He had long been communicating through various channels with some

members of the confederacy, and trying to induce them to separate

themselves from the rest. But he had as yet made no overture tending

to a general pacification. For he knew that there could be no general

pacification unless he was prepared to abandon the cause of James, and

to acknowledge the Prince and Princess of Orange as King and Queen of

England. This was in truth the point on which every thing turned. What

should be done with those great fortresses which Lewis had unjustly

seized and annexed to his empire in time of peace, Luxemburg which

overawed the Moselle, and Strasburg which domineered over the Upper

Rhine; what should be done with the places which he had recently won in

open war, Philipsburg, Mons and Namur, Huy and Charleroy; what barrier

should be given to the States General; on what terms Lorraine should be

restored to its hereditary Dukes; these were assuredly not unimportant

questions. But the all important question was whether England was to

be, as she had been under James, a dependency of France, or, as she

was under William and Mary, a power of the first rank. If Lewis really

wished for peace, he must bring himself to recognise the Sovereigns

whom he had so often designated as usurpers. Could he bring himself to

recognise them? His superstition, his pride, his regard for the unhappy

exiles who were pining at Saint Germains, his personal dislike of

the indefatigable and unconquerable adversary who had been constantly

crossing his path during twenty years, were on one side; his interests

and those of his people were on the other. He must have been sensible

that it was not in his power to subjugate the English, that he must at

last leave them to choose their government for themselves, and that what

he must do at last it would be best to do soon. Yet he could not at once

make up his mind to what was so disagreeable to him. He however opened

a negotiation with the States General through the intervention of Sweden

and Denmark, and sent a confidential emissary to confer in secret at

Brussels with Dykvelt, who possessed the entire confidence of William.

There was much discussion about matters of secondary importance; but

the great question remained unsettled. The French agent used, in private

conversation, expressions plainly implying that the government which he

represented was prepared to recognise William and Mary; but no formal

assurance could be obtained from him. Just at the same time the King

of Denmark informed the allies that he was endeavouring to prevail on

France not to insist on the restoration of James as an indispensable

condition of peace, but did not say that his endeavours had as yet

been successful. Meanwhile Avaux, who was now Ambassador at Stockholm,

informed the King of Sweden, that, as the dignity of all crowned heads

had been outraged in the person of James, the Most Christian King felt

assured that not only neutral powers, but even the Emperor, would try to

find some expedient which might remove so grave a cause of quarrel. The

expedient at which Avaux hinted doubtless was that James should waive

his rights, and that the Prince of Wales should be sent to England, bred

a Protestant, adopted by William and Mary, and declared their heir.

To such an arrangement William would probably have had no personal

objection. But we may be assured that he never would have consented to

make it a condition of peace with France. Who should reign in England

was a question to be decided by England alone. [469]

It might well be suspected that a negotiation conducted in this manner

was merely meant to divide the confederates. William understood the

whole importance of the conjuncture. He had not, it may be, the eye of a

great captain for all the turns of a battle. But he had, in the highest

perfection, the eye of a great statesman for all the turns of a war.

That France had at length made overtures to him was a sufficient proof

that she felt herself spent and sinking. That those overtures were made

with extreme reluctance and hesitation proved that she had not yet come

to a temper in which it was possible to have peace with her on fair

terms. He saw that the enemy was beginning to give ground, and that this

was the time to assume the offensive, to push forward, to bring up every

reserve. But whether the opportunity should be seized or lost it did not

belong to him to decide. The King of France might levy troops and exact

taxes without any limit save that which the laws of nature impose on

despotism. But the King of England could do nothing without the support

of the House of Commons; and the House of Commons, though it had

hitherto supported him zealously and liberally, was not a body on

which he could rely. It had indeed got into a state which perplexed

and alarmed all the most sagacious politicians of that age. There

was something appalling in the union of such boundless power and such

boundless caprice. The fate of the whole civilised world depended on

the votes of the representatives of the English people; and there was

no public man who could venture to say with confidence what those

representatives might not be induced to vote within twenty-four hours.

[470] William painfully felt that it was scarcely possible for a prince

dependent on an assembly so violent at one time, so languid at another,

to effect any thing great. Indeed, though no sovereign did so much to

secure and to extend the power of the House of Commons, no sovereign

loved the House of Commons less. Nor is this strange; for he saw that

House at the very worst. He saw it when it had just acquired the power

and had not yet acquired the gravity of a senate. In his letters to

Heinsius he perpetually complains of the endless talking, the factious

squabbling, the inconstancy, the dilatoriness, of the body which

his situation made it necessary for him to treat with deference. His

complaints were by no means unfounded; but he had not discovered either

the cause or the cure of the evil.

The truth was that the change which the Revolution had made in the

situation of the House of Commons had made another change necessary;

and that other change had not yet taken place. There was parliamentary

government; but there was no Ministry; and, without a Ministry, the

working of a parliamentary government, such as ours, must always be

unsteady and unsafe.

It is essential to our liberties that the House of Commons should

exercise a control over all the departments of the executive

administration. And yet it is evident that a crowd of five or six

hundred people, even if they were intellectually much above the average

of the members of the best Parliament, even if every one of them were

a Burleigh, or a Sully, would be unfit for executive functions. It has

been truly said that every large collection of human beings, however

well educated, has a strong tendency to become a mob; and a country of

which the Supreme Executive Council is a mob is surely in a perilous

situation.

Happily a way has been found out in which the House of Commons can

exercise a paramount influence over the executive government, without

assuming functions such as can never be well discharged by a body so

numerous and so variously composed. An institution which did not exist

in the times, of the Plantagenets, of the Tudors or of the Stuarts, an

institution not known to the law, an institution not mentioned in any

statute, an institution of which such writers as De Lolme and Blackstone

take no notice, began to exist a few years after the Revolution, grew

rapidly into importance, became firmly established, and is now almost

as essential a part of our polity as the Parliament itself. This

institution is the Ministry.

The Ministry is, in fact, a committee of leading members of the two

Houses. It is nominated by the Crown; but it consists exclusively of

statesmen whose opinions on the pressing questions of the time agree,

in the main, with the opinions of the majority of the House of

Commons. Among the members of this committee are distributed the great

departments of the administration. Each Minister conducts the ordinary

business of his own office without reference to his colleagues. But the

most important business of every office, and especially such business

as is likely to be the subject of discussion in Parliament, is brought

under the consideration of the whole Ministry. In Parliament the

Ministers are bound to act as one man on all questions relating to

the executive government. If one of them dissents from the rest on a

question too important to admit of compromise, it is his duty to retire.

While the Ministers retain the confidence of the parliamentary majority,

that majority supports them against opposition, and rejects every motion

which reflects on them or is likely to embarrass them. If they forfeit

that confidence, if the parliamentary majority is dissatisfied with

the way in which patronage is distributed, with the way in which the

prerogative of mercy is used, with the conduct of foreign affairs, with

the conduct of a war, the remedy is simple. It is not necessary that the

Commons should take on themselves the business of administration, that

they should request the Crown to make this man a bishop and that man

a judge, to pardon one criminal and to execute another, to negotiate a

treaty on a particular basis or to send an expedition to a particular

place. They have merely to declare that they have ceased to trust the

Ministry, and to ask for a Ministry which they can trust.

It is by means of Ministries thus constituted, and thus changed, that

the English government has long been conducted in general conformity

with the deliberate sense of the House of Commons, and yet has been

wonderfully free from the vices which are characteristic of governments

administered by large, tumultuous and divided assemblies. A few

distinguished persons, agreeing in their general opinions, are the

confidential advisers at once of the Sovereign and of the Estates of the

Realm. In the closet they speak with the authority of men who stand high

in the estimation of the representatives of the people. In Parliament

they speak with the authority of men versed in great affairs and

acquainted with all the secrets of the State. Thus the Cabinet has

something of the popular character of a representative body; and the

representative body has something of the gravity of a cabinet.

Sometimes the state of parties is such that no set of men who can be

brought together possesses the full confidence and steady support of a

majority of the House of Commons. When this is the case, there must be

a weak Ministry; and there will probably be a rapid succession of weak

Ministries. At such times the House of Commons never fails to get into

a state which no person friendly to representative government can

contemplate without uneasiness, into a state which may enable us to form

some faint notion of the state of that House during the earlier years

of the reign of William. The notion is indeed but faint; for the weakest

Ministry has great power as a regulator of parliamentary proceedings;

and in the earlier years of the reign of William there was no Ministry

at all.

No writer has yet attempted to trace the progress of this institution,

an institution indispensable to the harmonious working of our other

institutions. The first Ministry was the work, partly of mere chance,

and partly of wisdom, not however of that highest wisdom which is

conversant with great principles of political philosophy, but of that

lower wisdom which meets daily exigencies by daily expedients. Neither

William nor the most enlightened of his advisers fully understood the

nature and importance of that noiseless revolution,--for it was no

less,--which began about the close of 1693, and was completed about the

close of 1696. But every body could perceive that, at the close of

1693, the chief offices in the government were distributed not unequally

between the two great parties, that the men who held those offices were

perpetually caballing against each other, haranguing against each

other, moving votes of censure on each other, exhibiting articles of

impeachment against each other, and that the temper of the House of

Commons was wild, ungovernable and uncertain. Everybody could perceive

that at the close of 1696, all the principal servants of the Crown were

Whigs, closely bound together by public and private ties, and prompt to

defend one another against every attack, and that the majority of the

House of Commons was arrayed in good order under those leaders, and had

learned to move, like one man, at the word of command. The history

of the period of transition and of the steps by which the change was

effected is in a high degree curious and interesting.

The statesman who had the chief share in forming the first English

Ministry had once been but too well known, but had long hidden himself

from the public gaze, and had but recently emerged from the obscurity

in which it had been expected that he would pass the remains of an

ignominious and disastrous life. During that period of general terror

and confusion which followed the flight of James, Sunderland had

disappeared. It was high time; for of all the agents of the fallen

government he was, with the single exception of Jeffreys, the most

odious to the nation. Few knew that Sunderland's voice had in secret

been given against the spoliation of Magdalene College and the

prosecution of the Bishops; but all knew that he had signed numerous

instruments dispensing with statutes, that he had sate in the High

Commission, that he had turned or pretended to turn Papist, that he had,

a few days after his apostasy, appeared in Westminster Hall as a witness

against the oppressed fathers of the Church. He had indeed atoned for

many crimes by one crime baser than all the rest. As soon as he had

reason to believe that the day of deliverance and retribution was at

hand, he had, by a most dexterous and seasonable treason, earned his

pardon. During the three months which preceded the arrival of the Dutch

armament in Torbay, he had rendered to the cause of liberty and of the

Protestant religion services of which it is difficult to overrate either

the wickedness or the utility. To him chiefly it was owing that, at the

most critical moment in our history, a French army was not menacing the

Batavian frontier and a French fleet hovering about the English coast.

William could not, without staining his own honour, refuse to protect

one whom he had not scrupled to employ. Yet it was no easy task even for

William to save that guilty head from the first outbreak of public fury.

For even those extreme politicians of both sides who agreed in nothing

else agreed in calling for vengeance on the renegade. The Whigs hated

him as the vilest of the slaves by whom the late government had been

served, and the Jacobites as the vilest of the traitors by whom it had

been overthrown. Had he remained in England, he would probably have died

by the hand of the executioner, if indeed the executioner had not

been anticipated by the populace. But in Holland a political refugee,

favoured by the Stadtholder, might hope to live unmolested. To Holland

Sunderland fled, disguised, it is said, as a woman; and his wife

accompanied him. At Rotterdam, a town devoted to the House of Orange, he

thought himself secure. But the magistrates were not in all the secrets

of the Prince, and were assured by some busy Englishmen that His

Highness would be delighted to hear of the arrest of the Popish dog, the

Judas, whose appearance on Tower Hill was impatiently expected by all

London. Sunderland was thrown into prison, and remained there till

an order for his release arrived from Whitehall. He then proceeded to

Amsterdam, and there changed his religion again. His second apostasy

edified his wife as much as his first apostasy had edified his master.

The Countess wrote to assure her pious friends in England that her poor

dear lord's heart had at last been really touched by divine grace, and

that, in spite of all her afflictions, she was comforted by seeing him

so true a convert. We may, however, without any violation of Christian

charity, suspect that he was still the same false, callous, Sunderland

who, a few months before, had made Bonrepaux shudder by denying the

existence of a God, and had, at the same time, won the heart of James

by pretending to believe in transubstantiation. In a short time the

banished man put forth an apology for his conduct. This apology, when

examined, will be found to amount merely to a confession that he had

committed one series of crimes in order to gain James's favour, and

another series in order to avoid being involved in James's ruin. The

writer concluded by announcing his intention to pass all the rest of his

life in penitence and prayer. He soon retired from Amsterdam to Utrecht,

and at Utrecht made himself conspicuous by his regular and devout

attendance on the ministrations of Huguenot preachers. If his letters

and those of his wife were to be trusted, he had done for ever with

ambition. He longed indeed to be permitted to return from exile, not

that he might again enjoy and dispense the favours of the Crown, not

that his antechambers might again be filled by the daily swarm of

suitors, but that he might see again the turf, the trees and the family

pictures of his country seat. His only wish was to be suffered to end

his troubled life at Althorpe; and he would be content to forfeit his

head if ever he went beyond the palings of his park. [471]

While the House of Commons, which had been elected during the vacancy of

the throne, was busily engaged in the work of proscription, he could not

venture to show himself in England. But when that assembly had ceased to

exist, he thought himself safe. He returned a few days after the Act of

Grace had been laid on the table of the Lords. From the benefit of that

Act he was by name excluded; but he well knew that he had now nothing to

fear. He went privately to Kensington, was admitted into the closet,

had an audience which lasted two hours, and then retired to his country

house. [472]

During many months be led a secluded life, and had no residence in

London. Once in the spring of 1692, to the great astonishment of the

public, he showed his face in the circle at Court, and was graciously

received. [473] He seems to have been afraid that he might, on his

reappearance in Parliament, receive some marked affront. He therefore,

very prudently, stole down to Westminster, in the dead time of the year,

on a day to which the Houses stood adjourned by the royal command, and

on which they met merely for the purpose of adjourning again. Sunderland

had just time to present himself, to take the oaths, to sign the

declaration against transubstantiation, and to resume his seat. None of

the few peers who were present had an opportunity of making any remark.

[474] It was not till the year 1692 that he began to attend regularly.

He was silent; but silent he had always been in large assemblies, even

when he was at the zenith of power. His talents were not those of a

public speaker. The art in which he surpassed all men was the art of

whispering. His tact, his quick eye for the foibles of individuals,

his caressing manners, his power of insinuation, and, above all, his

apparent frankness, made him irresistible in private conversation.

By means of these qualities he had governed James, and now aspired to

govern William.

To govern William, indeed, was not easy. But Sunderland succeeded

in obtaining such a measure of favour and influence as excited much

surprise and some indignation. In truth, scarcely any mind was strong

enough to resist the witchery of his talk and of his manners. Every man

is prone to believe in the gratitude and attachment even of the most

worthless persons on whom he has conferred great benefits. It can

therefore hardly be thought strange that the most skilful of all

flatterers should have been heard with favour, when he, with every

outward sign of strong emotion, implored permission to dedicate all

his faculties to the service of the generous protector to whom he owed

property, liberty, life. It is not necessary, however, to suppose that

the King was deceived. He may have thought, with good reason, that,

though little confidence could be placed in Sunderland's professions,

much confidence might be placed in Sunderland's situation; and the truth

is that Sunderland proved, on the whole, a more faithful servant than a

much less depraved man might have been. He did indeed make, in profound

secresy, some timid overtures towards a reconciliation with James.

But it may be confidently affirmed that, even had those overtures

been graciously received,--and they appear to have been received very

ungraciously,--the twice turned renegade would never have rendered any

real service to the Jacobite cause. He well knew that he had done that

which at Saint Germains must be regarded as inexpiable. It was not

merely that he had been treacherous and ungrateful. Marlborough had been

as treacherous and ungrateful; and Marlborough had been pardoned.

But Marlborough had not been guilty of the impious hypocrisy of

counterfeiting the signs of conversion. Marlborough had not pretended

to be convinced by the arguments of the Jesuits, to be touched by divine

grace, to pine for union with the only true Church. Marlborough had not,

when Popery was in the ascendant, crossed himself, shrived himself,

done penance, taken the communion in one kind, and, as soon as a turn

of fortune came, apostatized back again, and proclaimed to all the world

that, when he knelt at the confessional and received the host, he was

merely laughing at the King and the priests. The crime of Sunderland

was one which could never be forgiven by James; and a crime which could

never be forgiven by James was, in some sense, a recommendation to

William. The Court, nay, the Council, was full of men who might hope

to prosper if the banished King were restored. But Sunderland had left

himself no retreat. He had broken down all the bridges behind him. He

had been so false to one side that he must of necessity be true to

the other. That he was in the main true to the government which now

protected him there is no reason to doubt; and, being true, he could not

but be useful. He was, in some respects, eminently qualified to be at

that time an adviser of the Crown. He had exactly the talents and the

knowledge which William wanted. The two together would have made up a

consummate statesman. The master was capable of forming and executing

large designs, but was negligent of those small arts in which the

servant excelled. The master saw farther off than other men; but what

was near no man saw so clearly as the servant. The master, though

profoundly versed in the politics of the great community of nations,

never thoroughly understood the politics of his own kingdom. The servant

was perfectly well informed as to the temper and the organization of the

English factions, and as to the strong and weak parts of the character

of every Englishman of note.

Early in 1693, it was rumoured that Sunderland was consulted on all

important questions relating to the internal administration of the

realm; and the rumour became stronger when it was known that he had come

up to London in the autumn before the meeting of Parliament and that he

had taken a large mansion near Whitehall. The coffeehouse politicians

were confident that he was about to hold some high office. As yet,

however, he had the wisdom to be content with the reality of power, and

to leave the show to others. [475]

His opinion was that, as long as the King tried to balance the two great

parties against each other, and to divide his favour equally between

them, both would think themselves ill used, and neither would lend to

the government that hearty and steady support which was now greatly

needed. His Majesty must make up his mind to give a marked preference

to one or the other; and there were three weighty reasons for giving the

preference to the Whigs.

In the first place, the Whigs were on principle attached to the reigning

dynasty. In their view the Revolution had been, not merely necessary,

not merely justifiable, but happy and glorious. It had been the triumph

of their political theory. When they swore allegiance to William, they

swore without scruple or reservation; and they were so far from having

any doubt about his title that they thought it the best of all titles.

The Tories, on the other hand, very generally disapproved of that vote

of the Convention which had placed him on the throne. Some of them were

at heart Jacobites, and had taken the oath of allegiance to him only

that they might be able to injure him. Others, though they thought

it their duty to obey him as King in fact, denied that he was King by

right, and, if they were loyal to him, were loyal without enthusiasm.

There could, therefore, be little doubt on which of the two parties it

would be safer for him to rely.

In the second place, as to the particular matter on which his heart

was at present set, the Whigs were, as a body, prepared to support him

strenuously, and the Tories were, as a body, inclined to thwart him. The

minds of men were at this time much occupied by the question, in what

way the war ought to be carried on. To that question the two parties

returned very different answers. An opinion had during many months been

growing among the Tories that the policy of England ought to be strictly

insular; that she ought to leave the defence of Flanders and the Rhine

to the States General, the House of Austria and the Princes of the

Empire; that she ought to carry on hostilities with vigour by sea, but

to keep up only such an army as might, with the help of the militia, be

sufficient to repel an invasion. It was plain that, if this system

were adopted, there might be an immediate reduction of the taxes which

pressed most heavily on the nation. But the Whigs maintained that

this relief would be dearly purchased. Many thousands of brave English

soldiers were now in Flanders. Yet the allies had not been able to

prevent the French from taking Mons in 1691, Namur in 1692, Charleroy in

1693. If the English troops were withdrawn, it was certain that Ostend,

Ghent, Liege, Brussels would fall. The German Princes would hasten to

make peace, each for himself. The Spanish Netherlands would probably be

annexed to the French monarchy. The United Provinces would be again in

as great peril as in 1672, and would accept whatever terms Lewis might

be pleased to dictate. In a few months, he would be at liberty to put

forth his whole strength against our island. Then would come a struggle

for life and death. It might well be hoped that we should be able to

defend our soil even against such a general and such an army as had

won the battle of Landen. But the fight must be long and hard. How many

fertile counties would be turned into deserts, how many flourishing

towns would be laid in ashes, before the invaders were destroyed or

driven out! One triumphant campaign in Kent and Middlesex would do more

to impoverish the nation than ten disastrous campaigns in Brabant. It is

remarkable that this dispute between the two great factions was, during

seventy years, regularly revived as often as our country was at war with

France. That England ought never to attempt great military operations on

the Continent continued to be a fundamental article of the creed of the

Tories till the French Revolution produced a complete change in their

feelings. [476] As the chief object of William was to open the

campaign of 1694 in Flanders with an immense display of force, it was

sufficiently clear to whom he must look for assistance.

In the third place, the Whigs were the stronger party in Parliament. The

general election of 1690, indeed, had not been favourable to them.

They had been, for a time, a minority; but they had ever since been

constantly gaining ground; they were now in number a full half of the

Lower House; and their effective strength was more than proportioned

to their number; for in energy, alertness and discipline, they were

decidedly superior to their opponents. Their organization was not indeed

so perfect as it afterwards became; but they had already begun to

look for guidance to a small knot of distinguished men, which was long

afterwards widely known by the name of the junto. There is, perhaps, no

parallel in history, ancient or modern, to the authority exercised by

this council, during twenty troubled years, over the Whig body. The men

who acquired that authority in the days of William and Mary continued

to possess it, without interruption, in office and out of office, till

George the First was on the throne.

One of these men was Russell. Of his shameful dealings with the Court of

Saint Germains we possess proofs which leave no room for doubt. But no

such proofs were laid before the world till he had been many years dead.

If rumours of his guilt got abroad, they were vague and improbable; they

rested on no evidence; they could be traced to no trustworthy author;

and they might well be regarded by his contemporaries as Jacobite

calumnies. What was quite certain was that he sprang from an illustrious

house, which had done and suffered great things for liberty and for the

Protestant religion, that he had signed the invitation of the thirtieth

of June, that he had landed with the Deliverer at Torbay, that he had in

Parliament, on all occasions, spoken and voted as a zealous Whig,

that he had won a great victory, that he had saved his country from an

invasion, and that, since he had left the Admiralty, every thing had

gone wrong. We cannot therefore wonder that his influence over his party

should have been considerable.

But the greatest man among the members of the junto, and, in some

respects, the greatest man of that age, was the Lord Keeper Somers. He

was equally eminent as a jurist and as a politician, as an orator and as

a writer. His speeches have perished; but his State papers remain, and

are models of terse, luminous, and dignified eloquence. He had left

a great reputation in the House of Commons, where he had, during four

years, been always heard with delight; and the Whig members still looked

up to him as their leader, and still held their meetings under his roof.

In the great place to which he had recently been promoted, he had so

borne himself that, after a very few months, even faction and envy had

ceased to murmur at his elevation. In truth, he united all the

qualities of a great judge, an intellect comprehensive, quick and acute,

diligence, integrity, patience, suavity. In council, the calm wisdom

which he possessed in a measure rarely found among men of parts so quick

and of opinions so decided as his, acquired for him the authority of

an oracle. The superiority of his powers appeared not less clearly in

private circles. The charm of his conversation was heightened by the

frankness with which he poured out his thoughts. [477] His good temper

and his good breeding never failed. His gesture, his look, his tones

were expressive of benevolence. His humanity was the more remarkable,

because he had received from nature a body such as is generally found

united with a peevish and irritable mind. His life was one long malady;

his nerves were weak; his complexion was livid; his face was prematurely

wrinkled. Yet his enemies could not pretend that he had ever once,

during a long and troubled public life, been goaded, even by sudden

provocation, into vehemence inconsistent with the mild dignity of his

character. All that was left to them was to assert that his disposition

was very far from being so gentle as the world believed, that he was

really prone to the angry passions, and that sometimes, while his voice

was soft, and his words kind and courteous, his delicate frame was

almost convulsed by suppressed emotion. It will perhaps be thought that

this reproach is the highest of all eulogies.

The most accomplished men of those times have told us that there was

scarcely any subject on which Somers was not competent to instruct and

to delight. He had never travelled; and, in that age, an Englishman who

had not travelled was generally thought incompetent to give an opinion

on works of art. But connoisseurs familiar with the masterpieces of the

Vatican and of the Florentine gallery allowed that the taste of Somers

in painting and sculpture was exquisite. Philology was one of his

favourite pursuits. He had traversed the whole vast range of polite

literature, ancient and modern. He was at once a munificent and severely

judicious patron of genius and learning. Locke owed opulence to Somers.

By Somers Addison was drawn forth from a cell in a college. In distant

countries the name of Somers was mentioned with respect and gratitude

by great scholars and poets who had never seen his face. He was the

benefactor of Leclerc. He was the friend of Filicaja. Neither political

nor religious differences prevented him from extending his powerful

protection to merit. Hickes, the fiercest and most intolerant of all

the nonjurors, obtained, by the influence of Somers, permission to

study Teutonic antiquities in freedom and safety. Vertue, a strict Roman

Catholic, was raised by the discriminating and liberal patronage of

Somers from poverty and obscurity to the first rank among the engravers

of the age.

The generosity with which Somers treated his opponents was the more

honourable to him because he was no waverer in politics. From the

beginning to the end of his public life he was a steady Whig. His voice

was indeed always raised, when his party was dominant in the State,

against violent and vindictive counsels; but he never forsook his

friends, even when their perverse neglect of his advice had brought them

to the verge of ruin.

His powers of mind and his acquirements were not denied, even by his

detractors. The most acrimonious Tories were forced to admit, with an

ungracious snarl, which increased the value of their praise, that he had

all the intellectual qualities of a great man, and that in him alone,

among his contemporaries, brilliant eloquence and wit were to be found

associated with the quiet and steady prudence which ensures success

in life. It is a remarkable fact, that, in the foulest of all the many

libels that were published against him, he was slandered under the name

of Cicero. As his abilities could not be questioned, he was charged with

irreligion and immorality. That he was heterodox all the country vicars

and foxhunting squires firmly believed; but as to the nature and extent

of his heterodoxy there were many different opinions. He seems to have

been a Low Churchman of the school of Tillotson, whom he always

loved and honoured; and he was, like Tillotson, called by bigots a

Presbyterian, an Arian, a Socinian, a Deist, and an Atheist.

The private life of this great statesman and magistrate was malignantly

scrutinised; and tales were told about his libertinism which went on

growing till they became too absurd for the credulity even of party

spirit. At last, long after he had been condemned to flannel and chicken

broth, a wretched courtesan, who had probably never seen him except in

the stage box at the theatre, when she was following her vocation below

in a mask, published a lampoon in which she described him as the master

of a haram more costly than the Great Turk's. There is, however, reason

to believe that there was a small nucleus of truth round which this

great mass of fiction gathered, and that the wisdom and selfcommand

which Somers never wanted in the senate, on the judgment seat, at the

council board, or in the society of wits, scholars and philosophers,

were not always proof against female attractions. [478]

Another director of the Whig party was Charles Montague. He was often,

when he had risen to power, honours and riches, called an upstart by

those who envied his success. That they should have called him so may

seem strange; for few of the statesmen of his time could show such a

pedigree as his. He sprang from a family as old as the Conquest; he was

in the succession to an earldom, and was, by the paternal side, cousin

of three earls. But he was the younger son of a younger brother; and

that phrase had, ever since the time of Shakspeare and Raleigh, and

perhaps before their time, been proverbially used to designate a person

so poor as to be broken to the most abject servitude or ready for the

most desperate adventure.

Charles Montague was early destined for the Church, was entered on the

foundation of Westminster, and, after distinguishing himself there by

skill in Latin versification, was sent up to Trinity College, Cambridge.

At Cambridge the philosophy of Des Cartes was still dominant in the

schools. But a few select spirits had separated from the crowd, and

formed a fit audience round a far greater teacher. [479] Conspicuous

among the youths of high promise who were proud to sit at the feet of

Newton was the quick and versatile Montague. Under such guidance the

young student made considerable proficiency in the severe sciences; but

poetry was his favourite pursuit; and when the University invited her

sons to celebrate royal marriages and funerals, he was generally allowed

to have surpassed his competitors. His fame travelled to London; he

was thought a clever lad by the wits who met at Will's, and the lively

parody which he wrote, in concert with his friend and fellow student

Prior, on Dryden's Hind and Panther, was received with great applause.

At this time all Montague's wishes pointed towards the Church. At a

later period, when he was a peer with twelve thousand a year, when his

villa on the Thames was regarded as the most delightful of all suburban

retreats, when he was said to revel in Tokay from the Imperial cellar,

and in soups made out of birds' nests brought from the Indian Ocean, and

costing three guineas a piece, his enemies were fond of reminding him

that there had been a time when he had eked out by his wits an income

of barely fifty pounds, when he had been happy with a trencher of mutton

chops and a flagon of ale from the College buttery, and when a tithe

pig was the rarest luxury for which he had dared to hope. The Revolution

came, and changed his whole scheme of life. He obtained, by the

influence of Dorset, who took a peculiar pleasure in befriending young

men of promise, a seat in the House of Commons. Still, during a few

months, the needy scholar hesitated between politics and divinity. But

it soon became clear that, in the new order of things, parliamentary

ability must fetch a higher price than any other kind of ability; and

he felt that in parliamentary ability he had no superior. He was in the

very situation for which he was peculiarly fitted by nature; and during

some years his life was a series of triumphs.

Of him, as of several of his contemporaries, especially of Mulgrave and

of Sprat, it may be said that his fame has suffered from the folly of

those editors who, down to our own time, have persisted in reprinting

his rhymes among the works of the British poets. There is not a year in

which hundreds of verses as good as any that he ever wrote are not sent

in for the Newdigate prize at Oxford and for the Chancellor's medal at

Cambridge. His mind had indeed great quickness and vigour, but not that

kind of quickness and vigour which produces great dramas or odes; and

it is most unjust to him that his loan of Honour and his Epistle on

the Battle of the Boyne should be placed side by side with Comus

and Alexander's Feast. Other eminent statesmen and orators, Walpole,

Pulteney, Chatham, Fox, wrote poetry not better than his. But

fortunately for them, their metrical compositions were never thought

worthy to be admitted into any collection of our national classics.

It has long been usual to represent the imagination under the figure of

a wing, and to call the successful exertions of the imagination flights.

One poet is the eagle; another is the swan; a third modestly compares

himself to the bee. But none of these types would have suited Montague.

His genius may be compared to that pinion which, though it is too weak

to lift the ostrich into the air, enables her, while she remains on the

earth, to outrun hound, horse and dromedary. If the man who possesses

this kind of genius attempts to ascend the heaven of invention, his

awkward and unsuccessful efforts expose him to derision. But if he will

be content to stay in the terrestrial region of business, he will find

that the faculties which would not enable him to soar into a higher

sphere will enable him to distance all his competitors in the lower. As

a poet Montague could never have risen above the crowd. But in the House

of Commons, now fast becoming supreme in the State, and extending

its control over one executive department after another, the young

adventurer soon obtained a place very different from the place which he

occupies among men of letters. At thirty, he would gladly have given all

his chances in life for a comfortable vicarage and a chaplain's scarf.

At thirty-seven, he was First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the

Exchequer and a Regent of the kingdom; and this elevation he owed not

at all to favour, but solely to the unquestionable superiority of his

talents for administration and debate.

The extraordinary ability with which, at the beginning of the year 1692,

he managed the conference on the Bill for regulating Trials in cases of

Treason, placed him at once in the first rank of parliamentary orators.

On that occasion he was opposed to a crowd of veteran senators renowned

for their eloquence, Halifax, Rochester, Nottingham, Mulgrave, and

proved himself a match for them all. He was speedily seated at the Board

of Treasury; and there the clearheaded and experienced Godolphin soon

found that his young colleague was his master. When Somers had quitted

the House of Commons, Montague had no rival there. Sir Thomas Littleton,

once distinguished as the ablest debater and man of business among the

Whig members, was content to serve under his junior. To this day we may

discern in many parts of our financial and commercial system the marks

of the vigorous intellect and daring spirit of Montague. His bitterest

enemies were unable to deny that some of the expedients which he had

proposed had proved highly beneficial to the nation. But it was said

that these expedients were not devised by himself. He was represented,

in a hundred pamphlets, as the daw in borrowed plumes. He had taken, it

was affirmed, the hint of every one of his great plans from the writings

or the conversation of some ingenious speculator. This reproach was,

in truth, no reproach. We can scarcely expect to find in the same human

being the talents which are necessary for the making of new discoveries

in political science, and the talents which obtain the assent of divided

and tumultuous assemblies to great practical reforms. To be at once an

Adam Smith and a Pitt is scarcely possible. It is surely praise enough

for a busy politician that he knows how to use the theories of others,

that he discerns, among the schemes of innumerable projectors, the

precise scheme which is wanted and which is practicable, that he shapes

it to suit pressing circumstances and popular humours, that he proposes

it just when it is most likely to be favourably received, that he

triumphantly defends it against all objectors, and that he carries it

into execution with prudence and energy; and to this praise no English

statesman has a fairer claim than Montague.

It is a remarkable proof of his selfknowledge that, from the moment at

which he began to distinguish himself in public life, he ceased to be

a versifier. It does not appear that, after he became a Lord of the

Treasury, he ever wrote a couplet, with the exception of a few well

turned lines inscribed on a set of toasting glasses which were sacred

to the most renowned Whig beauties of his time. He wisely determined

to derive from the poetry of others a glory which he never would have

derived from his own. As a patron of genius and learning he ranks with

his two illustrious friends, Dorset and Somers. His munificence fully

equalled theirs; and, though he was inferior to them in delicacy of

taste, he succeeded in associating his name inseparably with some names

which will last as long as our language.

Yet it must be acknowledged that Montague, with admirable parts and

with many claims on the gratitude of his country, had great faults, and

unhappily faults not of the noblest kind. His head was not strong enough

to bear without giddiness the speed of his ascent and the height of his

position. He became offensively arrogant and vain. He was too often cold

to his old friends, and ostentatious in displaying his new riches. Above

all, he was insatiably greedy of praise, and liked it best when it was

of the coarsest and rankest quality. But, in 1693, these faults were

less offensive than they became a few years later.

With Russell, Somers and Montague, was closely connected, during

a quarter of a century a fourth Whig, who in character bore little

resemblance to any of them. This was Thomas Wharton, eldest son of

Philip Lord Wharton. Thomas Wharton has been repeatedly mentioned in the

course of this narrative. But it is now time to describe him more

fully. He was in his forty-seventh year, but was still a young man in

constitution, in appearance and in manners. Those who hated him most

heartily,--and no man was hated more heartily,--admitted that his

natural parts were excellent, and that he was equally qualified for

debate and for action. The history of his mind deserves notice; for it

was the history of many thousands of minds. His rank and abilities

made him so conspicuous that in him we are able to trace distinctly

the origin and progress of a moral taint which was epidemic among his

contemporaries.

He was born in the days of the Covenant, and was the heir of a

covenanted house. His father was renowned as a distributor of

Calvinistic tracts, and a patron of Calvinistic divines. The boy's first

years were past amidst Geneva bands, heads of lank hair, upturned eyes,

nasal psalmody, and sermons three hours long. Plays and poems, hunting

and dancing, were proscribed by the austere discipline of his saintly

family. The fruits of this education became visible, when, from the

sullen mansion of Puritan parents, the hotblooded, quickwitted young

patrician emerged into the gay and voluptuous London of the Restoration.

The most dissolute cavaliers stood aghast at the dissoluteness of the

emancipated precisian. He early acquired and retained to the last the

reputation of being the greatest rake in England. Of wine indeed he

never became the slave; and he used it chiefly for the purpose of making

himself the master of his associates. But to the end of his long life

the wives and daughters of his nearest friends were not safe from his

licentious plots. The ribaldry of his conversation moved astonishment

even in that age. To the religion of his country he offered, in the mere

wantonness of impiety, insults too foul to be described. His mendacity

and his effrontery passed into proverbs. Of all the liars of his time he

was the most deliberate, the most inventive and the most circumstantial.

What shame meant he did not seem to understand. No reproaches, even when

pointed and barbed with the sharpest wit, appeared to give him pain.

Great satirists, animated by a deadly personal aversion, exhausted

all their strength in attacks upon him. They assailed him with keen

invective; they assailed him with still keener irony; but they found

that neither invective nor irony could move him to any thing but an

unforced smile and a goodhumoured curse; and they at length threw down

the lash, acknowledging that it was impossible to make him feel. That,

with such vices, he should have played a great part in life, should have

carried numerous elections against the most formidable opposition by his

personal popularity, should have had a large following in Parliament,

should have risen to the highest offices of the State, seems

extraordinary. But he lived in times when faction was almost a madness;

and he possessed in an eminent degree the qualities of the leader of

a faction. There was a single tie which he respected. The falsest

of mankind in all relations but one, he was the truest of Whigs. The

religious tenets of his family he had early renounced with contempt;

but to the politics of his family he stedfastly adhered through all the

temptations and dangers of half a century. In small things and in great

his devotion to his party constantly appeared. He had the finest stud in

England; and his delight was to win plates from Tories. Sometimes when,

in a distant county, it was fully expected that the horse of a High

Church squire would be first on the course, down came, on the very eve

of the race, Wharton's Careless, who had ceased to run at Newmarket

merely for want of competitors, or Wharton's Gelding, for whom Lewis

the Fourteenth had in vain offered a thousand pistoles. A man whose mere

sport was of this description was not likely to be easily beaten in

any serious contest. Such a master of the whole art of electioneering

England had never seen. Buckinghamshire was his own especial province;

and there he ruled without a rival. But he extended his care over

the Whig interest in Yorkshire, Cumberland, Westmoreland, Wiltshire.

Sometimes twenty, sometimes thirty, members of Parliament were named by

him. As a canvasser he was irresistible. He never forgot a face that

he had once seen. Nay, in the towns in which he wished to establish an

interest, he remembered, not only the voters, but their families.

His opponents were confounded by the strength of his memory and the

affability of his deportment, and owned, that it was impossible to

contend against a great man who called the shoemaker by his Christian

name, who was sure that the butcher's daughter must be growing a fine

girl, and who was anxious to know whether the blacksmith's youngest boy

was breeched. By such arts as these he made himself so popular that

his journeys to the Buckinghamshire Quarter Sessions resembled royal

progresses. The bells of every parish through which he passed were rung,

and flowers were strewed along the road. It was commonly believed that,

in the course of his life, he expended on his parliamentary interest not

less than eighty thousand pounds, a sum which, when compared with the

value of estates, must be considered as equivalent to more than three

hundred thousand pounds in our time.

But the chief service which Wharton rendered to the Whig party was that

of bringing in recruits from the young aristocracy. He was quite as

dexterous a canvasser among the embroidered coats at the Saint James's

Coffeehouse as among the leathern aprons at Wycombe and Aylesbury. He

had his eye on every boy of quality who came of age; and it was not

easy for such a boy to resist the arts of a noble, eloquent and wealthy

flatterer, who united juvenile vivacity to profound art and long

experience of the gay world. It mattered not what the novice preferred,

gallantry or field sports, the dicebox or the bottle. Wharton soon found

out the master passion, offered sympathy, advice and assistance, and,

while seeming to be only the minister of his disciple's pleasures, made

sure of his disciple's vote.

The party to whose interests Wharton, with such spirit and constancy,

devoted his time, his fortune, his talents, his very vices, judged

him, as was natural, far too leniently. He was widely known by the

very undeserved appellation of Honest Tom. Some pious men, Burnet, for

example, and Addison, averted their eyes from the scandal which he gave,

and spoke of him, not indeed with esteem, yet with goodwill. A most

ingenious and accomplished Whig, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, author

of the Characteristics, described Wharton as the most mysterious of

human beings, as a strange compound of best and worst, of private

depravity and public virtue, and owned himself unable to understand how

a man utterly without principle in every thing but politics should in

politics be as true as steel. But that which, in the judgment of one

faction, more than half redeemed all Wharton's faults, seemed to the

other faction to aggravate them all. The opinion which the Tories

entertained of him is expressed in a single line written after his death

by the ablest man of that party; "He was the most universal villain that

ever I knew." [480] Wharton's political adversaries thirsted for

his blood, and repeatedly tried to shed it. Had he not been a man of

imperturbable temper, dauntless courage and consummate skill in fence,

his life would have been a short one. But neither anger nor danger ever

deprived him of his presence of mind; he was an incomparable swordsman;

and he had a peculiar way of disarming opponents which moved the envy of

all the duellists of his time. His friends said that he had never given

a challenge, that he had never refused one, that he had never taken a

life, and yet that he had never fought without having his antagonist's

life at his mercy. [481]

The four men who have been described resembled each other so little that

it may be thought strange that they should ever have been able to act

in concert. They did, however, act in the closest concert during many

years. They more than once rose and more than once fell together. But

their union lasted till it was dissolved by death. Little as some of

them may have deserved esteem, none of them can be accused of having

been false to his brethren of the Junto.

While the great body of the Whigs was, under these able chiefs, arraying

itself in order resembling that of a regular army, the Tories were in a

state of an ill drilled and ill officered militia. They were numerous;

and they were zealous; but they can hardly be said to have had, at this

time, any chief in the House of Commons. The name of Seymour had once

been great among them, and had not quite lost its influence. But,

since he had been at the Board of Treasury, he had disgusted them

by vehemently defending all that he had himself, when out of place,

vehemently attacked. They had once looked up to the Speaker, Trevor; but

his greediness, impudence and venality were now so notorious that all

respectable gentlemen, of all shades of opinion, were ashamed to see him

in the chair. Of the old Tory members Sir Christopher Musgrave alone had

much weight. Indeed the real leaders of the party were two or three men

bred in principles diametrically opposed to Toryism, men who had carried

Whiggism to the verge of republicanism, and who had been considered not

merely as Low Churchmen, but as more than half Presbyterians. Of these

men the most eminent were two great Herefordshire squires, Robert Harley

and Paul Foley.

The space which Robert Harley fills in the history of three reigns,

his elevation, his fall, the influence which, at a great crisis, he

exercised on the politics of all Europe, the close intimacy in which

he lived with some of the greatest wits and poets of his time, and the

frequent recurrence of his name in the works of Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot,

and Prior, must always make him an object of interest. Yet the man

himself was of all men the least interesting. There is indeed a

whimsical contrast between the very ordinary qualities of his mind and

the very extraordinary vicissitudes of his fortune.

He was the heir of a Puritan family. His father, Sir Edward Harley,

had been conspicuous among the patriots of the Long parliament, had

commanded a regiment under Essex, had, after the Restoration, been an

active opponent of the Court, had supported the Exclusion Bill, had

harboured dissenting preachers, had frequented meetinghouses, and had

made himself so obnoxious to the ruling powers that at the time of the

Western Insurrection, he had been placed under arrest, and his house

had been searched for arms. When the Dutch army was marching from Torbay

towards London, he and his eldest son Robert declared for the Prince

of Orange and a free Parliament, raised a large body of horse, took

possession of Worcester, and evinced their zeal against Popery by

publicly breaking to pieces, in the High Street of that city, a piece

of sculpture which to rigid precisians seemed idolatrous. Soon after the

Convention became a Parliament, Robert Harley was sent up to Westminster

as member for a Cornish borough. His conduct was such as might have

been expected from his birth and education. He was a Whig, and indeed an

intolerant and vindictive Whig. Nothing would satisfy him but a general

proscription of the Tories. His name appears in the list of those

members who voted for the Sacheverell clause; and, at the general

election which took place in the spring of 1690, the party which he had

persecuted made great exertions to keep him out of the House of Commons.

A cry was raised that the Harleys were mortal enemies of the Church; and

this cry produced so much effect that it was with difficulty that any of

them could obtain a seat. Such was the commencement of the public life

of a man whose name, a quarter of a century later, was inseparably

coupled with the High Church in the acclamations of Jacobite mobs. [482]

Soon, however, it began to be observed that in every division Harley

was in the company of those gentlemen who held his political opinions

in abhorrence; nor was this strange; for he affected the character of

a Whig of the old pattern; and before the Revolution it had always

been supposed that a Whig was a person who watched with jealousy every

exertion of the prerogative, who was slow to loose the strings of the

public purse, and who was extreme to mark the faults of the ministers

of the Crown. Such a Whig Harley still professed to be. He did not admit

that the recent change of dynasty had made any change in the duties of a

representative of the people. The new government ought to be observed as

suspiciously, checked as severely, and supplied as sparingly as the old

one. Acting on these principles he necessarily found himself acting

with men whose principles were diametrically opposed to his. He liked to

thwart the King; they liked to thwart the usurper; the consequence

was that, whenever there was an opportunity of thwarting William, the

Roundhead stayed in the House or went into the lobby in company with the

whole crowd of Cavaliers.

Soon Harley acquired the authority of a leader among those with whom,

notwithstanding wide differences of opinion, he ordinarily voted. His

influence in Parliament was indeed altogether out of proportion to his

abilities. His intellect was both small and slow. He was unable to take

a large view of any subject. He never acquired the art of expressing

himself in public with fluency and perspicuity. To the end of his life

he remained a tedious, hesitating and confused speaker. [483]

He had none of the external graces of an orator. His countenance was

heavy, his figure mean and somewhat deformed, and his gestures uncouth.

Yet he was heard with respect. For, such as his mind was, it had been

assiduously cultivated. His youth had been studious; and to the last he

continued to love books and the society of men of genius and learning.

Indeed he aspired to the character of a wit and a poet, and occasionally

employed hours which should have been very differently spent in

composing verses more execrable than the bellman's. [484] His time

however was not always so absurdly wasted. He had that sort of industry

and that sort of exactness which would have made him a respectable

antiquary or King at Arms. His taste led him to plod among old records;

and in that age it was only by plodding among old records that any

man could obtain an accurate and extensive knowledge of the law of

Parliament. Having few rivals in this laborious and unattractive

pursuit, he soon began to be regarded as an oracle on questions of form

and privilege. His moral character added not a little to his influence.

He had indeed great vices; but they were not of a scandalous kind.

He was not to be corrupted by money. His private life was regular. No

illicit amour was imputed to him even by satirists. Gambling he held

in aversion; and it was said that he never passed White's, then the

favourite haunt of noble sharpers and dupes, without an exclamation of

anger. His practice of flustering himself daily with claret was hardly

considered as a fault by his contemporaries. His knowledge, his gravity

and his independent position gained for him the ear of the House; and

even his bad speaking was, in some sense, an advantage to him. For

people are very loth to admit that the same man can unite very different

kinds of excellence. It is soothing to envy to believe that what is

splendid cannot be solid, that what is clear cannot be profound. Very

slowly was the public brought to acknowledge that Mansfield was a great

jurist, and that Burke was a great master of political science. Montague

was a brilliant rhetorician, and, therefore, though he had ten times

Harley's capacity for the driest parts of business, was represented by

detractors as a superficial, prating pretender. But from the absence of

show in Harley's discourses many people inferred that there must be

much substance; and he was pronounced to be a deep read, deep thinking

gentleman, not a fine talker, but fitter to direct affairs of state than

all the fine talkers in the world. This character he long supported with

that cunning which is frequently found in company with ambitious and

unquiet mediocrity. He constantly had, even with his best friends, an

air of mystery and reserve which seemed to indicate that he knew some

momentous secret, and that his mind was labouring with some vast design.

In this way he got and long kept a high reputation for wisdom. It was

not till that reputation had made him an Earl, a Knight of the Garter,

Lord High Treasurer of England, and master of the fate of Europe, that

his admirers began to find out that he was really a dull puzzleheaded

man. [485]

Soon after the general election of 1690, Harley, generally voting with

the Tories, began to turn Tory. The change was so gradual as to be

almost imperceptible; but was not the less real. He early began to hold

the Tory doctrine that England ought to confine herself to a maritime

war. He early felt the true Tory antipathy to Dutchmen and to

moneyed men. The antipathy to Dissenters, which was necessary to

the completeness of the character, came much later. At length the

transformation was complete; and the old haunter of conventicles became

an intolerant High Churchman. Yet to the last the traces of his early

breeding would now and then show themselves; and, while he acted after

the fashion of Laud, he sometimes wrote in the style of Praise God

Barebones. [486]

Of Paul Foley we know comparatively little. His history, up to a certain

point, greatly resembles that of Harley: but he appears to have been

superior to Harley both in parts and in elevation of character. He was

the son of Thomas Foley, a new man, but a. man of great merit, who,

having begun life with nothing, had created a noble estate by ironworks,

and who was renowned for his spotless integrity and his munificent

charity. The Foleys were, like their neighbours the Harleys, Whigs and

Puritans. Thomas Foley lived on terms of close intimacy with Baxter, in

whose writings he is mentioned with warm eulogy. The opinions and the

attachments of Paul Foley were at first those of his family. But be,

like Harley, became, merely from the vehemence of his Whiggism, an ally

of the Tories, and might, perhaps, like Harley, have been completely

metamorphosed into a Tory, if the process of transmutation had not been

interrupted by death. Foley's abilities were highly respectable, and had

been improved by education. He was so wealthy that it was unnecessary

for him to follow the law as a profession; but he had studied it

carefully as a science. His morals were without stain; and the greatest

fault which could be imputed to him was that he paraded his independence

and disinterestedness too ostentatiously, and was so much afraid of

being thought to fawn that he was always growling.

Another convert ought to be mentioned. Howe, lately the most virulent

of the Whigs, had been, by the loss of his place, turned into one of the

most virulent of the Tories. The deserter brought to the party which he

had joined no weight of character, no capacity or semblance of capacity

for great affairs, but much parliamentary ability of a low kind, much

spite and much impudence. No speaker of that time seems to have had, in

such large measure, both the power and the inclination to give pain.

The assistance of these men was most welcome to the Tory party; but it

was impossible that they could, as yet, exercise over that party the

entire authority of leaders. For they still called themselves Whigs,

and generally vindicated their Tory votes by arguments grounded on Whig

principles. [487]

From this view of the state of parties in the House of Commons, it

seems clear that Sunderland had good reason for recommending that the

administration should be entrusted to the Whigs. The King, however,

hesitated long before he could bring himself to quit that neutral

position which he had long occupied between the contending parties. If

one of those parties was disposed to question his title, the other

was on principle hostile to his prerogative. He still remembered with

bitterness the unreasonable and vindictive conduct of the Convention

Parliament at the close of 1689 and the beginning of 1690; and he shrank

from the thought of being entirely in the hands of the men who had

obstructed the Bill of Indemnity, who had voted for the Sacheverell

clause, who had tried to prevent him from taking the command of his army

in Ireland, and who had called him an ungrateful tyrant merely because

he would not be their slave and their hangman. He had once, by a bold

and unexpected effort, freed himself from their yoke; and he was not

inclined to put it on his neck again. He personally disliked Wharton

and Russell. He thought highly of the capacity of Caermarthen, of

the integrity of Nottingham, of the diligence and financial skill of

Godolphin. It was only by slow degrees that the arguments of Sunderland,

backed by the force of circumstances, overcame all objections.

On the seventh of November 1693 the Parliament met; and the conflict of

parties instantly began. William from the throne pressed on the Houses

the necessity of making a great exertion to arrest the progress of

France on the Continent. During the last campaign, he said, she had, on

every point, had a superiority of force; and it had therefore been found

impossible to cope with her. His allies had promised to increase their

armies; and he trusted that the Commons would enable him to do the same.

[488]

The Commons at their next sitting took the King's speech into

consideration. The miscarriage of the Smyrna fleet was the chief subject

of discussion. The cry for inquiry was universal: but it was evident

that the two parties raised that cry for very different reasons.

Montague spoke the sense of the Whigs. He declared that the disasters of

the summer could not, in his opinion, be explained by the ignorance and

imbecility of those who had charge of the naval administration. There

must have been treason. It was impossible to believe that Lewis, when he

sent his Brest squadron to the Straits of Gibraltar, and left the whole

coast of his kingdom from Dunkirk to Bayonne unprotected, had trusted

merely to chance. He must have been well assured that his fleet

would meet with a vast booty under a feeble convoy. As there had been

treachery in some quarters, there had been incapacity in others. The

State was ill served. And then the orator pronounced a warm panegyric on

his friend Somers. "Would that all men in power would follow the example

of my Lord Keeper! If all patronage were bestowed as judiciously and

disinterestedly as his, we should not see the public offices filled with

men who draw salaries and perform no duties." It was moved and carried

unanimously, that the Commons would support their Majesties, and would

forthwith proceed to investigate the cause of the disaster in the Bay of

Lagos. [489] The Lords of the Admiralty were directed to produce a

great mass of documentary evidence. The King sent down copies of the

examinations taken before the Committee of Council which Mary had

appointed to inquire into the grievances of the Turkey merchants. The

Turkey merchants themselves were called in and interrogated. Rooke,

though too ill to stand or speak, was brought in a chair to the bar,

and there delivered in a narrative of his proceedings. The Whigs soon

thought that sufficient ground had been laid for a vote condemning the

naval administration, and moved a resolution attributing the miscarriage

of the Smyrna fleet to notorious and treacherous mismanagement. That

there had been mismanagement could not be disputed; but that there had

been foul play had certainly not been proved. The Tories proposed that

the word "treacherous" should be omitted. A division took place; and the

Whigs carried their point by a hundred and forty votes to a hundred and

three. Wharton was a teller for the majority. [490]

It was now decided that there had been treason, but not who was the

traitor. Several keen debates followed. The Whigs tried to throw the

blame on Killegrew and Delaval, who were Tories; the Tories did their

best to make out that the fault lay with the Victualling Department,

which was under the direction of Whigs. But the House of Commons has

always been much more ready to pass votes of censure drawn in general

terms than to brand individuals by name. A resolution clearing the

Victualling Office was proposed by Montague, and carried, after a

debate of two days, by a hundred and eighty-eight votes to a hundred and

fifty-two. [491] But when the victorious party brought forward a motion

inculpating the admirals, the Tories came up in great numbers from the

country, and, after a debate which lasted from nine in the morning till

near eleven at night, succeeded in saving their friends. The Noes were a

hundred and seventy, and the Ayes only a hundred and sixty-one. Another

attack was made a few days later with no better success. The Noes were

a hundred and eighty-five, the Ayes only a hundred and seventy-five. The

indefatigable and implacable Wharton was on both occasions tellers for

the minority. [492]

In spite of this check the advantage was decidedly with the Whigs;

The Tories who were at the head of the naval administration had indeed

escaped impeachment; but the escape had been so narrow that it was

impossible for the King to employ them any longer. The advice of

Sunderland prevailed. A new Commission of Admiralty was prepared; and

Russell was named First Lord. He had already been appointed to the

command of the Channel fleet.

His elevation made it necessary that Nottingham should retire. For,

though it was not then unusual to see men who were personally and

politically hostile to each other holding high offices at the same time,

the relation between the First Lord of the Admiralty and the Secretary

of State, who had charge of what would now be called the War Department,

was of so peculiar a nature that the public service could not be

well conducted without cordial cooperation between them; and between

Nottingham and Russell such cooperation was not to be expected. "I thank

you," William said to Nottingham, "for your services. I have nothing to

complain of in your conduct. It is only from necessity that I part with

you." Nottingham retired with dignity. Though a very honest man, he went

out of office much richer than he had come in five years before. What

were then considered as the legitimate emoluments of his place were

great; he had sold Kensington House to the Crown for a large sum; and he

had probably, after the fashion of that time, obtained for himself

some lucrative grants. He laid out all his gains in purchasing land. He

heard, he said, that his enemies meant to accuse him of having acquired

wealth by illicit means. He was perfectly ready to abide the issue of

an inquiry. He would not, as some ministers had done, place his fortune

beyond the reach of the justice of his country. He would have no secret

hoard. He would invest nothing in foreign funds. His property should all

be such as could be readily discovered and seized. [493]

During some weeks the seals which Nottingham had delivered up remained

in the royal closet. To dispose of them proved no easy matter. They were

offered to Shrewsbury, who of all the Whig leaders stood highest in the

King's favour; but Shrewsbury excused himself, and, in order to avoid

further importunity, retired into the country. There he soon received

a pressing letter from Elizabeth Villiers. This lady had, when a girl,

inspired William with a passion which had caused much scandal and much

unhappiness in the little Court of the Hague. Her influence over him she

owed not to her personal charms,--for it tasked all the art of Kneller

to make her look tolerably on canvass,--not to those talents which

peculiarly belong to her sex,--for she did not excel in playful talk,

and her letters are remarkably deficient in feminine ease and grace--,

but to powers of mind which qualified her to partake the cares and guide

the counsels of statesmen. To the end of her life great politicians

sought her advice. Even Swift, the shrewdest and most cynical of her

contemporaries, pronounced her the wisest of women, and more than once

sate, fascinated by her conversation, from two in the afternoon till

near midnight. [494] By degrees the virtues and charms of Mary conquered

the first place in her husband's affection. But he still, in difficult

conjunctures, frequently applied to Elizabeth Villiers for advice and

assistance. She now implored Shrewsbury to reconsider his determination,

and not to throw away the opportunity of uniting the Whig party for

ever. Wharton and Russell wrote to the same effect. In reply came

flimsy and unmeaning excuses: "I am not qualified for a court life; I

am unequal to a place which requires much exertion; I do not quite agree

with any party in the State; in short, I am unfit for the world; I

want to travel; I want to see Spain." These were mere pretences. Had

Shrewsbury spoken the whole truth, he would have said that he had, in

an evil hour, been false to the cause of that Revolution in which he had

borne so great a part, that he had entered into engagements of which he

repented, but from which he knew not how to extricate himself, and that,

while he remained under those engagements, he was unwilling to enter

into the service of the existing government. Marlborough, Godolphin and

Russell, indeed, had no scruple about corresponding with one King while

holding office under the other. But Shrewsbury had, what was wanting

to Marlborough, Godolphin and Russell, a conscience, a conscience which

indeed too often failed to restrain him from doing wrong, but which

never failed to punish him. [495]

In consequence of his refusal to accept the Seals, the ministerial

arrangements which the King had planned were not carried into entire

effect till the end of the session. Meanwhile the proceedings of the two

Houses had been highly interesting and important.

Soon after the Parliament met, the attention of the Commons was again

called to the state of the trade with India; and the charter which had

just been granted to the Old Company was laid before them. They would

probably have been disposed to sanction the new arrangement, which, in

truth, differed little from that which they had themselves suggested not

many months before, if the Directors had acted with prudence. But the

Directors, from the day on which they had obtained their charter, had

persecuted the interlopers without mercy, and had quite forgotten that

it was one thing to persecute interlopers in the Eastern Seas, and

another to persecute them in the port of London. Hitherto the war of the

monopolists against the private trade had been generally carried on at

the distance of fifteen thousand miles from England. If harsh things

were done, the English did not see them done, and did not hear of them

till long after they had been done; nor was it by any means easy to

ascertain at Westminster who had been right and who had been wrong in a

dispute which had arisen three or four years before at Moorshedabad or

Canton. With incredible rashness the Directors determined, at the very

moment when the fate of their company was in the balance, to give the

people of this country a near view of the most odious features of the

monopoly. Some wealthy merchants of London had equipped a fine ship

named the Redbridge. Her crew was numerous, her cargo of immense value.

Her papers had been made out for Alicant: but there was some reason to

suspect that she was really bound for the countries lying beyond the

Cape of Good Hope. She was stopped by the Admiralty, in obedience to an

order which the Company obtained from the Privy Council, doubtless by

the help of the Lord President. Every day that she lay in the Thames

caused a heavy expense to the owners. The indignation in the City was

great and general. The Company maintained that from the legality of the

monopoly the legality of the detention necessarily followed. The

public turned the argument round, and, being firmly convinced that the

detention was illegal, drew the inference that the monopoly must be

illegal too. The dispute was at the height when the Parliament met.

Petitions on both sides were speedily laid on the table of the

Commons; and it was resolved that these petitions should be taken into

consideration by a Committee of the whole House. The first question on

which the conflicting parties tried their strength was the choice of

a chairman. The enemies of the Old Company proposed Papillon, once the

closest ally and subsequently the keenest opponent of Child, and carried

their point by a hundred and thirty-eight votes to a hundred and six.

The Committee proceeded to inquire by what authority the Redbridge had

been stopped. One of her owners, Gilbert Heathcote, a rich merchant and

a stanch Whig, appeared at the bar as a witness. He was asked whether he

would venture to deny that the ship had really been fitted out for the

Indian trade. "It is no sin that I know of," he answered, "to trade

with India; and I shall trade with India till I am restrained by Act of

Parliament." Papillon reported that in the opinion of the Committee, the

detention of the Redbridge was illegal. The question was then put, that

the House would agree with the Committee. The friends of the Old Company

ventured on a second division, and were defeated by a hundred and

seventy-one votes to a hundred and twenty-five. [496]

The blow was quickly followed up. A few days later it was moved that all

subjects of England had equal right to trade to the East Indies unless

prohibited by Act of Parliament; and the supporters of the Old Company,

sensible that they were in a minority, suffered the motion to pass

without a division. [497]

This memorable vote settled the most important of the constitutional

questions which had been left unsettled by the Bill of Rights. It has

ever since been held to be the sound doctrine that no power but that

of the whole legislature can give to any person or to any society an

exclusive privilege of trading to any part of the world.

The opinion of the great majority of the House of Commons was that the

Indian trade could be advantageously carried on only by means of a joint

stock and a monopoly. It might therefore have been expected that the

resolution which destroyed the monopoly of the Old Company would have

been immediately followed by a law granting a monopoly to the New

Company. No such law, however, was passed. The Old Company, though not

strong enough to defend its own privileges, was able, with the help

of its Tory friends, to prevent the rival association from obtaining

similar privileges. The consequence was that, during some years, there

was nominally a free trade with India. In fact, the trade still lay

under severe restrictions. The private adventurer found indeed no

difficulty in sailing from England; but his situation was as perilous as

ever when he had turned the Cape of Good Hope. Whatever respect might

be paid to a vote of the House of Commons by public functionaries in

London, such a vote was, at Bombay or Calcutta, much less regarded than

a private letter from Child; and Child still continued to fight the

battle with unbroken spirit. He sent out to the factories of the Company

orders that no indulgence should be shown to the intruders. For the

House of Commons and for its resolutions he expressed the bitterest

contempt. "Be guided by my instructions," he wrote, "and not by the

nonsense of a few ignorant country gentlemen who have hardly wit enough

to manage their own private affairs, and who know nothing at all about

questions of trade." It appears that his directions were obeyed.

Every where in the East, during this period of anarchy, servant of the

Company and the independent merchant waged war on each other, accused

each other of piracy, and tried by every artifice to exasperate the

Mogul government against each other. [498]

The three great constitutional questions of the preceding year were, in

this year, again brought under the consideration of Parliament. In the

first week of the session, a Bill for the Regulation of Trials in cases

of High Treason, a Triennial Bill, and a Place Bill were laid on the

table of the House of Commons.

None of these bills became a law. The first passed the Commons, but was

unfavourably received by the Peers. William took so much interest in the

question that he came down to the House of Lords, not in his crown and

robes, but in the ordinary dress of a gentleman, and sate through the

whole debate on the second reading. Caermarthen spoke of the dangers to

which the State was at that time exposed, and entreated his brethren

not to give, at such a moment, impunity to traitors. He was powerfully

supported by two eminent orators, who had, during some years, been on

the uncourtly side of every question, but who, in this session, showed

a disposition to strengthen the hands of the government, Halifax and

Mulgrave. Marlborough, Rochester and Nottingham spoke for the bill;

but the general feeling was so clearly against them that they did not

venture to divide. It is probable, however, that the reasons urged by

Caermarthen were not the reasons which chiefly swayed his hearers. The

Peers were fully determined that the bill should not pass without a

clause altering the constitution of the Court of the Lord High Steward:

they knew that the Lower House was as fully determined not to pass

such a clause; and they thought it better that what must happen at last

should happen speedily, and without a quarrel. [499]

The fate of the Triennial Bill confounded all the calculations of the

best informed politicians of that time, and may therefore well seem

extraordinary to us. During the recess, that bill had been described in

numerous pamphlets, written for the most part by persons zealous for the

Revolution and for popular principles of government, as the one thing

needful, as the universal cure for the distempers of the State. On the

first, second and third readings in the House of Commons no division

took place. The Whigs were enthusiastic. The Tories seemed to be

acquiescent. It was understood that the King, though he had used

his Veto for the purpose of giving the Houses an opportunity of

reconsidering the subject, had no intention of offering a pertinacious

opposition to their wishes. But Seymour, with a cunning which long

experience had matured, after deferring the conflict to the last moment,

snatched the victory from his adversaries, when they were most secure.

When the Speaker held up the bill in his hands, and put the question

whether it should pass, the Noes were a hundred and forty-six, the

Ayes only a hundred and thirty-six. [500] Some eager Whigs flattered

themselves that their defeat was the effect of a surprise, and might be

retrieved. Within three days, therefore, Monmouth, the most ardent and

restless man in the whole party, brought into the Upper House a bill

substantially the same with that which had so strangely miscarried in

the Lower. The Peers passed this bill very expeditiously, and sent

it down to the Commons. But in the Commons it found no favour. Many

members, who professed to wish that the duration of parliaments should

be limited, resented the interference of the hereditary branch of the

legislature in a matter which peculiarly concerned the elective branch.

The subject, they said, is one which especially belongs to us; we

have considered it; we have come to a decision; and it is scarcely

parliamentary, it is certainly most indelicate, in their Lordships, to

call upon us to reverse that decision. The question now is, not whether

the duration of parliaments ought to be limited, but whether we ought

to submit our judgment to the authority of the Peers, and to rescind,

at their bidding, what we did only a fortnight ago. The animosity with

which the patrician order was regarded was inflamed by the arts and the

eloquence of Seymour. The bill contained a definition of the words,

"to hold a Parliament." This definition was scrutinised with extreme

jealousy, and was thought by many, with very little reason, to have been

framed for the purpose of extending the privileges, already invidiously

great, of the nobility. It appears, from the scanty and obscure

fragments of the debates which have come down to us, that bitter

reflections were thrown on the general conduct, both political and

judicial, of the Peers. Old Titus, though zealous for triennial

parliaments, owned that he was not surprised at the ill humour which

many gentlemen showed. "It is true," he said, "that we ought to be

dissolved; but it is rather hard, I must own, that the Lords are to

prescribe the time of our dissolution. The Apostle Paul wished to be

dissolved; but, I doubt, if his friends had set him a day, he would not

have taken it kindly of them." The bill was rejected by a hundred and

ninety-seven votes to a hundred and twenty-seven. [501]

The Place Bill, differing very little from the Place Bill which had been

brought in twelve months before, passed easily through the Commons.

Most of the Tories supported it warmly; and the Whigs did not venture

to oppose it. It went up to the Lords, and soon came back completely

changed. As it had been originally drawn, it provided that no member of

the House of Commons, elected after the first of January, 1694, should

accept any place of profit under the Crown, on pain of forfeiting his

seat, and of being incapable of sitting again in the same Parliament.

The Lords had added the words, "unless he be afterwards again chosen to

serve in the same Parliament." These words, few as they were, sufficed

to deprive the bill of nine tenths of its efficacy, both for good and

for evil. It was most desirable that the crowd of subordinate public

functionaries should be kept out of the House of Commons. It was most

undesirable that the heads of the great executive departments should be

kept out of that House. The bill, as altered, left that House open both

to those who ought and to those who ought not to have been admitted. It

very properly let in the Secretaries of State and the Chancellor of the

Exchequer; but it let in with them Commissioners of Wine Licenses and

Commissioners of the Navy, Receivers, Surveyors, Storekeepers, Clerks of

the Acts and Clerks of the Cheque, Clerks of the Green Cloth and Clerks

of the Great Wardrobe. So little did the Commons understand what they

were about that, after framing a law, in one view most mischievous, and

in another view most beneficial, they were perfectly willing that it

should be transformed into a law quite harmless and almost useless.

They agreed to the amendment; and nothing was now wanting but the royal

sanction.

That sanction certainly ought not to have been withheld, and probably

would not have been withheld, if William had known how unimportant the

bill now was. But he understood the question as little as the Commons

themselves. He knew that they imagined that they had devised a most

stringent limitation of the royal power; and he was determined not to

submit, without a struggle, to any such limitation. He was encouraged by

the success with which he had hitherto resisted the attempts of the two

Houses to encroach on his prerogative. He had refused to pass the bill

which quartered the judges on his hereditary revenue; and the Parliament

had silently acquiesced in the justice of the refusal. He had refused

to pass the Triennial Bill; and the Commons had since, by rejecting two

Triennial Bills, acknowledged that he had done well. He ought, however,

to have considered that, on both these occasions, the announcement

of his refusal was immediately followed by the announcement that the

Parliament was prorogued. On both these occasions, therefore, the

members had half a year to think and to grow cool before the next

sitting. The case was now very different. The principal business of

the session was hardly begun: estimates were still under consideration:

bills of supply were still depending; and, if the Houses should take a

fit of ill humour, the consequences might be serious indeed.

He resolved, however, to run the risk. Whether he had any adviser is not

known. His determination seems to have taken both the leading Whigs and

the leading Tories by surprise. When the Clerk had proclaimed that the

King and Queen would consider of the bill touching free and impartial

proceedings in Parliament, the Commons retired from the bar of the Lords

in a resentful and ungovernable mood. As soon as the Speaker was again

in his chair there was a long and tempestuous debate. All other business

was postponed. All committees were adjourned. It was resolved that the

House would, early the next morning, take into consideration the state

of the nation. When the morning came, the excitement did not appear to

have abated. The mace was sent into Westminster Hall and into the Court

of Requests. All members who could be found were brought into the House.

That none might be able to steal away unnoticed, the back door was

locked, and the key laid on the table. All strangers were ordered to

retire. With these solemn preparations began a sitting which reminded a

few old men of some of the first sittings of the Kong Parliament. High

words were uttered by the enemies of the government. Its friends, afraid

of being accused of abandoning the cause of the Commons of England

for the sake of royal favour, hardly ventured to raise their voices.

Montague alone seems to have defended the King. Lowther, though high

in office and a member of the cabinet, owned that there were evil

influences at work, and expressed a wish to see the Sovereign surrounded

by counsellors in whom the representatives of the people could confide.

Harley, Foley and Howe carried every thing before them. A resolution,

affirming that those who had advised the Crown on this occasion were

public enemies, was carried with only two or three Noes. Harley, after

reminding his hearers that they had their negative voice as the King had

his, and that, if His Majesty refused then redress, they could refuse

him money, moved that they should go up to the Throne, not, as usual,

with a Humble Address, but with a Representation. Some members proposed

to substitute the more respectful word Address: but they were overruled;

and a committee was appointed to draw up the Representation.

Another night passed; and, when the House met again, it appeared that

the storm had greatly subsided. The malignant joy and the wild hopes

which the Jacobites had, during the last forty-eight hours, expressed

with their usual imprudence, had incensed and alarmed the Whigs and

the moderate Tories. Many members too were frightened by hearing that

William was fully determined not to yield without an appeal to the

nation. Such an appeal might have been successful: for a dissolution, on

any ground whatever, would, at that moment, have been a highly popular

exercise of the prerogative. The constituent bodies, it was well known,

were generally zealous for the Triennial Bill, and cared comparatively

little about the Place Bill. Many Tory members, therefore, who had

recently voted against the Triennial Bill, were by no means desirous

to run the risks of a general election. When the Representation which

Harley and his friends had prepared was read, it was thought offensively

strong. After being recommitted, shortened and softened, it was

presented by the whole House. William's answer was kind and gentle;

but he conceded nothing. He assured the Commons that he remembered with

gratitude the support which he had on many occasions received from them,

that he should always consider their advice as most valuable, and that

he should look on counsellors who might attempt to raise dissension

between him and his Parliament as his enemies but he uttered not a word

which could be construed into an acknowledgment that he had used his

Veto ill, or into a promise that he would not use it again.

The Commons on the morrow took his speech into consideration. Harley

and his allies complained that the King's answer was no answer at all,

threatened to tack the Place Bill to a money bill, and proposed to make

a second representation pressing His Majesty to explain himself more

distinctly. But by this time there was a strong reflux of feeling in the

assembly. The Whigs had not only recovered from their dismay, but were

in high spirits and eager for conflict. Wharton, Russell and Littleton

maintained that the House ought to be satisfied with what the King had

said. "Do you wish," said Littleton, "to make sport for your enemies?

There is no want of them. They besiege our very doors. We read, as we

come through the lobby, in the face and gestures of every nonjuror whom

we pass, delight at the momentary coolness which has arisen between us

and the King. That should be enough for us. We may be sure that we are

voting rightly when we give a vote which tends to confound the hopes of

traitors." The House divided. Harley was a teller on one side, Wharton

on the other. Only eighty-eight voted with Harley, two hundred and

twenty-nine with Wharton. The Whigs were so much elated by their victory

that some of them wished to move a vote of thanks to William for his

gracious answer; but they were restrained by wiser men. "We have lost

time enough already in these unhappy debates," said a leader of the

party. "Let us get to Ways and Means as fast as we can. The best form

which our thanks can take is that of a money bill."

Thus ended, more happily than William had a right to expect, one of the

most dangerous contests in which he ever engaged with his Parliament.

At the Dutch Embassy the rising and going down of this tempest had been

watched with intense interest; and the opinion there seems to have been

that the King had on the whole lost neither power nor popularity by his

conduct. [502]