity. Districts, which had recently been as wild as those
where the first white settlers of Connecticut were contending
with the red men, were in a few years transformed into the
likeness of Kent and Norfolk. New buildings, roads, and
plantations were everywhere seen. The rent of estates rose fast;
and soon the English landowners began to complain that they were
met in every market by the products of Ireland, and to clamour
for protecting laws.
From Ireland the victorious chief, who was now in name, as he had
long been in reality, Lord General of the armies of the
Commonwealth, turned to Scotland. The Young King was there. He
had consented to profess himself a Presbyterian, and to subscribe
the Covenant; and, in return for these concessions, the austere
Puritans who bore sway at Edinburgh had permitted him to assume
the crown, and to hold, under their inspection and control, a
solemn and melancholy court. This mock royalty was of short
duration. In two great battles Cromwell annihilated the military
force of Scotland. Charles fled for his life, and, with extreme
difficulty, escaped the fate of his father. The ancient kingdom
of the Stuarts was reduced, for the first time, to profound
submission. Of that independence, so manfully defended against
the mightiest and ablest of the Plantagenets, no vestige was
left. The English Parliament made laws for Scotland. English
judges held assizes in Scotland. Even that stubborn Church, which
has held its own against so many governments, scarce dared to
utter an audible murmur.
Thus far there had been at least the semblance of harmony between
the warriors who had subjugated Ireland and Scotland and the
politicians who sate at Westminster: but the alliance which had
been cemented by danger was dissolved by victory. The Parliament
forgot that it was but the creature of the army. The army was
less disposed than ever to submit to the dictation of the
Parliament. Indeed the few members who made up what was
contemptuously called the Rump of the House of Commons had no
more claim than the military chiefs to be esteemed the
representatives of the nation. The dispute was soon brought to a
decisive issue. Cromwell filled the House with armed men. The
Speaker was pulled out of his chair, the mace taken from the
table, the room cleared, and the door locked. The nation, which
loved neither of the contending parties, but which was forced, in
its own despite, to respect the capacity and resolution of the
General, looked on with patience, if not with complacency.
King, Lords, and Commons, had now in turn been vanquished and
destroyed; and Cromwell seemed to be left the sole heir of the
powers of all three. Yet were certain limitations still imposed
on him by the very army to which he owed his immense authority.
That singular body of men was, for the most part, composed of
zealous republicans. In the act of enslaving their country, they
had deceived themselves into the belief that they were
emancipating her. The book which they venerated furnished them
with a precedent which was frequently in their mouths. It was
true that the ignorant and ungrateful nation murmured against its
deliverers. Even so had another chosen nation murmured against
the leader who brought it, by painful and dreary paths, from the
house of bondage to the land flowing with milk and honey. Yet had
that leader rescued his brethren in spite of themselves; nor had
he shrunk from making terrible examples of those who contemned
the proffered freedom, and pined for the fleshpots, the
taskmasters, and the idolatries of Egypt. The object of the
warlike saints who surrounded Cromwell was the settlement of a
free and pious commonwealth. For that end they were ready to
employ, without scruple, any means, however violent and lawless.
It was not impossible, therefore, to establish by their aid a
dictatorship such as no King had ever exercised: but it was
probable that their aid would be at once withdrawn from a ruler
who, even under strict constitutional restraints, should venture
to assume the kingly name and dignity.
The sentiments of Cromwell were widely different. He was not what
he had been; nor would it be just to consider the change which
his views had undergone as the effect merely of selfish ambition.
He had, when he came up to the Long Parliament, brought with him
from his rural retreat little knowledge of books, no experience
of great affairs, and a temper galled by the long tyranny of the
government and of the hierarchy. He had, during the thirteen
years which followed, gone through a political education of no
common kind. He had been a chief actor in a succession of
revolutions. He had been long the soul, and at last the head, of
a party. He had commanded armies, won battles, negotiated
treaties, subdued, pacified, and regulated kingdoms. It would
have been strange indeed if his notions had been still the same
as in the days when his mind was principally occupied by his
fields and his religion, and when the greatest events which
diversified the course of his life were a cattle fair or a prayer
meeting at Huntingdon. He saw that some schemes of innovation for
which he had once been zealous, whether good or bad in
themselves, were opposed to the general feeling of the country,
and that, if he persevered in those schemes, he had nothing
before him but constant troubles, which must he suppressed by the
constant use of the sword. He therefore wished to restore, in all
essentials, that ancient constitution which the majority of the
people had always loved, and for which they now pined. The course
afterwards taken by Monk was not open to Cromwell. The memory of
one terrible day separated the great regicide for ever from the
House of Stuart. What remained was that he should mount the
ancient English throne, and reign according to the ancient
English polity. If he could effect this, he might hope that the
wounds of the lacerated State would heal fast. Great numbers of
honest and quiet men would speedily rally round him. Those
Royalists whose attachment was rather to institutions than to
persons, to the kingly office than to King Charles the First or
King Charles the Second, would soon kiss the hand of King Oliver.
The peers, who now remained sullenly at their country houses, and
refused to take any part in public affairs, would, when summoned
to their House by the writ of a King in possession, gladly resume
their ancient functions. Northumberland and Bedford, Manchester
and Pembroke, would be proud to bear the crown and the spurs, the
sceptre and the globe, before the restorer of aristocracy. A
sentiment of loyalty would gradually bind the people to the new
dynasty; and, on the decease of the founder of that dynasty, the
royal dignity might descend with general acquiescence to his
posterity.
The ablest Royalists were of opinion that these views were
correct, and that, if Cromwell had been permitted to follow his
own judgment, the exiled line would never have been restored. But
his plan was directly opposed to the feelings of the only class
which he dared not offend. The name of King was hateful to the
soldiers. Some of them were indeed unwilling to see the
administration in the hands of any single person. The great
majority, however, were disposed to support their general, as
elective first magistrate of a commonwealth, against all factions
which might resist his authority: but they would not consent that
he should assume the regal title, or that the dignity, which was
the just reward of his personal merit, should be declared
hereditary in his family. All that was left to him was to give to
the new republic a constitution as like the constitution of the
old monarchy as the army would bear. That his elevation to power
might not seem to be merely his own act, he convoked a council,
composed partly of persons on whose support he could depend, and
partly of persons whose opposition he might safely defy. This
assembly, which he called a Parliament, and which the populace
nicknamed, from one of the most conspicuous members, Barebonesa's
Parliament, after exposing itself during a short time to the
public contempt, surrendered back to the General the powers which
it had received from him, and left him at liberty to frame a plan
of government.
His plan bore, from the first, a considerable resemblance to the
old English constitution: but, in a few years, he thought it safe
to proceed further, and to restore almost every part of the
ancient system under hew names and forms. The title of King was
not revived; but the kingly prerogatives were intrusted to a Lord
High Protector. The sovereign was called not His Majesty, but His
Highness. He was not crowned and anointed in Westminster Abbey,
but was solemnly enthroned, girt with a sword of state, clad in a
robe of purple, and presented with a rich Bible, in Westminster
Hall. His office was not declared hereditary: but he was
permitted to name his successor; and none could doubt that he
would name his Son.
A House of Commons was a necessary part of the new polity. In
constituting this body, the Protector showed a wisdom and a
public spirit which were not duly appreciated by his
contemporaries. The vices of the old representative system,
though by no means so serious as they afterwards became, had
already been remarked by farsighted men. Cromwell reformed that
system on the same principles on which Mr. Pitt, a hundred and
thirty years later, attempted to reform it, and on which it was
at length reformed in our own times. Small boroughs were
disfranchised even more unsparingly than in 1832; and the number
of county members was greatly increased. Very few unrepresented
towns had yet grown into importance. Of those towns the most
considerable were Manchester, Leeds, and Halifax. Representatives
were given to all three. An addition was made to the number of
the members for the capital. The elective franchise was placed on
such a footing that every man of substance, whether possessed of
freehold estates in land or not, had a vote for the county in
which he resided. A few Scotchmen and a few of the English
colonists settled in Ireland were summoned to the assembly which
was to legislate, at Westminster, for every part of the British
isles.
To create a House of Lords was a less easy task. Democracy does
not require the support of prescription. Monarchy has often stood
without that support. But a patrician order is the work of time.
Oliver found already existing a nobility, opulent, highly
considered, and as popular with the commonalty as any nobility
has ever been. Had he, as King of England, commanded the peers to
meet him in Parliament according to the old usage of the realm,
many of them would undoubtedly have obeyed the call. This he
could not do; and it was to no purpose that he offered to the
chiefs of illustrious families seats in his new senate. They
conceived that they could not accept a nomination to an upstart
assembly without renouncing their birthright and betraying their
order. The Protector was, therefore, under the necessity of
filling his Upper House with new men who, during the late
stirring times, had made themselves conspicuous. This was the
least happy of his contrivances, and displeased all parties. The
Levellers were angry with him for instituting a privileged class.
The multitude, which felt respect and fondness for the great
historical names of the land, laughed without restraint at a
House of Lords, in which lucky draymen and shoemakers were
seated, to which few of the old nobles were invited, and from
which almost all those old nobles who were invited turned
disdainfully away.
How Oliver's Parliaments were constituted, however, was
practically of little moment: for he possessed the means of
conducting the administration without their support, and in
defiance of their opposition. His wish seems to have been to
govern constitutionally, and to substitute the empire of the laws
for that of the sword. But he soon found that, hated as he was,
both by Royalists and Presbyterians, he could be safe only by
being absolute. The first House of Commons which the people
elected by his command, questioned his authority, and was
dissolved without having passed a single act. His second House of
Commons, though it recognised him as Protector, and would gladly
have made him King, obstinately refused to acknowledge his new
Lords. He had no course left but to dissolve the Parliament.
"God," he exclaimed, at parting, "be judge between you and me!"
Yet was the energy of the Protector's administration in nowise
relaxed by these dissensions. Those soldiers who would not suffer
him to assume the kingly title stood by him when he ventured on
acts of power, as high as any English King has ever attempted.
The government, therefore, though in form a republic, was in
truth a despotism, moderated only by the wisdom, the sobriety,
and the magnanimity of the despot. The country was divided into
military districts. Those districts were placed under the command
of Major Generals. Every insurrectionary movement was promptly
put down and punished. The fear inspired by the power of the
sword, in so strong, steady, and expert a hand, quelled the
spirit both of Cavaliers and Levellers. The loyal gentry declared
that they were still as ready as ever to risk their lives for the
old government and the old dynasty, if there were the slightest
hope of success: but to rush, at the head of their serving men
and tenants, on the pikes of brigades victorious in a hundred
battles and sieges, would be a frantic waste of innocent and
honourable blood. Both Royalists and Republicans, having no hope
in open resistance, began to revolve dark schemes of
assassination: but the Protector's intelligence was good: his
vigilance was unremitting; and, whenever he moved beyond the
walls of his palace, the drawn swords and cuirasses of his trusty
bodyguards encompassed him thick on every side.
Had he been a cruel, licentious, and rapacious prince, the nation
might have found courage in despair, and might have made a
convulsive effort to free itself from military domination. But
the grievances which the country suffered, though such as excited
serious discontent, were by no means such as impel great masses
of men to stake their lives, their fortunes, and the welfare of
their families against fearful odds. The taxation, though heavier
than it had been under the Stuarts, was not heavy when compared
with that of the neighbouring states and with the resources of
England. Property was secure. Even the Cavalier, who refrained
from giving disturbance to the new settlement, enjoyed in peace
whatever the civil troubles had left hem. The laws were violated
only in cases where the safety of the Protector's person and
government was concerned. Justice was administered between man
and man with an exactness and purity not before known. Under no
English government since the Reformation, had there been so
little religious persecution. The unfortunate Roman Catholics,
indeed, were held to be scarcely within the pale of Christian
charity. But the clergy of the fallen Anglican Church were
suffered to celebrate their worship on condition that they would
abstain from preaching about politics. Even the Jews, whose
public worship had, ever since the thirteenth century, been
interdicted, were, in spite of the strong opposition of jealous
traders and fanatical theologians, permitted to build a synagogue
in London.
The Protector's foreign policy at the same time extorted the
ungracious approbation of those who most detested him. The
Cavaliers could scarcely refrain from wishing that one who had
done so much to raise the fame of the nation had been a
legitimate King; and the Republicans were forced to own that the
tyrant suffered none but himself to wrong his country, and that,
if he had robbed her of liberty, he had at least given her glory
in exchange. After half a century during which England had been
of scarcely more weight in European politics than Venice or
Saxony, she at once became the most formidable power in the
world, dictated terms of peace to the United Provinces, avenged
the common injuries of Christendom on the pirates of Barbary,
vanquished the Spaniards by land and sea, seized one of the
finest West Indian islands, and acquired on the Flemish coast a
fortress which consoled the national pride for the loss of
Calais. She was supreme on the ocean. She was the head of the
Protestant interest. All the reformed Churches scattered over
Roman Catholic kingdoms acknowledged Cromwell as their guardian.
The Huguenots of Languedoc, the shepherds who, in the hamlets of
the Alps. professed a Protestantism older than that of Augsburg,
were secured from oppression by the mere terror of his great name
The Pope himself was forced to preach humanity and moderation to
Popish princes. For a voice which seldom threatened in vain had
declared that, unless favour were shown to the people of God, the
English guns should be heard in the Castle of Saint Angelo. In
truth, there was nothing which Cromwell had, for his own sake and
that of his family, so much reason to desire as a general
religious war in Europe. In such a war he must have been the
captain of the Protestant armies. The heart of England would have
been with him. His victories would have been hailed with an
unanimous enthusiasm unknown in the country since the rout of the
Armada, and would have effaced the stain which one act, condemned
by the general voice of the nation, has left on his splendid
fame. Unhappily for him he had no opportunity of displaying his
admirable military talents, except against the inhabitants of the
British isles.
While he lived his power stood firm, an object of mingled
aversion, admiration, and dread to his subjects. Few indeed loved
his government; but those who hated it most hated it less than
they feared it. Had it been a worse government, it might perhaps
have been overthrown in spite of all its strength. Had it been a
weaker government, it would certainly have been overthrown in
spite of all its merits. But it had moderation enough to abstain
from those oppressions which drive men mad; and it had a force
and energy which none but men driven mad by oppression would
venture to encounter.
It has often been affirmed, but with little reason, that Oliver
died at a time fortunate for his renown, and that, if his life
had been prolonged, it would probably have closed amidst
disgraces and disasters. It is certain that he was, to the last,
honoured by his soldiers, obeyed by the whole population of the
British islands, and dreaded by all foreign powers, that he was
laid among the ancient sovereigns of England with funeral pomp
such as London had never before seen, and that he was succeeded
by his son Richard as quietly as any King had ever been succeeded
by any Prince of Wales.
During five months, the administration of Richard Cromwell went
on so tranquilly and regularly that all Europe believed him to be
firmly established on the chair of state. In truth his situation
was in some respects much more advantageous than that of his
father. The young man had made no enemy. His hands were unstained
by civil blood. The Cavaliers themselves allowed him to be an
honest, good-natured gentleman. The Presbyterian party, powerful
both in numbers and in wealth, had been at deadly feud with the
late Protector, but was disposed to regard the present Protector
with favour. That party had always been desirous to see the old
civil polity of the realm restored with some clearer definitions
and some stronger safeguards for public liberty, but had many
reasons for dreading the restoration of the old family. Richard
was the very man for politicians of this description. His
humanity, ingenuousness, and modesty, the mediocrity of his
abilities, and the docility with which he submitted to the
guidance of persons wiser than himself, admirably qualified him
to be the head of a limited monarchy.
For a time it seemed highly probable that he would, under the
direction of able advisers, effect what his father had attempted
in vain. A Parliament was called, and the writs were directed
after the old fashion. The small boroughs which had recently been
disfranchised regained their lost privilege: Manchester, Leeds,
and Halifax ceased to return members; and the county of York was
again limited to two knights. It may seem strange to a generation
which has been excited almost to madness by the question of
parliamentary reform that great shires and towns should have
submitted with patience and even with complacency, to this
change: but though speculative men might, even in that age,
discern the vices of the old representative system, and predict
that those vices would, sooner or later, produce serious
practical evil, the practical evil had not yet been felt.
Oliver's representative system, on the other hand, though
constructed on sound principles, was not popular. Both the events
in which it originated, and the effects which it had produced,
prejudiced men against it. It had sprung from military violence.
It had been fruitful of nothing but disputes. The whole nation
was sick of government by the sword, and pined for government by
the law. The restoration, therefore, even of anomalies and
abuses, which were in strict conformity with the law, and which
had been destroyed by the sword, gave general satisfaction.
Among the Commons there was a strong opposition, consisting
partly of avowed Republicans, and partly of concealed Royalists:
but a large and steady majority appeared to be favourable to the
plan of reviving the old civil constitution under a new dynasty.
Richard was solemnly recognised as first magistrate. The Commons
not only consented to transact business with Oliver's Lords, but
passed a vote acknowledging the right of those nobles who had, in
the late troubles, taken the side of public liberty, to sit in
the Upper House of Parliament without any new creation.
Thus far the statesmen by whose advice Richard acted had been
successful. Almost all the parts of the government were now
constituted as they had been constituted at the commencement of
the civil war. Had the Protector and the Parliament been suffered
to proceed undisturbed, there can be little doubt that an order
of things similar to that which was afterwards established under
the House of Hanover would have been established under the House
of Cromwell. But there was in the state a power more than
sufficient to deal with Protector and Parliament together. Over
the soldiers Richard had no authority except that which he
derived from the great name which he had inherited. He had never
led them to victory. He had never even borne arms. All his tastes
and habits were pacific. Nor were his opinions and feelings on
religious subjects approved by the military saints. That he was a
good man he evinced by proofs more satisfactory than deep groans
or long sermons, by humility and suavity when he was at the
height of human greatness, and by cheerful resignation under
cruel wrongs and misfortunes: but the cant then common in every
guardroom gave him a disgust which he had not always the prudence
to conceal. The officers who had the principal influence among
the troops stationed near London were not his friends. They were
men distinguished by valour and conduct in the field, but
destitute of the wisdom and civil courage which had been
conspicuous in their deceased leader. Some of them were honest,
but fanatical, Independents and Republicans. Of this class
Fleetwood was the representative. Others were impatient to be
what Oliver had been. His rapid elevation, his prosperity and
glory, his inauguration in the Hall, and his gorgeous obsequies
in the Abbey, had inflamed their imagination. They were as well
born as he, and as well educated: they could not understand why
they were not as worthy to wear the purple robe, and to wield the
sword of state; and they pursued the objects of their wild
ambition, not, like him, with patience, vigilance, sagacity, and
determination, but with the restlessness and irresolution
characteristic of aspiring mediocrity. Among these feeble copies
of a great original the most conspicuous was Lambert.
On the very day of Richard's accession the officers began to
conspire against their new master. The good understanding which
existed between him and his Parliament hastened the crisis. Alarm
and resentment spread through the camp. Both the religious and
the professional feelings of the army were deeply wounded. It
seemed that the Independents were to be subjected to the
Presbyterians, and that the men of the sword were to be subjected
to the men of the gown. A coalition was formed between the
military malecontents and the republican minority of the House of
Commons. It may well be doubted whether Richard could have
triumphed over that coalition, even if he had inherited his
father's clear judgment and iron courage. It is certain that
simplicity and meekness like his were not the qualities which the
conjuncture required. He fell ingloriously, and without a
struggle. He was used by the army as an instrument for the
purpose of dissolving the Parliament, and was then contemptuously
thrown aside. The officers gratified their republican allies by
declaring that the expulsion of the Rump had been illegal, and by
inviting that assembly to resume its functions. The old Speaker
and a quorum of the old members came together, and were
proclaimed, amidst the scarcely stifled derision and execration
of the whole nation, the supreme power in the commonwealth. It
was at the same time expressly declared that there should be no
first magistrate, and no House of Lords.
But this state of things could not last. On the day on which the
long Parliament revived, revived also its old quarrel with the
army. Again the Rump forgot that it owed its existence to the
pleasure of the soldiers, and began to treat them as subjects.
Again the doors of the House of Commons were closed by military
violence; and a provisional government, named by the officers,
assumed the direction of affairs.
Meanwhile the sense of great evils, and the strong apprehension
of still greater evils close at hand, had at length produced an
alliance between the Cavaliers and the Presbyterians. Some
Presbyterians had, indeed, been disposed to such an alliance even
before the death of Charles the First: but it was not till after
the fall of Richard Cromwell that the whole party became eager
for the restoration of the royal house. There was no longer any
reasonable hope that the old constitution could be reestablished
under a new dynasty. One choice only was left, the Stuarts or the
army. The banished family had committed great faults; but it had
dearly expiated those faults, and had undergone a long, and, it
might be hoped, a salutary training in the school of adversity.
It was probable that Charles the Second would take warning by the
fate of Charles the First. But, be this as it might, the dangers
which threatened the country were such that, in order to avert
them, some opinions might well be compromised, and some risks
might well be incurred. It seemed but too likely that England
would fall under the most odious and degrading of all kinds of
government, under a government uniting all the evils of despotism
to all the evils of anarchy. Anything was preferable to the yoke
of a succession of incapable and inglorious tyrants, raised to
power, like the Deys of Barbary, by military revolutions
recurring at short intervals. Lambert seemed likely to be the
first of these rulers; but within a year Lambert might give place
to Desborough, and Desborough to Harrison. As often as the
truncheon was transferred from one feeble hand to another, the
nation would be pillaged for the purpose of bestowing a fresh
donative on the troops. If the Presbyterians obstinately stood
aloof from the Royalists, the state was lost; and men might well
doubt whether, by the combined exertions of Presbyterians and
Royalists, it could be saved. For the dread of that invincible
army was on all the inhabitants of the island; and the Cavaliers,
taught by a hundred disastrous fields how little numbers can
effect against discipline, were even more completely cowed than
the Roundheads.
While the soldiers remained united, all the plots and risings of
the malecontents were ineffectual. But a few days after the
second expulsion of the Rump, came tidings which gladdened the
hearts of all who were attached either to monarchy or to liberty:
That mighty force which had, during many years, acted as one man,
and which, while so acting, had been found irresistible, was at
length divided against itself. The army of Scotland had done good
service to the Commonwealth, and was in the highest state of
efficiency. It had borne no part in the late revolutions, and had
seen them with indignation resembling the indignation which the
Roman legions posted on the Danube and the Euphrates felt, when
they learned that the empire had been put up to sale by the
Praetorian Guards. It was intolerable that certain regiments
should, merely because they happened to be quartered near
Westminster, take on themselves to make and unmake several
governments in the course of half a year. If it were fit that the
state should be regulated by the soldiers, those soldiers who
upheld the English ascendency on the north of the Tweed were as
well entitled to a voice as those who garrisoned the Tower of
London. There appears to have been less fanaticism among the
troops stationed in Scotland than in any other part of the army;
and their general, George Monk, was himself the very opposite of
a zealot. He had at the commencement of the civil war, borne arms
for the King, had been made prisoner by the Roundheads, had then
accepted a commission from the Parliament, and, with very slender
pretensions to saintship, had raised himself to high commands by
his courage and professional skill. He had been an useful servant
to both the Protectors, and had quietly acquiesced when the
officers at Westminster had pulled down Richard and restored the
Long Parliament, and would perhaps have acquiesced as quietly in
the second expulsion of the Long Parliament, if the provisional
government had abstained from giving him cause of offence and
apprehension. For his nature was cautious and somewhat sluggish;
nor was he at all disposed to hazard sure and moderate advantages
for the chalice of obtaining even the most splendid success. He
seems to have been impelled to attack the new rulers of the
Commonwealth less by the hope that, if he overthrew them, he
should become great, than by the fear that, if he submitted to
them, he should not even be secure. Whatever were his motives, he
declared himself the champion of the oppressed civil power,
refused to acknowledge the usurped authority of the provisional
government, and, at the head of seven thousand veterans, marched
into England.
This step was the signal for a general explosion. The people
everywhere refused to pay taxes. The apprentices of the City
assembled by thousands and clamoured for a free Parliament. The
fleet sailed up the Thames, and declared against the tyranny of
the soldiers. The soldiers, no longer under the control of one
commanding mind, separated into factions. Every regiment, afraid
lest it should be left alone a mark for the vengeance of the
oppressed nation, hastened to make a separate peace. Lambert, who
had hastened northward to encounter the army of Scotland, was
abandoned by his troops, and became a prisoner. During thirteen
years the civil power had, in every conflict, been compelled to
yield to the military power. The military power now humbled
itself before the civil power. The Rump, generally hated and
despised, but still the only body in the country which had any
show of legal authority, returned again to the house from which
it had been twice ignominiously expelled.
In the mean time Monk was advancing towards London. Wherever he
came, the gentry flocked round him, imploring him to use his
power for the purpose of restoring peace and liberty to the
distracted nation. The General, coldblooded, taciturn, zealous
for no polity and for no religion, maintained an impenetrable
reserve. What were at this time his plans, and whether he had any
plan, may well be doubted. His great object, apparently, was to
keep himself, as long as possible, free to choose between several
lines of action. Such, indeed, is commonly the policy of men who
are, like him, distinguished rather by wariness than by
farsightedness. It was probably not till he had been some days in
the capital that he had made up his mind. The cry of the whole
people was for a free Parliament; and there could be no doubt
that a Parliament really free would instantly restore the exiled
family. The Rump and the soldiers were still hostile to the House
of Stuart. But the Rump was universally detested and despised.
The power of the soldiers was indeed still formidable, but had
been greatly diminished by discord. They had no head. They had
recently been, in many parts of the country, arrayed against each
other. On the very day before Monk reached London, there was a
fight in the Strand between the cavalry and the infantry. An
united army had long kept down a divided nation; but the nation
was now united, and the army was divided.
During a short time the dissimulation or irresolution of Monk
kept all parties in a state of painful suspense. At length he
broke silence, and declared for a free Parliament.
As soon as his declaration was known, the whole nation was wild
with delight. Wherever he appeared thousands thronged round him,
shouting and blessing his name. The bells of all England rang
joyously: the gutters ran with ale; and, night after night, the
sky five miles round London was reddened by innumerable bonfires.
Those Presbyterian members of the House of Commons who had many
years before been expelled by the army, returned to their seats,
and were hailed with acclamations by great multitudes, which
filled Westminster Hall and Palace Yard. The Independent leaders
no longer dared to show their faces in the streets, and were
scarcely safe within their own dwellings. Temporary provision was
made for the government: writs were issued for a general
election; and then that memorable Parliament, which had, in the
course of twenty eventful years, experienced every variety of
fortune, which had triumphed over its sovereign, which had been
enslaved and degraded by its servants, which had been twice
ejected and twice restored, solemnly decreed its own dissolution.
The result of the elections was such as might have been expected
from the temper of the nation. The new House of Commons
consisted, with few exceptions, of persons friendly to the royal
family. The Presbyterians formed the majority.
That there would be a restoration now seemed almost certain; but
whether there would be a peaceable restoration was matter of
painful doubt. The soldiers were in a gloomy and savage mood.
They hated the title of King. They hated the name of Stuart. They
hated Presbyterianism much, and Prelacy more. They saw with
bitter indignation that the close of their long domination was
approaching, and that a life of inglorious toil and penury was
before them. They attributed their ill fortune to the weakness of
some generals, and to the treason of others. One hour of their
beloved Oliver might even now restore the glory which had
departed. Betrayed, disunited, and left without any chief in whom
they could confide, they were yet to be dreaded. It was no light
thing to encounter the rage and despair of fifty thousand
fighting men, whose backs no enemy had ever seen. Monk, and those
with whom he acted, were well aware that the crisis was most
perilous. They employed every art to soothe and to divide the
discontented warriors. At the same time vigorous preparation was
made for a conflict. The army of Scotland, now quartered in
London, was kept in good humour by bribes, praises, and promises.
The wealthy citizens grudged nothing to a redcoat, and were
indeed so liberal of their best wine, that warlike saints were
sometimes seen in a condition not very honourable either to their
religious or to their military character. Some refractory
regiments Monk ventured to disband. In the mean time the greatest
exertions were made by the provisional government, with the
strenuous aid of the whole body of the gentry and magistracy, to
organise the militia. In every county the trainbands were held
ready to march; and this force cannot be estimated at less than a
hundred and twenty thousand men. In Hyde Park twenty thousand
citizens, well armed and accoutred, passed in review, and showed
a spirit which justified the hope that, in case of need, they
would fight manfully for their shops and firesides. The fleet was
heartily with the nation. It was a stirring time, a time of
anxiety, yet of hope. The prevailing opinion was that England
would be delivered, but not without a desperate and bloody
struggle, and that the class which had so long ruled by the sword
would perish by the sword.
Happily the dangers of a conflict were averted. There was indeed
one moment of extreme peril. Lambert escaped from his
confinement, and called his comrades to arms. The flame of civil
war was actually rekindled; but by prompt and vigorous exertion
it was trodden out before it had time to spread. The luckless
imitator of Cromwell was again a prisoner. The failure of his
enterprise damped the spirit of the soldiers; and they sullenly
resigned themselves to their fate.
The new Parliament, which, having been called without the royal
writ, is more accurately described as a Convention, met at
Westminster. The Lords repaired to the hall, from which they had,
during more than eleven years, been excluded by force. Both
Houses instantly invited the King to return to his country. He
was proclaimed with pomp never before known. A gallant fleet
convoyed him from Holland to the coast of Kent. When he landed,
the cliffs of Dover were covered by thousands of gazers, among
whom scarcely one could be found who was not weeping with
delight. The journey to London was a continued triumph. The whole
road from Rochester was bordered by booths and tents, and looked
like an interminable fair. Everywhere flags were flying, bells
and music sounding, wine and ale flowing in rivers to the health
of him whose return was the return of peace, of law, and of
freedom. But in the midst of the general joy, one spot presented
a dark and threatening aspect. On Blackheath the army was drawn
up to welcome the sovereign. He smiled, bowed, and extended his
hand graciously to the lips of the colonels and majors. But all
his courtesy was vain. The countenances of the soldiers were sad
and lowering; and had they given way to their feelings, the
festive pageant of which they reluctantly made a part would have
had a mournful and bloody end. But there was no concert among
them. Discord and defection had left them no confidence in their
chiefs or in each other. The whole array of the City of London
was under arms. Numerous companies of militia had assembled from
various parts of the realm, under the command of loyal noblemen
and gentlemen, to welcome the King. That great day closed in
peace; and the restored wanderer reposed safe in the palace of
his ancestors.
CHAPTER II.
THE history of England, during the seventeenth century, is the
history of the transformation of a limited monarchy, constituted
after the fashion of the middle ages, into a limited monarchy
suited to that more advanced state of society in which the public
charges can no longer be borne by the estates of the crown, and
in which the public defence can no longer be entrusted to a
feudal militia. We have seen that the politicians who were at the
head of the Long Parliament made, in 1642, a great effort to
accomplish this change by transferring, directly and formally, to
the estates of the realm the choice of ministers, the command of
the army, and the superintendence of the whole executive
administration. This scheme was, perhaps, the best that could
then be contrived: but it was completely disconcerted by the
course which the civil war took. The Houses triumphed, it is
true; but not till after such a struggle as made it necessary for
them to call into existence a power which they could not control,
and which soon began to domineer over all orders and all parties:
During a few years, the evils inseparable from military
government were, in some degree, mitigated by the wisdom and
magnanimity of the great man who held the supreme command. But,
when the sword, which he had wielded, with energy indeed, but
with energy always guided by good sense and generally tempered by
good nature, had passed to captains who possessed neither his
abilities nor his virtues. it seemed too probable that order and
liberty would perish in one ignominious ruin.
That ruin was happily averted. It has been too much the practice
of writers zealous for freedom to represent the Restoration as a
disastrous event, and to condemn the folly or baseness of that
Convention, which recalled the royal family without exacting new
securities against maladministration. Those who hold this
language do not comprehend the real nature of the crisis which
followed the deposition of Richard Cromwell. England was in
imminent danger of falling under the tyranny of a succession of
small men raised up and pulled down by military caprice. To
deliver the country from the domination of the soldiers was the
first object of every enlightened patriot: but it was an object
which, while the soldiers were united, the most sanguine could
scarcely expect to attain. On a sudden a gleam of hope appeared.
General was opposed to general, army to army. On the use which
might be made of one auspicious moment depended the future
destiny of the nation. Our ancestors used that moment well. They
forgot old injuries, waved petty scruples, adjourned to a more
convenient season all dispute about the reforms which our
institutions needed, and stood together, Cavaliers and
Roundheads, Episcopalians and Presbyterians, in firm union, for
the old laws of the land against military despotism. The exact
partition of power among King, Lords, and Commons might well be
postponed till it had been decided whether England should be
governed by King, Lords, and Commons, or by cuirassiers and
pikemen. Had the statesmen of the Convention taken a different
course, had they held long debates on the principles of
government, had they drawn up a new constitution and sent it to
Charles, had conferences been opened, had couriers been passing
and repassing during some weeks between Westminster and the
Netherlands, with projects and counterprojects, replies by Hyde
and rejoinders by Prynne, the coalition on which the public
safety depended would have been dissolved: the Presbyterians and
Royalists would certainly have quarrelled: the military factions
might possibly have been reconciled; and the misjudging friends
of liberty might long have regretted, under a rule worse than
that of the worst Stuart, the golden opportunity which had been
suffered to escape.
The old civil polity was, therefore, by the general consent of
both the great parties, reestablished. It was again exactly what
it had been when Charles the First, eighteen years before,
withdrew from his capital. All those acts of the Long Parliament
which had received the royal assent were admitted to be still in
full force. One fresh concession, a concession in which the
Cavaliers were even more deeply interested than the Roundheads,
was easily obtained from the restored King. The military tenure
of land had been originally created as a means of national
defence. But in the course of ages whatever was useful in the
institution had disappeared; and nothing was left but ceremonies
and grievances. A landed proprietor who held an estate under the
crown by knight service,--and it was thus that most of the soil
of England was held,--had to pay a large fine on coming to his
property. He could not alienate one acre without purchasing a
license. When he died, if his domains descended to an infant, the
sovereign was guardian, and was not only entitled to great part
of the rents during the minority, but could require the ward,
under heavy penalties, to marry any person of suitable rank. The
chief bait which attracted a needy sycophant to the court was the
hope of obtaining as the reward of servility and flattery, a
royal letter to an heiress. These abuses had perished with the
monarchy. That they should not revive with it was the wish of
every landed gentleman in the kingdom. They were, therefore,
solemnly abolished by statute; and no relic of the ancient
tenures in chivalry was allowed to remain except those honorary
services which are still, at a coronation, rendered to the person
of the sovereign by some lords of manors.
The troops were now to be disbanded. Fifty thousand men,
accustomed to the profession of arms, were at once thrown on the
world: and experience seemed to warrant the belief that this
change would produce much misery and crime, that the discharged
veterans would be seen begging in every street, or that they
would be driven by hunger to pillage. But no such result
followed. In a few months there remained not a trace indicating
that the most formidable army in the world had just been absorbed
into the mass of the community. The Royalists themselves
confessed that, in every department of honest industry the
discarded warriors prospered beyond other men, that none was
charged with any theft or robbery, that none was heard to ask an
alms, and that, if a baker, a mason, or a waggoner attracted
notice by his diligence and sobriety, he was in all probability
one of Oliver's old soldiers
The military tyranny had passed away; but it had left deep and
enduring traces in the public mind. The name of standing army was
long held in abhorrence: and it is remarkable that this feeling
was even stronger among the Cavaliers than among the Roundheads.
It ought to be considered as a most fortunate circumstance that,
when our country was, for the first and last time, ruled by the
sword, the sword was in the hands, not of legitimate princes, but
of those rebels who slew the King and demolished the Church. Had
a prince with a title as good as that of Charles, commanded an
army as good as that of Cromwell, there would have been little
hope indeed for the liberties of England. Happily that instrument
by which alone the monarchy could be made absolute became an
object of peculiar horror and disgust to the monarchical party,
and long continued to be inseparably associated in the
imagination of Royalists and Prelatists with regicide and field
preaching. A century after the death of Cromwell, the Tories
still continued to clamour against every augmentation of the
regular soldiery, and to sound the praise of a national militia.
So late as the year 1786, a minister who enjoyed no common
measure of their confidence found it impossible to overcome their
aversion to his scheme of fortifying the coast: nor did they ever
look with entire complacency on the standing army, till the
French Revolution gave a new direction to their apprehensions.
The coalition which had restored the King terminated with the
danger from which it had sprung; and two hostile parties again
appeared ready for conflict. Both, indeed, were agreed as to the
propriety of inflicting punishment on some unhappy men who were,
at that moment, objects of almost universal hatred. Cromwell was
no more; and those who had fled before him were forced to content
themselves with the miserable satisfaction of digging up,
hanging, quartering, and burning the remains of the greatest
prince that has ever ruled England.
Other objects of vengeance, few indeed, yet too many, were found
among the republican chiefs. Soon, however, the conquerors,
glutted with the blood of the regicides, turned against each
other. The Roundheads, while admitting the virtues of the late
King, and while condemning the sentence passed upon him by an
illegal tribunal, yet maintained that his administration had
been, in many things, unconstitutional, and that the Houses had
taken arms against him from good motives and on strong grounds.
The monarchy, these politicians conceived, had no worse enemy
than the flatterer who exalted prerogative above the law, who
condemned all opposition to regal encroachments, and who reviled,
not only Cromwell and Harrison, but Pym and Hampden, as traitors.
If the King wished for a quiet and prosperous reign, he must
confide in those who, though they had drawn the sword in defence
of the invaded privileges of Parliament, had yet exposed
themselves to the rage of the soldiers in order to save his
father, and had taken the chief part in bringing back the royal
family.
The feeling of the Cavaliers was widely different. During
eighteen years they had, through all vicissitudes, been faithful
to the Crown. Having shared the distress of their prince, were
they not to share his triumph? Was no distinction to be made
between them and the disloyal subject who had fought against his
rightful sovereign, who had adhered to Richard Cromwell, and who
had never concurred in the restoration of the Stuarts, till it
appeared that nothing else could save the nation from the tyranny
of the army? Grant that such a man had, by his recent services,
fairly earned his pardon. Yet were his services, rendered at the
eleventh hour, to be put in comparison with the toils and
sufferings of those who had borne the burden and heat of the day?
Was he to be ranked with men who had no need of the royal
clemency, with men who had, in every part of their lives, merited
the royal gratitude? Above all, was he to be suffered to retain a
fortune raised out of the substance of the ruined defenders of
the throne? Was it not enough that his head and his patrimonial
estate, a hundred times forfeited to justice, were secure, and
that he shared, with the rest of the nation, in the blessings of
that mild government of which he had long been the foe? Was it
necessary that he should be rewarded for his treason at the
expense of men whose only crime was the fidelity with which they
had observed their oath of allegiance. And what interest had the
King in gorging his old enemies with prey torn from his old
friends? What confidence could be placed in men who had opposed
their sovereign, made war on him, imprisoned him, and who, even
now, instead of hanging down their heads in shame and contrition,
vindicated all that they had done, and seemed to think that they
had given an illustrious proof of loyalty by just stopping short
of regicide? It was true they had lately assisted to set up the
throne: but it was not less true that they had previously pulled
it down, and that they still avowed principles which might impel
them to pull it down again. Undoubtedly it might he fit that
marks of royal approbation should be bestowed on some converts
who had been eminently useful: but policy, as well as justice and
gratitude, enjoined the King to give the highest place in his
regard to those who, from first to last, through good and evil,
had stood by his house. On these grounds the Cavaliers very
naturally demanded indemnity for all that they had suffered, and
preference in the distribution of the favours of the Crown. Some
violent members of the party went further, and clamoured for
large categories of proscription.
The political feud was, as usual, exasperated by a religious
feud. The King found the Church in a singular state. A short time
before the commencement of the civil war, his father had given a
reluctant assent to a bill, strongly supported by Falkland, which
deprived the Bishops of their seats in the House of Lords: but
Episcopacy and the Liturgy had never been abolished by law. The
Long Parliament, however, had passed ordinances which had made a
complete revolution in Church government and in public worship.
The new system was, in principle, scarcely less Erastian than
that which it displaced. The Houses, guided chiefly by the
counsels of the accomplished Selden, had determined to keep the
spiritual power strictly subordinate to the temporal power. They
had refused to declare that any form of ecclesiastical polity was
of divine origin; and they had provided that, from all the Church
courts, an appeal should lie in the last resort to Parliament.
With this highly important reservation, it had been resolved to
set up in England a hierarchy closely resembling that which now
exists in Scotland. The authority of councils, rising one above
another in regular gradation, was substituted for the authority
of Bishops and Archbishops. The Liturgy gave place to the
Presbyterian Directory. But scarcely had the new regulations been
framed, when the Independents rose to supreme influence in the
state. The Independents had no disposition to enforce the
ordinances touching classical, provincial, and national synods.
Those ordinances, therefore, were never carried into full
execution. The Presbyterian system was fully established nowhere
but in Middlesex and Lancashire. In the other fifty counties
almost every parish seems to have been unconnected with the
neighbouring parishes. In some districts, indeed, the ministers
formed themselves into voluntary associations, for the purpose of
mutual help and counsel; but these associations had no coercive
power. The patrons of livings, being now checked by neither
Bishop nor Presbytery, would have been at liberty to confide the
cure of souls to the most scandalous of mankind, but for the
arbitrary intervention of Oliver. He established, by his own
authority, a board of commissioners, called Triers. Most of these
persons were Independent divines; but a few Presbyterian
ministers and a few laymen had seats. The certificate of the
Triers stood in the place both of institution and of induction;
and without such a certificate no person could hold a benefice.
This was undoubtedly one of the most despotic acts ever done by
any English ruler. Yet, as it was generally felt that, without
some such precaution, the country would be overrun by ignorant
and drunken reprobates, bearing the name and receiving the pay of
ministers, some highly respectable persons, who were not in
general friendly to Cromwell, allowed that, on this occasion, he
had been a public benefactor. The presentees whom the Triers had
approved took possession of the rectories, cultivated the glebe
lands, collected the tithes, prayed without book or surplice, and
administered the Eucharist to communicants seated at long tables.
Thus the ecclesiastical polity of the realm was in inextricable
confusion. Episcopacy was the form of government prescribed by
the old law which was still unrepealed. The form of government
prescribed by parliamentary ordinance was Presbyterian. But
neither the old law nor the parliamentary ordinance was
practically in force. The Church actually established may be
described as an irregular body made up of a few Presbyteries and
many Independent congregations, which were all held down and held
together by the authority of the government.
Of those who had been active in bringing back the King, many were
zealous for Synods and for the Directory, and many were desirous
to terminate by a compromise the religious dissensions which had
long agitated England. Between the bigoted followers of Laud and
the bigoted followers of Knox there could be neither peace nor
truce: but it did not seem impossible to effect an accommodation
between the moderate Episcopalians of the school of Usher and the
moderate Presbyterians of the school of Baxter. The moderate
Episcopalians would admit that a Bishop might lawfully be
assisted by a council. The moderate Presbyterians would not deny
that each provincial assembly might lawfully have a permanent
president, and that this president might lawfully be called a
Bishop. There might be a revised Liturgy which should not exclude
extemporaneous prayer, a baptismal service in which the sign of
the cross might be used or omitted at discretion, a communion
service at which the faithful might sit if their conscience
forbade them to kneel. But to no such plan could the great bodies
of the Cavaliers listen with patience. The religious members of
that party were conscientiously attached to the whole system of
their Church. She had been dear to their murdered King. She had
consoled them in defeat and penury. Her service, so often
whispered in an inner chamber during the season of trial, had
such a charm for them that they were unwilling to part with a
single response. Other Royalists, who made little presence to
piety, yet loved the episcopal church because she was the foe of
their foes. They valued a prayer or a ceremony, not on account of
the comfort which it conveyed to themselves, but on account of
the vexation which it gave to the Roundheads, and were so far
from being disposed to purchase union by concession that they
objected to concession chiefly because it tended to produce
union.
Such feelings, though blamable, were natural, and not wholly
inexcusable. The Puritans had undoubtedly, in the day of their
power, given cruel provocation. They ought to have learned, if
from nothing else, yet from their own discontents, from their own
struggles, from their own victory, from the fall of that proud
hierarchy by which they had been so heavily oppressed, that, in
England, and in the seventeenth century, it was not in the power
of the civil magistrate to drill the minds of men into conformity
with his own system of theology. They proved, however, as
intolerant and as meddling as ever Laud had been. They
interdicted under heavy penalties the use of the Book of Common
Prayer, not only in churches, but even in private houses. It was
a crime in a child to read by the bedside of a sick parent one of
those beautiful collects which had soothed the griefs of forty
generations of Christians. Severe punishments were denounced
against such as should presume to blame the Calvinistic mode of
worship. Clergymen of respectable character were not only ejected
from their benefices by thousands, but were frequently exposed to
the outrages of a fanatical rabble. Churches and sepulchres, fine
works of art and curious remains of antiquity, were brutally
defaced. The Parliament resolved that all pictures in the royal
collection which contained representations of Jesus or of the
Virgin Mother should be burned. Sculpture fared as ill as
painting. Nymphs and Graces, the work of Ionian chisels, were
delivered over to Puritan stonemasons to be made decent. Against
the lighter vices the ruling faction waged war with a zeal little
tempered by humanity or by common sense. Sharp laws were passed
against betting. It was enacted that adultery should be punished
with death. The illicit intercourse of the sexes, even where
neither violence nor seduction was imputed, where no public
scandal was given, where no conjugal right was violated, was made
a misdemeanour. Public amusements, from the masques which were
exhibited at the mansions of the great down to the wrestling
matches and grinning matches on village greens, were vigorously
attacked. One ordinance directed that all the Maypoles in England
should forthwith be hewn down. Another proscribed all theatrical
diversions. The playhouses were to be dismantled, the spectators
fined, the actors whipped at the cart's tail. Rope-dancing,
puppet-shows, bowls, horse-racing, were regarded with no friendly
eye. But bearbaiting, then a favourite diversion of high and low,
was the abomination which most strongly stirred the wrath of the
austere sectaries. It is to be remarked that their antipathy to
this sport had nothing in common with the feeling which has, in
our own time, induced the legislature to interfere for the
purpose of protecting beasts against the wanton cruelty of men.
The Puritan hated bearbaiting, not because it gave pain to the
bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. Indeed, he
generally contrived to enjoy the double pleasure of tormenting
both spectators and bear.16
Perhaps no single circumstance more strongly illustrates the
temper of the precisians than their conduct respecting Christmas
day. Christmas had been, from time immemorial, the season of joy
and domestic affection, the season when families assembled, when
children came home from school, when quarrels were made up, when
carols were heard in every street, when every house was decorated
with evergreens, and every table was loaded with good cheer. At
that season all hearts not utterly destitute of kindness were
enlarged and softened. At that season the poor were admitted to
partake largely of the overflowings of the wealth of the rich,
whose bounty was peculiarly acceptable on account of the
shortness of the days and of the severity of the weather. At that
season, the interval between landlord and tenant, master and
servant, was less marked than through the rest of the year. Where
there is much enjoyment there will be some excess: yet, on the
whole, the spirit in which the holiday was kept was not unworthy
of a Christian festival. The long Parliament gave orders, in
1644, that the twenty-fifth of December should be strictly
observed as a fast, and that all men should pass it in humbly
bemoaning the great national sin which they and their fathers had
so often committed on that day by romping under the mistletoe,
eating boar's head, and drinking ale flavored with roasted
apples. No public act of that time seems to have irritated the
common people more. On the next anniversary of the festival
formidable riots broke out in many places. The constables were
resisted, the magistrates insulted, the houses of noted zealots
attacked, and the prescribed service of the day openly read in
the churches.
Such was the spirit of the extreme Puritans, both Presbyterian
and Independent. Oliver, indeed, was little disposed to be either
a persecutor or a meddler. But Oliver, the head of a party, and
consequently, to a great extent, the slave of a party, could not
govern altogether according to his own inclinations. Even under
his administration many magistrates, within their own
jurisdiction, made themselves as odious as Sir Hudibras,
interfered with all the pleasures of the neighbourhood, dispersed
festive meetings, and put fiddlers in the stocks. Still more
formidable was the zeal of the soldiers. In every village where
they appeared there was an end of dancing, bellringing, and
hockey. In London they several times interrupted theatrical
performances at which the Protector had the judgment and good
nature to connive.
With the fear and hatred inspired by such a tyranny contempt was
largely mingled. The peculiarities of the Puritan, his look, his
dress, his dialect, his strange scruples, had been, ever since
the time of Elizabeth, favourite subjects with mockers. But these
peculiarities appeared far more grotesque in a faction which
ruled a great empire than in obscure and persecuted
congregations. The cant, which had moved laughter when it was
heard on the stage from Tribulation Wholesome and
Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, was still more laughable when it proceeded
from the lips of Generals and Councillors of State. It is also to
be noticed that during the civil troubles several sects had
sprung into existence, whose eccentricities surpassed anything
that had before been seen in England. A mad tailor, named
Lodowick Muggleton, wandered from pothouse to pothouse, tippling
ale, and denouncing eternal torments against those who refused to
believe, on his testimony, that the Supreme Being was only six
feet high, and that the sun was just four miles from the earth.17
George Fox had raised a tempest of derision by proclaiming that
it was a violation of Christian sincerity to designate a single
person by a plural pronoun, and that it was an idolatrous homage
to Janus and Woden to talk about January and Wednesday. His
doctrine, a few years later, was embraced by some eminent men,
and rose greatly in the public estimation. But at the time of the
Restoration the Quakers were popularly regarded as the most
despicable of fanatics. By the Puritans they were treated with
severity here, and were persecuted to the death in New England.
Nevertheless the public, which seldom makes nice distinctions,
often confounded the Puritan with the Quaker. Both were
schismatics. Both hated episcopacy and the Liturgy. Both had what
seemed extravagant whimsies about dress, diversions and postures.
Widely as the two differed in opinion, they were popularly
classed together as canting schismatics; and whatever was
ridiculous or odious in either increased the scorn and aversion
which the multitude felt for both.
Before the civil wars, even those who most disliked the opinions
and manners of the Puritan were forced to admit that his moral
conduct was generally, in essentials, blameless; but this praise
was now no longer bestowed, and, unfortunately, was no longer
deserved. The general fate of sects is to obtain a high
reputation for sanctity while they are oppressed, and to lose it
as soon as they become powerful: and the reason is obvious. It is
seldom that a man enrolls himself in a proscribed body from any
but conscientious motives. Such a body, therefore, is composed,
with scarcely an exception, of sincere persons. The most rigid
discipline that can be enforced within a religious society is a
very feeble instrument of purification, when compared with a
little sharp persecution from without. We may be certain that
very few persons, not seriously impressed by religious
convictions, applied for baptism while Diocletian was vexing the
Church, or joined themselves to Protestant congregations at the
risk of being burned by Bonner. But, when a sect becomes
powerful, when its favour is the road to riches and dignities,
worldly and ambitious men crowd into it, talk its language,
conform strictly to its ritual, mimic its peculiarities, and
frequently go beyond its honest members in all the outward
indications of zeal. No discernment, no watchfulness, on the part
of ecclesiastical rulers, can prevent the intrusion of such false
brethren. The tares and wheat must grow together. Soon the world
begins to find out that the godly are not better than other men,
and argues, with some justice, that, if not better, they must be
much worse. In no long time all those signs which were formerly
regarded as characteristic of a saint are regarded as
characteristic of a knave.
Thus it was with the English Nonconformists. They had been
oppressed; and oppression had kept them a pure body. They then
became supreme in the state. No man could hope to rise to
eminence and command but by their favour. Their favour was to be
gained only by exchanging with them the signs and passwords of
spiritual fraternity. One of the first resolutions adopted by
Barebone's Parliament, the most intensely Puritanical of all our
political assemblies, was that no person should be admitted into
the public service till the House should be satisfied of his real
godliness. What were then considered as the signs of real
godliness, the sadcoloured dress, the sour look, the straight
hair, the nasal whine, the speech interspersed with quaint texts,
the Sunday, gloomy as a Pharisaical Sabbath, were easily imitated
by men to whom all religions were the same. The sincere Puritans
soon found themselves lost in a multitude, not merely of men of
the world, but of the very worst sort of men of the world. For
the most notorious libertine who had fought under the royal
standard might justly be thought virtuous when compared with some
of those who, while they talked about sweet experiences and
comfortable scriptures, lived in the constant practice of fraud,
rapacity, and secret debauchery. The people, with a rashness
which we may justly lament, but at which we cannot wonder, formed
their estimate of the whole body from these hypocrites. The
theology, the manners, the dialect of the Puritan were thus
associated in the public mind with the darkest and meanest vices.
As soon as the Restoration had made it safe to avow enmity to the
party which had so long been predominant, a general outcry
against Puritanism rose from every corner of the kingdom, and was
often swollen by the voices of those very dissemblers whose
villany had brought disgrace on the Puritan name.
Thus the two great parties, which, after a long contest, had for
a moment concurred in restoring monarchy, were, both in politics
and in religion, again opposed to each other. The great body of
the nation leaned to the Royalists. The crimes of Strafford and
Laud, the excesses of the Star Chamber and of the High
Commission, the great services which the Long Parliament had,
during the first year of its existence, rendered to the state,
had faded from the minds of men. The execution of Charles the
First, the sullen tyranny of the Rump, the violence of the army,
were remembered with loathing; and the multitude was inclined to
hold all who had withstood the late King responsible for his
death and for the subsequent disasters.
The House of Commons, having been elected while the Presbyterians
were dominant, by no means represented the general sense of the
people. Most of the members, while execrating Cromwell and
Bradshaw, reverenced the memory of Essex and of Pym. One sturdy
Cavalier, who ventured to declare that all who had drawn the
sword against Charles the First were as much traitors as those
who kind cut off his head, was called to order, placed at the
bar, and reprimanded by the Speaker. The general wish of the
House undoubtedly was to settle the ecclesiastical disputes in a
manner satisfactory to the moderate Puritans. But to such a
settlement both the court and the nation were averse.
The restored King was at this time more loved by the people than
any of his predecessors had ever been. The calamities of his
house, the heroic death of his father, his own long sufferings
and romantic adventures, made him an object of tender interest.
His return had delivered the country from an intolerable bondage.
Recalled by the voice of both the contending factions, he was in
a position which enabled him to arbitrate between them; and in
some respects he was well qualified for the task. He had received
from nature excellent parts and a happy temper. His education had
been such as might have been expected to develope his
understanding, and to form him to the practice of every public
and private virtue. He had passed through all varieties of
fortune, and had seen both sides of human nature. He had, while
very young, been driven forth from a palace to a life of exile.
penury, and danger. He had, at the age when the mind and body are
in their highest perfection, and when the first effervescence of
boyish passions should have subsided, been recalled from his
wanderings to wear a crown. He had been taught by bitter
experience how much baseness, perfidy, and ingratitude may lie
hid under the obsequious demeanor of courtiers. He had found, on
the other hand, in the huts of the poorest, true nobility of
soul. When wealth was offered to any who would betray him, when
death was denounced against all who should shelter him, cottagers
and serving men had kept his secret truly, and had kissed his
hand under his mean disguises with as much reverence as if he had
been seated on his ancestral throne. From such a school it might
have been expected that a young man who wanted neither abilities
nor amiable qualities would have come forth a great and good
King. Charles came forth from that school with social habits,
with polite and engaging manners, and with some talent for lively
conversation, addicted beyond measure to sensual indulgence, fond
of sauntering and of frivolous amusements, incapable of
selfdenial and of exertion, without faith in human virtue or in
human attachment without desire of renown, and without
sensibility to reproach. According to him, every person was to be
bought: but some people haggled more about their price than
others; and when this haggling was very obstinate and very
skilful it was called by some fine name. The chief trick by which
clever men kept up the price of their abilities was called
integrity. The chief trick by which handsome women kept up the
price of their beauty was called modesty. The love of God, the
love of country, the love of family, the love of friends, were
phrases of the same sort, delicate and convenient synonymes for
the love of self. Thinking thus of mankind, Charles naturally
cared very little what they thought of him. Honour and shame were
scarcely more to him than light and darkness to the blind. His
contempt of flattery has been highly commended, but seems, when
viewed in connection with the rest of his character, to deserve
no commendation. It is possible to be below flattery as well as
above it. One who trusts nobody will not trust sycophants. One
who does not value real glory will not value its counterfeit.
It is creditable to Charles's temper that, ill as he thought of
his species, he never became a misanthrope. He saw little in men
but what was hateful. Yet he did not hate them. Nay, he was so
far humane that it was highly disagreeable to him to see their
sufferings or to hear their complaints. This, however, is a sort
of humanity which, though amiable and laudable in a private man
whose power to help or hurt is bounded by a narrow circle, has in
princes often been rather a vice than a virtue. More than one
well disposed ruler has given up whole provinces to rapine and
oppression, merely from a wish to see none but happy faces round
his own board and in his own walks. No man is fit to govern great
societies who hesitates about disobliging the few who have access
to him, for the sake of the many whom he will never see. The
facility of Charles was such as has perhaps never been found in
any man of equal sense. He was a slave without being a dupe.
Worthless men and women, to the very bottom of whose hearts he
saw, and whom he knew to be destitute of affection for him and
undeserving of his confidence, could easily wheedle him out of
titles, places, domains, state secrets and pardons. He bestowed
much; yet he neither enjoyed the pleasure nor acquired the fame
of beneficence. He never gave spontaneously; but it was painful
to him to refuse. The consequence was that his bounty generally
went, not to those who deserved it best, nor even to those whom
he liked best, but to the most shameless and importunate suitor
who could obtain an audience.
The motives which governed the political conduct of Charles the
Second differed widely from those by which his predecessor and
his successor were actuated. He was not a man to be imposed upon
by the patriarchal theory of government and the doctrine of
divine right. He was utterly without ambition. He detested
business, and would sooner have abdicated his crown than have
undergone the trouble of really directing the administration.
Such was his aversion to toil, and such his ignorance of affairs,
that the very clerks who attended him when he sate in council
could not refrain from sneering at his frivolous remarks, and at
his childish impatience. Neither gratitude nor revenge had any
share in determining his course; for never was there a mind on
which both services and injuries left such faint and transitory
impressions. He wished merely to be a King such as Lewis the
Fifteenth of France afterwards was; a King who could draw without
limit on the treasury for the gratification of his private
tastes, who could hire with wealth and honours persons capable of
assisting him to kill the time, and who, even when the state was
brought by maladministration to the depths of humiliation and to
the brink of ruin, could still exclude unwelcome truth from the
purlieus of his own seraglio, and refuse to see and hear whatever
might disturb his luxurious repose. For these ends, and for these
ends alone, he wished to obtain arbitrary power, if it could be
obtained without risk or trouble. In the religious disputes which
divided his Protestant subjects his conscience was not at all
interested. For his opinions oscillated in contented suspense
between infidelity and Popery. But, though his conscience was
neutral in the quarrel between the Episcopalians and the
Presbyterians, his taste was by no means so. His favourite vices
were precisely those to which the Puritans were least indulgent.
He could not get through one day without the help of diversions
which the Puritans regarded as sinful. As a man eminently well
bred, and keenly sensible of the ridiculous, he was moved to
contemptuous mirth by the Puritan oddities. He had indeed some
reason to dislike the rigid sect. He had, at the age when the
passions are most impetuous and when levity is most pardonable,
spent some months in Scotland, a King in name, but in fact a
state prisoner in the hands of austere Presbyterians. Not content
with requiring him to conform to their worship and to subscribe
their Covenant, they had watched all his motions, and lectured
him on all his youthful follies. He had been compelled to give
reluctant attendance at endless prayers and sermons, and might
think himself fortunate when he was not insolently reminded from
the pulpit of his own frailties, of his father's tyranny, and of
his mother's idolatry. Indeed he had been so miserable during
this part of his life that the defeat which made him again a
wanderer might be regarded as a deliverance rather than as a
calamity. Under the influence of such feelings as these Charles
was desirous to depress the party which had resisted his father.
The King's brother, James Duke of York, took the same side.
Though a libertine, James was diligent, methodical, and fond of
authority and business. His understanding was singularly slow and
narrow, and his temper obstinate, harsh, and unforgiving. That
such a prince should have looked with no good will on the free
institutions of England, and on the party which was peculiarly
zealous for those institutions, can excite no surprise. As yet
the Duke professed himself a member of the Anglican Church but he
had already shown inclinations which had seriously alarmed good
Protestants.
The person on whom devolved at this time the greatest part of the
labour of governing was Edward Hyde, Chancellor of the realm, who
was soon created Earl of Clarendon. The respect which we justly
feel for Clarendon as a writer must not blind us to the faults
which he committed as a statesman. Some of those faults, however,
are explained and excused by the unfortunate position in which he
stood. He had, during the first year of the Long Parliament, been
honourably distinguished among the senators who laboured to
redress the grievances of the nation. One of the most odious of
those grievances, the Council of York, had been removed in
consequence chiefly of his exertions. When the great schism took
place, when the reforming party and the conservative party first
appeared marshalled against each other, he, with many wise and
good men, took the conservative side. He thenceforward followed
the fortunes of the court, enjoyed as large a share of the
confidence of Charles the First as the reserved nature and
tortuous policy of that prince allowed to any minister, and
subsequently shared the exile and directed the political conduct
of Charles the Second. At the Restoration Hyde became chief
minister. In a few months it was announced that he was closely
related by affinity to the royal house. His daughter had become,
by a secret marriage, Duchess of York. His grandchildren might
perhaps wear the crown. He was raised by this illustrious
connection over the heads of the old nobility of the land, and
was for a time supposed to be allpowerful. In some respects he
was well fitted for his great place. No man wrote abler state
papers. No man spoke with more weight and dignity in Council and
in Parliament. No man was better acquainted with general maxims
of statecraft. No man observed the varieties of character with a
more discriminating eye. It must be added that he had a strong
sense of moral and religious obligation, a sincere reverence for
the laws of his country, and a conscientious regard for the
honour and interest of the Crown. But his temper was sour,
arrogant, and impatient of opposition. Above all, he bad been
long an exile; and this circumstance alone would have completely
disqualified him for the supreme direction of affairs. It is
scarcely possible that a politician, who has been compelled by
civil troubles to go into banishment, and to pass many of the
best years of his life abroad, can be fit, on the day on which he
returns to his native land, to be at the head of the government.
Clarendon was no exception to this rule. He had left England with
a mind heated by a fierce conflict which had ended in the
downfall of his party and of his own fortunes. From 1646 to 1660
he had lived beyond sea, looking on all that passed at home from
a great distance, and through a false medium. His notions of
public affairs were necessarily derived from the reports of
plotters, many of whom were ruined and desperate men. Events
naturally seemed to him auspicious, not in proportion as they
increased the prosperity and glory of the nation, but in
proportion as they tended to hasten the hour of his own return.
His wish, a wish which he has not disguised, was that, till his
countrymen brought back the old line, they might never enjoy
quiet or freedom. At length he returned; and, without having a
single week to look about him, to mix with society, to note the
changes which fourteen eventful years had produced in the
national character and feelings, he was at once set to rule the
state. In such circumstances, a minister of the greatest tact and
docility would probably have fallen into serious errors. But tact
and docility made no part of the character of Clarendon. To him
England was still the England of his youth; and he sternly
frowned down every theory and every practice which had sprung up
during his own exile. Though he was far from meditating any
attack on the ancient and undoubted power of the House of
Commons, he saw with extreme uneasiness the growth of that power.
The royal prerogative, for which he had long suffered, and by
which he had at length been raised to wealth and dignity, was
sacred in his eyes. The Roundheads he regarded both with
political and with personal aversion. To the Anglican Church he
had always been strongly attached, and had repeatedly, where her
interests were concerned, separated himself with regret from his
dearest friends. His zeal for Episcopacy and for the Book of
Common Prayer was now more ardent than ever, and was mingled with
a vindictive hatred of the Puritans, which did him little honour
either as a statesman or as a Christian.
While the House of Commons which had recalled the royal family
was sitting, it was impossible to effect the re-establishment of
the old ecclesiastical system. Not only were the intentions of
the court strictly concealed, but assurances which quieted the
minds of the moderate Presbyterians were given by the King in the
most solemn manner. He had promised, before his restoration, that
he would grant liberty of conscience to his subjects. He now
repeated that promise, and added a promise to use his best
endeavours for the purpose of effecting a compromise between the
contending sects. He wished, he said, to see the spiritual
jurisdiction divided between bishops and synods. The Liturgy
should be revised by a body of learned divines, one-half of whom
should be Presbyterians. The questions respecting the surplice,
the posture at the Eucharist, and the sign of the cross in
baptism, should be settled in a way which would set tender
consciences at ease. When the King had thus laid asleep the
vigilance of those whom he most feared, he dissolved the
Parliament. He had already given his assent to an act by which an
amnesty was granted, with few exceptions, to all who, during the
late troubles, had been guilty of political offences. He had also
obtained from the Commons a grant for life of taxes, the annual
product of which was estimated at twelve hundred thousand pounds.
The actual income, indeed, during some years, amounted to little
more than a million: but this sum, together with the hereditary
revenue of the crown, was then sufficient to defray the expenses
of the government in time of peace. Nothing was allowed for a
standing army. The nation was sick of the very name; and the
least mention of such a force would have incensed and alarmed all
parties.
Early in 1661 took place a general election. The people were mad
with loyal enthusiasm. The capital was excited by preparations
for the most splendid coronation that had ever been known. The
result was that a body of representatives was returned, such as
England had never yet seen. A large proportion of the successful
candidates were men who had fought for the Crown and the Church,
and whose minds had been exasperated by many injuries and insults
suffered at the hands of the Roundheads. When the members met,
the passions which animated each individually acquired new
strength from sympathy. The House of Commons was, during some
years, more zealous for royalty than the King, more zealous for
episcopacy than the Bishops. Charles and Clarendon were almost
terrified at the completeness of their own success. They found
themselves in a situation not unlike that in which Lewis the
Eighteenth and the Duke of Richelieu were placed while the
Chamber of 1815 was sitting. Even if the King had been desirous
to fulfill the promises which he had made to the Presbyterians,
it would have been out of his power to do so. It was indeed only
by the strong exertion of his influence that he could prevent the
victorious Cavaliers from rescinding the act of indemnity, and
retaliating without mercy all that they had suffered.
The Commons began by resolving that every member should, on pain
of expulsion, take the sacrament according to the form prescribed
by the old Liturgy, and that the Covenant should be burned by the
hangman in Palace Yard. An act was passed, which not only
acknowledged the power of the sword to be solely in the King, but
declared that in no extremity whatever could the two Houses be
justified in withstanding him by force. Another act was passed
which required every officer of a corporation to receive the
Eucharist according to the rites of the Church of England, and to
swear that he held resistance to the King's authority to be in
all cases unlawful. A few hotheaded men wished to bring in a
bill, which should at once annul all the statutes passed by the
Long Parliament, and should restore the Star Chamber and the High
Commission; but the reaction, violent as it was, did not proceed
quite to this length. It still continued to be the law that a
Parliament should be held every three years: but the stringent
clauses which directed the returning officers to proceed to
election at the proper time, even without the royal writ, were
repealed. The Bishops were restored to their seats in the Upper
House. The old ecclesiastical polity and the old Liturgy were
revived without any modification which had any tendency to
conciliate even the most reasonable Presbyterians. Episcopal
ordination was now, for the first time, made an indispensable
qualification for church preferment. About two thousand ministers
of religion, whose conscience did not suffer them to conform,
were driven from their benefices in one day. The dominant party
exultingly reminded the sufferers that the Long Parliament, when
at the height of power, had turned out a still greater number of
Royalist divines. The reproach was but too well founded: but the
Long Parliament had at least allowed to the divines whom it
ejected a provision sufficient to keep them from starving; and
this example the Cavaliers, intoxicated with animosity, had not
the justice and humanity to follow.
Then came penal statutes against Nonconformists, statutes for
which precedents might too easily be found in the Puritan
legislation, but to which the King could not give his assent
without a breach of promises publicly made, in the most important
crisis of his life, to those on whom his fate depended. The
Presbyterians, in extreme distress and terror, fled to the foot
of the throne, and pleaded their recent services and the royal
faith solemnly and repeatedly plighted. The King wavered. He
could not deny his own hand and seal. He could not but be
conscious that he owed much to the petitioners. He was little in
the habit of resisting importunate solicitation. His temper was
not that of a persecutor. He disliked the Puritans indeed; but in
him dislike was a languid feeling, very little resembling the
energetic hatred which had burned in the heart of Laud. He was,
moreover, partial to the Roman Catholic religion; and he knew
that it would be impossible to grant liberty of worship to the
professors of that religion without extending the same indulgence
to Protestant dissenters. He therefore made a feeble attempt to
restrain the intolerant zeal of the House of Commons; but that
House was under the influence of far deeper convictions and far
stronger passions than his own. After a faint struggle he
yielded, and passed, with the show of alacrity, a series of
odious acts against the separatists. It was made a crime to
attend a dissenting place of worship. A single justice of the
peace might convict without a jury, and might, for the third
offence, pass sentence of transportation beyond sea for seven
years. With refined cruelty it was provided that the offender
should not be transported to New England, where he was likely to
find sympathising friends. If he returned to his own country
before the expiration of his term of exile, he was liable to
capital punishment. A new and most unreasonable test was imposed
on divines who had been deprived of their benefices for
nonconformity; and all who refused to take that test were
prohibited from coming within five miles of any town which was
governed by a corporation, of any town which was represented in
Parliament, or of any town where they had themselves resided as
ministers. The magistrates, by whom these rigorous statutes were
to be enforced, were in general men inflamed by party spirit and
by the remembrance of wrongs suffered in the time of the
commonwealth. The gaols were therefore soon crowded with
dissenters, and, among the sufferers, were some of whose genius
and virtue any Christian society might well be proud.
The Church of England was not ungrateful for the protection which
she received from the government. From the first day of her
existence, she had been attached to monarchy. But, during the
quarter of a century which followed the Restoration, her zeal for
royal authority and hereditary right passed all bounds. She had
suffered with the House of Stuart. She had been restored with
that House. She was connected with it by common interests,
friendships, and enmities. It seemed impossible that a day could
ever come when the ties which bound her to the children of her
august martyr would be sundered, and when the loyalty in which
she gloried would cease to be a pleasing and profitable duty. She
accordingly magnified in fulsome phrase that prerogative which
was constantly employed to defend and to aggrandise her, and
reprobated, much at her ease, the depravity of those whom
oppression, from which she was exempt, had goaded to rebellion.
Her favourite theme was the doctrine of non-resistance. That
doctrine she taught without any qualification, and followed out
to all its extreme consequences. Her disciples were never weary
of repeating that in no conceivable case, not even if England
were cursed with a King resembling Busiris or Phalaris, with a
King who, in defiance of law, and without the presence of
justice, should daily doom hundreds of innocent victims to
torture and death, would all the Estates of the realm united be
justified in withstanding his tyranny by physical force. Happily
the principles of human nature afford abundant security that such
theories will never be more than theories. The day of trial came;
and the very men who had most loudly and most sincerely professed
this extravagant loyalty were, in every county of England arrayed
in arms against the throne.
Property all over the kingdom was now again changing hands. The
national sales, not having been confirmed by Act of Parliament,
were regarded by the tribunals as nullities. The bishops, the
deans, the chapters, the Royalist nobility and gentry, reentered
on their confiscated estates, and ejected even purchasers who had
given fair prices. The losses which the Cavaliers had sustained
during the ascendency of their opponents were thus in part
repaired; but in part only. All actions for mesne profits were
effectually barred by the general amnesty; and the numerous
Royalists, who, in order to discharge fines imposed by the Long
Parliament, or in order to purchase the favour of powerful
Roundheads, had sold lands for much less than the real value,
were not relieved from the legal consequences of their own acts.
While these changes were in progress, a change still more
important took place in the morals and manners of the community.
Those passions and tastes which, under the rule of the Puritans,
had been sternly repressed, and, if gratified at all, had been
gratified by stealth, broke forth with ungovernable violence as
soon as the check was withdrawn. Men flew to frivolous amusements
and to criminal pleasures with the greediness which long and
enforced abstinence naturally produces. Little restraint was
imposed by public opinion. For the nation, nauseated with cant,
suspicious of all pretensions to sanctity and still smarting from
the recent tyranny of rulers austere in life and powerful in
prayer, looked for a time with complacency on the softer and
gayer vices. Still less restraint was imposed by the government.
Indeed there was no excess which was not encouraged by the
ostentatious profligacy of the King and of his favourite
courtiers. A few counsellors of Charles the First, who were now
no longer young, retained the decorous gravity which had been
thirty years before in fashion at Whitehall. Such were Clarendon
himself, and his friends, Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of
Southampton, Lord Treasurer, and James Butler, Duke of Ormond,
who, having through many vicissitudes struggled gallantly for the
royal cause in Ireland, now governed that kingdom as Lord
Lieutenant. But neither the memory of the services of these men,
nor their great power in the state, could protect them from the
sarcasms which modish vice loves to dart at obsolete virtue. The
praise of politeness and vivacity could now scarcely be obtained
except by some violation of decorum. Talents great and various
assisted to spread the contagion. Ethical philosophy had recently
taken a form well suited to please a generation equally devoted
to monarchy and to vice. Thomas Hobbes had, in language more
precise and luminous than has ever been employed by any other
metaphysical writer, maintained that the will of the prince was
the standard of right and wrong, and that every subject ought to
be ready to profess Popery, Mahometanism, or Paganism, at the
royal command. Thousands who were incompetent to appreciate what
was really valuable in his speculations, eagerly welcomed a
theory which, while it exalted the kingly office, relaxed the
obligations of morality, and degraded religion into a mere affair
of state. Hobbism soon became an almost essential part of the
character of the fine gentleman. All the lighter kinds of
literature were deeply tainted by the prevailing licentiousness.
Poetry stooped to be the pandar of every low desire. Ridicule,
instead of putting guilt and error to the blush, turned her
formidable shafts against innocence and truth. The restored
Church contended indeed against the prevailing immorality, but
contended feebly, and with half a heart. It was necessary to the
decorum of her character that she should admonish her erring
children: but her admonitions were given in a somewhat
perfunctory manner. Her attention was elsewhere engaged. Her
whole soul was in the work of crushing the Puritans, and of
teaching her disciples to give unto Caesar the things which were
Caesar's. She had been pillaged and oppressed by the party which
preached an austere morality. She had been restored to opulence
and honour by libertines. Little as the men of mirth and fashion
were disposed to shape their lives according to her precepts,
they were yet ready to fight knee deep in blood for her
cathedrals and places, for every line of her rubric and every
thread of her vestments. If the debauched Cavalier haunted
brothels and gambling houses, he at least avoided conventicles.
If he never spoke without uttering ribaldry and blasphemy, he
made some amends by his eagerness to send Baxter and Howe to
gaol for preaching and praying. Thus the clergy, for a time,
made war on schism with so much vigour that they had little
leisure to make war on vice. The ribaldry of Etherege and
Wycherley was, in the presence and under the special sanction of
the head of the Church, publicly recited by female lips in female
ears, while the author of the Pilgrim's Progress languished in a
dungeon for the crime of proclaiming the gospel to the poor. It
is an unquestionable and a most instructive fact that the years
during which the political power of the Anglican hierarchy was in
the zenith were precisely the years during which national virtue
was at the lowest point.
Scarcely any rank or profession escaped the infection of the
prevailing immorality; but those persons who made politics their
business were perhaps the most corrupt part of the corrupt
society. For they were exposed, not only to the same noxious
influences which affected the nation generally, but also to a
taint of a peculiar and of a most malignant kind. Their character
had been formed amidst frequent and violent revolutions and
counterrevolutions. In the course of a few years they had seen
the ecclesiastical and civil polity of their country repeatedly
changed. They had seen an Episcopal Church persecuting Puritans,
a Puritan Church persecuting Episcopalians, and an Episcopal
Church persecuting Puritans again. They had seen hereditary
monarchy abolished and restored. They had seen the Long
Parliament thrice supreme in the state, and thrice dissolved
amidst the curses and laughter of millions. They had seen a new
dynasty rapidly rising to the height of power and glory, and then
on a sudden hurled down from the chair of state without a
struggle. They had seen a new representative system devised,
tried and abandoned. They had seen a new House of Lords created
and scattered. They had seen great masses of property violently
transferred from Cavaliers to Roundheads, and from Roundheads
back to Cavaliers. During these events no man could be a stirring
and thriving politician who was not prepared to change with every
change of fortune. It was only in retirement that any person
could long keep the character either of a steady Royalist or of a
steady Republican. One who, in such an age, is determined to
attain civil greatness must renounce all thoughts of consistency.
Instead of affecting immutability in the midst of endless
mutation, he must be always on the watch for the indications of a
coming reaction. He must seize the exact moment for deserting a
falling cause. Having gone all lengths with a faction while it
was uppermost, he must suddenly extricate himself from it when
its difficulties begin, must assail it, must persecute it, must
enter on a new career of power and prosperity in company with new
associates. His situation naturally developes in him to the
highest degree a peculiar class of abilities and a peculiar class
of vices. He becomes quick of observation and fertile of
resource. He catches without effort the tone of any sect or party
with which he chances to mingle. He discerns the signs of the
times with a sagacity which to the multitude appears miraculous,
with a sagacity resembling that with which a veteran police
officer pursues the faintest indications of crime, or with which
a Mohawk warrior follows a track through the woods. But we shell
seldom find, in a statesman so trained, integrity, constancy, any
of the virtues of the noble family of Truth. He has no faith in
any doctrine, no zeal for any cause. He has seen so many old
institutions swept away, that he has no reverence for
prescription. He has seen so many new institutions, from which
much had been expected, produce mere disappointment, that he has
no hope of improvement. He sneers alike at those who are anxious
to preserve and at those who are eager to reform. There is
nothing in the state which he could not, without a scruple or a
blush, join in defending or in destroying. Fidelity to opinions
and to friends seems to him mere dulness and wrongheadedness.
Politics he regards, not as a science of which the object is the
happiness of mankind, but as an exciting game of mixed chance and
skill, at which a dexterous and lucky player may win an estate, a
coronet, perhaps a crown, and at which one rash move may lead to
the loss of fortune and of life. Ambition, which, in good times,
and in good minds, is half a virtue, now, disjoined from every
elevated and philanthropic sentiment, becomes a selfish cupidity
scarcely less ignoble than avarice. Among those politicians who,
from the Restoration to the accession of the House of Hanover,
were at the head of the great parties in the state, very few can
be named whose reputation is not stained by what, in our age,
would be called gross perfidy and corruption. It is scarcely an
exaggeration to say that the most unprincipled public men who
have taken part in affairs within our memory would, if tried by
the standard which was in fashion during the latter part of the
seventeenth century, deserve to be regarded as scrupulous and
disinterested.
While these political, religious, and moral changes were taking
place in England, the Royal authority had been without difficulty
reestablished in every other part of the British islands. In
Scotland the restoration of the Stuarts had been hailed with
delight; for it was regarded as the restoration of national
independence. And true it was that the yoke which Cromwell had
imposed was, in appearance, taken away, that the Scottish Estates
again met in their old hall at Edinburgh, and that the Senators
of the College of Justice again administered the Scottish law
according to the old forms. Yet was the independence of the
little kingdom necessarily rather nominal than real; for, as long
as the King had England on his side, he had nothing to apprehend
from disaffection in his other dominions. He was now in such a
situation that he could renew the attempt which had proved
destructive to his father without any danger of his father's
fate. Charles the First had tried to force his own religion by
his regal power on the Scots at a moment when both his religion
and his regal power were unpopular in England; and he had not
only failed, but had raised troubles which had ultimately cost
him his crown and his head. Times had now changed: England was
zealous for monarchy and prelacy; and therefore the scheme which
had formerly been in the highest degree imprudent might be
resumed with little risk to the throne. The government resolved
to set up a prelatical church in Scotland. The design was
disapproved by every Scotchman whose judgment was entitled to
respect. Some Scottish statesmen who were zealous for the King's
prerogative had been bred Presbyterians. Though little troubled
with scruples, they retained a preference for the religion of
their childhood; and they well knew how strong a hold that
religion had on the hearts of their countrymen. They remonstrated
strongly: but, when they found that they remonstrated in vain,
they had not virtue enough to persist in an opposition which
would have given offence to their master; and several of them
stooped to the wickedness and baseness of persecuting what in
their consciences they believed to be the purest form of
Christianity. The Scottish Parliament was so constituted that it
had scarcely ever offered any serious opposition even to Kings
much weaker than Charles then was. Episcopacy, therefore, was
established by law. As to the form of worship, a large discretion
was left to the clergy. In some churches the English Liturgy was
used. In others, the ministers selected from that Liturgy such
prayers and thanksgivings as were likely to be least offensive to
the people. But in general the doxology was sung at the close of
public worship; and the Apostles' Creed was recited when baptism
was administered. By the great body of the Scottish nation the
new Church was detested both as superstitious and as foreign; as
tainted with the corruptions of Rome, and as a mark of the
predominance of England. There was, however, no general
insurrection. The country was not what it had been twenty-two
years before. Disastrous war and alien domination had tamed the
spirit of the people. The aristocracy, which was held in great
honour by the middle class and by the populace, had put itself at
the head of the movement against Charles the First, but proved
obsequious to Charles the Second. From the English Puritans no
aid was now to be expected. They were a feeble party, proscribed
both by law and by public opinion. The bulk of the Scottish
nation, therefore, sullenly submitted, and, with many misgivings
of conscience, attended the ministrations of the Episcopal
clergy, or of Presbyterian divines who had consented to accept
from the government a half toleration, known by the name of the
Indulgence. But there were, particularly in the western lowlands,
many fierce and resolute men who held that the obligation to
observe the Covenant was paramount to the obligation to obey the
magistrate. These people, in defiance of the law, persisted in
meeting to worship God after their own fashion. The Indulgence
they regarded, not as a partial reparation of the wrongs
inflicted by the State on the Church, but as a new wrong, the
more odious because it was disguised under the appearance of a
benefit. Persecution, they said, could only kill the body; but
the black Indulgence was deadly to the soul. Driven from the
towns, they assembled on heaths and mountains. Attacked by the
civil power, they without scruple repelled force by force. At
every conventicle they mustered in arms. They repeatedly broke
out into open rebellion. They were easily defeated, and
mercilessly punished: but neither defeat nor punishment could
subdue their spirit. Hunted down like wild beasts, tortured till
their bones were beaten flat, imprisoned by hundreds, hanged by
scores, exposed at one time to the license of soldiers from
England, abandoned at another time to the mercy of troops of
marauders from the Highlands, they still stood at bay in a mood
so savage that the boldest and mightiest oppressor could not but
dread the audacity of their despair.
Such was, during the reign of Charles the Second, the state of
Scotland. Ireland was not less distracted. In that island existed
feuds, compared with which the hottest animosities of English
politicians were lukewarm. The enmity between the Irish Cavaliers
and the Irish Roundheads was almost forgotten in the fiercer
enmity which raged between the English and the Celtic races. The
interval between the Episcopalian and the Presbyterian seemed to
vanish, when compared with the interval which separated both from
the Papist. During the late civil troubles the greater part of
the Irish soil had been transferred from the vanquished nation to
the victors. To the favour of the Crown few either of the old or
of the new occupants had any pretensions. The despoilers and the
despoiled had, for the most part, been rebels alike. The
government was soon perplexed and wearied by the conflicting
claims and mutual accusations of the two incensed factions. Those
colonists among whom Cromwell had portioned out the conquered
territory, and whose descendants are still called Cromwellians,
asserted that the aboriginal inhabitants were deadly enemies of
the English nation under every dynasty, and of the Protestant
religion in every form. They described and exaggerated the
atrocities which had disgraced the insurrection of Ulster: they
urged the King to follow up with resolution the policy of the
Protector; and they were not ashamed to hint that there would
never be peace in Ireland till the old Irish race should be
extirpated. The Roman Catholics extenuated their offense as they
best might, and expatiated in piteous language on the severity of
their punishment, which, in truth, had not been lenient. They
implored Charles not to confound the innocent with the guilty,
and reminded him that many of the guilty had atoned for their
fault by returning to their allegiance, and by defending his
rights against the murderers of his father. The court, sick of
the importunities of two parties, neither of which it had any
reason to love, at length relieved itself from trouble by
dictating a compromise. That system, cruel, but most complete and
energetic, by which Oliver had proposed to make the island
thoroughly English, was abandoned. The Cromwellians were induced
to relinquish a third part of their acquisitions. The land thus
surrendered was capriciously divided among claimants whom the
government chose to favour. But great numbers who protested that
they were innocent of all disloyalty, and some persons who
boasted that their loyalty had been signally displayed, obtained
neither restitution nor compensation, and filled France and Spain
with outcries against the injustice and ingratitude of the House
of Stuart.
Meantime the government had, even in England, ceased to be
popular. The Royalists had begun to quarrel with the court and
with each other; and the party which had been vanquished,
trampled down, and, as it seemed, annihilated, but which had
still retained a strong principle of life, again raised its head,
and renewed the interminable war.
Had the administration been faultless, the enthusiasm with which
the return of the King and the termination of the military
tyranny had been hailed could not have been permanent. For it is
the law of our nature that such fits of excitement shall always
be followed by remissions. The manner in which the court abused
its victory made the remission speedy and complete. Every
moderate man was shocked by the insolence, cruelty, and perfidy
with which the Nonconformists were treated. The penal laws had
effectually purged the oppressed party of those insincere members
whose vices had disgraced it, and had made it again an honest and
pious body of men. The Puritan, a conqueror, a ruler, a
persecutor, a sequestrator, had been detested. The Puritan,
betrayed and evil entreated, deserted by all the timeservers who,
in his prosperity, had claimed brotherhood with him, hunted from
his home, forbidden under severe penalties to pray or receive the
sacrament according to his conscience, yet still firm in his
resolution to obey God rather than man, was, in spite of some
unpleasing recollections, an object of pity and respect to well
constituted minds. These feelings became stronger when it was
noised abroad that the court was not disposed to treat Papists
with the same rigour which had been shown to Presbyterians. A
vague suspicion that the King and the Duke were not sincere
Protestants sprang up and gathered strength. Many persons too who
had been disgusted by the austerity and hypocrisy of the Saints
of the Commonwealth began to be still more disgusted by the open
profligacy of the court and of the Cavaliers, and were disposed
to doubt whether the sullen preciseness of Praise God Barebone
might not be preferable to the outrageous profaneness and
licentiousness of the Buckinghams and Sedleys. Even immoral men,
who were not utterly destitute of sense and public spirit,
complained that the government treated the most serious matters
as trifles, and made trifles its serious business. A King might
be pardoned for amusing his leisure with wine, wit, and beauty.
But it was intolerable that he should sink into a mere lounger
and voluptuary, that the gravest affairs of state should be
neglected, and that the public service should be starved and the
finances deranged in order that harlots and parasites might grow
rich.
A large body of Royalists joined in these complaints, and added
many sharp reflections on the King's ingratitude. His whole
revenue, indeed, would not have sufficed to reward them all in
proportion to their own consciousness of desert. For to every
distressed gentleman who had fought under Rupert or Derby his own
services seemed eminently meritorious, and his own sufferings
eminently severe. Every one had flattered himself that, whatever
became of the rest, he should be largely recompensed for all that
he had lost during the civil troubles, and that the restoration
of the monarchy would be followed by the restoration of his own
dilapidated fortunes. None of these expectants could restrain his
indignation, when he found that he was as poor under the King as
he had been under the Rump or the Protector. The negligence and
extravagance of the court excited the bitter indignation of these
loyal veterans. They justly said that one half of what His
Majesty squandered on concubines and buffoons would gladden the
hearts of hundreds of old Cavaliers who, after cutting down their
oaks and melting their plate to help his father, now wandered
about in threadbare suits, and did not know where to turn for a
meal.
At the same time a sudden fall of rents took place. The income of
every landed proprietor was diminished by five shillings in the
pound. The cry of agricultural distress rose from every shire in
the kingdom; and for that distress the government was, as usual,
held accountable. The gentry, compelled to retrench their
expenses for a period, saw with indignation the increasing
splendour and profusion of Whitehall, and were immovably fixed in
the belief that the money which ought to have supported their
households had, by some inexplicable process, gone to the
favourites of the King.
The minds of men were now in such a temper that every public act
excited discontent. Charles had taken to wife Catharine Princess
of Portugal. The marriage was generally disliked; and the murmurs
became loud when it appeared that the King was not likely to have
any legitimate posterity. Dunkirk, won by Oliver from Spain, was
sold to Lewis the Fourteenth, King of France. This bargain
excited general indignation. Englishmen were already beginning to
observe with uneasiness the progress of the French power, and to
regard the House of Bourbon with the same feeling with which
their grandfathers had regarded the House of Austria. Was it
wise, men asked, at such a time, to make any addition to the
strength of a monarchy already too formidable? Dunkirk was,
moreover, prized by the people, not merely as a place of arms,
and as a key to the Low Countries, but also as a trophy of
English valour. It was to the subjects of Charles what Calais had
been to an earlier generation, and what the rock of Gibraltar, so
manfully defended, through disastrous and perilous years, against
the fleets and armies of a mighty coalition, is to ourselves. The
plea of economy might have had some weight, if it had been urged
by an economical government. But it was notorious that the
charges of Dunkirk fell far short of the sums which were wasted
at court in vice and folly. It seemed insupportable that a
sovereign, profuse beyond example in all that regarded his own
pleasures, should be niggardly in all that regarded the safety
and honour of the state.
The public discontent was heightened, when it was found that,
while Dunkirk was abandoned on the plea of economy, the fortress
of Tangier, which was part of the dower of Queen Catharine, was
repaired and kept up at an enormous charge. That place was
associated with no recollections gratifying to the national
pride: it could in no way promote the national interests: it
involved us in inglorious, unprofitable, and interminable wars
with tribes of half savage Mussulmans and it was situated in a
climate singularly unfavourable to the health and vigour of the
English race.
But the murmurs excited by these errors were faint, when compared
with the clamours which soon broke forth. The government engaged
in war with the United Provinces. The House of Commons readily
voted sums unexampled in our history, sums exceeding those which
had supported the fleets and armies of Cromwell at the time when
his power was the terror of all the world. But such was the
extravagance, dishonesty, and incapacity of those who had
succeeded to his authority, that this liberality proved worse
than useless. The sycophants of the court, ill qualified to
contend against the great men who then directed the arms of
Holland, against such a statesman as De Witt, and such a
commander as De Ruyter, made fortunes rapidly, while the sailors
mutinied from very hunger, while the dockyards were unguarded,
while the ships were leaky and without rigging. It was at length
determined to abandon all schemes of offensive war; and it soon
appeared that even a defensive war was a task too hard for that
administration. The Dutch fleet sailed up the Thames, and burned
the ships of war which lay at Chatham. It was said that, on the
very day of that great humiliation, the King feasted with the
ladies of his seraglio, and amused himself with hunting a moth
about the supper room. Then, at length, tardy justice was done to
the memory of Oliver. Everywhere men magnified his valour,
genius, and patriotism. Everywhere it was remembered how, when he
ruled, all foreign powers had trembled at the name of England,
how the States General, now so haughty, had crouched at his feet,
and how, when it was known that he was no more, Amsterdam was
lighted up as for a great deliverance, and children ran along the
canals, shouting for joy that the Devil was dead. Even Royalists
exclaimed that the state could be saved only by calling the old
soldiers of the Commonwealth to arms. Soon the capital began to
feel the miseries of a blockade. Fuel was scarcely to be
procured. Tilbury Fort, the place where Elizabeth had, with manly
spirit, hurled foul scorn at Parma and Spain, was insulted by the
invaders. The roar of foreign guns was heard, for the first time,
by the citizens of London. In the Council it was seriously
proposed that, if the enemy advanced, the Tower should be
abandoned. Great multitudes of people assembled in the streets
crying out that England was bought and sold. The houses and
carriages of the ministers were attacked by the populace; and it
seemed likely that the government would have to deal at once with
an invasion and with an insurrection. The extreme danger, it is
true, soon passed by. A treaty was concluded, very different from
the treaties which Oliver had been in the habit of signing; and
the nation was once more at peace, but was in a mood scarcely
less fierce and sullen than in the days of shipmoney.
The discontent engendered by maladministration was heightened by
calamities which the best administration could not have averted.
While the ignominious war with Holland was raging, London
suffered two great disasters, such as never, in so short a space
of time, befel one city. A pestilence, surpassing in horror any
that during three centuries had visited the island, swept away,
in six mouths, more than a hundred thousand human beings. And
scarcely had the dead cart ceased to go its rounds, when a fire,
such as had not been known in Europe since the conflagration of
Rome under Nero, laid in ruins the whole city, from the Tower to
the Temple, and from the river to the purlieus of Smithfield.
Had there been a general election while the nation was smarting
under so many disgraces and misfortunes, it is probable that the
Roundheads would have regained ascendency in the state. But the
Parliament was still the Cavalier Parliament, chosen in the
transport of loyalty which had followed the Restoration.
Nevertheless it soon became evident that no English legislature,
however loyal, would now consent to be merely what the
legislature had been under the Tudors. From the death of
Elizabeth to the eve of the civil war, the Puritans, who
predominated in the representative body, had been constantly, by
a dexterous use of the power of the purse, encroaching on the
province of the executive government. The gentlemen who, after
the Restoration, filled the Lower House, though they abhorred the
Puritan name, were well pleased to inherit the fruit of the
Puritan policy. They were indeed most willing to employ the power
which they possessed in the state for the purpose of making their
King mighty and honoured, both at home and abroad: but with the
power itself they were resolved not to part. The great English
revolution of the seventeenth century, that is to say, the
transfer of the supreme control of the executive administration
from the crown to the House of Commons, was, through the whole
long existence of this Parliament, proceeding noiselessly, but
rapidly and steadily. Charles, kept poor by his follies and
vices, wanted money. The Commons alone could legally grant him
money. They could not be prevented from putting their own price
on their grants. The price which they put on their grants was
this, that they should be allowed to interfere with every one of
the King's prerogatives, to wring from him his consent to laws
which he disliked, to break up cabinets, to dictate the course of
foreign policy, and even to direct the administration of war. To
the royal office, and the royal person, they loudly and sincerely
professed the strongest attachment. But to Clarendon they owed no
allegiance; and they fell on him as furiously as their
predecessors had fallen on Strafford. The minister's virtues and
vices alike contributed to his ruin. He was the ostensible head
of the administration, and was therefore held responsible even
for those acts which he had strongly, but vainly, opposed in
Council. He was regarded by the Puritans, and by all who pitied
them, as an implacable bigot, a second Laud, with much more than
Laud's understanding. He had on all occasions maintained that the
Act of indemnity ought to be strictly observed; and this part of
his conduct, though highly honourable to him, made him hateful to
all those Royalists who wished to repair their ruined fortunes by
suing the Roundheads for damages and mesne profits. The
Presbyterians of Scotland attributed to him the downfall of their
Church. The Papists of Ireland attributed to him the loss of
their lands. As father of the Duchess of York, he had an obvious
motive for wishing that there might be a barren Queen; and he was
therefore suspected of having purposely recommended one. The sale
of Dunkirk was justly imputed to him. For the war with Holland,
he was, with less justice, held accountable. His hot temper, his
arrogant deportment, the indelicate eagerness with which he
grasped at riches, the ostentation with which he squandered them,
his picture gallery, filled with masterpieces of Vandyke which
had once been the property of ruined Cavaliers, his palace, which
reared its long and stately front right opposite to the humbler
residence of our Kings, drew on him much deserved, and some
undeserved, censure. When the Dutch fleet was in the Thames, it
was against the Chancellor that the rage of the populace was
chiefly directed. His windows were broken; the trees of his
garden were cut down; and a gibbet was set up before his door.
But nowhere was he more detested than in the House of Commons. He
was unable to perceive that the time was fast approaching when
that House, if it continued to exist at all, must be supreme in
the state, when the management of that House would be the most
important department of politics, and when, without the help of
men possessing the ear of that House, it would be impossible to
carry on the government. He obstinately persisted in considering
the Parliament as a body in no respect differing from the
Parliament which had been sitting when, forty years before, he
first began to study law at the Temple. He did not wish to
deprive the legislature of those powers which were inherent in it
by the old constitution of the realm: but the new development of
those powers, though a development natural, inevitable, and to be
prevented only by utterly destroying the powers themselves,
disgusted and alarmed him. Nothing would have induced him to put
the great seal to a writ for raising shipmoney, or to give his
voice in Council for committing a member of Parliament to the
Tower, on account of words spoken in debate: but, when the
Commons began to inquire in what manner the money voted for the
war had been wasted, and to examine into the maladministration of
the navy, he flamed with indignation. Such inquiry, according to
him, was out of their province. He admitted that the House was a
most loyal assembly, that it had done good service to the crown,
and that its intentions were excellent. But, both in public and
in the closet, he, on every occasion, expressed his concern that
gentlemen so sincerely attached to monarchy should unadvisedly
encroach on the prerogative of the monarch. Widely as they
differed in spirit from the members of the Long Parliament, they
yet, he said, imitated that Parliament in meddling with matters
which lay beyond the sphere of the Estates of the realm, and
which were subject to the authority of the crown alone. The
country, he maintained, would never be well governed till the
knights of shires and the burgesses were content to be what their
predecessors had been in the days of Elizabeth. All the plans
which men more observant than himself of the signs of that time
proposed, for the purpose of maintaining a good understanding
between the Court and the Commons, he disdainfully rejected as
crude projects, inconsistent with the old polity of England.
Towards the young orators, who were rising to distinction and
authority in the Lower House, his deportment was ungracious: and
he succeeded in making them, with scarcely an exception, his
deadly enemies. Indeed one of his most serious faults was an
inordinate contempt for youth: and this contempt was the more
unjustifiable, because his own experience in English politics was
by no means proportioned to his age. For so great a part of his
life had been passed abroad that he knew less of that world in
which he found himself on his return than many who might have
been his sons.
For these reasons he was disliked by the Commons. For very
different reasons he was equally disliked by the Court. His
morals as well as his polities were those of an earlier
generation. Even when he was a young law student, living much
with men of wit and pleasure, his natural gravity and his
religious principles had to a great extent preserved him from the
contagion of fashionable debauchery; and he was by no means
likely, in advanced years and in declining health, to turn
libertine. On the vices of the young and gay he looked with an
aversion almost as bitter and contemptuous as that which he felt
for the theological errors of the sectaries. He missed no
opportunity of showing his scorn of the mimics, revellers, and
courtesans who crowded the palace; and the admonitions which he
addressed to the King himself were very sharp, and, what Charles
disliked still more, very long. Scarcely any voice was raised in
favour of a minister loaded with the double odium of faults which
roused the fury of the people, and of virtues which annoyed and
importuned the sovereign. Southampton was no more. Ormond
performed the duties of friendship manfully and faithfully, but
in vain. The Chancellor fell with a great ruin. The seal was
taken from him: the Commons impeached him: his head was not safe:
he fled from the country: an act was passed which doomed him to
perpetual exile; and those who had assailed and undermined him
began to struggle for the fragments of his power.
The sacrifice of Clarendon in some degree took off the edge of
the public appetite for revenge. Yet was the anger excited by the
profusion and negligence of the government, and by the
miscarriages of the late war, by no means extinguished. The
counsellors of Charles, with the fate of the Chancellor before
their eyes, were anxious for their own safety. They accordingly
advised their master to soothe the irritation which prevailed
both in the Parliament and throughout the country, and for that
end, to take a step which has no parallel in the history of the
House of Stuart, and which was worthy of the prudence and
magnanimity of Oliver.
We have now reached a point at which the history of the great
English revolution begins to be complicated with the history of
foreign politics. The power of Spain had, during many years, been
declining. She still, it is true held in Europe the Milanese and
the two Sicilies, Belgium, and Franche Comte. In America her
dominions still spread, on both sides of the equator, far beyond
the limits of the torrid zone. But this great body had been
smitten with palsy, and was not only incapable of giving
molestation to other states, but could not, without assistance,
repel aggression. France was now, beyond all doubt, the greatest
power in Europe. Her resources have, since those days, absolutely
increased, but have not increased so fast as the resources of
England. It must also be remembered that, a hundred and eighty
years ago, the empire of Russia, now a monarchy of the first
class, was as entirely out of the system of European politics as
Abyssinia or Siam, that the House of Brandenburg was then hardly
more powerful than the House of Saxony, and that the republic of
the United States had not then begun to exist. The weight of
France, therefore, though still very considerable, has relatively
diminished. Her territory was not in the days of Lewis the
Fourteenth quite so extensive as at present: but it was large,
compact, fertile, well placed both for attack and for defence,
situated in a happy climate, and inhabited by a brave, active,
and ingenious people. The state implicitly obeyed the direction
of a single mind. The great fiefs which, three hundred years
before, had been, in all but name, independent principalities,
had been annexed to the crown. Only a few old men could remember
the last meeting of the States General. The resistance which the
Huguenots, the nobles, and the parliaments had offered to the
kingly power, had been put down by the two great Cardinals who
had ruled the nation during forty years. The government was now a
despotism, but, at least in its dealings with the upper classes,
a mild and generous despotism, tempered by courteous manners and
chivalrous sentiments. The means at the disposal of the sovereign
were, for that age, truly formidable. His revenue, raised, it is
true, by a severe and unequal taxation which pressed heavily on
the cultivators of the soil, far exceeded that of any other
potentate. His army, excellently disciplined, and commanded by
the greatest generals then living, already consisted of more than
a hundred and twenty thousand men. Such an array of regular
troops had not been seen in Europe since the downfall of the
Roman empire. Of maritime powers France was not the first. But,
though she had rivals on the sea, she had not yet a superior.
Such was her strength during the last forty years of the
seventeenth century, that no enemy could singly withstand her,
and that two great coalitions, in which half Christendom was
united against her, failed of success.
The personal qualities of the French King added to the respect
inspired by the power and importance of his kingdom. No sovereign
has ever represented the majesty of a great state with more
dignity and grace. He was his own prime minister, and performed
the duties of a prime minister with an ability and industry which
could not be reasonably expected from one who had in infancy
succeeded to a crown, and who had been surrounded by flatterers
before he could speak. He had shown, in an eminent degree, two
talents invaluable to a prince, the talent of choosing his
servants well, and the talent of appropriating to himself the
chief part of the credit of their acts. In his dealings with
foreign powers he had some generosity, but no justice. To unhappy
allies who threw themselves at his feet, and had no hope but in
his compassion, he extended his protection with a romantic
disinterestedness, which seemed better suited to a knight errant
than to a statesman. But he broke through the most sacred ties of
public faith without scruple or shame, whenever they interfered
with his interest, or with what he called his glory. His perfidy
and violence, however, excited less enmity than the insolence
with which he constantly reminded his neighbours of his own
greatness and of their littleness. He did not at this time
profess the austere devotion which, at a later period, gave to
his court the aspect of a monastery. On the contrary, he was as
licentious, though by no means as frivolous and indolent, as his
brother of England. But he was a sincere Roman Catholic; and both
his conscience and his vanity impelled him to use his power for
the defence and propagation of the true faith, after the example
of his renowned predecessors, Clovis, Charlemagne, and Saint
Lewis.
Our ancestors naturally looked with serious alarm on the growing
power of France. This feeling, in itself perfectly reasonable,
was mingled with other feelings less praiseworthy. France was our
old enemy. It was against France that the most glorious battles
recorded in our annals had been fought. The conquest of France
had been twice effected by the Plantagenets. The loss of France
had been long remembered as a great national disaster. The title
of King of France was still borne by our sovereigns. The lilies
of France still appeared, mingled with our own lions, on the
shield of the House of Stuart. In the sixteenth century the dread
inspired by Spain had suspended the animosity of which France had
anciently been the object. But the dread inspired by Spain had
given place to contemptuous compassion; and France was again
regarded as our national foe. The sale of Dunkirk to France had
been the most generally unpopular act of the restored King.
Attachment to France had been prominent among the crimes imputed
by the Commons to CIarendon. Even in trifles the public feeling
showed itself. When a brawl took place in the streets of
Westminster between the retinues of the French and Spanish
embassies, the populace, though forcibly prevented from
interfering, had given unequivocal proofs that the old antipathy
to France was not extinct.
France and Spain were now engaged in a more serious contest. One
of the chief objects of the policy of Lewis throughout his life
was to extend his dominions towards the Rhine. For this end he
had engaged in war with Spain, and he was now in the full career
of conquest. The United Provinces saw with anxiety the progress
of his arms. That renowned federation had reached the height of
power, prosperity, and glory. The Batavian territory, conquered
from the waves and defended against them by human art, was in
extent little superior to the principality of Wales. But all that
narrow space was a busy and populous hive, in which new wealth
was every day created, and in which vast masses of old wealth
were hoarded. The aspect of Holland, the rich cultivation, the
innumerable canals, the ever whirling mills, the endless fleets
of barges, the quick succession of great towns, the ports
bristling with thousands of masts, the large and stately
mansions, the trim villas, the richly furnished apartments, the
picture galleries, the summer rouses, the tulip beds, produced on
English travellers in that age an effect similar to the effect
which the first sight of England now produces on a Norwegian or a
Canadian. The States General had been compelled to humble
themselves before Cromwell. But after the Restoration they had
taken their revenge, had waged war with success against Charles,
and had concluded peace on honourable terms. Rich, however, as
the Republic was, and highly considered in Europe, she was no
match for the power of Lewis. She apprehended, not without good
cause, that his kingdom might soon be extended to her frontiers;
and she might well dread the immediate vicinity of a monarch so
great, so ambitious, and so unscrupulous. Yet it was not easy to
devise any expedient which might avert the danger. The Dutch
alone could not turn the scale against France. On the side of the
Rhine no help was to be expected. Several German princes had been
gained by Lewis; and the Emperor himself was embarrassed by the
discontents of Hungary. England was separated from the United
Provinces by the recollection of cruel injuries recently
inflicted and endured; and her policy had, since the restoration,
been so devoid of wisdom and spirit, that it was scarcely
possible to expect from her any valuable assistance
But the fate of Clarendon and the growing ill humour of the
Parliament determined the advisers of Charles to adopt on a
sudden a policy which amazed and delighted the nation.
The English resident at Brussels, Sir William Temple, one of the
most expert diplomatists and most pleasing writers of that age,
had already represented to this court that it was both desirable
and practicable to enter into engagements with the States General
for the purpose of checking the progress of France. For a time
his suggestions had been slighted; but it was now thought
expedient to act on them. He was commissioned to negotiate with
the States General. He proceeded to the Hague, and soon came to
an understanding with John De Witt, then the chief minister of
Holland. Sweden, small as her resources were, had, forty years
before, been raised by the genius of Gustavus Adolphus to a high
rank among European powers, and had not yet descended to her
natural position. She was induced to join on this occasion with
England and the States. Thus was formed that coalition known as
the Triple Alliance. Lewis showed signs of vexation and
resentment, but did not think it politic to draw on himself the
hostility of such a confederacy in addition to that of Spain. He
consented, therefore, to relinquish a large part of the territory
which his armies had occupied. Peace was restored to Europe; and
the English government, lately an object of general contempt,
was, during a few months, regarded by foreign powers with respect
scarcely less than that which the Protector had inspired.
At home the Triple Alliance was popular in the highest degree. It
gratified alike national animosity and national pride. It put a
limit to the encroachments of a powerful and ambitious neighbour.
It bound the leading Protestant states together in close union.
Cavaliers and Roundheads rejoiced in common: but the joy of the
Roundhead was even greater than that of the Cavalier. For England
had now allied herself strictly with a country republican in
government and Presbyterian in religion, against a country ruled
by an arbitrary prince and attached to the Roman Catholic Church.
The House of Commons loudly applauded the treaty; and some
uncourtly grumblers described it as the only good thing that had
been done since the King came in.
The King, however, cared little for the approbation of his
Parliament or of his people. The Triple Alliance he regarded
merely as a temporary expedient for quieting discontents which
had seemed likely to become serious. The independence, the
safety, the dignity of the nation over which he presided were
nothing to him. He had begun to find constitutional restraints
galling. Already had been formed in the Parliament a strong
connection known by the name of the Country Party. That party
included all the public men who leaned towards Puritanism and
Republicanism, and many who, though attached to the Church and to
hereditary monarchy, had been driven into opposition by dread of
Popery, by dread of France, and by disgust at the extravagance,
dissoluteness, and faithlessness of the court. The power of this
band of politicians was constantly growing. Every year some of
those members who had been returned to Parliament during the
loyal excitement of 1661 had dropped off; and the vacant seats
had generally been filled by persons less tractable. Charles did
not think himself a King while an assembly of subjects could call
for his accounts before paying his debts, and could insist on
knowing which of his mistresses or boon companions had
intercepted the money destined for the equipping and manning of
the fleet. Though not very studious of fame, he was galled by the
taunts which were sometimes uttered in the discussions of the
Commons, and on one occasion attempted to restrain the freedom of
speech by disgraceful means. Sir John Coventry, a country
gentleman, had, in debate, sneered at the profligacy of the
court. In any former reign he would probably have been called
before the Privy Council and committed to the Tower. A different
course was now taken. A gang of bullies was secretly sent to slit
the nose of the offender. This ignoble revenge, instead of
quelling the spirit of opposition, raised such a tempest that the
King was compelled to submit to the cruel humiliation of passing
an act which attainted the instruments of his revenge, and which
took from him the power of pardoning them.
But, impatient as he was of constitutional restraints, how was he
to emancipate himself from them? He could make himself despotic
only by the help of a great standing army; and such an army was
not in existence. His revenues did indeed enable him to keep up
some regular troops: but those troops, though numerous enough to
excite great jealousy and apprehension in the House of Commons
and in the country, were scarcely numerous enough to protect
Whitehall and the Tower against a rising of the mob of London.
Such risings were, indeed to be dreaded; for it was calculated
that in the capital and its suburbs dwelt not less than twenty
thousand of Oliver's old soldiers.
Since the King was bent on emancipating himself from the control
of Parliament, and since, in such an enterprise, he could not
hope for effectual aid at home, it followed that he must look for
aid abroad. The power and wealth of the King of France might be
equal to the arduous task of establishing absolute monarchy in
England. Such an ally would undoubtedly expect substantial proofs
of gratitude for such a service. Charles must descend to the rank
of a great vassal, and must make peace and war according to the
directions of the government which protected him. His relation to
Lewis would closely resemble that in which the Rajah of Nagpore
and the King of Oude now stand to the British Government. Those
princes are bound to aid the East India Company in all
hostilities, defensive and offensive, and to have no diplomatic
relations but such as the East India Company shall sanction. The
Company in return guarantees them against insurrection. As long
as they faithfully discharge their obligations to the paramount
power, they are permitted to dispose of large revenues, to fill
their palaces with beautiful women, to besot themselves in the
company of their favourite revellers, and to oppress with
impunity any subject who may incur their displeasure.18 Such a
life would be insupportable to a man of high spirit and of
powerful understanding. But to Charles, sensual, indolent,
unequal to any strong intellectual exertion, and destitute alike
of all patriotism and of all sense of personal dignity, the
prospect had nothing unpleasing.
That the Duke of York should have concurred in the design of
degrading that crown which it was probable that he would himself
one day wear may seem more extraordinary. For his nature was
haughty and imperious; and, indeed, he continued to the very last
to show, by occasional starts and struggles, his impatience of
the French yoke. But he was almost as much debased by
superstition as his brother by indolence and vice. James was now
a Roman Catholic. Religious bigotry had become the dominant
sentiment of his narrow and stubborn mind, and had so mingled
itself with his love of rule, that the two passions could hardly
be distinguished from each other. It seemed highly improbable
that, without foreign aid, he would be able to obtain ascendency,
or even toleration, for his own faith: and he was in a temper to
see nothing humiliating in any step which might promote the
interests of the true Church.
A negotiation was opened which lasted during several months. The
chief agent between the English and French courts was the
beautiful, graceful, and intelligent Henrietta, Duchess of
Orleans, sister of Charles, sister in law of Lewis, and a
favourite with both. The King of England offered to declare
himself a Roman Catholic, to dissolve the Triple Alliance, and to
join with France against Holland, if France would engage to lend
him such military and pecuniary aid as might make him independent
of his parliament. Lewis at first affected to receive these
propositions coolly, and at length agreed to them with the air of
a man who is conferring a great favour: but in truth, the course
which he had resolved to take was one by which he might gain and
could not lose.
It seems certain that he never seriously thought of establishing
despotism and Popery in England by force of arms. He must have
been aware that such an enterprise would be in the highest degree
arduous and hazardous, that it would task to the utmost all the
energies of France during many years, and that it would be
altogether incompatible with more promising schemes of
aggrandisement, which were dear to his heart. He would indeed
willingly have acquired the merit and the glory of doing a great
service on reasonable terms to the Church of which he was a
member. But he was little disposed to imitate his ancestors who,
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, had led the flower of
French chivalry to die in Syria and Egypt: and he well knew that
a crusade against Protestantism in Great Britain would not be
less perilous than the expeditions in which the armies of Lewis
the Seventh and of Lewis the Ninth had perished. He had no motive
for wishing the Stuarts to be absolute. He did not regard the
English constitution with feelings at all resembling those which
have in later times induced princes to make war on the free
institutions of neighbouring nations. At present a great party
zealous for popular government has ramifications in every
civilised country. And important advantage gained anywhere by
that party is almost certain to be the signal for general
commotion. It is not wonderful that governments threatened by a
common danger should combine for the purpose of mutual insurance.
But in the seventeenth century no such danger existed. Between
the public mind of England and the public mind of France, there
was a great gulph. Our institutions and our factions were as
little understood at Paris as at Constantinople. It may be
doubted whether any one of the forty members of the French
Academy had an English volume in his library, or knew
Shakespeare, Jonson, or Spenser, even by name. A few Huguenots,
who had inherited the mutinous spirit of their ancestors, might
perhaps have a fellow feeling with their brethren in the faith,
the English Roundheads: but the Huguenots had ceased to be
formidable. The French, as a people, attached to the Church of
Rome, and proud of the greatness of their King and of their own
loyalty, looked on our struggles against Popery and arbitrary
power, not only without admiration or sympathy, but with strong
disapprobation and disgust. It would therefore be a great error
to ascribe the conduct of Lewis to apprehensions at all
resembling those which, in our age, induced the Holy Alliance to
interfere in the internal troubles of Naples and Spain.
Nevertheless, the propositions made by the court of Whitehall
were most welcome to him. He already meditated gigantic designs,
which were destined to keep Europe in constant fermentation
during more than forty years. He wished to humble the United
Provinces, and to annex Belgium, Franche Comte, and Loraine to
his dominions. Nor was this all. The King of Spain was a sickly
child. It was likely that he would die without issue. His eldest
sister was Queen of France. A day would almost certainly come,
and might come very soon, when the House of Bourbon might lay
claim to that vast empire on which the sun never set. The union
of two great monarchies under one head would doubtless be opposed
by a continental coalition. But for any continental coalition
France singlehanded was a match. England could turn the scale. On
the course which, in such a crisis, England might pursue, the
destinies of the world would depend; and it was notorious that
the English Parliament and nation were strongly attached to the
policy which had dictated the Triple Alliance. Nothing,
therefore, could be more gratifying to Lewis than to learn that
the princes of the House of Stuart needed his help, and were
willing to purchase that help by unbounded subserviency. He
determined to profit by the opportunity, and laid down for
himself a plan to which, without deviation, he adhered, till the
Revolution of 1688 disconcerted all his politics. He professed
himself desirous to promote the designs of the English court. He
promised large aid. He from time to time doled out such aid as
might serve to keep hope alive, and as he could without risk or
inconvenience spare. In this way, at an expense very much less
than that which he incurred in building and decorating Versailles
or Marli, he succeeded in making England, during nearly twenty
years, almost as insignificant a member of the political system
of Europe as the republic of San Marino.
His object was not to destroy our constitution, but to keep the
various elements of which it was composed in a perpetual state of
conflict, and to set irreconcilable enmity between those who had
the power of the purse and those who had the power of the sword.
With this view he bribed and stimulated both parties in turn,
pensioned at once the ministers of the crown and the chiefs of
the opposition, encouraged the court to withstand the seditious
encroachments of the Parliament, and conveyed to the Parliament
intimations of the arbitrary designs of the court.
One of the devices to which he resorted for the purpose of
obtaining an ascendency in the English counsels deserves especial
notice. Charles, though incapable of love in the highest sense of
the word, was the slave of any woman whose person excited his
desires, and whose airs and prattle amused his leisure. Indeed a
husband would be justly derided who should bear from a wife of
exalted rank and spotless virtue half the insolence which the
King of England bore from concubines who, while they owed
everything to his bounty, caressed his courtiers almost before
his face. He had patiently endured the termagant passions of
Barbara Palmer and the pert vivacity of Eleanor Gwynn. Lewis
thought that the most useful envoy who could be sent to London,
would be a handsome, licentious, and crafty Frenchwoman. Such a
woman was Louisa, a lady of the House of Querouaille, whom our
rude ancestors called Madam Carwell. She was soon triumphant over
all her rivals, was created Duchess of Portsmouth, was loaded
with wealth, and obtained a dominion which ended only with the
life of Charles.
The most important conditions of the alliance between the crowns
were digested into a secret treaty which was signed at Dover in
May, 1670, just ten years after the day on which Charles had
landed at that very port amidst the acclamations and joyful tears
of a too confiding people.
By this treaty Charles bound himself to make public profession of
the Roman Catholic religion, to join his arms to those of Lewis
for the purpose of destroying the power of the United Provinces,
and to employ the whole strength of England, by land and sea, in
support of the rights of the House of Bourbon to the vast
monarchy of Spain. Lewis, on the other hand, engaged to pay a
large subsidy, and promised that, if any insurrection should
break out in England, he would send an army at his own charge to
support his ally.
This compact was made with gloomy auspices. Six weeks after it
had been signed and sealed, the charming princess, whose
influence over her brother and brother in law had been so
pernicious to her country, was no more. Her death gave rise to
horrible suspicions which, for a moment, seemed likely to
interrupt the newly formed friendship between the Houses of
Stuart and Bourbon: but in a short time fresh assurances of
undiminished good will were exchanged between the confederates.
The Duke of York, too dull to apprehend danger, or too fanatical
to care about it, was impatient to see the article touching the
Roman Catholic religion carried into immediate execution: but
Lewis had the wisdom to perceive that, if this course were taken,
there would be such an explosion in England as would probably
frustrate those parts of the plan which he had most at heart. It
was therefore determined that Charles should still call himself a
Protestant, and should still, at high festivals, receive the
sacrament according to the ritual of the Church of England. His
more scrupulous brother ceased to appear in the royal chapel.
About this time died the Duchess of York, daughter of the
banished Earl of Clarendon. She had been, during some years, a
concealed Roman Catholic. She left two daughters, Mary and Anne,
afterwards successively Queens of Great Britain. They were bred
Protestants by the positive command of the King, who knew that it
would be vain for him to profess himself a member of the Church
of England, if children who seemed likely to inherit his throne
were, by his permission, brought up as members of the Church of
Rome.
The principal servants of the crown at this time were men whose
names have justly acquired an unenviable notoriety. We must take
heed, however, that we do not load their memory with infamy which
of right belongs to their master. For the treaty of Dover the
King himself is chiefly answerable. He held conferences on it
with the French agents: he wrote many letters concerning it with
his own hand: he was the person who first suggested the most
disgraceful articles which it contained; and he carefully
concealed some of those articles from the majority of his
Cabinet.
Few things in our history are more curious than the origin and
growth of the power now possessed by the Cabinet. From an early
period the Kings of England had been assisted by a Privy Council
to which the law assigned many important functions and duties.
During several centuries this body deliberated on the gravest and
most delicate affairs. But by degrees its character changed. It
became too large for despatch and secrecy. The rank of Privy
Councillor was often bestowed as an honorary distinction on
persons to whom nothing was confided, and whose opinion was never
asked. The sovereign, on the most important occasions, resorted
for advice to a small knot of leading ministers. The advantages
and disadvantages of this course were early pointed out by Bacon,
with his usual judgment and sagacity: but it was not till after
the Restoration that the interior council began to attract
general notice. During many years old fashioned politicians
continued to regard the Cabinet as an unconstitutional and
dangerous board. Nevertheless, it constantly became more and more
important. It at length drew to itself the chief executive power,
and has now been regarded, during several generations as an
essential part of our polity. Yet, strange to say, it still
continues to be altogether unknown to the law: the names of the
noblemen and gentlemen who compose it are never officially
announced to the public: no record is kept of its meetings and
resolutions; nor has its existence ever been recognised by any
Act of Parliament.
During some years the word Cabal was popularly used as synonymous
with Cabinet. But it happened by a whimsical coincidence that, in
1671, the Cabinet consisted of five persons the initial letters
of whose names made up the word Cabal; Clifford, Arlington,
Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale. These ministers were
therefore emphatically called the Cabal; and they soon made that
appellation so infamous that it has never since their time been
used except as a term of reproach.
Sir Thomas Clifford was a Commissioner of the Treasury, and had
greatly distinguished himself in the House of Commons. Of the
members of the Cabal he was the most respectable. For, with a
fiery and imperious temper, he had a strong though a lamentably
perverted sense of duty and honour.
Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington, then Secretary of State, had since
he came to manhood, resided principally on the Continent, and had
learned that cosmopolitan indifference to constitutions and
religions which is often observable in persons whose life has
been passed in vagrant diplomacy. If there was any form of
government which he liked it was that of France. If there was any
Church for which he felt a preference, it was that of Rome. He
had some talent for conversation, and some talent also for
transacting the ordinary business of office. He had learned,
during a life passed in travelling and negotiating, the art of
accommodating his language and deportment to the society in which
he found himself. His vivacity in the closet amused the King: his
gravity in debates and conferences imposed on the public; and he
had succeeded in attaching to himself, partly by services and
partly by hopes, a considerable number of personal retainers.
Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale were men in whom the
immorality which was epidemic among the politicians of that age
appeared in its most malignant type, but variously modified by
greet diversities of temper and understanding. Buckingham was a
sated man of pleasure, who had turned to ambition as to a
pastime. As he had tried to amuse himself with architecture and
music, with writing farces and with seeking for the philosopher's
stone, so he now tried to amuse himself with a secret negotiation
and a Dutch war. He had already, rather from fickleness and love
of novelty than from any deep design, been faithless to every
party. At one time he had ranked among the Cavaliers. At another
time warrants had been out against him for maintaining a
treasonable correspondence with the remains of the Republican
party in the city. He was now again a courtier, and was eager to
win the favour of the King by services from which the most
illustrious of those who had fought and suffered for the royal
house would have recoiled with horror.
Ashley, with a far stronger head, and with a far fiercer and more
earnest ambition, had been equally versatile. But Ashley's
versatility was the effect, not of levity, but of deliberate
selfishness. He had served and betrayed a succession of
governments. But he had timed all his treacheries so well that
through all revolutions, his fortunes had constantly been rising.
The multitude, struck with admiration by a prosperity which,
while everything else was constantly changing, remained
unchangeable, attributed to him a prescience almost miraculous,
and likened him to the Hebrew statesman of whom it is written
that his counsel was as if a man had inquired of the oracle of
God.
Lauderdale, loud and coarse both in mirth and anger, was,
perhaps, under the outward show of boisterous frankness, the most
dishonest man in the whole Cabal. He had made himself conspicuous
among the Scotch insurgents of 1638 by his zeal for the Covenant.
He was accused of having been deeply concerned in the sale of
Charles the First to the English Parliament, and was therefore,
in the estimation of good Cavaliers, a traitor, if possible, of a
worse description than those who had sate in the High Court of
Justice. He often talked with a noisy jocularity of the days when
he was a canter and a rebel. He was now the chief instrument
employed by the court in the work of forcing episcopacy on his
reluctant countrymen; nor did he in that cause shrink from the
unsparing use of the sword, the halter, and the boot. Yet those
who knew him knew that thirty years had made no change in his
real sentiments, that he still hated the memory of Charles the
First, and that he still preferred the Presbyterian form of
church government to every other.
Unscrupulous as Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale were, it was
not thought safe to intrust to them the King's intention of
declaring himself a Roman Catholic. A false treaty, in which the
article concerning religion was omitted, was shown to them. The
names and seals of Clifford and Arlington are affixed to the
genuine treaty. Both these statesmen had a partiality for the old
Church, a partiality which the brave and vehement Clifford in no
long time manfully avowed, but which the colder and meaner
Arlington concealed, till the near approach of death scared him
into sincerity. The three other cabinet ministers, however, were
not men to be kept easily in the dark, and probably suspected
more than was distinctly avowed to them. They were certainly
privy to all the political engagements contracted with France,
and were not ashamed to receive large gratifications from Lewis.
The first object of Charles was to obtain from the Commons
supplies which might be employed in executing the secret treaty.
The Cabal, holding power at a time when our government was in a
state of transition, united in itself two different kinds of
vices belonging to two different ages and to two different
systems. As those five evil counsellors were among the last
English statesmen who seriously thought of destroying the
Parliament, so they were the first English statesmen who
attempted extensively to corrupt it. We find in their policy at
once the latest trace of the Thorough of Strafford, and the
earliest trace of that methodical bribery which was afterwards
practiced by Walpole. They soon perceived, however, that, though
the House of Commons was chiefly composed of Cavaliers, and
though places and French gold had been lavished on the members,
there was no chance that even the least odious parts of the
scheme arranged at Dover would be supported by a majority. It was
necessary to have recourse to fraud. The King professed great
zeal for the principles of the Triple Alliance, and pretended
that, in order to hold the ambition of France in check, it would
be necessary to augment the fleet. The Commons fell into the
snare, and voted a grant of eight hundred thousand pounds. The
Parliament was instantly prorogued; and the court, thus
emancipated from control, proceeded to the execution of the great
design.
The financial difficulties however were serious. A war with
Holland could be carried on only at enormous cost. The ordinary
revenue was not more than sufficient to support the government in
time of peace. The eight hundred thousand pounds out of which the
Commons had just been tricked would not defray the naval and
military charge of a single year of hostilities. After the
terrible lesson given by the Long Parliament, even the Cabal did
not venture to recommend benevolences or shipmoney. In this
perplexity Ashley and Clifford proposed a flagitious breach of
public faith. The goldsmiths of London were then not only dealers
in the precious metals, but also bankers, and were in the habit
of advancing large sums of money to the government. In return for
these advances they received assignments on the revenue, and were
repaid with interest as the taxes came in. About thirteen hundred
thousand pounds had been in this way intrusted to the honour of
the state. On a sudden it was announced that it was not
convenient to pay the principal, and that the lenders must
content themselves with interest. They were consequently unable
to meet their own engagements. The Exchange was in an uproar:
several great mercantile houses broke; and dismay and distress
spread through all society. Meanwhile rapid strides were made
towards despotism. Proclamations, dispensing with Acts of
Parliament, or enjoining what only Parliament could lawfully
enjoin, appeared in rapid succession. Of these edicts the most
important was the Declaration of Indulgence. By this instrument
the penal laws against Roman Catholics were set aside; and, that
the real object of the measure might not be perceived, the laws
against Protestant Nonconformists were also suspended.
A few days after the appearance of the Declaration of Indulgence,
war was proclaimed against the United Provinces. By sea the Dutch
maintained the struggle with honour; but on land they were at
first borne down by irresistible force. A great French army
passed the Rhine. Fortress after fortress opened its gates. Three
of the seven provinces of the federation were occupied by the
invaders. The fires of the hostile camp were seen from the top of
the Stadthouse of Amsterdam. The Republic, thus fiercely assailed
from without, was torn at the same time by internal dissensions.
The government was in the hands of a close oligarchy of powerful
burghers. There were numerous selfelected Town Councils, each of
which exercised within its own sphere, many of the rights of
sovereignty. These councils sent delegates to the Provincial
States, and the Provincial States again sent delegates to the
States General. A hereditary first magistrate was no essential
part of this polity. Nevertheless one family, singularly fertile
of great men, had gradually obtained a large and somewhat
indefinite authority. William, first of the name, Prince of
Orange Nassau, and Stadtholder of Holland, had headed the
memorable insurrection against Spain. His son Maurice had been
Captain General and first minister of the States, had, by eminent
abilities and public services, and by some treacherous and cruel
actions, raised himself to almost kingly power, and had
bequeathed a great part of that power to his family. The
influence of the Stadtholders was an object of extreme jealousy
to the municipal oligarchy. But the army, and that great body of
citizens which was excluded from all share in the government,
looked on the Burgomasters and Deputies with a dislike resembling
the dislike with which the legions and the common people of Rome
regarded the Senate, and were as zealous for the House of Orange
as the legions and the common people of Rome for the House of
Caesar. The Stadtholder commanded the forces of the commonwealth,
disposed of all military commands, had a large share of the civil
patronage, and was surrounded by pomp almost regal.
Prince William the Second had been strongly opposed by the
oligarchical party. His life had terminated in the year 1650,
amidst great civil troubles. He died childless: the adherents of
his house were left for a short time without a head; and the
powers which he had exercised were divided among the Town
Councils, the Provincial States, and the States General.
But, a few days after William's death, his widow, Mary, daughter
of Charles the first, King of Great Britain, gave birth to a son,
destined to raise the glory and authority of the House of Nassau
to the highest point, to save the United Provinces from slavery,
to curb the power of France, and to establish the English
constitution on a lasting foundation.
This Prince, named William Henry, was from his birth an object of
serious apprehension to the party now supreme in Holland, and of
loyal attachment to the old friends of his line. He enjoyed high
consideration as the possessor of a splendid fortune, as the
chief of one of the most illustrious houses in Europe, as a
Magnate of the German empire, as a prince of the blood royal of
England, and, above all, as the descendant of the founders of
Batavian liberty. But the high office which had once been
considered as hereditary in his family remained in abeyance; and
the intention of the aristocratical party was that there should
never be another Stadtholder. The want of a first magistrate was,
to a great extent, supplied by the Grand Pensionary of the
Province of Holland, John De Witt, whose abilities, firmness, and
integrity had raised him to unrivalled authority in the councils
of the municipal oligarchy.
The French invasion produced a complete change. The suffering and
terrified people raged fiercely against the government. In their
madness they attacked the bravest captains and the ablest
statesmen of the distressed commonwealth. De Ruyter was insulted
by the rabble. De Witt was torn in pieces before the gate of the
palace of the States General at the Hague. The Prince of Orange,
who had no share in the guilt of the murder, but who, on this
occasion, as on another lamentable occasion twenty years later,
extended to crimes perpetrated in his cause an indulgence which
has left a stain on his glory, became chief of the government
without a rival. Young as he was, his ardent and unconquerable
spirit, though disguised by a cold and sullen manner, soon roused
the courage of his dismayed countrymen. It was in vain that both
his uncle and the French King attempted by splendid offers to
seduce him from the cause of the Republic. To the States General
he spoke a high and inspiriting language. He even ventured to
suggest a scheme which has an aspect of antique heroism, and
which, if it had been accomplished, would have been the noblest
subject for epic song that is to be found in the whole compass of
modern history. He told the deputies that, even if their natal
soil and the marvels with which human industry had covered it
were buried under the ocean, all was not lost. The Hollanders
might survive Holland. Liberty and pure religion, driven by
tyrants and bigots from Europe, might take refuge in the farthest
isles of Asia. The shipping in the ports of the republic would
suffice to carry two hundred thousand emigrants to the Indian
Archipelago. There the Dutch commonwealth might commence a new
and more glorious existence, and might rear, under the Southern
Cross, amidst the sugar canes and nutmeg trees, the Exchange of a
wealthier Amsterdam, and the schools of a more learned Leyden.
The national spirit swelled and rose high. The terms offered by
the allies were firmly rejected. The dykes were opened. The whole
country was turned into one great lake from which the cities,
with their ramparts and steeples, rose like islands. The invaders
were forced to save themselves from destruction by a precipitate
retreat. Lewis, who, though he sometimes thought it necessary to
appear at the head of his troops, greatly preferred a palace to a
camp, had already returned to enjoy the adulation of poets and
the smiles of ladies in the newly planted alleys of Versailles.
And now the tide turned fast. The event of the maritime war had
been doubtful; by land the United Provinces had obtained a
respite; and a respite, though short, was of infinite importance.
Alarmed by the vast designs of Lewis, both the branches of the
great House of Austria sprang to arms. Spain and Holland, divided
by the memory of ancient wrongs and humiliations, were reconciled
by the nearness of the common danger. From every part of Germany
troops poured towards the Rhine. The English government had
already expended all the funds which had been obtained by
pillaging the public creditor. No loan could be expected from the
City. An attempt to raise taxes by the royal authority would have
at once produced a rebellion; and Lewis, who had now to maintain
a contest against half Europe, was in no condition to furnish the
means of coercing the people of England. It was necessary to
convoke the Parliament.
In the spring of 1673, therefore, the Houses reassembled after a
recess of near two years. Clifford, now a peer and Lord
Treasurer, and Ashley, now Earl of Shaftesbury and Lord
Chancellor, were the persons on whom the King principally relied
as Parliamentary managers. The Country Party instantly began to
attack the policy of the Cabal. The attack was made, not in the
way of storm. but by slow and scientific approaches. The Commons
at first held out hopes that they would give support to the
king's foreign policy, but insisted that he should purchase that
support by abandoning his whole system of domestic policy. Their
chief object was to obtain the revocation of the Declaration of
Indulgence. Of all the many unpopular steps taken by the
government the most unpopular was the publishing of this
Declaration. The most opposite sentiments had been shocked by an
act so liberal, done in a manner so despotic. All the enemies of
religious freedom, and all the friends of civil freedom, found
themselves on the same side; and these two classes made up
nineteen twentieths of the nation. The zealous churchman
exclaimed against the favour which had been shown both to the
Papist and to the Puritan. The Puritan, though he might rejoice
in the suspension of the persecution by which he had been
harassed, felt little gratitude for a toleration which he was to
share with Antichrist. And all Englishmen who valued liberty and
law, saw with uneasiness the deep inroad which the prerogative
had made into the province of the legislature.
It must in candour be admitted that the constitutional question
was then not quite free from obscurity. Our ancient Kings had
undoubtedly claimed and exercised the right of suspending the
operation of penal laws. The tribunals had recognised that right.
Parliaments had suffered it to pass unchallenged. That some such
right was inherent in the crown, few even of the Country Party
ventured, in the face of precedent and authority, to deny. Yet it
was clear that, if this prerogative were without limit, the
English government could scarcely be distinguished from a pure
despotism. That there was a limit was fully admitted by the King
and his ministers. Whether the Declaration of Indulgence lay
within or without the limit was the question; and neither party
could succeed in tracing any line which would bear examination.
Some opponents of the government complained that the Declaration
suspended not less than forty statutes. But why not forty as well
as one? There was an orator who gave it as his opinion that the
King might constitutionally dispense with bad laws, but not with
good laws. The absurdity of such a distinction it is needless to
expose. The doctrine which seems to have been generally received
in the House of Commons was, that the dispensing power was
confined to secular matters, and did not extend to laws enacted
for the security of the established religion. Yet, as the King
was supreme head of the Church, it should seem that, if he
possessed the dispensing power at all, he might well possess that
power where the Church was concerned. When the courtiers on the
other side attempted to point out the bounds of this prerogative,
they were not more successful than the opposition had been.
The truth is that the dispensing power was a great anomaly in
politics. It was utterly inconsistent in theory with the
principles of mixed government: but it had grown up in times when
people troubled themselves little about theories.19 It had not
been very grossly abused in practice. It had therefore been
tolerated, and had gradually acquired a kind of prescription. At
length it was employed, after a long interval, in an enlightened
age, and at an important conjuncture, to an extent never before
known, and for a purpose generally abhorred. It was instantly
subjected to a severe scrutiny. Men did not, indeed, at first,
venture to pronounce it altogether unconstitutional. But they
began to perceive that it was at direct variance with the spirit
of the constitution, and would, if left unchecked, turn the
English government from a limited into an absolute monarchy.
Under the influence of such apprehensions, the Commons denied the
King's right to dispense, not indeed with all penal statutes, but
with penal statutes in matters ecclesiastical, and gave him
plainly to understand that, unless he renounced that right, they
would grant no supply for the Dutch war. He, for a moment, showed
some inclination to put everything to hazard; but he was strongly
advised by Lewis to submit to necessity, and to wait for better
times, when the French armies, now employed in an arduous
struggle on the Continent, might be available for the purpose of
suppressing discontent in England. In the Cabal itself the signs
of disunion and treachery began to appear. Shaftesbury, with his
proverbial sagacity, saw that a violent reaction was at hand, and
that all things were tending towards a crisis resembling that of
1640. He was determined that such a crisis should not find him in
the situation of Strafford. He therefore turned suddenly round,
and acknowledged, in the House of Lords, that the Declaration was
illegal. The King, thus deserted by his ally and by his
Chancellor, yielded, cancelled the Declaration, and solemnly
promised that it should never be drawn into precedent.
Even this concession was insufficient. The Commons, not content
with having forced their sovereign to annul the Indulgence, next
extorted his unwilling assent to a celebrated law, which
continued in force down to the reign of George the Fourth. This
law, known as the Test Act, provided that all persons holding any
office, civil or military, should take the oath of supremacy,
should subscribe a declaration against transubstantiation, and
should publicly receive the sacrament according to the rites of
the Church of England. The preamble expressed hostility only to
the Papists: but the enacting clauses were scarcely more
unfavourable to the Papists than to the rigid Puritans. The
Puritans, however, terrified at the evident leaning of the court
towards Popery, and encouraged by some churchmen to hope that, as
soon as the Roman Catholics should have been effectually
disarmed, relief would be extended to Protestant Nonconformists,
made little opposition; nor could the King, who was in extreme
want of money, venture to withhold his sanction. The act was
passed; and the Duke of York was consequently under the necessity
of resigning the great place of Lord High Admiral.
Hitherto the Commons had not declared against the Dutch war. But,
when the King had, in return for money cautiously doled out,
relinquished his whole plan of domestic policy, they fell
impetuously on his foreign policy. They requested him to dismiss
Buckingham and Lauderdale from his councils forever, and
appointed a committee to consider the propriety of impeaching
Arlington. In a short time the Cabal was no more. Clifford, who,
alone of the five, had any claim to be regarded as an honest man,
refused to take the new test, laid down his white staff, and
retired to his country seat. Arlington quitted the post of
Secretary of State for a quiet and dignified employment in the
Royal household. Shaftesbury and Buckingham made their peace with
the opposition, and appeared at the head of the stormy democracy
of the city. Lauderdale, however, still continued to be minister
for Scotch affairs, with which the English Parliament could not
interfere.
And now the Commons urged the King to make peace with Holland,
and expressly declared that no more supplies should be granted
for the war, unless it should appear that the enemy obstinately
refused to consent to reasonable terms. Charles found it
necessary to postpone to a more convenient season all thought of
executing the treaty of Dover, and to cajole the nation by
pretending to return to the policy of the Triple Alliance.
Temple, who, during the ascendency of the Cabal, had lived in
seclusion among his books and flower beds, was called forth from
his hermitage. By his instrumentality a separate peace was
concluded with the United Provinces; and he again became
ambassador at the Hague, where his presence was regarded as a
sure pledge for the sincerity of his court.
The chief direction of affairs was now intrusted to Sir Thomas
Osborne, a Yorkshire baronet, who had, in the House of Commons,
shown eminent talents for business and debate. Osborne became
Lord Treasurer, and was soon created Earl of Danby. He was not a
man whose character, if tried by any high standard of morality,
would appear to merit approbation. He was greedy of wealth and
honours, corrupt himself, and a corrupter of others. The Cabal
had bequeathed to him the art of bribing Parliaments, an art
still rude, and giving little promise of the rare perfection to
which it was brought in the following century. He improved
greatly on the plan of the first inventors. They had merely
purchased orators: but every man who had a vote, might sell
himself to Danby. Yet the new minister must not be confounded
with the negotiators of Dover. He was not without the feelings of
an Englishman and a Protestant; nor did he, in his solicitude for
his own interests, ever wholly forget the interests of his
country and of his religion. He was desirous, indeed, to exalt
the prerogative: but the means by which he proposed to exalt it
were widely different from those which had been contemplated by
Arlington and Clifford. The thought of establishing arbitrary
power, by calling in the aid of foreign arms, and by reducing the
kingdom to the rank of a dependent principality, never entered
into his mind. His plan was to rally round the monarchy those
classes which had been the firm allies of the monarchy during the
troubles of the preceding generation, and which had been
disgusted by the recent crimes and errors of the court. With the
help of the old Cavalier interest, of the nobles, of the country
gentlemen, of the clergy, and of the Universities, it might, he
conceived, be possible to make Charles, not indeed an absolute
sovereign, but a sovereign scarcely less powerful than Elizabeth
had been.
Prompted by these feelings, Danby formed the design of securing
to the Cavalier party the exclusive possession of all political
power both executive and legislative. In the year 1675,
accordingly, a bill was offered to the Lords which provided that
no person should hold any office, or should sit in either House
of Parliament, without first declaring on oath that he considered
resistance to the kingly power as in all cases criminal, and that
he would never endeavour to alter the government either in Church
or State. During several weeks the debates, divisions, and
protests caused by this proposition kept the country in a state
of excitement. The opposition in the House of Lords, headed by
two members of the Cabal who were desirous to make their peace
with the nation, Buckingham and Shaftesbury, was beyond all
precedent vehement and pertinacious, and at length proved
successful. The bill was not indeed rejected, but was retarded,
mutilated, and at length suffered to drop.
So arbitrary and so exclusive was Danby's scheme of domestic
policy. His opinions touching foreign policy did him more honour.
They were in truth directly opposed to those of the Cabal and
differed little from those of the Country Party. He bitterly
lamented the degraded situation to which England was reduced, and
declared, with more energy than politeness, that his dearest wish
was to cudgel the French into a proper respect for her. So little
did he disguise his feelings that, at a great banquet where the
most illustrious dignitaries of the State and of the Church were
assembled, he not very decorously filled his glass to the
confusion of all who were against a war with France. He would
indeed most gladly have seen his country united with the powers
which were then combined against Lewis, and was for that end bent
on placing Temple, the author of the Triple Alliance, at the head
of the department which directed foreign affairs. But the power
of the prime minister was limited. In his most confidential
letters he complained that the infatuation of his master
prevented England from taking her proper place among European
nations. Charles was insatiably greedy of French gold: he had by
no means relinquished the hope that he might, at some future day,
be able to establish absolute monarchy by the help of the French
arms; and for both reasons he wished to maintain a good
understanding with the court of Versailles.
Thus the sovereign leaned towards one system of foreign politics,
and the minister towards a system diametrically opposite. Neither
the sovereign nor the minister, indeed, was of a temper to pursue
any object with undeviating constancy. Each occasionally yielded
to the importunity of the other; and their jarring inclinations
and mutual concessions gave to the whole administration a
strangely capricious character. Charles sometimes, from levity
and indolence, suffered Danby to take steps which Lewis resented
as mortal injuries. Danby, on the other hand, rather than
relinquish his great place, sometimes stooped to compliances
which caused him bitter pain and shame. The King was brought to
consent to a marriage between the Lady Mary, eldest daughter and
presumptive heiress of the Duke of York. and William of Orange,
the deadly enemy of France and the hereditary champion of the
Reformation. Nay, the brave Earl of Ossory, son of Ormond, was
sent to assist the Dutch with some British troops, who, on the
most bloody day of the whole war, signally vindicated the
national reputation for stubborn courage. The Treasurer, on the
other hand, was induced not only to connive at some scandalous
pecuniary transactions which took place between his master and
the court of Versailles, but to become, unwillingly indeed and
ungraciously, an agent in those transactions.
Meanwhile the Country Party was driven by two strong feelings in
two opposite directions. The popular leaders were afraid of the
greatness of Lewis, who was not only making head against the
whole strength of the continental alliance, but was even gaining
ground. Yet they were afraid to entrust their own King with the
means of curbing France, lest those means should he used to
destroy the liberties of England. The conflict between these
apprehensions, both of which were perfectly legitimate, made the
policy of the Opposition seem as eccentric and fickle as that of
the Court. The Commons called for a war with France, till the
King, pressed by Danby to comply with their wish, seemed disposed
to yield, and began to raise an army. But, as soon as they saw
that the recruiting had commenced, their dread of Lewis gave
place to a nearer dread. They began to fear that the new levies
might be employed on a service in which Charles took much more
interest than in the defence of Flanders. They therefore refused
supplies, and clamoured for disbanding as loudly as they had just
before clamoured for arming. Those historians who have severely
reprehended this inconsistency do not appear to have made
sufficient allowance for the embarrassing situation of subjects
who have reason to believe that their prince is conspiring with a
foreign and hostile power against their liberties. To refuse him
military resources is to leave the state defenceless. Yet to give
him military resources may be only to arm him against the state.
In such circumstances vacillation cannot be considered as a proof
of dishonesty or even of weakness.
These jealousies were studiously fomented by the French King. He
had long kept England passive by promising to support the throne
against the Parliament. He now, alarmed at finding that the
patriotic counsels of Danby seemed likely to prevail in the
closet, began to inflame the Parliament against the throne.
Between Lewis and the Country Party there was one thing, and one
only in common, profound distrust of Charles. Could the Country
Party have been certain that their sovereign meant only to make
war on France, they would have been eager to support him. Could
Lewis have been certain that the new levies were intended only to
make war on the constitution of England, he would have made no
attempt to stop them. But the unsteadiness and faithlessness of
Charles were such that the French Government and the English
opposition, agreeing in nothing else, agreed in disbelieving his
protestations, and were equally desirous to keep him poor and
without an army. Communications were opened between Barillon, the
Ambassador of Lewis, and those English politicians who had always
professed, and who indeed sincerely felt, the greatest dread and
dislike of the French ascendency. The most upright of the Country
Party, William Lord Russell, son of the Earl of Bedford, did not
scruple to concert with a foreign mission schemes for
embarrassing his own sovereign. This was the whole extent of
Russell's offence. His principles and his fortune alike raised
him above all temptations of a sordid kind: but there is too much
reason to believe that some of his associates were less
scrupulous. It would be unjust to impute to them the extreme
wickedness of taking bribes to injure their country. On the
contrary, they meant to serve her: but it is impossible to deny
that they were mean and indelicate enough to let a foreign prince
pay them for serving her. Among those who cannot be acquitted of
this degrading charge was one man who is popularly considered as
the personification of public spirit, and who, in spite of some
great moral and intellectual faults, has a just claim to be
called a hero, a philosopher, and a patriot. It is impossible to
see without pain such a name in the list of the pensioners of
France. Yet it is some consolation to reflect that, in our time,
a public man would be thought lost to all sense of duty and of
shame, who should not spurn from him a temptation which conquered
the virtue and the pride of Algernon Sydney.
The effect of these intrigues was that England, though she
occasionally took a menacing attitude, remained inactive till the
continental war, having lasted near seven years, was terminated
by the treaty of Nimeguen. The United Provinces, which in 1672
had seemed to be on the verge of utter ruin, obtained honourable
and advantageous terms. This narrow escape was generally ascribed
to the ability and courage of the young Stadtholder. His fame was
great throughout Europe, and especially among the English, who
regarded him as one of their own princes, and rejoiced to see him
the husband of their future Queen. France retained many important
towns in the Low Countries and the great province of Franche
Comte. Almost the whole loss was borne by the decaying monarchy
of Spain.
A few months after the termination of hostilities on the
Continent came a great crisis in English politics. Towards such a
crisis things had been tending during eighteen years. The whole
stock of popularity, great as it was, with which the King had
commenced his administration, had long been expended. To loyal
enthusiasm had succeeded profound disaffection. The public mind
had now measured back again the space over which it had passed
between 1640 and 1660, and was once more in the state in which it
had been when the Long Parliament met.
The prevailing discontent was compounded of many feelings. One of
these was wounded national pride. That generation had seen
England, during a few years, allied on equal terms with France,
victorious over Holland and Spain, the mistress of the sea, the
terror of Rome, the head of the Protestant interest. Her
resources had not diminished; and it might have been expected
that she would have been at least as highly considered in Europe
under a legitimate King, strong in the affection and willing
obedience of his subjects, as she had been under an usurper whose
utmost vigilance and energy were required to keep down a mutinous
people. Yet she had, in consequence of the imbecility and
meanness of her rulers, sunk so low that any German or Italian
principality which brought five thousand men into the field was a
more important member of the commonwealth of nations.
With the sense of national humiliation was mingled anxiety for
civil liberty. Rumours, indistinct indeed, but perhaps the more
alarming by reason of their indistinctness, imputed to the court
a deliberate design against all the constitutional rights of
Englishmen. It had even been whispered that this design was to be
carried into effect by the intervention of foreign arms. The
thought of Such intervention made the blood, even of the
Cavaliers, boil in their veins. Some who had always professed the
doctrine of non-resistance in its full extent were now heard to
mutter that there was one limitation to that doctrine. If a
foreign force were brought over to coerce the nation, they would
not answer for their own patience.
But neither national pride nor anxiety for public liberty had so
great an influence on the popular mind as hatred of the Roman
Catholic religion. That hatred had become one of the ruling
passions of the community, and was as strong in the ignorant and
profane as in those who were Protestants from conviction. The
cruelties of Mary's reign, cruelties which even in the most
accurate and sober narrative excite just detestation, and which
were neither accurately nor soberly related in the popular
martyrologies, the conspiracies against Elizabeth, and above all
the Gunpowder Plot, had left in the minds of the vulgar a deep
and bitter feeling which was kept up by annual commemorations,
prayers, bonfires, and processions. It should be added that those
classes which were peculiarly distinguished by attachment to the
throne, the clergy and the landed gentry, had peculiar reasons
for regarding the Church of Rome with aversion. The clergy
trembled for their benefices; the landed gentry for their abbeys
and great tithes. While the memory of the reign of the Saints was
still recent, hatred of Popery had in some degree given place to
hatred of Puritanism; but, during the eighteen years which had
elapsed since the Restoration, the hatred of Puritanism had
abated, and the hatred of Popery had increased. The stipulations
of the treaty of Dover were accurately known to very few; but
some hints had got abroad. The general impression was that a
great blow was about to be aimed at the Protestant religion. The
King was suspected by many of a leaning towards Rome. His brother
and heir presumptive was known to be a bigoted Roman Catholic.
The first Duchess of York had died a Roman Catholic. James had
then, in defiance of the remonstrances of the House of Commons,
taken to wife the Princess Mary of Modena, another Roman
Catholic. If there should be sons by this marriage, there was
reason to fear that they might be bred Roman Catholics, and that
a long succession of princes, hostile to the established faith,
might sit on the English throne. The constitution had recently
been violated for the purpose of protecting the Roman Catholics
from the penal laws. The ally by whom the policy of England had,
during many years, been chiefly governed, was not only a Roman
Catholic, but a persecutor of the reformed Churches. Under such
circumstances it is not strange that the common people should
have been inclined to apprehend a return of the times of her whom
they called Bloody Mary.
Thus the nation was in such a temper that the smallest spark
might raise a flame. At this conjuncture fire was set in two
places at once to the vast mass of combustible matter; and in a
moment the whole was in a blaze.
The French court, which knew Danby to be its mortal enemy,
artfully contrived to ruin him by making him pass for its friend.
Lewis, by the instrumentality of Ralph Montague, a faithless and
shameless man who had resided in France as minister from England,
laid before the House of Commons proofs that the Treasurer had
been concerned in an application made by the Court of Whitehall
to the Court of Versailles for a sum of money. This discovery
produced its natural effect. The Treasurer was, in truth, exposed
to the vengeance of Parliament, not on account of his
delinquencies, but on account of his merits; not because he had
been an accomplice in a criminal transaction, but because he had
been a most unwilling and unserviceable accomplice. But of the
circumstances, which have, in the judgment of posterity, greatly
extenuated his fault, his contemporaries were ignorant. In their
view he was the broker who had sold England to France. It seemed
clear that his greatness was at an end, and doubtful whether his
head could be saved.
Yet was the ferment excited by this discovery slight, when
compared with the commotion which arose when it was noised abroad
that a great Popish plot had been detected. One Titus Oates, a
clergyman of the Church of England, had, by his disorderly life
and heterodox doctrine, drawn on himself the censure of his
spiritual superiors, had been compelled to quit his benefice, and
had ever since led an infamous and vagrant life. He had once
professed himself a Roman Catholic, and had passed some time on
the Continent in English colleges of the order of Jesus. In those
seminaries he had heard much wild talk about the best means of
bringing England back to the true Church. From hints thus
furnished he constructed a hideous romance, resembling rather the
dream of a sick man than any transaction which ever took place in
the real world. The Pope, he said, had entrusted the government
of England to the Jesuits. The Jesuits had, by commissions under
the seal of their society, appointed Roman Catholic clergymen,
noblemen, and gentlemen, to all the highest offices in Church and
State. The Papists had burned down London once. They had tried to
burn it down again. They were at that moment planning a scheme
for setting fire to all the shipping in the Thames. They were to
rise at a signal and massacre all their Protestant neighbours. A
French army was at the same time to land in Ireland. All the
leading statesmen and divines of England were to be murdered.
Three or four schemes had been formed for assassinating the King.
He was to be stabbed. He was to be poisoned in his medicine He
was to be shot with silver bullets. The public mind was so sore
and excitable that these lies readily found credit with the
vulgar; and two events which speedily took place led even some
reflecting men to suspect that the tale, though evidently
distorted and exaggerated, might have some foundation.
Edward Coleman, a very busy, and not very honest, Roman Catholic
intriguer, had been among the persons accused. Search was made
for his papers. It was found that he had just destroyed the
greater part of them. But a few which had escaped contained some
passages such as, to minds strongly prepossessed, might seem to
confirm the evidence of Oates. Those passages indeed, when
candidly construed, appear to express little more than the hopes
which the posture of affairs, the predilections of Charles, the
still stronger predilections of James, and the relations existing
between the French and English courts, might naturally excite in
the mind of a Roman Catholic strongly attached to the interests
of his Church. But the country was not then inclined to construe
the letters of Papists candidly; and it was urged, with some show
of reason, that, if papers which had been passed over as
unimportant were filled with matter so suspicious, some great
mystery of iniquity must have been contained in those documents
which had been carefully committed to the flames.
A few days later it was known that Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey, an
eminent justice of the peace who had taken the depositions of
Oates against Coleman, had disappeared. Search was made; and
Godfrey's corpse was found in a field near London. It was clear
that he had died by violence. It was equally clear that he had
not been set upon by robbers. His fate is to this day a secret.
Some think that he perished by his own hand; some, that he was
slain by a private enemy. The most improbable supposition is that
he was murdered by the party hostile to the court, in order to
give colour to the story of the plot. The most probable
supposition seems, on the whole, to be that some hotheaded Roman
Catholic, driven to frenzy by the lies of Oates and by the
insults of the multitude, and not nicely distinguishing between
the perjured accuser and the innocent magistrate, had taken a
revenge of which the history of persecuted sects furnishes but
too many examples. If this were so, the assassin must have
afterwards bitterly execrated his own wickedness and folly. The
capital and the whole nation went mad with hatred and fear. The
penal laws, which had begun to lose something of their edge, were
sharpened anew. Everywhere justices were busied in searching
houses and seizing papers. All the gaols were filled with
Papists. London had the aspect of a city in a state of siege. The
trainbands were under arms all night. Preparations were made for
barricading the great thoroughfares. Patrols marched up and down
the streets. Cannon were planted round Whitehall. No citizen
thought himself safe unless he carried under his coat a small
flail loaded with lead to brain the Popish assassins. The corpse
of the murdered magistrate was exhibited during several days to
the gaze of great multitudes, and was then committed to the grave
with strange and terrible ceremonies, which indicated rather fear
and the thirst of vengeance shall sorrow or religious hope. The
Houses insisted that a guard should be placed in the vaults over
which they sate, in order to secure them against a second
Gunpowder Plot. All their proceedings were of a piece with this
demand. Ever since the reign of Elizabeth the oath of supremacy
had been exacted from members of the House of Commons. Some Roman
Catholics, however, had contrived so to interpret this oath that
they could take it without scruple. A more stringent test was now
added: every member of Parliament was required to make the
Declaration against Transubstantiation; and thus the Roman
Catholic Lords were for the first time excluded from their seats.
Strong resolutions were adopted against the Queen. The Commons
threw one of the Secretaries of State into prison for having
countersigned commissions directed to gentlemen who were not good
Protestants. They impeached the Lord Treasurer of high treason.
Nay, they so far forgot the doctrine which, while the memory of
the civil war was still recent, they had loudly professed, that
they even attempted to wrest the command of the militia out of
the King's hands. To such a temper had eighteen years of
misgovernment brought the most loyal Parliament that had ever met
in England.
Yet it may seem strange that, even in that extremity, the King
should have ventured to appeal to the people; for the people were
more excited than their representatives. The Lower House,
discontented as it was, contained a larger number of Cavaliers
than were likely to find seats again. But it was thought that a
dissolution would put a stop to the prosecution of the Lord
Treasurer, a prosecution which might probably bring to light all
the guilty mysteries of the French alliance, and might thus cause
extreme personal annoyance and embarrassment to Charles.
Accord |
