William and Mary proclaimed in London
Rejoicings throughout England; Rejoicings in Holland
Discontent of the Clergy and of the Army
Reaction of Public Feeling
Temper of the Tories
Temper of the Whigs
Ministerial Arrangements
William his own Minister for Foreign Affairs
Danby
Halifax
Nottingham Shrewsbury The Board of Admiralty; the Board of Treasury
The Great Seal
The Judges
The Household
Subordinate Appointments
The Convention turned into a Parliament
The Members of the two Houses required to take the Oaths Questions relating to the Revenue
Abolition of the Hearth Money
Repayment of the Expenses of the United Provinces
Mutiny at Ipswich
The first Mutiny Bill
Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act
Unpopularity of William
Popularity of Mary
The Court removed from Whitehall to Hampton Court
The Court at Kensington; William's foreign Favourites
General Maladministration
Dissensions among Men in Office
Department of Foreign Affairs
Religious Disputes
The High Church Party
The Low Church Party
William's Views concerning Ecclesiastical Polity
Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury
Nottingham's Views concerning Ecclesiastical Polity
The Toleration Bill
The Comprehension Bill
The Bill for settling the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy
The Bill for settling the Coronation Oath
The Coronation
Promotions
The Coalition against France; the Devastation of the Palatinate
War declared against France
CHAPTER XII
State of Ireland at the Time of the Revolution; the Civil Power in the Hands of the Roman Catholics
The Military Power in the Hands of the Roman Catholics
Mutual Enmity between the Englishry and Irishry
Panic among the Englishry
History of the Town of Kenmare
Enniskillen
Londonderry
Closing of the Gates of Londonderry
Mountjoy sent to pacify Ulster
William opens a Negotiation with Tyrconnel
The Temples consulted
Richard Hamilton sent to Ireland on his Parole
Tyrconnel sends Mountjoy and Rice to France
Tyrconnel calls the Irish People to Arms
Devastation of the Country
The Protestants in the South unable to resist
Enniskillen and Londonderry hold out; Richard Hamilton marches into Ulster with an Army
James determines to go to Ireland
Assistance furnished by Lewis to James
Choice of a French Ambassador to accompany James
The Count of Avaux
James lands at Kinsale
James enters Cork
Journey of James from Cork to Dublin
Discontent in England
Factions at Dublin Castle
James determines to go to Ulster
Journey of James to Ulster
The Fall of Londonderry expected
Succours arrive from England
Treachery of Lundy; the Inhabitants of Londonderry resolve to defend themselves
Their Character
Londonderry besieged
The Siege turned into a Blockade
Naval Skirmish in Bantry Bay
A Parliament summoned by James sits at Dublin
A Toleration Act passed; Acts passed for the Confiscation of the Property of Protestants
Issue of base Money
The great Act of Attainder
James prorogues his Parliament; Persecution of the Protestants in Ireland
Effect produced in England by the News from Ireland
Actions of the Enniskilleners
Distress of Londonderry
Expedition under Kirke arrives in Loch Foyle
Cruelty of Rosen
The Famine in Londonderry extreme
Attack on the Boom
The Siege of Londonderry raised
Operations against the Enniskilleners
Battle of Newton Butler
Consternation of the Irish
CHAPTER XIII.
The Revolution more violent in Scotland than in England
Elections for the Convention; Rabbling of the Episcopal Clergy
State of Edinburgh
Question of an Union between England and Scotland raised
Wish of the English Low Churchmen to preserve Episcopacy in Scotland
Opinions of William about Church Government in Scotland
Comparative Strength of Religious Parties in Scotland
Letter from William to the Scotch Convention
William's Instructions to his Agents in Scotland; the Dalrymples
Melville
James's Agents in Scotland: Dundee; Balcarras
Meeting of the Convention
Hamilton elected President
Committee of Elections; Edinburgh Castle summoned
Dundee threatened by the Covenanters
Letter from James to the Convention
Effect of James's Letter
Flight of Dundee
Tumultuous Sitting of the Convention
A Committee appointed to frame a Plan of Government
Resolutions proposed by the Committee
William and Mary proclaimed; the Claim of Right; Abolition of Episcopacy
Torture
William and Mary accept the Crown of Scotland
Discontent of the Covenanters
Ministerial Arrangements in Scotland
Hamilton; Crawford
The Dalrymples; Lockhart; Montgomery
Melville; Carstairs
The Club formed: Annandale; Ross
Hume; Fletcher of Saltoun
War breaks out in the Highlands; State of the Highlands
Peculiar Nature of Jacobitism in the Highlands
Jealousy of the Ascendency of the Campbells
The Stewarts and Macnaghtens
The Macleans; the Camerons: Lochiel
The Macdonalds; Feud between the Macdonalds and Mackintoshes; Inverness
Inverness threatened by Macdonald of Keppoch
Dundee appears in Keppoch's Camp
Insurrection of the Clans hostile to the Campbells
Tarbet's Advice to the Government
Indecisive Campaign in the Highlands
Military Character of the Highlanders
Quarrels in the Highland Army
Dundee applies to James for Assistance; the War in the Highlands suspended
Scruples of the Covenanters about taking Arms for King William
The Cameronian Regiment raised
Edinburgh Castle surrenders
Session of Parliament at Edinburgh
Ascendancy of the Club
Troubles in Athol
The War breaks out again in the Highlands
Death of Dundee
Retreat of Mackay
Effect of the Battle of Killiecrankie; the Scottish Parliament adjourned
The Highland Army reinforced
Skirmish at Saint Johnston's
Disorders in the Highland Army
Mackay's Advice disregarded by the Scotch Ministers
The Cameronians stationed at Dunkeld
The Highlanders attack the Cameronians and are repulsed
Dissolution of the Highland Army; Intrigues of the Club; State of the Lowlands
CHAPTER XIV
Disputes in the English Parliament
The Attainder of Russell reversed
Other Attainders reversed; Case of Samuel Johnson
Case of Devonshire
Case of Oates
Bill of Rights
Disputes about a Bill of Indemnity
Last Days of Jeffreys
The Whigs dissatisfied with the King
Intemperance of Howe
Attack on Caermarthen
Attack on Halifax
Preparations for a Campaign in Ireland
Schomberg
Recess of the Parliament
State of Ireland; Advice of Avaux
Dismission of Melfort; Schomberg lands in Ulster
Carrickfergus taken
Schomberg advances into Leinster; the English and Irish Armies encamp near each other
Schomberg declines a Battle
Frauds of the English Commissariat
Conspiracy among the French Troops in the English Service
Pestilence in the English Army
The English and Irish Armies go into Winter Quarters
Various Opinions about Schomberg's Conduct
Maritime Affairs
Maladministration of Torrington
Continental Affairs
Skirmish at Walcourt
Imputations thrown on Marlborough
Pope Innocent XI. succeeded by Alexander VIII.
The High Church Clergy divided on the Subject of the Oaths
Arguments for taking the Oaths
Arguments against taking the Oaths
A great Majority of the Clergy take the Oaths
The Nonjurors; Ken
Leslie
Sherlock
Hickes
Collier
Dodwell
Kettlewell; Fitzwilliam
General Character of the Nonjuring Clergy
The Plan of Comprehension; Tillotson
An Ecclesiastical Commission issued.
Proceedings of the Commission
The Convocation of the Province of Canterbury summoned; Temper of the Clergy
The Clergy ill affected towards the King
The Clergy exasperated against the Dissenters by the Proceedings of the Scotch Presbyterians
Constitution of the Convocation
Election of Members of Convocation; Ecclesiastical Preferments bestowed,
Compton discontented
The Convocation meets
The High Churchmen a Majority of the Lower House of Convocation
Difference between the two Houses of Convocation
The Lower House of Convocation proves unmanageable.
The Convocation prorogued
CHAPTER XV
The Parliament meets; Retirement of Halifax
Supplies voted
The Bill of Rights passed
Inquiry into Naval Abuses
Inquiry into the Conduct of the Irish War
Reception of Walker in England
Edmund Ludlow
Violence of the Whigs
Impeachments
Committee of Murder
Malevolence of John Hampden
The Corporation Bill
Debates on the Indemnity Bill
Case of Sir Robert Sawyer
The King purposes to retire to Holland
He is induced to change his Intention; the Whigs oppose his going to Ireland
He prorogues the Parliament
Joy of the Tories
Dissolution and General Election
Changes in the Executive Departments
Caermarthen Chief Minister
Sir John Lowther
Rise and Progress of Parliamentary Corruption in England
Sir John Trevor
Godolphin retires; Changes at the Admiralty
Changes in the Commissions of Lieutenancy
Temper of the Whigs; Dealings of some Whigs with Saint Germains; Shrewsbury; Ferguson
Hopes of the Jacobites
Meeting of the new Parliament; Settlement of the Revenue
Provision for the Princess of Denmark
Bill declaring the Acts of the preceding Parliament valid
Debate on the Changes in the Lieutenancy of London
Abjuration Bill
Act of Grace
The Parliament prorogued; Preparations for the first War
Administration of James at Dublin
An auxiliary Force sent from France to Ireland
Plan of the English Jacobites; Clarendon, Aylesbury, Dartmouth
Penn
Preston
The Jacobites betrayed by Fuller
Crone arrested
Difficulties of William
Conduct of Shrewsbury
The Council of Nine
Conduct of Clarendon
Penn held to Bail
Interview between William and Burnet; William sets out for Ireland
Trial of Crone
Danger of Invasion and Insurrection; Tourville's Fleet in the
Channel
Arrests of suspected Persons
Torrington ordered to give Battle to Tourville
Battle of Beachy Head
Alarm in London; Battle of Fleurus
Spirit of the Nation
Conduct of Shrewsbury
CHAPTER XVI
William lands at Carrickfergus, and proceeds to Belfast
State of Dublin; William's military Arrangements
William marches southward
The Irish Army retreats
The Irish make a Stand at the Boyne
The Army of James
The Army of William
Walker, now Bishop of Derry, accompanies the Army
William reconnoitres the Irish Position; William is wounded
Battle of the Boyne
Flight of James
Loss of the two Armies
Fall of Drogheda; State of Dublin
James flies to France; Dublin evacuated by the French and Irish Troops
Entry of William into Dublin
Effect produced in France by the News from Ireland
Effect produced at Rome by the News from Ireland
Effect produced in London by the News from Ireland
James arrives in France; his Reception there
Tourville attempts a Descent on England
Teignmouth destroyed
Excitement of the English Nation against the French
The Jacobite Press
The Jacobite Form of Prayer and Humiliation
Clamour against the nonjuring Bishops
Military Operations in Ireland; Waterford taken
The Irish Army collected at Limerick; Lauzun pronounces that the Place cannot be defended
The Irish insist on defending Limerick
Tyrconnel is against defending Limerick; Limerick defended by the Irish alone
Sarsfield surprises the English Artillery
Arrival of Baldearg O'Donnel at Limerick
The Besiegers suffer from the Rains
Unsuccessful Assault on Limerick; The Siege raised
Tyrconnel and Lauzun go to France; William returns to England; Reception of William in England
Expedition to the South of Ireland
Marlborough takes Cork
Marlborough takes Kinsale
Affairs of Scotland; Intrigues of Montgomery with the Jacobites
War in the Highlands
Fort William built; Meeting of the Scottish Parliament
Melville Lord High Commissioner; the Government obtains a Majority
Ecclesiastical Legislation
The Coalition between the Club and the Jacobites dissolved
The Chiefs of the Club betray each other
General Acquiescence in the new Ecclesiastical Polity
Complaints of the Episcopalians
The Presbyterian Conjurors
William dissatisfied with the Ecclesiastical Arrangements in Scotland
Meeting of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland
State of Affairs on the Continent
The Duke of Savoy joins the Coalition
Supplies voted; Ways and Means
Proceedings against Torrington
Torrington's Trial and Acquittal
Animosity of the Whigs against Caermarthen
Jacobite Plot
Meeting of the leading Conspirators
The Conspirators determine to send Preston to Saint Germains
Papers entrusted to Preston
Information of the Plot given to Caermarthen
Arrest of Preston and his Companions
CHAPTER XI
William and Mary proclaimed in London--Rejoicings throughout
England; Rejoicings in Holland--Discontent of the Clergy and of the
Army--Reaction of Public Feeling--Temper of the Tories--Temper of the
Whigs--Ministerial Arrangements--William his own Minister for Foreign
Affairs--Danby--Halifax--Nottingham Shrewsbury The Board of
Admiralty; the Board of Treasury--The Great Seal--The Judges--The
Household--Subordinate Appointments--The Convention turned into a
Parliament--The Members of the two Houses required to take the
Oaths Questions relating to the Revenue--Abolition of the Hearth
Money--Repayment of the Expenses of the United Provinces--Mutiny
at Ipswich--The first Mutiny Bill--Suspension of the Habeas Corpus
Act--Unpopularity of William--Popularity of Mary--The Court removed from
Whitehall to Hampton Court--The Court at Kensington; William's foreign
Favourites--General Maladministration--Dissensions among Men in
Office--Department of Foreign Affairs--Religious Disputes--The
High Church Party--The Low Church Party--William's Views concerning
Ecclesiastical Polity--Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury--Nottingham's Views
concerning Ecclesiastical Polity--The Toleration Bill--The Comprehension
Bill--The Bill for settling the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy--The
Bill for settling the Coronation Oath--The Coronation--Promotions--The
Coalition against France; the Devastation of the Palatinate--War
declared against France
THE Revolution had been accomplished. The decrees of the Convention were
everywhere received with submission. London, true during fifty eventful
years to the cause of civil freedom and of the reformed religion, was
foremost in professing loyalty to the new Sovereigns. Garter King at
arms, after making proclamation under the windows of Whitehall, rode in
state along the Strand to Temple Bar. He was followed by the maces of
the two Houses, by the two Speakers, Halifax and Powle, and by a long
train of coaches filled with noblemen and gentlemen. The magistrates
of the City threw open their gates and joined the procession. Four
regiments of militia lined the way up Ludgate Hill, round Saint Paul's
Cathedral, and along Cheapside. The streets, the balconies, and the very
housetops were crowded with gazers. All the steeples from the Abbey to
the Tower sent forth a joyous din. The proclamation was repeated, with
sound of trumpet, in front of the Royal Exchange, amidst the shouts of
the citizens.
In the evening every window from Whitechapel to Piccadilly was lighted
up. The state rooms of the palace were thrown open, and were filled by a
gorgeous company of courtiers desirous to kiss the hands of the King and
Queen. The Whigs assembled there, flushed with victory and prosperity.
There were among them some who might be pardoned if a vindictive feeling
mingled with their joy. The most deeply injured of all who had survived
the evil times was absent. Lady Russell, while her friends were crowding
the galleries of Whitehall, remained in her retreat, thinking of one
who, if he had been still living, would have held no undistinguished
place in the ceremonies of that great day. But her daughter, who had a
few months before become the wife of Lord Cavendish, was presented to
the royal pair by his mother the Countess of Devonshire. A letter is
still extant in which the young lady described with great vivacity
the roar of the populace, the blaze in the streets, the throng in the
presence chamber, the beauty of Mary, and the expression which ennobled
and softened the harsh features of William. But the most interesting
passage is that in which the orphan girl avowed the stern delight with
which she had witnessed the tardy punishment of her father's murderer.
[1]
The example of London was followed by the provincial towns. During three
weeks the Gazettes were filled with accounts of the solemnities by which
the public joy manifested itself, cavalcades of gentlemen and yeomen,
processions of Sheriffs and Bailiffs in scarlet gowns, musters of
zealous Protestants with orange flags and ribands, salutes, bonfires,
illuminations, music, balls, dinners, gutters running with ale and
conduits spouting claret. [2]
Still more cordial was the rejoicing among the Dutch, when they learned
that the first minister of their Commonwealth had been raised to a
throne. On the very day of his accession he had written to assure the
States General that the change in his situation had made no change in
the affection which he bore to his native land, and that his new dignity
would, he hoped, enable him to discharge his old duties more efficiently
than ever. That oligarchical party, which had always been hostile to the
doctrines of Calvin and to the House of Orange, muttered faintly that
His Majesty ought to resign the Stadtholdership. But all such mutterings
were drowned by the acclamations of a people proud of the genius and
success of their great countryman. A day of thanksgiving was appointed.
In all the cities of the Seven Provinces the public joy manifested
itself by festivities of which the expense was chiefly defrayed by
voluntary gifts. Every class assisted. The poorest labourer could help
to set up an arch of triumph, or to bring sedge to a bonfire. Even the
ruined Huguenots of France could contribute the aid of their ingenuity.
One art which they had carried with them into banishment was the art of
making fireworks; and they now, in honour of the victorious champion of
their faith, lighted up the canals of Amsterdam with showers of splendid
constellations. [3]
To superficial observers it might well seem that William was, at this
time, one of the most enviable of human beings. He was in truth one of
the most anxious and unhappy. He well knew that the difficulties of his
task were only beginning. Already that dawn which had lately been so
bright was overcast; and many signs portended a dark and stormy day.
It was observed that two important classes took little or no part in
the festivities by which, all over England, the inauguration of the
new government was celebrated. Very seldom could either a priest or
a soldier be seen in the assemblages which gathered round the market
crosses where the King and Queen were proclaimed. The professional pride
both of the clergy and of the army had been deeply wounded. The doctrine
of nonresistance had been dear to the Anglican divines. It was their
distinguishing badge. It was their favourite theme. If we are to judge
by that portion of their oratory which has come down to us, they had
preached about the duty of passive obedience at least as often and as
zealously as about the Trinity or the Atonement. [4] Their attachment to
their political creed had indeed been severely tried, and had, during
a short time, wavered. But with the tyranny of James the bitter feeling
which that tyranny had excited among them had passed away. The parson
of a parish was naturally unwilling to join in what was really a triumph
over those principles which, during twenty-eight years, his flock had
heard him proclaim on every anniversary of the Martyrdom and on every
anniversary of the Restoration.
The soldiers, too, were discontented. They hated Popery indeed; and they
had not loved the banished King. But they keenly felt that, in the short
campaign which had decided the fate of their country, theirs had been an
inglorious part. Forty fine regiments, a regular army such as had
never before marched to battle under the royal standard of England,
had retreated precipitately before an invader, and had then, without a
struggle, submitted to him. That great force had been absolutely of no
account in the late change, had done nothing towards keeping William
out, and had done nothing towards bringing him in. The clowns, who,
armed with pitchforks and mounted on carthorses, had straggled in
the train of Lovelace or Delamere, had borne a greater part in the
Revolution than those splendid household troops, whose plumed hats,
embroidered coats, and curvetting chargers the Londoners had so often
seen with admiration in Hyde Park. The mortification of the army was
increased by the taunts of the foreigners, taunts which neither orders
nor punishments could entirely restrain. [5] At several places the anger
which a brave and highspirited body of men might, in such circumstances,
be expected to feel, showed itself in an alarming manner. A battalion
which lay at Cirencester put out the bonfires, huzzaed for King James,
and drank confusion to his daughter and his nephew. The garrison of
Plymouth disturbed the rejoicings of the County of Cornwall: blows were
exchanged, and a man was killed in the fray. [6]
The ill humour of the clergy and of the army could not but be noticed by
the most heedless; for the clergy and the army were distinguished from
other classes by obvious peculiarities of garb. "Black coats and red
coats," said a vehement Whig in the House of Commons, "are the curses
of the nation." [7] But the discontent was not confined to the black coats
and the red coats. The enthusiasm with which men of all classes had
welcomed William to London at Christmas had greatly abated before the
close of February. The new king had, at the very moment at which
his fame and fortune reached the highest point, predicted the coming
reaction. That reaction might, indeed, have been predicted by a less
sagacious observer of human affairs. For it is to be chiefly ascribed
to a law as certain as the laws which regulate the succession of the
seasons and the course of the trade winds. It is the nature of man to
overrate present evil, and to underrate present good; to long for what
he has not, and to be dissatisfied with what he has. This propensity, as
it appears in individuals, has often been noticed both by laughing
and by weeping philosophers. It was a favourite theme of Horace and
of Pascal, of Voltaire and of Johnson. To its influence on the fate
of great communities may be ascribed most of the revolutions and
counterrevolutions recorded in history. A hundred generations have
elapsed since the first great national emancipation, of which an account
has come down to us. We read in the most ancient of books that a
people bowed to the dust under a cruel yoke, scourged to toil by hard
taskmasters, not supplied with straw, yet compelled to furnish the daily
tale of bricks, became sick of life, and raised such a cry of misery as
pierced the heavens. The slaves were wonderfully set free: at the moment
of their liberation they raised a song of gratitude and triumph: but, in
a few hours, they began to regret their slavery, and to murmur against
the leader who had decoyed them away from the savoury fare of the house
of bondage to the dreary waste which still separated them from the land
flowing with milk and honey. Since that time the history of every great
deliverer has been the history of Moses retold. Down to the present
hour rejoicings like those on the shore of the Red Sea have ever been
speedily followed by murmurings like those at the Waters of Strife. [8]
The most just and salutary revolution must produce much suffering. The
most just and salutary revolution cannot produce all the good that had
been expected from it by men of uninstructed minds and sanguine tempers.
Even the wisest cannot, while it is still recent, weigh quite fairly the
evils which it has caused against the evils which it has removed. For
the evils which it has caused are felt; and the evils which it has
removed are felt no longer.
Thus it was now in England. The public was, as it always is during
the cold fits which follow its hot fits, sullen, hard to please,
dissatisfied with itself, dissatisfied with those who had lately been
its favourites. The truce between the two great parties was at an end.
Separated by the memory of all that had been done and suffered during a
conflict of half a century, they had been, during a few months, united
by a common danger. But the danger was over: the union was dissolved;
and the old animosity broke forth again in all its strength.
James had during the last year of his reign, been even more hated by
the Tories than by the Whigs; and not without cause for the Whigs he was
only an enemy; and to the Tories he had been a faithless and thankless
friend. But the old royalist feeling, which had seemed to be extinct in
the time of his lawless domination, had been partially revived by his
misfortunes. Many lords and gentlemen, who had, in December, taken arms
for the Prince of Orange and a Free Parliament, muttered, two months
later, that they had been drawn in; that they had trusted too much
to His Highness's Declaration; that they had given him credit for a
disinterestedness which, it now appeared, was not in his nature. They
had meant to put on King James, for his own good, some gentle force, to
punish the Jesuits and renegades who had misled him, to obtain from
him some guarantee for the safety of the civil and ecclesiastical
institutions of the realm, but not to uncrown and banish him. For his
maladministration, gross as it had been, excuses were found. Was it
strange that, driven from his native land, while still a boy, by rebels
who were a disgrace to the Protestant name, and forced to pass his
youth in countries where the Roman Catholic religion was established,
he should have been captivated by that most attractive of all
superstitions? Was it strange that, persecuted and calumniated as he
had been by an implacable faction, his disposition should have become
sterner and more severe than it had once been thought, and that, when
those who had tried to blast his honour and to rob him of his birthright
were at length in his power, he should not have sufficiently tempered
justice with mercy? As to the worst charge which had been brought
against him, the charge of trying to cheat his daughters out of their
inheritance by fathering a supposititious child, on what grounds did it
rest? Merely on slight circumstances, such as might well be imputed to
accident, or to that imprudence which was but too much in harmony with
his character. Did ever the most stupid country justice put a boy in
the stocks without requiring stronger evidence than that on which the
English people had pronounced their King guilty of the basest and most
odious of all frauds? Some great faults he had doubtless committed,
nothing could be more just or constitutional than that for those faults
his advisers and tools should be called to a severe reckoning; nor did
any of those advisers and tools more richly deserve punishment than the
Roundhead sectaries whose adulation had encouraged him to persist in the
fatal exercise of the dispensing power. It was a fundamental law of the
land that the King could do no wrong, and that, if wrong were done by
his authority, his counsellors and agents were responsible. That great
rule, essential to our polity, was now inverted. The sycophants, who
were legally punishable, enjoyed impunity: the King, who was not legally
punishable, was punished with merciless severity. Was it possible for
the Cavaliers of England, the sons of the warriors who had fought under
Rupert, not to feel bitter sorrow and indignation when they reflected
on the fate of their rightful liege lord, the heir of a long line of
princes, lately enthroned in splendour at Whitehall, now an exile, a
suppliant, a mendicant? His calamities had been greater than even those
of the Blessed Martyr from whom he sprang. The father had been slain by
avowed and mortal foes: the ruin of the son had been the work of his
own children. Surely the punishment, even if deserved, should have been
inflicted by other hands. And was it altogether deserved? Had not the
unhappy man been rather weak and rash than wicked? Had he not some of
the qualities of an excellent prince? His abilities were certainly not
of a high order: but he was diligent: he was thrifty: he had fought
bravely: he had been his own minister for maritime affairs, and had, in
that capacity, acquitted himself respectably: he had, till his spiritual
guides obtained a fatal ascendency over his mind, been regarded as a man
of strict justice; and, to the last, when he was not misled by them, he
generally spoke truth and dealt fairly. With so many virtues he might,
if he had been a Protestant, nay, if he had been a moderate Roman
Catholic, have had a prosperous and glorious reign. Perhaps it might not
be too late for him to retrieve his errors. It was difficult to believe
that he could be so dull and perverse as not to have profited by the
terrible discipline which he had recently undergone; and, if that
discipline had produced the effects which might reasonably be expected
from it, England might still enjoy, under her legitimate ruler, a larger
measure of happiness and tranquillity than she could expect from the
administration of the best and ablest usurper.
We should do great injustice to those who held this language, if we
supposed that they had, as a body, ceased to regard Popery and despotism
with abhorrence. Some zealots might indeed be found who could not bear
the thought of imposing conditions on their King, and who were ready
to recall him without the smallest assurance that the Declaration of
Indulgence should not be instantly republished, that the High Commission
should not be instantly revived, that Petre should not be again seated
at the Council Board, and that the fellows of Magdalene should not again
be ejected. But the number of these men was small. On the other hand,
the number of those Royalists, who, if James would have acknowledged
his mistakes and promised to observe the laws, were ready to rally
round him, was very large. It is a remarkable fact that two able and
experienced statesmen, who had borne a chief part in the Revolution,
frankly acknowledged, a few days after the Revolution had been
accomplished, their apprehension that a Restoration was close at hand.
"If King James were a Protestant," said Halifax to Reresby, "we could
not keep him out four months." "If King James," said Danby to the
same person about the same time, "would but give the country some
satisfaction about religion, which he might easily do, it would be very
hard to make head against him." [9] Happily for England, James was, as
usual, his own worst enemy. No word indicating that he took blame
to himself on account of the past, or that he intended to govern
constitutionally for the future, could be extracted from him. Every
letter, every rumour, that found its way from Saint Germains to England
made men of sense fear that, if, in his present temper, he should be
restored to power, the second tyranny would be worse than the first.
Thus the Tories, as a body, were forced to admit, very unwillingly,
that there was, at that moment, no choice but between William and public
ruin. They therefore, without altogether relinquishing the hope that he
who was King by right might at some future time be disposed to listen to
reason, and without feeling any thing like loyalty towards him who was
King in possession, discontentedly endured the new government.
It may be doubted whether that government was not, during the first
months of its existence, in more danger from the affection of the Whigs
than from the disaffection of the Tories. Enmity can hardly be more
annoying than querulous, jealous, exacting fondness; and such was the
fondness which the Whigs felt for the Sovereign of their choice. They
were loud in his praise. They were ready to support him with purse and
sword against foreign and domestic foes. But their attachment to him was
of a peculiar kind. Loyalty such as had animated the gallant gentlemen
who fought for Charles the First, loyalty such as had rescued Charles
the Second from the fearful dangers and difficulties caused by twenty
years of maladministration, was not a sentiment to which the doctrines
of Milton and Sidney were favourable; nor was it a sentiment which a
prince, just raised to power by a rebellion, could hope to inspire. The
Whig theory of government is that kings exist for the people, and not
the people for the kings; that the right of a king is divine in no
other sense than that in which the right of a member of parliament, of
a judge, of a juryman, of a mayor, of a headborough, is divine; that,
while the chief magistrate governs according to law, he ought to be
obeyed and reverenced; that, when he violates the law, he ought to be
withstood; and that, when he violates the law grossly, systematically
and pertinaciously, he ought to be deposed. On the truth of these
principles depended the justice of William's title to the throne. It is
obvious that the relation between subjects who held these principles,
and a ruler whose accession had been the triumph of these principles,
must have been altogether different from the relation which had
subsisted between the Stuarts and the Cavaliers. The Whigs loved William
indeed: but they loved him not as a King, but as a party leader; and it
was not difficult to foresee that their enthusiasm would cool fast if he
should refuse to be the mere leader of their party, and should attempt
to be King of the whole nation. What they expected from him in return
for their devotion to his cause was that he should be one of themselves,
a stanch and ardent Whig; that he should show favour to none but Whigs;
that he should make all the old grudges of the Whigs his own; and there
was but too much reason to apprehend that, if he disappointed this
expectation, the only section of the community which was zealous in his
cause would be estranged from him. [10]
Such were the difficulties by which, at the moment of his elevation, he
found himself beset. Where there was a good path he had seldom failed to
choose it. But now he had only a choice among paths every one of which
seemed likely to lead to destruction. From one faction he could hope for
no cordial support. The cordial support of the other faction he could
retain only by becoming himself the most factious man in his kingdom, a
Shaftesbury on the throne. If he persecuted the Tories, their sulkiness
would infallibly be turned into fury. If he showed favour to the Tories,
it was by no means certain that he would gain their goodwill; and it was
but too probable that he might lose his hold on the hearts of the Whigs.
Something however he must do: something he must risk: a Privy Council
must be sworn in: all the great offices, political and judicial, must be
filled. It was impossible to make an arrangement that would please every
body, and difficult to make an arrangement that would please any body;
but an arrangement must be made.
What is now called a ministry he did not think of forming. Indeed what
is now called a ministry was never known in England till he had been
some years on the throne. Under the Plantagenets, the Tudors, and the
Stuarts, there had been ministers; but there had been no ministry. The
servants of the Crown were not, as now, bound in frankpledge for
each other. They were not expected to be of the same opinion even on
questions of the gravest importance. Often they were politically and
personally hostile to each other, and made no secret of their hostility.
It was not yet felt to be inconvenient or unseemly that they should
accuse each other of high crimes, and demand each other's heads. No man
had been more active in the impeachment of the Lord Chancellor Clarendon
than Coventry, who was a Commissioner of the Treasury. No man had
been more active in the impeachment of the Lord Treasurer Danby
than Winnington, who was Solicitor General. Among the members of the
Government there was only one point of union, their common head,
the Sovereign. The nation considered him as the proper chief of the
administration, and blamed him severely if he delegated his high
functions to any subject. Clarendon has told us that nothing was so
hateful to the Englishmen of his time as a Prime Minister. They would
rather, he said, be subject to an usurper like Oliver, who was first
magistrate in fact as well as in name, than to a legitimate King who
referred them to a Grand Vizier. One of the chief accusations which the
country party had brought against Charles the Second was that he was
too indolent and too fond of pleasure to examine with care the balance
sheets of public accountants and the inventories of military stores.
James, when he came to the crown, had determined to appoint no Lord
High Admiral or Board of Admiralty, and to keep the entire direction of
maritime affairs in his own hands; and this arrangement, which would now
be thought by men of all parties unconstitutional and pernicious in the
highest degree, was then generally applauded even by people who were not
inclined to see his conduct in a favourable light. How completely the
relation in which the King stood to his Parliament and to his ministers
had been altered by the Revolution was not at first understood even by
the most enlightened statesmen. It was universally supposed that
the government would, as in time past, be conducted by functionaries
independent of each other, and that William would exercise a general
superintendence over them all. It was also fully expected that a prince
of William's capacity and experience would transact much important
business without having recourse to any adviser.
There were therefore no complaints when it was understood that he had
reserved to himself the direction of foreign affairs. This was indeed
scarcely matter of choice: for, with the single exception of Sir William
Temple, whom nothing would induce to quit his retreat for public life,
there was no Englishman who had proved himself capable of conducting an
important negotiation with foreign powers to a successful and honourable
issue. Many years had elapsed since England had interfered with weight
and dignity in the affairs of the great commonwealth of nations.
The attention of the ablest English politicians had long been almost
exclusively occupied by disputes concerning the civil and ecclesiastical
constitution of their own country. The contests about the Popish Plot
and the Exclusion Bill, the Habeas Corpus Act and the Test Act, had
produced an abundance, it might almost be said a glut, of those talents
which raise men to eminence in societies torn by internal factions. All
the Continent could not show such skilful and wary leaders of parties,
such dexterous parliamentary tacticians, such ready and eloquent
debaters, as were assembled at Westminister. But a very different
training was necessary to form a great minister for foreign affairs; and
the Revolution had on a sudden placed England in a situation in which
the services of a great minister for foreign affairs were indispensable
to her.
William was admirably qualified to supply that in which the most
accomplished statesmen of his kingdom were deficient. He had long been
preeminently distinguished as a negotiator. He was the author and the
soul of the European coalition against the French ascendency. The clue,
without which it was perilous to enter the vast and intricate maze
of Continental politics, was in his hands. His English counsellors,
therefore, however able and active, seldom, during his reign, ventured
to meddle with that part of the public business which he had taken as
his peculiar province. [11]
The internal government of England could be carried on only by the
advice and agency of English ministers. Those ministers William selected
in such a manner as showed that he was determined not to proscribe any
set of men who were willing to support his throne. On the day after
the crown had been presented to him in the Banqueting House, the Privy
Council was sworn in. Most of the Councillors were Whigs; but the names
of several eminent Tories appeared in the list. [12] The four highest
offices in the state were assigned to four noblemen, the representatives
of four classes of politicians.
In practical ability and official experience Danby had no superior among
his contemporaries. To the gratitude of the new Sovereigns he had a
strong claim; for it was by his dexterity that their marriage had been
brought about in spite of difficulties which had seemed insuperable. The
enmity which he had always borne to France was a scarcely less powerful
recommendation. He had signed the invitation of the thirtieth of June,
had excited and directed the northern insurrection, and had, in the
Convention, exerted all his influence and eloquence in opposition to
the scheme of Regency. Yet the Whigs regarded him with unconquerable
distrust and aversion. They could not forget that he had, in evil days,
been the first minister of the state, the head of the Cavaliers, the
champion of prerogative, the persecutor of dissenters. Even in becoming
a rebel, he had not ceased to be a Tory. If he had drawn the sword
against the Crown, he had drawn it only in defence of the Church. If he
had, in the Convention, done good by opposing the scheme of Regency, he
had done harm by obstinately maintaining that the throne was not vacant,
and that the Estates had no right to determine who should fill it. The
Whigs were therefore of opinion that he ought to think himself
amply rewarded for his recent merits by being suffered to escape the
punishment of those offences for which he had been impeached ten years
before. He, on the other hand, estimated his own abilities and services,
which were doubtless considerable, at their full value, and thought
himself entitled to the great place of Lord High Treasurer, which he had
formerly held. But he was disappointed. William, on principle, thought
it desirable to divide the power and patronage of the Treasury among
several Commissioners. He was the first English King who never, from the
beginning to the end of his reign, trusted the white staff in the hands
of a single subject. Danby was offered his choice between the Presidency
of the Council and a Secretaryship of State. He sullenly accepted the
Presidency, and, while the Whigs murmured at seeing him placed so high,
hardly attempted to conceal his anger at not having been placed higher.
[13]
Halifax, the most illustrious man of that small party which boasted that
it kept the balance even between Whigs and Tories, took charge of the
Privy Seal, and continued to be Speaker of the House of Lords. [14] He
had been foremost in strictly legal opposition to the late Government,
and had spoken and written with great ability against the dispensing
power: but he had refused to know any thing about the design of
invasion: he had laboured, even when the Dutch were in full march
towards London, to effect a reconciliation; and he had never deserted
James till James had deserted the throne. But, from the moment of that
shameful flight, the sagacious Trimmer, convinced that compromise was
thenceforth impossible, had taken a decided part. He had distinguished
himself preeminently in the Convention: nor was it without a peculiar
propriety that he had been appointed to the honourable office of
tendering the crown, in the name of all the Estates of England, to the
Prince and Princess of Orange; for our Revolution, as far as it can
be said to bear the character of any single mind, assuredly bears the
character of the large yet cautious mind of Halifax. The Whigs, however,
were not in a temper to accept a recent service as an atonement for an
old offence; and the offence of Halifax had been grave indeed. He had
long before been conspicuous in their front rank during a hard fight
for liberty. When they were at length victorious, when it seemed that
Whitehall was at their mercy, when they had a near prospect of dominion
and revenge, he had changed sides; and fortune had changed sides with
him. In the great debate on the Exclusion Bill, his eloquence had struck
them dumb, and had put new life into the inert and desponding party of
the Court. It was true that, though he had left them in the day of
their insolent prosperity, he had returned to them in the day of their
distress. But, now that their distress was over, they forgot that he had
returned to them, and remembered only that he had left them. [15]
The vexation with which they saw Danby presiding in the Council, and
Halifax bearing the Privy Seal, was not diminished by the news that
Nottingham was appointed Secretary of State. Some of those zealous
churchmen who had never ceased to profess the doctrine of nonresistance,
who thought the Revolution unjustifiable, who had voted for a Regency,
and who had to the last maintained that the English throne could never
be one moment vacant, yet conceived it to be their duty to submit to the
decision of the Convention. They had not, they said, rebelled against
James. They had not selected William. But, now that they saw on the
throne a Sovereign whom they never would have placed there, they were
of opinion that no law, divine or human, bound them to carry the contest
further. They thought that they found, both in the Bible and in the
Statute Book, directions which could not be misunderstood. The Bible
enjoins obedience to the powers that be. The Statute Book contains an
act providing that no subject shall be deemed a wrongdoer for adhering
to the King in possession. On these grounds many, who had not concurred
in setting up the new government, believed that they might give it
their support without offence to God or man. One of the most eminent
politicians of this school was Nottingham. At his instance the
Convention had, before the throne was filled, made such changes in the
oath of allegiance as enabled him and those who agreed with him to take
that oath without scruple. "My principles," he said, "do not permit me
to bear any part in making a King. But when a King has been made, my
principles bind me to pay him an obedience more strict than he can
expect from those who have made him." He now, to the surprise of some
of those who most esteemed him, consented to sit in the council, and
to accept the seals of Secretary. William doubtless hoped that this
appointment would be considered by the clergy and the Tory country
gentlemen as a sufficient guarantee that no evil was meditated against
the Church. Even Burnet, who at a later period felt a strong antipathy
to Nottingham, owned, in some memoirs written soon after the Revolution,
that the King had judged well, and that the influence of the Tory
Secretary, honestly exerted in support of the new Sovereigns, had saved
England from great calamities. [16]
The other Secretary was Shrewsbury. [17] No man so young had within
living memory occupied so high a post in the government. He had but just
completed his twenty-eighth year. Nobody, however, except the solemn
formalists at the Spanish embassy, thought his youth an objection to his
promotion. [18] He had already secured for himself a place in history
by the conspicuous part which he had taken in the deliverance of his
country. His talents, his accomplishments, his graceful manners, his
bland temper, made him generally popular. By the Whigs especially he
was almost adored. None suspected that, with many great and many amiable
qualities, he had such faults both of head and of heart as would
make the rest of a life which had opened under the fairest auspices
burdensome to himself and almost useless to his country.
The naval administration and the financial administration were confided
to Boards. Herbert was First Commissioner of the Admiralty. He had in
the late reign given up wealth and dignities when he found that he could
not retain them with honour and with a good conscience. He had carried
the memorable invitation to the Hague. He had commanded the Dutch fleet
during the voyage from Helvoetsluys to Torbay. His character for courage
and professional skill stood high. That he had had his follies and vices
was well known. But his recent conduct in the time of severe trial had
atoned for all, and seemed to warrant the hope that his future career
would be glorious. Among the commissioners who sate with him at the
Admiralty were two distinguished members of the House of Commons,
William Sacheverell, a veteran Whig, who had great authority in his
party, and Sir John Lowther, an honest and very moderate Tory, who in
fortune and parliamentary interest was among the first of the English
gentry. [19]
Mordaunt, one of the most vehement of the Whigs, was placed at the head
of the Treasury; why, it is difficult to say. His romantic courage, his
flighty wit, his eccentric invention, his love of desperate risks and
startling effects, were not qualities likely to be of much use to him in
financial calculations and negotiations. Delamere, a more vehement Whig,
if possible, than Mordaunt, sate second at the board, and was Chancellor
of the Exchequer. Two Whig members of the House of Commons were in the
Commission, Sir Henry Capel, brother of that Earl of Essex who died by
his own hand in the Tower, and Richard Hampden, son of the great leader
of the Long Parliament. But the Commissioner on whom the chief weight of
business lay was Godolphin. This man, taciturn, clearminded, laborious,
inoffensive, zealous for no government and useful to every government,
had gradually become an almost indispensable part of the machinery of
the state. Though a churchman, he had prospered in a Court governed by
Jesuits. Though he had voted for a Regency, he was the real head of a
treasury filled with Whigs. His abilities and knowledge, which had in
the late reign supplied the deficiencies of Bellasyse and Dover, were
now needed to supply the deficiencies of Mordaunt and Delamere. [20]
There were some difficulties in disposing of the Great Seal. The King
at first wished to confide it to Nottingham, whose father had borne it
during several years with high reputation. [21] Nottingham, however,
declined the trust; and it was offered to Halifax, but was again
declined. Both these Lords doubtless felt that it was a trust which they
could not discharge with honour to themselves or with advantage to
the public. In old times, indeed, the Seal had been generally held by
persons who were not lawyers. Even in the seventeenth century it had
been confided to two eminent men, who had never studied at any Inn
of Court. Dean Williams had been Lord Keeper to James the First.
Shaftesbury had been Lord Chancellor to Charles the Second. But such
appointments could no longer be made without serious inconvenience.
Equity had been gradually shaping itself into a refined science, which
no human faculties could master without long and intense application.
Even Shaftesbury, vigorous as was his intellect, had painfully felt his
want of technical knowledge; [22] and, during the fifteen years which had
elapsed since Shaftesbury had resigned the Seal, technical knowledge
had constantly been becoming more and more necessary to his successors.
Neither Nottingham therefore, though he had a stock of legal learning
such as is rarely found in any person who has not received a legal
education, nor Halifax, though, in the judicial sittings of the House
of Lords, the quickness of his apprehension and the subtlety of his
reasoning had often astonished the bar, ventured to accept the highest
office which an English layman can fill. After some delay the Seal was
confided to a commission of eminent lawyers, with Maynard at their head.
[23]
The choice of judges did honour to the new government. Every Privy
Councillor was directed to bring a list. The lists were compared; and
twelve men of conspicuous merit were selected. [24] The professional
attainments and Whig principles of Pollexfen gave him pretensions to
the highest place. But it was remembered that he had held briefs for the
Crown, in the Western counties, at the assizes which followed the battle
of Sedgemoor. It seems indeed from the reports of the trials that he did
as little as he could do if he held the briefs at all, and that he
left to the Judges the business of browbeating witnesses and prisoners.
Nevertheless his name was inseparably associated in the public mind with
the Bloody Circuit. He, therefore, could not with propriety be put at
the head of the first criminal court in the realm. [25] After acting
during a few weeks as Attorney General, he was made Chief Justice of the
Common Pleas. Sir John Holt, a young man, but distinguished by learning,
integrity, and courage, became Chief Justice of the King's Bench. Sir
Robert Atkyns, an eminent lawyer, who had passed some years in rural
retirement, but whose reputation was still great in Westminster Hall,
was appointed Chief Baron. Powell, who had been disgraced on account
of his honest declaration in favour of the Bishops, again took his seat
among the judges. Treby succeeded Pollexfen as Attorney General; and
Somers was made Solicitor. [26]
Two of the chief places in the Royal household were filled by two
English noblemen eminently qualified to adorn a court. The high spirited
and accomplished Devonshire was named Lord Steward. No man had done more
or risked more for England during the crisis of her fate. In retrieving
her liberties he had retrieved also the fortunes of his own house. His
bond for thirty thousand pounds was found among the papers which James
had left at Whitehall, and was cancelled by William. [27]
Dorset became Lord Chamberlain, and employed the influence and patronage
annexed to his functions, as he had long employed his private means, in
encouraging genius and in alleviating misfortune. One of the first acts
which he was under the necessity of performing must have been painful to
a man of so generous a nature, and of so keen a relish for whatever
was excellent in arts and letters. Dryden could no longer remain Poet
Laureate. The public would not have borne to see any Papist among the
servants of their Majesties; and Dryden was not only a Papist, but
an apostate. He had moreover aggravated the guilt of his apostasy by
calumniating and ridiculing the Church which he had deserted. He had,
it was facetiously said, treated her as the Pagan persecutors of old
treated her children. He had dressed her up in the skin of a wild beast,
and then baited her for the public amusement. [28] He was removed; but
he received from the private bounty of the magnificent Chamberlain
a pension equal to the salary which had been withdrawn. The deposed
Laureate, however, as poor of spirit as rich in intellectual gifts,
continued to complain piteously, year after year, of the losses which he
had not suffered, till at length his wailings drew forth expressions
of well merited contempt from brave and honest Jacobites, who had
sacrificed every thing to their principles without deigning to utter one
word of deprecation or lamentation. [29]
In the Royal household were placed some of those Dutch nobles who stood
highest in the favour of the King. Bentinck had the great office of
Groom of the Stole, with a salary of five thousand pounds a year.
Zulestein took charge of the robes. The Master of the Horse was
Auverquerque, a gallant soldier, who united the blood of Nassau to the
blood of Horn, and who wore with just pride a costly sword presented to
him by the States General in acknowledgment of the courage with which he
had, on the bloody day of Saint Dennis, saved the life of William.
The place of Vice Chamberlain to the Queen was given to a man who had
just become conspicuous in public life, and whose name will frequently
recur in the history of this reign. John Howe, or, as he was more
commonly called, Jack Howe, had been sent up to the Convention by the
borough of Cirencester. His appearance was that of a man whose body was
worn by the constant workings of a restless and acrid mind. He was tall,
lean, pale, with a haggard eager look, expressive at once of flightiness
and of shrewdness. He had been known, during several years, as a small
poet; and some of the most savage lampoons which were handed about the
coffeehouses were imputed to him. But it was in the House of Commons
that both his parts and his illnature were most signally displayed.
Before he had been a member three weeks, his volubility, his asperity,
and his pertinacity had made him conspicuous. Quickness, energy, and
audacity, united, soon raised him to the rank of a privileged man. His
enemies, and he had many enemies, said that he consulted his personal
safety even in his most petulant moods, and that he treated soldiers
with a civility which he never showed to ladies or to Bishops. But no
man had in larger measure that evil courage which braves and even
courts disgust and hatred. No decencies restrained him: his spite was
implacable: his skill in finding out the vulnerable parts of strong
minds was consummate. All his great contemporaries felt his sting in
their turns. Once it inflicted a wound which deranged even the stern
composure of William, and constrained him to utter a wish that he were a
private gentleman, and could invite Mr. Howe to a short interview
behind Montague House. As yet, however, Howe was reckoned among the
most strenuous supporters of the new government, and directed all his
sarcasms and invectives against the malcontents. [30]
The subordinate places in every public office were divided between the
two parties: but the Whigs had the larger share. Some persons, indeed,
who did little honour to the Whig name, were largely recompensed for
services which no good man would have performed. Wildman was made
Postmaster General. A lucrative sinecure in the Excise was bestowed on
Ferguson. The duties of the Solicitor of the Treasury were both very
important and very invidious. It was the business of that officer to
conduct political prosecutions, to collect the evidence, to instruct the
counsel for the Crown, to see that the prisoners were not liberated on
insufficient bail, to see that the juries were not composed of persons
hostile to the government. In the days of Charles and James, the
Solicitors of the Treasury had been with too much reason accused of
employing all the vilest artifices of chicanery against men obnoxious
to the Court. The new government ought to have made a choice which was
above all suspicion. Unfortunately Mordaunt and Delamere pitched upon
Aaron Smith, an acrimonious and unprincipled politician, who had been
the legal adviser of Titus Oates in the days of the Popish Plot, and who
had been deeply implicated in the Rye House Plot. Richard Hampden, a
man of decided opinions but of moderate temper, objected to this
appointment. His objections however were overruled. The Jacobites, who
hated Smith and had reason to hate him, affirmed that he had obtained
his place by bullying the Lords of the Treasury, and particularly by
threatening that, if his just claims were disregarded, he would be the
death of Hampden. [31]
Some weeks elapsed before all the arrangements which have been mentioned
were publicly announced: and meanwhile many important events had taken
place. As soon as the new Privy Councillors had been sworn in, it was
necessary to submit to them a grave and pressing question. Could the
Convention now assembled be turned into a Parliament? The Whigs, who had
a decided majority in the Lower House, were all for the affirmative.
The Tories, who knew that, within the last month, the public feeling had
undergone a considerable change, and who hoped that a general election
would add to their strength, were for the negative. They maintained
that to the existence of a Parliament royal writs were indispensably
necessary. The Convention had not been summoned by such writs: the
original defect could not now be supplied: the Houses were therefore
mere clubs of private men, and ought instantly to disperse.
It was answered that the royal writ was mere matter of form, and that to
expose the substance of our laws and liberties to serious hazard for the
sake of a form would be the most senseless superstition. Wherever the
Sovereign, the Peers spiritual and temporal, and the Representatives
freely chosen by the constituent bodies of the realm were met together,
there was the essence of a Parliament. Such a Parliament was now
in being; and what could be more absurd than to dissolve it at a
conjuncture when every hour was precious, when numerous important
subjects required immediate legislation, and when dangers, only to be
averted by the combined efforts of King, Lords, and Commons, menaced
the State? A Jacobite indeed might consistently refuse to recognise the
Convention as a Parliament. For he held that it had from the beginning
been an unlawful assembly, that all its resolutions were nullities,
and that the Sovereigns whom it had set up were usurpers. But with what
consistency could any man, who maintained that a new Parliament ought to
be immediately called by writs under the great seal of William and Mary,
question the authority which had placed William and Mary on the throne?
Those who held that William was rightful King must necessarily hold that
the body from which he derived his right was itself a rightful Great
Council of the Realm. Those who, though not holding him to be rightful
King, conceived that they might lawfully swear allegiance to him as King
in fact, might surely, on the same principle, acknowledge the Convention
as a Parliament in fact. It was plain that the Convention was the
fountainhead from which the authority of all future Parliaments must be
derived, and that on the validity of the votes of the Convention must
depend the validity of every future statute. And how could the
stream rise higher than the source? Was it not absurd to say that the
Convention was supreme in the state, and yet a nullity; a legislature
for the highest of all purposes, and yet no legislature for the
humblest purposes; competent to declare the throne vacant, to change
the succession, to fix the landmarks of the constitution, and yet not
competent to pass the most trivial Act for the repairing of a pier or
the building of a parish church?
These arguments would have had considerable weight, even if every
precedent had been on the other side. But in truth our history afforded
only one precedent which was at all in point; and that precedent
was decisive in favour of the doctrine that royal writs are not
indispensably necessary to the existence of a Parliament. No royal writ
had summoned the Convention which recalled Charles the Second. Yet
that Convention had, after his Restoration, continued to sit and to
legislate, had settled the revenue, had passed an Act of amnesty, had
abolished the feudal tenures. These proceedings had been sanctioned by
authority of which no party in the state could speak without reverence.
Hale had borne a considerable share in them, and had always maintained
that they were strictly legal. Clarendon, little as he was inclined to
favour any doctrine derogatory to the rights of the Crown, or to the
dignity of that seal of which he was keeper, had declared that, since
God had, at a most critical conjuncture, given the nation a good
Parliament, it would be the height of folly to look for technical flaws
in the instrument by which that Parliament was called together. Would
it be pretended by any Tory that the Convention of 1660 had a more
respectable origin than the Convention of 1689? Was not a letter written
by the first Prince of the Blood, at the request of the whole peerage,
and of hundreds of gentlemen who had represented counties and towns, at
least as good a warrant as a vote of the Rump?
Weaker reasons than these would have satisfied the Whigs who formed
the majority of the Privy Council. The King therefore, on the fifth
day after he had been proclaimed, went with royal state to the House of
Lords, and took his seat on the throne. The Commons were called in; and
he, with many gracious expressions, reminded his hearers of the perilous
situation of the country, and exhorted them to take such steps as might
prevent unnecessary delay in the transaction of public business. His
speech was received by the gentlemen who crowded the bar with the deep
hum by which our ancestors were wont to indicate approbation, and which
was often heard in places more sacred than the Chamber of the Peers.
[32] As soon as he had retired, a Bill declaring the Convention a
Parliament was laid on the table of the Lords, and rapidly passed by
them. In the Commons the debates were warm. The House resolved itself
into a Committee; and so great was the excitement that, when the
authority of the Speaker was withdrawn, it was hardly possible to
preserve order. Sharp personalities were exchanged. The phrase, "hear
him," a phrase which had originally been used only to silence
irregular noises, and to remind members of the duty of attending to the
discussion, had, during some years, been gradually becoming what it
now is; that is to say, a cry indicative, according to the tone, of
admiration, acquiescence, indignation, or derision. On this occasion,
the Whigs vociferated "Hear, hear," so tumultuously that the Tories
complained of unfair usage. Seymour, the leader of the minority,
declared that there could be no freedom of debate while such clamour was
tolerated. Some old Whig members were provoked into reminding him that
the same clamour had occasionally been heard when he presided, and had
not then been repressed. Yet, eager and angry as both sides were, the
speeches on both sides indicated that profound reverence for law and
prescription which has long been characteristic of Englishmen, and
which, though it runs sometimes into pedantry and sometimes into
superstition, is not without its advantages. Even at that momentous
crisis, when the nation was still in the ferment of a revolution, our
public men talked long and seriously about all the circumstances of the
deposition of Edward the Second and of the deposition of Richard
the Second, and anxiously inquired whether the assembly which, with
Archbishop Lanfranc at its head, set aside Robert of Normandy, and put
William Rufus on the throne, did or did not afterwards continue to act
as the legislature of the realm. Much was said about the history
of writs; much about the etymology of the word Parliament. It is
remarkable, that the orator who took the most statesmanlike view of the
subject was old Maynard. In the civil conflicts of fifty eventful years
he had learned that questions affecting the highest interests of the
commonwealth were not to be decided by verbal cavils and by scraps of
Law French and Law Latin; and, being by universal acknowledgment the
most subtle and the most learned of English jurists, he could express
what he felt without the risk of being accused of ignorance and
presumption. He scornfully thrust aside as frivolous and out of place
all that blackletter learning, which some men, far less versed in such
matters than himself, had introduced into the discussion. "We are,"
he said, "at this moment out of the beaten path. If therefore we are
determined to move only in that path, we cannot move at all. A man in
a revolution resolving to do nothing which is not strictly according to
established form resembles a man who has lost himself in the wilderness,
and who stands crying 'Where is the king's highway? I will walk nowhere
but on the king's highway.' In a wilderness a man should take the track
which will carry him home. In a revolution we must have recourse to
the highest law, the safety of the state." Another veteran Roundhead,
Colonel Birch, took the same side, and argued with great force and
keenness from the precedent of 1660. Seymour and his supporters were
beaten in the Committee, and did not venture to divide the House on the
Report. The Bill passed rapidly, and received the royal assent on the
tenth day after the accession of William and Mary. [33]
The law which turned the Convention into a Parliament contained a clause
providing that no person should, after the first of March, sit or vote
in either House without taking the oaths to the new King and Queen. This
enactment produced great agitation throughout society. The adherents of
the exiled dynasty hoped and confidently predicted that the recusants
would be numerous. The minority in both Houses, it was said, would be
true to the cause of hereditary monarchy. There might be here and there
a traitor; but the great body of those who had voted for a Regency would
be firm. Only two Bishops at most would recognise the usurpers. Seymour
would retire from public life rather than abjure his principles. Grafton
had determined to fly to France and to throw himself at the feet of his
uncle. With such rumours as these all the coffeehouses of London were
filled during the latter part of February. So intense was the public
anxiety that, if any man of rank was missed, two days running, at his
usual haunts, it was immediately whispered that he had stolen away to
Saint Germains. [34]
The second of March arrived; and the event quieted the fears of one
party, and confounded the hopes of the other. The Primate indeed and
several of his suffragans stood obstinately aloof: but three Bishops and
seventy-three temporal peers took the oaths. At the next meeting of the
Upper House several more prelates came in. Within a week about a hundred
Lords had qualified themselves to sit. Others, who were prevented by
illness from appearing, sent excuses and professions of attachment
to their Majesties. Grafton refuted all the stories which had been
circulated about him by coming to be sworn on the first day. Two members
of the Ecclesiastical Commission, Mulgrave and Sprat, hastened to make
atonement for their fault by plighting their faith to William. Beaufort,
who had long been considered as the type of a royalist of the old
school, submitted after a very short hesitation. Aylesbury and
Dartmouth, though vehement Jacobites, had as little scruple about taking
the oath of allegiance as they afterwards had about breaking it. [35]
The Hydes took different paths. Rochester complied with the law; but
Clarendon proved refractory. Many thought it strange that the brother
who had adhered to James till James absconded should be less sturdy than
the brother who had been in the Dutch camp. The explanation perhaps
is that Rochester would have sacrificed much more than Clarendon by
refusing to take the oaths. Clarendon's income did not depend on the
pleasure of the Government but Rochester had a pension of four thousand
a year, which he could not hope to retain if he refused to acknowledge
the new Sovereigns. Indeed, he had so many enemies that, during some
months, it seemed doubtful whether he would, on any terms, be suffered
to retain the splendid reward which he had earned by persecuting the
Whigs and by sitting in the High Commission. He was saved from what
would have been a fatal blow to his fortunes by the intercession of
Burnet, who had been deeply injured by him, and who revenged himself as
became a Christian divine. [36]
In the Lower House four hundred members were sworn in on the second
of March; and among them was Seymour. The spirit of the Jacobites was
broken by his defection; and the minority with very few exceptions
followed his example. [37]
Before the day fixed for the taking of the oaths, the Commons had begun
to discuss a momentous question which admitted of no delay. During the
interregnum, William had, as provisional chief of the administration,
collected the taxes and applied them to the public service; nor could
the propriety of this course be questioned by any person who approved
of the Revolution. But the Revolution was now over: the vacancy of the
throne had been supplied: the Houses were sitting: the law was in full
force; and it became necessary immediately to decide to what revenue the
Government was entitled.
Nobody denied that all the lands and hereditaments of the Crown had
passed with the Crown to the new Sovereigns. Nobody denied that all
duties which had been granted to the Crown for a fixed term of years
might be constitutionally exacted till that term should expire. But
large revenues had been settled by Parliament on James for life; and
whether what had been settled on James for life could, while he lived,
be claimed by William and Mary, was a question about which opinions were
divided.
Holt, Treby, Pollexfen, indeed all the eminent Whig lawyers, Somers
excepted, held that these revenues had been granted to the late King, in
his political capacity, but for his natural life, and ought therefore,
as long as he continued to drag on his existence in a strange land,
to be paid to William and Mary. It appears from a very concise and
unconnected report of the debate that Somers dissented from this
doctrine. His opinion was that, if the Act of Parliament which had
imposed the duties in question was to be construed according to the
spirit, the word life must be understood to mean reign, and that
therefore the term for which the grant had been made had expired. This
was surely the sound opinion: for it was plainly irrational to treat the
interest of James in this grant as at once a thing annexed to his
person and a thing annexed to his office; to say in one breath that the
merchants of London and Bristol must pay money because he was naturally
alive, and that his successors must receive that money because he was
politically defunct. The House was decidedly with Somers. The members
generally were bent on effecting a great reform, without which it was
felt that the Declaration of Rights would be but an imperfect guarantee
for public liberty. During the conflict which fifteen successive
Parliaments had maintained against four successive Kings, the chief
weapon of the Commons had been the power of the purse; and never had
the representatives of the people been induced to surrender that weapon
without having speedy cause to repent of their too credulous loyalty.
In that season of tumultuous joy which followed the Restoration, a large
revenue for life had been almost by acclamation granted to Charles the
Second. A few months later there was scarcely a respectable Cavalier in
the kingdom who did not own that the stewards of the nation would have
acted more wisely if they had kept in their hands the means of checking
the abuses which disgraced every department of the government. James
the Second had obtained from his submissive Parliament, without a
dissentient voice, an income sufficient to defray the ordinary expenses
of the state during his life; and, before he had enjoyed that income
half a year, the great majority of those who had dealt thus liberally
with him blamed themselves severely for their liberality. If experience
was to be trusted, a long and painful experience, there could be no
effectual security against maladministration, unless the Sovereign were
under the necessity of recurring frequently to his Great Council for
pecuniary aid. Almost all honest and enlightened men were therefore
agreed in thinking that a part at least of the supplies ought to be
granted only for short terms. And what time could be fitter for the
introduction of this new practice than the year 1689, the commencement
of a new reign, of a new dynasty, of a new era of constitutional
government? The feeling on this subject was so strong and general that
the dissentient minority gave way. No formal resolution was passed; but
the House proceeded to act on the supposition that the grants which had
been made to James for life had been annulled by his abdication. [38]
It was impossible to make a new settlement of the revenue without
inquiry and deliberation. The Exchequer was ordered to furnish such
returns as might enable the House to form estimates of the public
expenditure and income. In the meantime, liberal provision was made
for the immediate exigencies of the state. An extraordinary aid, to be
raised by direct monthly assessment, was voted to the King. An Act was
passed indemnifying all who had, since his landing, collected by his
authority the duties settled on James; and those duties which had
expired were continued for some months.
Along William's whole line of march, from Torbay to London, he had been
importuned by the common people to relieve them from the intolerable
burden of the hearth money. In truth, that tax seems to have united all
the worst evils which can be imputed to any tax. It was unequal, and
unequal in the most pernicious way: for it pressed heavily on the poor,
and lightly on the rich. A peasant, all whose property was not worth
twenty pounds, was charged ten shillings. The Duke of Ormond, or the
Duke of Newcastle, whose estates were worth half a million, paid only
four or five pounds. The collectors were empowered to examine the
interior of every house in the realm, to disturb families at meals,
to force the doors of bedrooms, and, if the sum demanded were not
punctually paid, to sell the trencher on which the barley loaf was
divided among the poor children, and the pillow from under the head
of the lying-in woman. Nor could the Treasury effectually restrain the
chimneyman from using his powers with harshness: for the tax was farmed;
and the government was consequently forced to connive at outrages and
exactions such as have, in every age made the name of publican a proverb
for all that is most hateful.
William had been so much moved by what he had heard of these grievances
that, at one of the earliest sittings of the Privy Council, he
introduced the subject. He sent a message requesting the House of
Commons to consider whether better regulations would effectually prevent
the abuses which had excited so much discontent. He added that he would
willingly consent to the entire abolition of the tax if it should appear
that the tax and the abuses were inseparable. [39] This communication
was received with loud applause. There were indeed some financiers of
the old school who muttered that tenderness for the poor was a fine
thing; but that no part of the revenue of the state came in so exactly
to the day as the hearth money; that the goldsmiths of the City could
not always be induced to lend on the security of the next quarter's
customs or excise, but that on an assignment of hearth money there was
no difficulty in obtaining advances. In the House of Commons, those who
thought thus did not venture to raise their voices in opposition to
the general feeling. But in the Lords there was a conflict of which the
event for a time seemed doubtful. At length the influence of the
Court, strenuously exerted, carried an Act by which the chimney tax was
declared a badge of slavery, and was, with many expressions of gratitude
to the King, abolished for ever. [40]
The Commons granted, with little dispute, and without a division,
six hundred thousand pounds for the purpose of repaying to the United
Provinces the charges of the expedition which had delivered England. The
facility with which this large sum was voted to a shrewd, diligent and
thrifty people, our allies, indeed, politically, but commercially our
most formidable rivals, excited some murmurs out of doors, and
was, during many years, a favourite subject of sarcasm with Tory
pamphleteers. [41] The liberality of the House admits however of an
easy explanation. On the very day on which the subject was under
consideration, alarming news arrived at Westminster, and convinced many,
who would at another time have been disposed to scrutinise severely any
account sent in by the Dutch, that our country could not yet dispense
with the services of the foreign troops.
France had declared war against the States General; and the States
General had consequently demanded from the King of England those
succours which he was bound by the treaty of Nimeguen to furnish. [42]
He had ordered some battalions to march to Harwich, that they might be
in readiness to cross to the Continent. The old soldiers of James
were generally in a very bad temper; and this order did not produce a
soothing effect. The discontent was greatest in the regiment which now
ranks as first of the line. Though borne on the English establishment,
that regiment, from the time when it first fought under the great
Gustavus, had been almost exclusively composed of Scotchmen; and
Scotchmen have never, in any region to which their adventurous and
aspiring temper has led them, failed to note and to resent every slight
offered to Scotland. Officers and men muttered that a vote of a foreign
assembly was nothing to them. If they could be absolved from their
allegiance to King James the Seventh, it must be by the Estates at
Edinburgh, and not by the Convention at Westminster. Their ill humour
increased when they heard that Schomberg had been appointed their
colonel. They ought perhaps to have thought it an honour to be called by
the name of the greatest soldier in Europe. But, brave and skilful as
he was, he was not their countryman: and their regiment, during the
fifty-six years which had elapsed since it gained its first honourable
distinctions in Germany, had never been commanded but by a Hepburn or a
Douglas. While they were in this angry and punctilious mood, they were
ordered to join the forces which were assembling at Harwich. There was
much murmuring; but there was no outbreak till the regiment arrived at
Ipswich. There the signal of revolt was given by two captains who were
zealous for the exiled King. The market place was soon filled with
pikemen and musketeers running to and fro. Gunshots were wildly fired
in all directions. Those officers who attempted to restrain the rioters
were overpowered and disarmed. At length the chiefs of the insurrection
established some order, and marched out of Ipswich at the head of their
adherents. The little army consisted of about eight hundred men. They
had seized four pieces of cannon, and had taken possession of the
military chest, which contained a considerable sum of money. At the
distance of half a mile from the town a halt was called: a general
consultation was held; and the mutineers resolved that they would hasten
back to their native country, and would live and die with their rightful
King. They instantly proceeded northward by forced marches. [43]
When the news reached London the dismay was great. It was rumoured that
alarming symptoms had appeared in other regiments, and particularly
that a body of fusileers which lay at Harwich was likely to imitate the
example set at Ipswich. "If these Scots," said Halifax to Reresby,
"are unsupported, they are lost. But if they have acted in concert with
others, the danger is serious indeed." [44] The truth seems to be that
there was a conspiracy which had ramifications in many parts of the
army, but that the conspirators were awed by the firmness of the
government and of the Parliament. A committee of the Privy Council
was sitting when the tidings of the mutiny arrived in London. William
Harbord, who represented the borough of Launceston, was at the board.
His colleagues entreated him to go down instantly to the House of
Commons, and to relate what had happened. He went, rose in his place,
and told his story. The spirit of the assembly rose to the occasion.
Howe was the first to call for vigorous action. "Address the King," he
said, "to send his Dutch troops after these men. I know not who else can
be trusted." "This is no jesting matter," said old Birch, who had been a
colonel in the service of the Parliament, and had seen the most powerful
and renowned House of Commons that ever sate twice purged and twice
expelled by its own soldiers; "if you let this evil spread, you will
have an army upon you in a few days. Address the King to send horse and
foot instantly, his own men, men whom he can trust, and to put these
people down at once." The men of the long robe caught the flame. "It
is not the learning of my profession that is needed here," said Treby.
"What is now to be done is to meet force with force, and to maintain
in the field what we have done in the senate." "Write to the Sheriffs,"
said Colonel Mildmay, member for Essex. "Raise the militia. There are a
hundred and fifty thousand of them: they are good Englishmen: they will
not fail you." It was resolved that all members of the House who
held commissions in the army should be dispensed from parliamentary
attendance, in order that they might repair instantly to their military
posts. An address was unanimously voted requesting the King to take
effectual steps for the suppression of the rebellion, and to put forth
a proclamation denouncing public vengeance on the rebels. One gentleman
hinted that it might be well to advise his Majesty to offer a pardon
to those who should peaceably submit: but the House wisely rejected the
suggestion. "This is no time," it was well said, "for any thing that
looks like fear." The address was instantly sent up to the Lords.
The Lords concurred in it. Two peers, two knights of shires, and two
burgesses were sent with it to Court. William received them graciously,
and informed them that he had already given the necessary orders. In
fact, several regiments of horse and dragoons had been sent northward
under the command of Ginkell, one of the bravest and ablest officers of
the Dutch army. [45]
Meanwhile the mutineers were hastening across the country which lies
between Cambridge and the Wash. Their road lay through a vast and
desolate fen, saturated with all the moisture of thirteen counties, and
overhung during the greater part of the year by a low grey mist, high
above which rose, visible many miles, the magnificent tower of Ely. In
that dreary region, covered by vast flights of wild fowl, a half savage
population, known by the name of the Breedlings, then led an amphibious
life, sometimes wading, and sometimes rowing, from one islet of firm
ground to another. [46] The roads were amongst the worst in the island,
and, as soon as rumour announced the approach of the rebels, were
studiously made worse by the country people. Bridges were broken down.
Trees were laid across the highways to obstruct the progress of the
cannon. Nevertheless the Scotch veterans not only pushed forward with
great speed, but succeeded in carrying their artillery with them. They
entered Lincolnshire, and were not far from Sleaford, when they learned
that Ginkell with an irresistible force was close on their track.
Victory and escape were equally out of the question. The bravest
warriors could not contend against fourfold odds. The most active
infantry could not outrun horsemen. Yet the leaders, probably despairing
of pardon, urged the men to try the chance of battle. In that region, a
spot almost surrounded by swamps and pools was without difficulty found.
Here the insurgents were drawn up; and the cannon were planted at the
only point which was thought not to be sufficiently protected by natural
defences. Ginkell ordered the attack to be made at a place which was
out of the range of the guns; and his dragoons dashed gallantly into the
water, though it was so deep that their horses were forced to swim. Then
the mutineers lost heart. They beat a parley, surrendered at discretion,
and were brought up to London under a strong guard. Their lives were
forfeit: for they had been guilty, not merely of mutiny, which was
then not a legal crime, but of levying war against the King. William,
however, with politic clemency, abstained from shedding the blood even
of the most culpable. A few of the ringleaders were brought to trial
at the next Bury assizes, and were convicted of high treason; but their
lives were spared. The rest were merely ordered to return to their duty.
The regiment, lately so refractory, went submissively to the Continent,
and there, through many hard campaigns, distinguished itself by
fidelity, by discipline, and by valour. [47]
This event facilitated an important change in our polity, a change
which, it is true, could not have been long delayed, but which would not
have been easily accomplished except at a moment of extreme danger. The
time had at length arrived at which it was necessary to make a legal
distinction between the soldier and the citizen. Under the Plantagenets
and the Tudors there had been no standing army. The standing army
which had existed under the last kings of the House of Stuart had been
regarded by every party in the state with strong and not unreasonable
aversion. The common law gave the Sovereign no power to control his
troops. The Parliament, regarding them as mere tools of tyranny, had not
been disposed to give such power by statute. James indeed had
induced his corrupt and servile judges to put on some obsolete laws a
construction which enabled him to punish desertion capitally. But this
construction was considered by all respectable jurists as unsound,
and, had it been sound, would have been far from effecting all that was
necessary for the purpose of maintaining military discipline. Even James
did not venture to inflict death by sentence of a court martial. The
deserter was treated as an ordinary felon, was tried at the assizes by a
petty jury on a bill found by a grand jury, and was at liberty to
avail himself of any technical flaw which might be discovered in the
indictment.
The Revolution, by altering the relative position of the prince and the
parliament, had altered also the relative position of the army and the
nation. The King and the Commons were now at unity; and both were alike
menaced by the greatest military power which had existed in Europe
since the downfall of the Roman empire. In a few weeks thirty thousand
veterans, accustomed to conquer, and led by able and experienced
captains, might cross from the ports of Normandy and Brittany to our
shores. That such a force would with little difficulty scatter three
times that number of militia, no man well acquainted with war could
doubt. There must then be regular soldiers; and, if there were to be
regular soldiers, it must be indispensable, both to their efficiency,
and to the security of every other class, that they should be kept under
a strict discipline. An ill disciplined army has ever been a more costly
and a more licentious militia, impotent against a foreign enemy, and
formidable only to the country which it is paid to defend. A strong line
of demarcation must therefore be drawn between the soldiers and the
rest of the community. For the sake of public freedom, they must, in the
midst of freedom, be placed under a despotic rule. They must be subject
to a sharper penal code, and to a more stringent code of procedure,
than are administered by the ordinary tribunals. Some acts which in the
citizen are innocent must in the soldier be crimes. Some acts which in
the citizen are punished with fine or imprisonment must in the soldier
be punished with death. The machinery by which courts of law ascertain
the guilt or innocence of an accused citizen is too slow and too
intricate to be applied to an accused soldier. For, of all the maladies
incident to the body politic, military insubordination is that which
requires the most prompt and drastic remedies. If the evil be not
stopped as soon as it appears, it is certain to spread; and it cannot
spread far without danger to the very vitals of the commonwealth. For
the general safety, therefore, a summary jurisdiction of terrible extent
must, in camps, be entrusted to rude tribunals composed of men of the
sword.
But, though it was certain that the country could not at that moment
be secure without professional soldiers, and equally certain that
professional soldiers must be worse than useless unless they were placed
under a rule more arbitrary and severe than that to which other men were
subject, it was not without great misgivings that a House of Commons
could venture to recognise the existence and to make provision for the
government of a standing army. There was scarcely a public man of note
who had not often avowed his conviction that our polity and a standing
army could not exist together. The Whigs had been in the constant habit
of repeating that standing armies had destroyed the free institutions of
the neighbouring nations. The Tories had repeated as constantly that, in
our own island, a standing army had subverted the Church, oppressed the
gentry, and murdered the King. No leader of either party could, without
laying himself open to the charge of gross inconsistency, propose that
such an army should henceforth be one of the permanent establishments
of the realm. The mutiny at Ipswich, and the panic which that mutiny
produced, made it easy to effect what would otherwise have been in the
highest degree difficult. A short bill was brought in which began by
declaring, in explicit terms, that standing armies and courts martial
were unknown to the law of England. It was then enacted that, on account
of the extreme perils impending at that moment over the state, no man
mustered on pay in the service of the crown should, on pain of death,
or of such lighter punishment as a court martial should deem sufficient,
desert his colours or mutiny against his commanding officers. This
statute was to be in force only six months; and many of those who voted
for it probably believed that it would, at the close of that period,
be suffered to expire. The bill passed rapidly and easily. Not a single
division was taken upon it in the House of Commons. A mitigating clause
indeed, which illustrates somewhat curiously the manners of that age,
was added by way of rider after the third reading. This clause provided
that no court martial should pass sentence of death except between the
hours of six in the morning and one in the afternoon. The dinner hour
was then early; and it was but too probable that a gentleman who had
dined would be in a state in which he could not safely be trusted with
the lives of his fellow creatures. With this amendment, the first and
most concise of our many Mutiny Bills was sent up to the Lords, and was,
in a few hours, hurried by them through all its stages and passed by the
King. [48]
Thus was made, without one dissentient voice in Parliament, without one
murmur in the nation, the first step towards a change which had become
necessary to the safety of the state, yet which every party in the state
then regarded with extreme dread and aversion. Six months passed;
and still the public danger continued. The power necessary to the
maintenance of military discipline was a second time entrusted to the
crown for a short term. The trust again expired, and was again renewed.
By slow degrees familiarity reconciled the public mind to the names,
once so odious, of standing army and court martial. It was proved by
experience that, in a well constituted society, professional soldiers
may be terrible to a foreign enemy, and yet submissive to the civil
power. What had been at first tolerated as the exception began to be
considered as the rule. Not a session passed without a Mutiny Bill.
When at length it became evident that a political change of the highest
importance was taking place in such a manner as almost to escape notice,
a clamour was raised by some factious men desirous to weaken the hands
of the government, and by some respectable men who felt an honest but
injudicious reverence for every old constitutional tradition, and who
were unable to understand that what at one stage in the progress of
society is pernicious may at another stage be indispensable. This
clamour however, as years rolled on, became fainter and fainter.
The debate which recurred every spring on the Mutiny Bill came to be
regarded merely as an occasion on which hopeful young orators fresh
from Christchurch were to deliver maiden speeches, setting forth how
the guards of Pisistratus seized the citadel of Athens, and how the
Praetorian cohorts sold the Roman empire to Didius. At length
these declamations became too ridiculous to be repeated. The most
oldfashioned, the most eccentric, politician could hardly, in the reign
of George the Third, contend that there ought to be no regular soldiers,
or that the ordinary law, administered by the ordinary courts, would
effectually maintain discipline among such soldiers. All parties being
agreed as to the general principle, a long succession of Mutiny Bills
passed without any discussion, except when some particular article of
the military code appeared to require amendment. It is perhaps because
the army became thus gradually, and almost imperceptibly, one of the
institutions of England, that it has acted in such perfect harmony with
all her other institutions, has never once, during a hundred and sixty
years, been untrue to the throne or disobedient to the law, has never
once defied the tribunals or overawed the constituent bodies. To this
day, however, the Estates of the Realm continue to set up periodically,
with laudable jealousy, a landmark on the frontier which was traced
at the time of the Revolution. They solemnly reassert every year the
doctrine laid down in the Declaration of Rights; and they then grant
to the Sovereign an extraordinary power to govern a certain number of
soldiers according to certain rules during twelve months more.
In the same week in which the first Mutiny Bill was laid on the table
of the Commons, another temporary law, made necessary by the unsettled
state of the kingdom, was passed. Since the flight of James many persons
who were believed to have been deeply implicated in his unlawful acts,
or to be engaged in plots for his restoration, had been arrested and
confined. During the vacancy of the throne, these men could derive no
benefit from the Habeas Corpus Act. For the machinery by which alone
that Act could be carried into execution had ceased to exist; and,
through the whole of Hilary term, all the courts in Westminster Hall had
remained closed. Now that the ordinary tribunals were about to resume
their functions, it was apprehended that all those prisoners whom it was
not convenient to bring instantly to trial would demand and obtain their
liberty. A bill was therefore brought in which empowered the King to
detain in custody during a few weeks such persons as he should suspect
of evil designs against his government. This bill passed the two Houses
with little or no opposition. [49] But the malecontents out of doors did
not fail to remark that, in the late reign, the Habeas Corpus Act had
not been one day suspended. It was the fashion to call James a tyrant,
and William a deliverer. Yet, before the deliverer had been a month on
the throne, he had deprived Englishmen of a precious right which the
tyrant had respected. [50] This is a kind of reproach which a government
sprung from a popular revolution almost inevitably incurs. From such
a government men naturally think themselves entitled to demand a more
gentle and liberal administration than is expected from old and deeply
rooted power. Yet such a government, having, as it always has, many
active enemies, and not having the strength derived from legitimacy and
prescription, can at first maintain itself only by a vigilance and
a severity of which old and deeply rooted power stands in no need.
Extraordinary and irregular vindications of public liberty are sometimes
necessary: yet, however necessary, they are almost always followed
by some temporary abridgments of that very liberty; and every such
abridgment is a fertile and plausible theme for sarcasm and invective.
Unhappily sarcasm and invective directed against William were but too
likely to find favourable audience. Each of the two great parties had
its own reasons for being dissatisfied with him; and there were some
complaints in which both parties joined. His manners gave almost
universal offence. He was in truth far better qualified to save a nation
than to adorn a court. In the highest parts of statesmanship, he had
no equal among his contemporaries. He had formed plans not inferior in
grandeur and boldness to those of Richelieu, and had carried them into
effect with a tact and wariness worthy of Mazarin. Two countries, the
seats of civil liberty and of the Reformed Faith, had been preserved
by his wisdom and courage from extreme perils. Holland he had delivered
from foreign, and England from domestic foes. Obstacles apparently
insurmountable had been interposed between him and the ends on which
he was intent; and those obstacles his genius had turned into stepping
stones. Under his dexterous management the hereditary enemies of his
house had helped him to mount a throne; and the persecutors of his
religion had helped him to rescue his religion from persecution.
Fleets and armies, collected to withstand him, had, without a struggle,
submitted to his orders. Factions and sects, divided by mortal
antipathies, had recognised him as their common head. Without carnage,
without devastation, he had won a victory compared with which all the
victories of Gustavus and Turenne were insignificant. In a few weeks he
had changed the relative position of all the states in Europe, and
had restored the equilibrium which the preponderance of one power had
destroyed. Foreign nations did ample justice to his great qualities. In
every Continental country where Protestant congregations met, fervent
thanks were offered to God, who, from among the progeny of His servants,
Maurice, the deliverer of Germany, and William, the deliverer of
Holland, had raised up a third deliverer, the wisest and mightiest
of all. At Vienna, at Madrid, nay, at Rome, the valiant and sagacious
heretic was held in honour as the chief of the great confederacy
against the House of Bourbon; and even at Versailles the hatred which he
inspired was largely mingled with admiration.
Here he was less favourably judged. In truth, our ancestors saw him in
the worst of all lights. By the French, the Germans, and the Italians,
he was contemplated at such a distance that only what was great could be
discerned, and that small blemishes were invisible. To the Dutch he was
brought close: but he was himself a Dutchman. In his intercourse with
them he was seen to the best advantage, he was perfectly at his ease
with them; and from among them he had chosen his earliest and dearest
friends. But to the English he appeared in a most unfortunate point of
view. He was at once too near to them and too far from them. He lived
among them, so that the smallest peculiarity of temper or manner could
not escape their notice. Yet he lived apart from them, and was to the
last a foreigner in speech, tastes, and habits.
One of the chief functions of our Sovereigns had long been to preside
over the society of the capital. That function Charles the Second had
performed with immense success. His easy bow, his good stories, his
style of dancing and playing tennis, the sound of his cordial laugh,
were familiar to all London. One day he was seen among the elms of Saint
James's Park chatting with Dryden about poetry. [51] Another day his arm
was on Tom Durfey's shoulder; and his Majesty was taking a second, while
his companion sang "Phillida, Phillida," or "To horse, brave boys,
to Newmarket, to horse." [52] James, with much less vivacity and good
nature, was accessible, and, to people who did not cross him, civil.
But of this sociableness William was entirely destitute. He seldom came
forth from his closet; and, when he appeared in the public rooms, he
stood among the crowd of courtiers and ladies, stern and abstracted,
making no jest and smiling at none. His freezing look, his silence, the
dry and concise answers which he uttered when he could keep silence no
longer, disgusted noblemen and gentlemen who had been accustomed to
be slapped on the back by their royal masters, called Jack or Harry,
congratulated about race cups or rallied about actresses. The women
missed the homage due to their sex. They observed that the King spoke in
a somewhat imperious tone even to the wife to whom he owed so much, and
whom he sincerely loved and esteemed. [53] They were amused and shocked
to see him, when the Princess Anne dined with him, and when the first
green peas of the year were put on the table, devour the whole dish
without offering a spoonful to her Royal Highness; and they pronounced
that this great soldier and politician was no better than a Low Dutch
bear. [54]
One misfortune, which was imputed to him as a crime, was his bad
English. He spoke our language, but not well. His accent was foreign:
his diction was inelegant; and his vocabulary seems to have been no
larger than was necessary for the transaction of business. To the
difficulty which he felt in expressing himself, and to his consciousness
that his pronunciation was bad, must be partly ascribed the taciturnity
and the short answers which gave so much offence. Our literature he was
incapable of enjoying or of understanding. He never once, during his
whole reign, showed himself at the theatre. [55] The poets who wrote
Pindaric verses in his praise complained that their flights of sublimity
were beyond his comprehension. [56] Those who are acquainted with the
panegyrical odes of that age will perhaps be of opinion that he did not
lose much by his ignorance.
It is true that his wife did her best to supply what was wanting, and
that she was excellently qualified to be the head of the Court. She was
English by birth, and English also in her tastes and feelings. Her
face was handsome, her port majestic, her temper sweet and lively, her
manners affable and graceful. Her understanding, though very imperfectly
cultivated, was quick. There was no want of feminine wit and shrewdness
in her conversation; and her letters were so well expressed that they
deserved to be well spelt. She took much pleasure in the lighter kinds
of literature, and did something towards bringing books into fashion
among ladies of quality. The stainless purity of her private life and
the strict attention which she paid to her religious duties were the
more respectable, because she was singularly free from censoriousness,
and discouraged scandal as much as vice. In dislike of backbiting indeed
she and her husband cordially agreed; but they showed their dislike in
different and in very characteristic ways. William preserved profound
silence, and gave the talebearer a look which, as was said by a person
who had once encountered it, and who took good care never to encounter
it again, made your story go back down your throat. [57] Mary had a way
of interrupting tattle about elopements, duels, and playdebts by asking
the tattlers, very quietly yet significantly, whether they had ever read
her favourite sermon, Doctor Tillotson's on Evil Speaking. Her charities
were munificent and judicious; and, though she made no ostentatious
display of them, it was known that she retrenched from her own state in
order to relieve Protestants whom persecution had driven from France and
Ireland, and who were starving in the garrets of London. So amiable was
her conduct, that she was generally spoken of with esteem and tenderness
by the most respectable of those who disapproved of the manner in which
she had been raised to the throne, and even of those who refused
to acknowledge her as Queen. In the Jacobite lampoons of that time,
lampoons which, in virulence and malignity, far exceed any thing that
our age has produced, she was not often mentioned with severity. Indeed
she sometimes expressed her surprise at finding that libellers who
respected nothing else respected her name. God, she said, knew where
her weakness lay. She was too sensitive to abuse and calumny; He had
mercifully spared her a trial which was beyond her strength; and the
best return which she could make to Him was to discountenance all
malicious reflections on the characters of others. Assured that she
possessed her husband's entire confidence and affection, she turned the
edge of his sharp speeches sometimes by soft and sometimes by playful
answers, and employed all the influence which she derived from her many
pleasing qualities to gain the hearts of the people for him. [58]
If she had long continued to assemble round her the best society of
London, it is probable that her kindness and courtesy would have done
much to efface the unfavourable impression made by his stern and frigid
demeanour. Unhappily his physical infirmities made it impossible for him
to reside at Whitehall. The air of Westminster, mingled with the fog
of the river which in spring tides overflowed the courts of his palace,
with the smoke of seacoal from two hundred thousand chimneys, and with
the fumes of all the filth which was then suffered to accumulate in
the streets, was insupportable to him; for his lungs were weak, and his
sense of smell exquisitely keen. His constitutional asthma made rapid
progress. His physicians pronounced it impossible that he could live
to the end of the year. His face was so ghastly that he could hardly be
recognised. Those who had to transact business with him were shocked to
hear him gasping for breath, and coughing till the tears ran down his
cheeks. [59] His mind, strong as it was, sympathized with his body. His
judgment was indeed as clear as ever. But there was, during some
months, a perceptible relaxation of that energy by which he had been
distinguished. Even his Dutch friends whispered that he was not the man
that he had been at the Hague. [60] It was absolutely necessary that he
should quit London. He accordingly took up his residence in the purer
air of Hampton Court. That mansion, begun by the magnificent Wolsey, was
a fine specimen of the architecture which flourished in England under
the first Tudors; but the apartments were not, according to the notions
of the seventeenth century, well fitted for purposes of state. Our
princes therefore had, since the Restoration, repaired thither seldom,
and only when they wished to live for a time in retirement. As William
purposed to make the deserted edifice his chief palace, it was necessary
for him to build and to plant; nor was the necessity disagreeable to
him. For he had, like most of his countrymen, a pleasure in decorating
a country house; and next to hunting, though at a great interval, his
favourite amusements were architecture and gardening. He had already
created on a sandy heath in Guelders a paradise, which attracted
multitudes of the curious from Holland and Westphalia. Mary had laid the
first stone of the house. Bentinck had superintended the digging of the
fishponds. There were cascades and grottoes, a spacious orangery, and
an aviary which furnished Hondekoeter with numerous specimens of
manycoloured plumage. [61] The King, in his splendid banishment, pined
for this favourite seat, and found some consolation in creating another
Loo on the banks of the Thames. Soon a wide extent of ground was laid
out in formal walks and parterres. Much idle ingenuity was employed in
forming that intricate labyrinth of verdure which has puzzled and amused
five generations of holiday visitors from London. Limes thirty years
old were transplanted from neighbouring woods to shade the alleys.
Artificial fountains spouted among the flower beds. A new court, not
designed with the purest taste, but stately, spacious, and commodious,
rose under the direction of Wren. The wainscots were adorned with the
rich and delicate carvings of Gibbons. The staircases were in a blaze
with the glaring frescoes of Verrio. In every corner of the mansion
appeared a profusion of gewgaws, not yet familiar to English eyes. Mary
had acquired at the Hague a taste for the porcelain of China, and amused
herself by forming at Hampton a vast collection of hideous images, and
of vases on which houses, trees, bridges, and mandarins were depicted
in outrageous defiance of all the laws of perspective. The fashion, a
frivolous and inelegant fashion it must be owned, which was thus set
by the amiable Queen, spread fast and wide. In a few years almost
every great house in the kingdom contained a museum of these grotesque
baubles. Even statesmen and generals were not ashamed to be renowned as
judges of teapots and dragons; and satirists long continued to repeat
that a fine lady valued her mottled green pottery quite as much as she
valued her monkey, and much more than she valued her husband. [62] But
the new palace was embellished with works of art of a very different
kind. A gallery was erected for the cartoons of Raphael. Those great
pictures, then and still the finest on our side of the Alps, had been
preserved by Cromwell from the fate which befell most of the other
masterpieces in the collection of Charles the First, but had been
suffered to lie during many years nailed up in deal boxes. They were
now brought forth from obscurity to be contemplated by artists with
admiration and despair. The expense of the works at Hampton was a
subject of bitter complaint to many Tories, who had very gently blamed
the boundless profusion with which Charles the Second had built and
rebuilt, furnished and refurnished, the dwelling of the Duchess of
Portsmouth. [63] The expense, however, was not the chief cause of the
discontent which William's change of residence excited. There was no
longer a Court at Westminster. Whitehall, once the daily resort of the
noble and the powerful, the beautiful and the gay, the place to which
fops came to show their new peruques, men of gallantry to exchange
glances with fine ladies, politicians to push their fortunes, loungers
to hear the news, country gentlemen to see the royal family, was now,
in the busiest season of the year, when London was full, when Parliament
was sitting, left desolate. A solitary sentinel paced the grassgrown
pavement before that door which had once been too narrow for the
opposite streams of entering and departing courtiers. The services which
the metropolis had rendered to the King were great and recent; and it
was thought that he might have requited those services better than by
treating it as Lewis had treated Paris. Halifax ventured to hint this,
but was silenced by a few words which admitted of no reply. "Do you
wish," said William peevishly, "to see me dead?" [64]
In a short time it was found that Hampton Court was too far from the
Houses of Lords and Commons, and from the public offices, to be the
ordinary abode of the Sovereign. Instead, however, of returning to
Whitehall, William determined to have another dwelling, near enough to
his capital for the transaction of business, but not near enough to be
within that atmosphere in which he could not pass a night without risk
of suffocation. At one time he thought of Holland House, the villa of
the noble family of Rich; and he actually resided there some weeks.
[65] But he at length fixed his choice on Kensington House, the suburban
residence of the Earl of Nottingham. The purchase was made for eighteen
thousand guineas, and was followed by more building, more planting,
more expense, and more discontent. [66] At present Kensington House is
considered as a part of London. It was then a rural mansion, and could
not, in those days of highwaymen and scourers, of roads deep in mire and
nights without lamps, be the rallying point of fashionable society.
It was well known that the King, who treated the English nobility and
gentry so ungraciously, could, in a small circle of his own countrymen,
be easy, friendly, even jovial, could pour out his feelings garrulously,
could fill his glass, perhaps too often; and this was, in the view of
our forefathers, an aggravation of his offences. Yet our forefathers
should have had the sense and the justice to acknowledge that the
patriotism which they considered as a virtue in themselves, could not be
a fault in him. It was unjust to blame him for not at once transferring
to our island the love which he bore to the country of his birth. If, in
essentials, he did his duty towards England, he might well be suffered
to feel at heart an affectionate preference for Holland. Nor is it
a reproach to him that he did not, in this season of his greatness,
discard companions who had played with him in his childhood, who had
stood by him firmly through all the vicissitudes of his youth and
manhood, who had, in defiance of the most loathsome and deadly forms of
infection, kept watch by his sick-bed, who had, in the thickest of the
battle, thrust themselves between him and the French swords, and whose
attachment was, not to the Stadtholder or to the King, but to plain
William of Nassau. It may be added that his old friends could not but
rise in his estimation by comparison with his new courtiers. To the
end of his life all his Dutch comrades, without exception, continued
to deserve his confidence. They could be out of humour with him, it is
true; and, when out of humour, they could be sullen and rude; but
never did they, even when most angry and unreasonable, fail to keep
his secrets and to watch over his interests with gentlemanlike and
soldierlike fidelity. Among his English councillors such fidelity was
rare. [67] It is painful, but it is no more than just, to acknowledge
that he had but too good reason for thinking meanly of our national
character. That character was indeed, in essentials, what it has always
been. Veracity, uprightness, and manly boldness were then, as now,
qualities eminently English. But those qualities, though widely diffused
among the great body of the people, were seldom to be found in the
class with which William was best acquainted. The standard of honour and
virtue among our public men was, during his reign, at the very lowest
point. His predecessors had bequeathed to him a court foul with all the
vices of the Restoration, a court swarming with sycophants, who
were ready, on the first turn of fortune, to abandon him as they had
abandoned his uncle. Here and there, lost in that ignoble crowd, was to
be found a man of true integrity and public spirit. Yet even such a
man could not long live in such society without much risk that the
strictness of his principles would be relaxed, and the delicacy of
his sense of right and wrong impaired. It was unjust to blame a prince
surrounded by flatterers and traitors for wishing to keep near him four
or five servants whom he knew by proof to be faithful even to death.
Nor was this the only instance in which our ancestors were unjust to
him. They had expected that, as soon as so distinguished a soldier and
statesman was placed at the head of affairs, he would give some signal
proof, they scarcely knew what, of genius and vigour. Unhappily, during
the first months of his reign, almost every thing went wrong. His
subjects, bitterly disappointed, threw the blame on him, and began to
doubt whether he merited that reputation which he had won at his first
entrance into public life, and which the splendid success of his last
great enterprise had raised to the highest point. Had they been in
a temper to judge fairly, they would have perceived that for the
maladministration of which they with good reason complained he was not
responsible. He could as yet work only with the machinery which he had
found; and the machinery which he had found was all rust and rottenness.
From the time of the Restoration to the time of the Revolution, neglect
and fraud had been almost constantly impairing the efficiency of every
department of the government. Honours and public trusts, peerages,
baronetcies, regiments, frigates, embassies, governments,
commissionerships, leases of crown lands, contracts for clothing, for
provisions, for ammunition, pardons for murder, for robbery, for arson,
were sold at Whitehall scarcely less openly than asparagus at Covent
Garden or herrings at Billingsgate. Brokers had been incessantly plying
for custom in the purlieus of the court; and of these brokers the most
successful had been, in the days of Charles, the harlots, and in the
days of James, the priests. From the palace which was the chief seat of
this pestilence the taint had diffused itself through every office
and through every rank in every office, and had every where produced
feebleness and disorganization. So rapid was the progress of the decay
that, within eight years after the time when Oliver had been the umpire
of Europe, the roar of the guns of De Ruyter was heard in the Tower
of London. The vices which had brought that great humiliation on the
country had ever since been rooting themselves deeper and spreading
themselves wider. James had, to do him justice, corrected a few of the
gross abuses which disgraced the naval administration. Yet the naval
administration, in spite of his attempts to reform it, moved the
contempt of men who were acquainted with the dockyards of France and
Holland. The military administration was still worse. The courtiers
took bribes from the colonels; the colonels cheated the soldiers: the
commissaries sent in long bills for what had never been furnished: the
keepers of the arsenals sold the public stores and pocketed the price.
But these evils, though they had sprung into existence and grown
to maturity under the government of Charles and James, first made
themselves severely felt under the government of William. For Charles
and James were content to be the vassals and pensioners of a powerful
and ambitious neighbour: they submitted to his ascendency: they shunned
with pusillanimous caution whatever could give him offence; and thus,
at the cost of the independence and dignity of that ancient and glorious
crown which they unworthily wore, they avoided a conflict which would
instantly have shown how helpless, under their misrule, their once
formidable kingdom had become. Their ignominious policy it was neither
in William's power nor in his nature to follow. It was only by arms that
the liberty and religion of England could be protected against the most
formidable enemy that had threatened our island since the Hebrides were
strown with the wrecks of the Armada. The body politic, which, while it
remained in repose, had presented a superficial appearance of health
and vigour, was now under the necessity of straining every nerve in a
wrestle for life or death, and was immediately found to be unequal to
the exertion. The first efforts showed an utter relaxation of fibre, an
utter want of training. Those efforts were, with scarcely an exception,
failures; and every failure was popularly imputed, not to the rulers
whose mismanagement had produced the infirmities of the state, but to
the ruler in whose time the infirmities of the state became visible.
William might indeed, if he had been as absolute as Lewis, have used
such sharp remedies as would speedily have restored to the English
administration that firm tone which had been wanting since the death of
Oliver. But the instantaneous reform of inveterate abuses was a task far
beyond the powers of a prince strictly restrained by law, and restrained
still more strictly by the difficulties of his situation. [68]
Some of the most serious difficulties of his situation were caused by
the conduct of the ministers on whom, new as he was to the details of
English affairs, he was forced to rely for information about men and
things. There was indeed no want of ability among his chief counsellors:
but one half of their ability was employed in counteracting the other
half. Between the Lord President and the Lord Privy Seal there was an
inveterate enmity. [69] It had begun twelve years before when Danby was
Lord High Treasurer, a persecutor of nonconformists, an uncompromising
defender of prerogative, and when Halifax was rising to distinction as
one of the most eloquent leaders of the country party. In the reign of
James, the two statesmen had found themselves in opposition together;
and their common hostility to France and to Rome, to the High Commission
and to the dispensing power, had produced an apparent reconciliation;
but as soon as they were in office together the old antipathy revived.
The hatred which the Whig party felt towards them both ought, it should
seem, to have produced a close alliance between them: but in fact each
of them saw with complacency the danger which threatened the other.
Danby exerted himself to rally round him a strong phalanx of Tories.
Under the plea of ill health, he withdrew from court, seldom came to the
Council over which it was his duty to preside, passed much time in
the country, and took scarcely any part in public affairs except by
grumbling and sneering at all the acts of the government, and by doing
jobs and getting places for his personal retainers. [70] In consequence
of this defection, Halifax became prime minister, as far any minister
could, in that reign, be called prime minister. An immense load of
business fell on him; and that load he was unable to sustain. In wit and
eloquence, in amplitude of comprehension and subtlety of disquisition,
he had no equal among the statesmen of his time. But that very
fertility, that very acuteness, which gave a singular charm to his
conversation, to his oratory and to his writings, unfitted him for the
work of promptly deciding practical questions. He was slow from very
quickness. For he saw so many arguments for and against every possible
course that he was longer in making up his mind than a dull man would
have been. Instead of acquiescing in his first thoughts, he replied
on himself, rejoined on himself, and surrejoined on himself. Those who
heard him talk owned that he talked like an angel: but too often, when
he had exhausted all that could be said, and came to act, the time for
action was over.
Meanwhile the two Secretaries of State were constantly labouring to draw
their master in diametrically opposite directions. Every scheme,
every person, recommended by one of them was reprobated by the other.
Nottingham was never weary of repeating that the old Roundhead party,
the party which had taken the life of Charles the First and had plotted
against the life of Charles the Second, was in principle republican,
and that the Tories were the only true friends of monarchy. Shrewsbury
replied that the Tories might be friends of monarchy, but that they
regarded James as their monarch. Nottingham was always bringing to the
closet intelligence of the wild daydreams in which a few old eaters of
calf's head, the remains of the once formidable party of Bradshaw and
Ireton, still indulged at taverns in the city. Shrewsbury produced
ferocious lampoons which the Jacobites dropped every day in the
coffeehouses. "Every Whig," said the Tory Secretary, "is an enemy of
your Majesty's prerogative." "Every Tory," said the Whig Secretary, "is
an enemy of your Majesty's title." [71]