These hopes were kept up by the despatches of Villeroy. He proposed,

he said, first to annihilate the army of Vaudemont, and then to drive

William from Namur. Vaudemont might try to avoid an action; but he could

not escape. The Marshal went so far as to promise his master news of a

complete victory within twenty-four hours. Lewis passed a whole day

in impatient expectation. At last, instead of an officer of high rank

loaded with English and Dutch standards, arrived a courier bringing news

that Vaudemont had effected a retreat with scarcely any loss, and was

safe under the walls of Ghent. William extolled the generalship of his

lieutenant in the warmest terms. "My cousin," he wrote, "you have shown

yourself a greater master of your art than if you had won a pitched

battle." [604] In the French camp, however, and at the French Court it

was universally held that Vaudemont had been saved less by his own skill

than by the misconduct of those to whom he was opposed. Some threw

the whole blame on Villeroy; and Villeroy made no attempt to vindicate

himself. But it was generally believed that he might, at least to a

great extent, have vindicated himself, had he not preferred royal favour

to military renown. His plan, it was said, might have succeeded, had not

the execution been entrusted to the Duke of Maine. At the first glimpse

of danger the bastard's heart had died within him. He had not been able

to conceal his poltroonery. He had stood trembling, stuttering, calling

for his confessor, while the old officers round him, with tears in their

eyes, urged him to advance. During a short time the disgrace of the son

was concealed from the father. But the silence of Villeroy showed

that there was a secret; the pleasantries of the Dutch gazettes soon

elucidated the mystery; and Lewis learned, if not the whole truth, yet

enough to make him miserable. Never during his long reign had he been so

moved. During some hours his gloomy irritability kept his servants, his

courtiers, even his priests, in terror. He so far forgot the grace and

dignity for which he was renowned throughout the world that, in the

sight of all the splendid crowd of gentlemen and ladies who came to see

him dine at Marli, he broke a cane on the shoulders of a lacquey, and

pursued the poor man with the handle. [605]

The siege of Namur meanwhile was vigorously pressed by the allies. The

scientific part of their operations was under the direction of Cohorn,

who was spurred by emulation to exert his utmost skill. He had suffered,

three years before, the mortification of seeing the town, as he had

fortified it, taken by his great master Vauban. To retake it, now that

the fortifications had received Vauban's last improvements, would be a

noble revenge.

On the second of July the trenches were opened. On the eighth a gallant

sally of French dragoons was gallantly beaten back; and, late on the

same evening, a strong body of infantry, the English footguards leading

the way, stormed, after a bloody conflict, the outworks on the Brussels

side. The King in person directed the attack; and his subjects were

delighted to learn that, when the fight was hottest, he laid his hand on

the shoulder of the Elector of Bavaria, and exclaimed, "Look, look at

my brave English!" Conspicuous in bravery even among those brave English

was Cutts. In that bulldog courage which flinches from no danger,

however terrible, he was unrivalled. There was no difficulty in finding

hardy volunteers, German, Dutch and British, to go on a forlorn hope;

but Cutts was the only man who appeared to consider such an expedition

as a party of pleasure. He was so much at his ease in the hottest

fire of the French batteries that his soldiers gave him the honourable

nickname of the Salamander. [606]

On the seventeenth the first counterscarp of the town was attacked.

The English and Dutch were thrice repulsed with great slaughter, and

returned thrice to the charge. At length, in spite of the exertions of

the French officers, who fought valiantly sword in hand on the glacis,

the assailants remained in possession of the disputed works. While the

conflict was raging, William, who was giving his orders under a shower

of bullets, saw with surprise and anger, among the officers of his

staff, Michael Godfrey the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. This

gentleman had come to the King's headquarters in order to make some

arrangements for the speedy and safe remittance of money from England

to the army in the Netherlands, and was curious to see real war. Such

curiosity William could not endure. "Mr. Godfrey," he said, "you ought

not to run these hazards; you are not a soldier; you can be of no use

to us here." "Sir," answered Godfrey, "I run no more hazard than Your

Majesty." "Not so," said William; "I am where it is my duty to be; and

I may without presumption commit my life to God's keeping; but you--"

While they were talking a cannon ball from the ramparts laid Godfrey

dead at the King's feet. It was not found however that the fear of being

Godfreyed,--such was during some time the cant phrase,--sufficed to

prevent idle gazers from coming to the trenches. [607] Though William

forbade his coachmen, footmen and cooks to expose themselves, he

repeatedly saw them skulking near the most dangerous spots and trying to

get a peep at the fighting. He was sometimes, it is said, provoked into

horsewhipping them out of the range of the French guns; and the story,

whether true or false, is very characteristic.

On the twentieth of July the Bavarians and Brandenburghers, under the

direction of Cohorn, made themselves masters, after a hard fight, of a

line of works which Vauban had cut in the solid rock from the Sambre to

the Meuse. Three days later, the English and Dutch, Cutts, as usual, in

the front, lodged themselves on the second counterscarp. All was ready

for a general assault, when a white flag was hung out from the ramparts.

The effective strength of the garrison was now little more than one half

of what it had been when the trenches were opened. Boufflers apprehended

that it would be impossible for eight thousand men to defend the whole

circuit of the walls much longer; but he felt confident that such a

force would be sufficient to keep the stronghold on the summit of the

rock. Terms of capitulation were speedily adjusted. A gate was delivered

up to the allies. The French were allowed forty-eight hours to retire

into the castle, and were assured that the wounded men whom they left

below, about fifteen hundred in number, should be well treated. On the

sixth the allies marched in. The contest for the possession of the

town was over; and a second and more terrible contest began for the

possession of the citadel. [608]

Villeroy had in the meantime made some petty conquests. Dixmuyde, which

might have offered some resistance, had opened its gates to him, not

without grave suspicion of treachery on the part of the governor.

Deynse, which was less able to make any defence, had followed the

example. The garrisons of both towns were, in violation of a convention

which had been made for the exchange of prisoners, sent into France. The

Marshal then advanced towards Brussels in the hope, as it should seem,

that, by menacing that beautiful capital, he might induce the allies

to raise the siege of the castle of Namur. During thirty-six hours he

rained shells and redhot bullets on the city. The Electress of Bavaria,

who was within the walls, miscarried from terror. Six convents perished.

Fifteen hundred houses were at once in flames. The whole lower town

would have been burned to the ground, had not the inhabitants stopped

the conflagration by blowing up numerous buildings. Immense quantities

of the finest lace and tapestry were destroyed; for the industry and

trade which made Brussels famous throughout the world had hitherto been

little affected by the war. Several of the stately piles which looked

down on the market place were laid in ruins. The Town Hall itself, the

noblest of the many noble senate houses reared by the burghers of the

Netherlands, was in imminent peril. All this devastation, however,

produced no effect except much private misery. William was not to be

intimidated or provoked into relaxing the firm grasp with which he held

Namur. The fire which his batteries kept up round the castle was such as

had never been known in war. The French gunners were fairly driven from

their pieces by the hail of balls, and forced to take refuge in vaulted

galleries under the ground. Cohorn exultingly betted the Elector

of Bavaria four hundred pistoles that the place would fall by the

thirty-first of August, New Style. The great engineer lost his wager

indeed, but lost it only by a few hours. [609]

Boufflers now began to feel that his only hope was in Villeroy. Villeroy

had proceeded from Brussels to Enghien; he had there collected all the

French troops that could be spared from the remotest fortresses of the

Netherlands; and he now, at the head of more than eighty thousand men,

marched towards Namur. Vaudemont meanwhile joined the besiegers. William

therefore thought himself strong enough to offer battle to Villeroy,

without intermitting for a moment the operations against Boufflers. The

Elector of Bavaria was entrusted with the immediate direction of the

siege. The King of England took up, on the west of the town, a strong

position strongly intrenched, and there awaited the French, who were

advancing from Enghien. Every thing seemed to indicate that a great

day was at hand. Two of the most numerous and best ordered armies that

Europe had ever seen were brought face to face. On the fifteenth of

August the defenders of the castle saw from their watchtowers the mighty

host of their countrymen. But between that host and the citadel was

drawn up in battle order the not less mighty host of William. Villeroy,

by a salute of ninety guns, conveyed to Boufflers the promise of a

speedy rescue; and at night Boufflers, by fire signals which were seen

far over the vast plain of the Meuse and Sambre, urged Villeroy to

fulfil that promise without delay. In the capitals both of France and

England the anxiety was intense. Lewis shut himself up in his oratory,

confessed, received the Eucharist, and gave orders that the host should

be exposed in his chapel. His wife ordered all her nuns to their knees.

[610] London was kept in a state of distraction by a succession of

rumours fabricated some by Jacobites and some by stockjobbers. Early one

morning it was confidently averred that there had been a battle, that

the allies had been beaten, that the King had been killed, that the

siege had been raised. The Exchange, as soon as it was opened, was

filled to overflowing by people who came to learn whether the bad news

was true. The streets were stopped up all day by groups of talkers and

listeners. In the afternoon the Gazette, which had been impatiently

expected, and which was eagerly read by thousands, calmed the

excitement, but not completely; for it was known that the Jacobites

sometimes received, by the agency of privateers and smugglers who put to

sea in all weathers, intelligence earlier than that which came through

regular channels to the Secretary of State at Whitehall. Before night,

however, the agitation had altogether subsided; but it was suddenly

revived by a bold imposture. A horseman in the uniform of the Guards

spurred through the City, announcing that the King had been killed. He

would probably have raised a serious tumult, had not some apprentices,

zealous for the Revolution and the Protestant religion, knocked him down

and carried him to Newgate. The confidential correspondent of the

States General informed them that, in spite of all the stories which the

disaffected party invented and circulated, the general persuasion was

that the allies would be successful. The touchstone of sincerity in

England, he said, was the betting. The Jacobites were ready enough

to prove that William must be defeated, or to assert that he had been

defeated; but they would not give the odds, and could hardly be induced

to take any moderate odds. The Whigs, on the other hand, were ready to

stake thousands of guineas on the conduct and good fortune of the King.

[611]

The event justified the confidence of the Whigs and the backwardness of

the Jacobites. On the sixteenth, the seventeenth, and the eighteenth

of August the army of Villeroy and the army of William confronted each

other. It was fully expected that the nineteenth would be the decisive

day. The allies were under arms before dawn. At four William mounted,

and continued till eight at night to ride from post to post, disposing

his own troops and watching the movements of the enemy. The enemy

approached his lines in several places, near enough to see that it would

not be easy to dislodge him; but there was no fighting. He lay down to

rest, expecting to be attacked when the sun rose. But when the sun rose

he found that the French had fallen back some miles. He immediately sent

to request that the Elector would storm the castle without delay. While

the preparations were making, Portland was sent to summon the garrison

for the last time. It was plain, he said to Boufflers, that Villeroy had

given up all hope of being able to raise the siege. It would therefore

be an useless waste of life to prolong the contest. Boufflers however

thought that another day of slaughter was necessary to the honour of the

French arms; and Portland returned unsuccessful. [612]

Early in the afternoon the assault was made in four places at once by

four divisions of the confederate army. One point was assigned to the

Brandenburghers, another to the Dutch, a third to the Bavarians, and

a fourth to the English. The English were at first less fortunate than

they had hitherto been. The truth is that most of the regiments which

had seen service had marched with William to encounter Villeroy. As

soon as the signal was given by the blowing up of two barrels of powder,

Cutts, at the head of a small body of grenadiers, marched first out of

the trenches with drums beating and colours flying. This gallant band

was to be supported by four battalions which had never been in action,

and which, though full of spirit, wanted the steadiness which so

terrible a service required. The officers fell fast. Every Colonel,

every Lieutenant Colonel, was killed or severely wounded. Cutts received

a shot in the head which for a time disabled him. The raw recruits, left

almost without direction, rushed forward impetuously till they found

themselves in disorder and out of breath, with a precipice before them,

under a terrible fire, and under a shower, scarcely less terrible,

of fragments of rock and wall. They lost heart, and rolled back in

confusion, till Cutts, whose wound had by this time been dressed,

succeeded in rallying them. He then led them, not to the place from

which they had been driven back, but to another spot where a fearful

battle was raging. The Bavarians had made their onset gallantly but

unsuccessfully; their general had fallen; and they were beginning to

waver when the arrival of the Salamander and his men changed the fate

of the day. Two hundred English volunteers, bent on retrieving at all

hazards the disgrace of the recent repulse, were the first to force a

way, sword in hand, through the palisades, to storm a battery which had

made great havoc among the Bavarians, and to turn the guns against the

garrison. Meanwhile the Brandenburghers, excellently disciplined and

excellently commanded, had performed, with no great loss, the duty

assigned to them. The Dutch had been equally successful. When the

evening closed in the allies had made a lodgment of a mile in extent on

the outworks of the castle. The advantage had been purchased by the loss

of two thousand men. [613]

And now Boufflers thought that he had done all that his duty required.

On the morrow he asked for a truce of forty-eight hours in order that

the hundreds of corpses which choked the ditches and which would soon

have spread pestilence among both the besiegers and the besieged might

be removed and interred. His request was granted; and, before the time

expired, he intimated that he was disposed to capitulate. He would, he

said, deliver up the castle in ten days, if he were not relieved sooner.

He was informed that the allies would not treat with him on such terms,

and that he must either consent to an immediate surrender, or prepare

for an immediate assault. He yielded, and it was agreed that he and his

men should be suffered to depart, leaving the citadel, the artillery,

and the stores to the conquerors. Three peals from all the guns of the

confederate army notified to Villeroy the fall of the stronghold which

he had vainly attempted to succour. He instantly retreated towards

Mons, leaving William to enjoy undisturbed a triumph which was made more

delightful by the recollection of many misfortunes.

The twenty-sixth of August was fixed for an exhibition such as the

oldest soldier in Europe had never seen, and such as, a few weeks

before, the youngest had scarcely hoped to see. From the first battle of

Conde to the last battle of Luxemburg, the tide of military success had

run, without any serious interruption, in one direction. That tide

had turned. For the first time, men said, since France had Marshals, a

Marshal of France was to deliver up a fortress to a victorious enemy.

The allied forces, foot and horse, drawn up in two lines, formed a

magnificent avenue from the breach which had lately been so desperately

contested to the bank of the Meuse. The Elector of Bavaria, the

Landgrave of Hesse, and many distinguished officers were on horseback

in the vicinity of the castle. William was near them in his coach. The

garrison, reduced to about five thousand men, came forth with drums

beating and ensigns flying. Boufflers and his staff closed the

procession. There had been some difficulty about the form of the

greeting which was to be exchanged between him and the allied

Sovereigns. An Elector of Bavaria was hardly entitled to be saluted by

the Marshal with the sword. A King of England was undoubtedly entitled

to such a mark of respect; but France did not recognise William as King

of England. At last Boufflers consented to perform the salute without

marking for which of the two princes it was intended. He lowered his

sword. William alone acknowledged the compliment. A short conversation

followed. The Marshal, in order to avoid the use of the words Sire and

Majesty, addressed himself only to the Elector. The Elector, with every

mark of deference, reported to William what had been said; and William

gravely touched his hat. The officers of the garrison carried back to

their country the news that the upstart who at Paris was designated

only as Prince of Orange, was treated by the proudest potentates of the

Germanic body with a respect as profound as that which Lewis exacted

from the gentlemen of his bedchamber. [614]

The ceremonial was now over; and Boufflers passed on but he had

proceeded but a short way when he was stopped by Dykvelt who accompanied

the allied army as deputy from the States General. "You must return to

the town, Sir," said Dykvelt. "The King of England has ordered me to

inform you that you are his prisoner." Boufflers was in transports of

rage. His officers crowded round him and vowed to die in his defence.

But resistance was out of the question; a strong body of Dutch cavalry

came up; and the Brigadier who commanded them demanded the Marshal's

sword. The Marshal uttered indignant exclamations: "This is an infamous

breach of faith. Look at the terms of the capitulation. What have I done

to deserve such an affront? Have I not behaved like a man of honour?

Ought I not to be treated as such? But beware what you do, gentlemen.

I serve a master who can and will avenge me." "I am a soldier, Sir,"

answered the Brigadier, "and my business is to obey orders without

troubling myself about consequences." Dykvelt calmly and courteously

replied to the Marshal's indignant exclamations. "The King of England

has reluctantly followed the example set by your master. The soldiers

who garrisoned Dixmuyde and Deynse have, in defiance of plighted faith,

been sent prisoners into France. The Prince whom they serve would be

wanting in his duty to them if he did not retaliate. His Majesty might

with perfect justice have detained all the French who were in Namur. But

he will not follow to such a length a precedent which he disapproves.

He has determined to arrest you and you alone; and, Sir, you must not

regard as an affront what is in truth a mark of his very particular

esteem. How can he pay you a higher compliment than by showing that he

considers you as fully equivalent to the five or six thousand men whom

your sovereign wrongfully holds in captivity? Nay, you shall even now be

permitted to proceed if you will give me your word of honour to return

hither unless the garrisons of Dixmuyde and Deynse are released within a

fortnight." "I do not at all know," answered Boufflers, "why the King my

master detains those men; and therefore I cannot hold out any hope that

he will liberate them. You have an army at your back; I am alone; and

you must do your pleasure." He gave up his sword, returned to Namur, and

was sent thence to Huy, where he passed a few days in luxurious repose,

was allowed to choose his own walks and rides, and was treated with

marked respect by those who guarded him. In the shortest time in which

it was possible to post from the place where he was confined to the

French Court and back again, he received full powers to promise that the

garrisons of Dixmuyde and Deynse should be sent back. He was instantly

liberated; and he set off for Fontainebleau, where an honourable

reception awaited him. He was created a Duke and a Peer. That he might

be able to support his new dignities a considerable sum of money was

bestowed on him; and, in the presence of the whole aristocracy of

France, he was welcomed home by Lewis with an affectionate embrace.

[615]

In all the countries which were united against France the news of

the fall of Namur was received with joy; but here the exultation was

greatest. During several generations our ancestors had achieved nothing

considerable by land against foreign enemies. We had indeed occasionally

furnished to our allies small bands of auxiliaries who had well

maintained the honour of the nation. But from the day on which the

two brave Talbots, father and son, had perished in the vain attempt to

reconquer Guienne, till the Revolution, there had been on the Continent

no campaign in which Englishmen had borne a principal part. At length

our ancestors had again, after an interval of near two centuries and a

half, begun to dispute with the warriors of France the palm of military

prowess. The struggle had been hard. The genius of Luxemburg and the

consummate discipline of the household troops of Lewis had pervailed

in two great battles; but the event of those battles had been long

doubtful; the victory had been dearly purchased, and the victor had

gained little more than the honour of remaining master of the field

of slaughter. Meanwhile he was himself training his adversaries. The

recruits who survived his severe tuition speedily became veterans.

Steinkirk and Landen had formed the volunteers who followed Cutts

through the palisades of Namur. The judgment of all the great warriors

whom all the nations of Western Europe had sent to the confluence of the

Sambre and the Meuse was that the English subaltern was inferior to

no subaltern and the English private soldier to no private soldier in

Christendom. The English officers of higher rank were thought hardly

worthy to command such an army. Cutts, indeed, had distinguished himself

by his intrepidity. But those who most admired him acknowledged that he

had neither the capacity nor the science necessary to a general.

The joy of the conquerors was heightened by the recollection of the

discomfiture which they had suffered, three years before, on the same

spot, and of the insolence with which their enemy had then triumphed

over them. They now triumphed in their turn. The Dutch struck medals.

The Spaniards sang Te Deums. Many poems, serious and sportive, appeared,

of which one only has lived. Prior burlesqued, with admirable spirit

and pleasantry, the bombastic verses in which Boileau had celebrated

the first taking of Namur. The two odes, printed side by side, were read

with delight in London; and the critics at Will's pronounced that, in

wit as in arms, England had been victorious.

The fall of Namur was the great military event of this year. The Turkish

war still kept a large part of the forces of the Emperor employed in

indecisive operations on the Danube. Nothing deserving to be mentioned

took place either in Piedmont or on the Rhine. In Catalonia the

Spaniards obtained some slight advantages, advantages due to their

English and Dutch allies, who seem to have done all that could be

done to help a nation never much disposed to help itself. The maritime

superiority of England and Holland was now fully established. During

the whole year Russell was the undisputed master of the Mediterranean,

passed and repassed between Spain and Italy, bombarded Palamos, spread

terror along the whole shore of Provence, and kept the French fleet

imprisoned in the harbour of Toulon. Meanwhile Berkeley was the

undisputed master of the Channel, sailed to and fro in sight of the

coasts of Artois, Picardy, Normandy and Brittany, threw shells into

Saint Maloes, Calais and Dunkirk, and burned Granville to the ground.

The navy of Lewis, which, five years before, had been the most

formidable in Europe, which had ranged the British seas unopposed from

the Downs to the Land's End, which had anchored in Torbay and had laid

Teignmouth in ashes, now gave no sign of existence except by pillaging

merchantmen which were unprovided with convoy. In this lucrative war

the French privateers were, towards the close of the summer, very

successful. Several vessels laden with sugar from Barbadoes were

captured. The losses of the unfortunate East India Company, already

surrounded by difficulties and impoverished by boundless prodigality in

corruption, were enormous. Five large ships returning from the Eastern

seas, with cargoes of which the value was popularly estimated at a

million, fell into the hands of the enemy. These misfortunes produced

some murmuring on the Royal Exchange. But, on the whole, the temper of

the capital and of the nation was better than it had been during some

years.

Meanwhile events which no preceding historian has condescended to

mention, but which were of far greater importance than the achievements

of William's army or of Russell's fleet, were taking place in London.

A great experiment was making. A great revolution was in progress.

Newspapers had made their appearance.

While the Licensing Act was in force there was no newspaper in England

except the London Gazette, which was edited by a clerk in the office

of the Secretary of State, and which contained nothing but what the

Secretary of State wished the nation to know. There were indeed many

periodical papers; but none of those papers could be called a newspaper.

Welwood, a zealous Whig, published a journal called the Observator; but

his Observator, like the Observator which Lestrange had formerly edited,

contained, not the news, but merely dissertations on politics. A crazy

bookseller, named John Dunton, published the Athenian Mercury; but the

Athenian Mercury merely discussed questions of natural philosophy, of

casuistry and of gallantry. A fellow of the Royal Society, named John

Houghton, published what he called a Collection for the Improvement of

Industry and Trade. But his Collection contained little more than the

prices of stocks, explanations of the modes of doing business in

the City, puffs of new projects, and advertisements of books, quack

medicines, chocolate, spa water, civet cats, surgeons wanting ships,

valets wanting masters and ladies wanting husbands. If ever he printed

any political news, he transcribed it from the Gazette. The Gazette was

so partial and so meagre a chronicle of events that, though it had no

competitors, it had but a small circulation. Only eight thousand copies

were printed, much less than one to each parish in the kingdom. In truth

a person who had studied the history of his own time only in the Gazette

would have been ignorant of many events of the highest importance.

He would, for example, have known nothing about the Court Martial

on Torrington, the Lancashire Trials, the burning of the Bishop of

Salisbury's Pastoral Letter or the impeachment of the Duke of Leeds.

But the deficiencies of the Gazette were to a certain extent supplied in

London by the coffeehouses, and in the country by the newsletters.

On the third of May 1695 the law which had subjected the press to a

censorship expired. Within a fortnight, a stanch old Whig, named Harris,

who had, in the days of the Exclusion Bill, attempted to set up a

newspaper entitled Intelligence Domestic and Foreign, and who had

been speedily forced to relinquish that design, announced that the

Intelligence Domestic and Foreign, suppressed fourteen years before

by tyranny, would again appear. Ten days after the first number of the

Intelligence Domestic and Foreign was printed the first number of the

English Courant. Then came the Packet Boat from Holland and Flanders,

the Pegasus, the London Newsletter, the London Post, the Flying Post,

the Old Postmaster, the Postboy and the Postman. The history of the

newspapers of England from that time to the present day is a most

interesting and instructive part of the history of the country. At first

they were small and meanlooking. Even the Postboy and the Postman,

which seem to have been the best conducted and the most prosperous, were

wretchedly printed on scraps of dingy paper such as would not now be

thought good enough for street ballads. Only two numbers came out in a

week, and a number contained little more matter than may be found in a

single column of a daily paper of our time. What is now called a

leading article seldom appeared, except when there was a scarcity of

intelligence, when the Dutch mails were detained by the west wind, when

the Rapparees were quiet in the Bog of Allen, when no stage coach had

been stopped by highwaymen, when no nonjuring congregation had been

dispersed by constables, when no ambassador had made his entry with a

long train of coaches and six, when no lord or poet had been buried in

the Abbey, and when consequently it was difficult to fill up four scanty

pages. Yet the leading articles, though inserted, as it should

seem, only in the absence of more attractive matter, are by no means

contemptibly written.

It is a remarkable fact that the infant newspapers were all on the side

of King William and the Revolution. This fact may be partly explained

by the circumstance that the editors were, at first, on their good

behaviour. It was by no means clear that their trade was not in itself

illegal. The printing of newspapers was certainly not prohibited by any

statute. But, towards the close of the reign of Charles the Second,

the judges had pronounced that it was a misdemeanour at common law to

publish political intelligence without the King's license. It is true

that the judges who laid down this doctrine were removable at the royal

pleasure and were eager on all occasions to exalt the royal prerogative.

How the question, if it were again raised, would be decided by Holt

and Treby was doubtful; and the effect of the doubt was to make the

ministers of the Crown indulgent and to make the journalists cautious.

On neither side was there a wish to bring the question of right to

issue. The government therefore connived at the publication of the

newspapers; and the conductors of the newspapers carefully abstained

from publishing any thing that could provoke or alarm the government. It

is true that, in one of the earliest numbers of one of the new journals,

a paragraph appeared which seemed intended to convey an insinuation that

the Princess Anne did not sincerely rejoice at the fall of Namur. But

the printer made haste to atone for his fault by the most submissive

apologies. During a considerable time the unofficial gazettes, though

much more garrulous and amusing than the official gazette, were scarcely

less courtly. Whoever examines them will find that the King is always

mentioned with profound respect. About the debates and divisions of the

two Houses a reverential silence is preserved. There is much invective;

but it is almost all directed against the Jacobites and the French. It

seems certain that the government of William gained not a little by the

substitution of these printed newspapers, composed under constant dread

of the Attorney General, for the old newsletters, which were written

with unbounded license. [616]

The pamphleteers were under less restraint than the journalists; yet

no person who has studied with attention the political controversies

of that time can have failed to perceive that the libels on William's

person and government were decidedly less coarse and rancorous during

the latter half of his reign than during the earlier half. And the

reason evidently is that the press, which had been fettered during the

earlier half of his reign, was free during the latter half. While the

censorship existed, no tract blaming, even in the most temperate and

decorous language, the conduct of any public department, was likely to

be printed with the approbation of the licenser. To print such a

tract without the approbation of the licenser was illegal. In general,

therefore, the respectable and moderate opponents of the Court, not

being able to publish in the manner prescribed by law, and not thinking

it right or safe to publish in a manner prohibited by law, held their

peace, and left the business of criticizing the administration to two

classes of men, fanatical nonjurors who sincerely thought that the

Prince of Orange was entitled to as little charity or courtesy as the

Prince of Darkness, and Grub Street hacks, coarseminded, badhearted and

foulmouthed. Thus there was scarcely a single man of judgment, temper

and integrity among the many who were in the habit of writing against

the government. Indeed the habit of writing against the government had,

of itself, an unfavourable effect on the character. For whoever was in

the habit of writing against the government was in the habit of breaking

the law; and the habit of breaking even an unreasonable law tends to

make men altogether lawless. However absurd a tariff may be, a smuggler

is but too likely to be a knave and a ruffian. How ever oppressive a

game law may be, the transition is but too easy from a poacher to a

murderer. And so, though little indeed can be said in favour of the

statutes which imposed restraints on literature, there was much risk

that a man who was constantly violating those statutes would not be a

man of high honour and rigid uprightness. An author who was determined

to print, and could not obtain the sanction of the licenser, must employ

the services of needy and desperate outcasts, who, hunted by the peace

officers, and forced to assume every week new aliases and new disguises,

hid their paper and their types in those dens of vice which are the pest

and the shame of great capitals. Such wretches as these he must bribe to

keep his secret and to run the chance of having their backs flayed and

their ears clipped in his stead. A man stooping to such companions and

to such expedients could hardly retain unimpaired the delicacy of his

sense of what was right and becoming. The emancipation of the press

produced a great and salutary change. The best and wisest men in the

ranks of the opposition now assumed an office which had hitherto been

abandoned to the unprincipled or the hotheaded. Tracts against the

government were written in a style not misbecoming statesmen and

gentlemen; and even the compositions of the lower and fiercer class of

malecontents became somewhat less brutal and less ribald than in the

days of the licensers.

Some weak men had imagined that religion and morality stood in need of

the protection of the licenser. The event signally proved that they

were in error. In truth the censorship had scarcely put any restraint

on licentiousness or profaneness. The Paradise Lost had narrowly escaped

mutilation; for the Paradise Lost was the work of a man whose politics

were hateful to the ruling powers. But Etherege's She Would If She

Could, Wycherley's Country Wife, Dryden's Translations from the Fourth

Book of Lucretius, obtained the Imprimatur without difficulty; for

Dryden, Etherege and Wycherley were courtiers. From the day on which the

emancipation of our literature was accomplished, the purification of

our literature began. That purification was effected, not by the

intervention of senates or magistrates, but by the opinion of the great

body of educated Englishmen, before whom good and evil were set, and who

were left free to make their choice. During a hundred and sixty years

the liberty of our press has been constantly becoming more and more

entire; and during those hundred and sixty years the restraint imposed

on writers by the general feeling of readers has been constantly

becoming more and more strict. At length even that class of works

in which it was formerly thought that a voluptuous imagination was

privileged to disport itself, love songs, comedies, novels, have become

more decorous than the sermons of the seventeenth century. At this day

foreigners, who dare not print a word reflecting on the government under

which they live, are at a loss to understand how it happens that the

freest press in Europe is the most prudish.

On the tenth of October, the King, leaving his army in winter quarters,

arrived in England, and was received with unwonted enthusiasm. During

his passage through the capital to his palace, the bells of every church

were ringing, and every street was lighted up. It was late before he

made his way through the shouting crowds to Kensington. But, late as it

was, a council was instantly held. An important point was to be decided.

Should the House of Commons be permitted to sit again, or should there

be an immediate dissolution? The King would probably have been willing

to keep that House to the end of his reign. But this was not in his

power. The Triennial Act had fixed the twenty-fifth of March as the

latest day of the existence of the Parliament. If therefore there were

not a general election in 1695, there must be a general election in

1696; and who could say what might be the state of the country in 1696?

There might be an unfortunate campaign. There might be, indeed there

was but too good reason to believe that there would be, a terrible

commercial crisis. In either case, it was probable that there would be

much ill humour. The campaign of 1695 had been brilliant; the nation

was in an excellent temper; and William wisely determined to seize the

fortunate moment. Two proclamations were immediately published. One of

them announced, in the ordinary form, that His Majesty had determined to

dissolve the old Parliament and had ordered writs to be issued for a new

Parliament. The other proclamation was unprecedented. It signified the

royal pleasure to be that every regiment quartered in a place where an

election was to be held should march out of that place the day before

the nomination, and should not return till the people had made their

choice. From this order, which was generally considered as indicating

a laudable respect for popular rights, the garrisons of fortified towns

and castles were necessarily excepted.

But, though William carefully abstained from disgusting the constituent

bodies by any thing that could look like coercion or intimidation, he

did not disdain to influence their votes by milder means. He resolved

to spend the six weeks of the general election in showing himself to

the people of many districts which he had never yet visited. He hoped to

acquire in this way a popularity which might have a considerable

effect on the returns. He therefore forced himself to behave with a

graciousness and affability in which he was too often deficient; and the

consequence was that he received, at every stage of his progress, marks

of the good will of his subjects. Before he set out he paid a visit in

form to his sister in law, and was much pleased with his reception.

The Duke of Gloucester, only six years old, with a little musket on his

shoulder, came to meet his uncle, and presented arms. "I am learning my

drill," the child said, "that I may help you to beat the French." The

King laughed much, and, a few days later, rewarded the young soldier

with the Garter. [617]

On the seventeenth of October William went to Newmarket, now a place

rather of business than of pleasure, but, in the autumns of the

seventeenth century, the gayest and most luxurious spot in the island.

It was not unusual for the whole Court and Cabinet to go down to the

meetings. Jewellers and milliners, players and fiddlers, venal wits and

venal beauties followed in crowds. The streets were made impassable by

coaches and six. In the places of public resort peers flirted with maids

of honour; and officers of the Life Guards, all plumes and gold

lace, jostled professors in trencher caps and black gowns. For

the neighbouring University of Cambridge always sent her highest

functionaries with loyal addresses, and selected her ablest theologians

to preach before the Sovereign and his splendid retinue. In the wild

days of the Restoration, indeed, the most learned and eloquent divine

might fail to draw a fashionable audience, particularly if Buckingham

announced his intention of holding forth; for sometimes His Grace would

enliven the dulness of a Sunday morning by addressing to the bevy of

fine gentlemen and fine ladies a ribald exhortation which he called

a sermon. But the Court of William was more decent; and the Academic

dignitaries were treated with marked respect. With lords and ladies from

Saint James's and Soho, and with doctors from Trinity College and King's

College, were mingled the provincial aristocracy, foxhunting squires and

their rosycheeked daughters, who had come in queerlooking family coaches

drawn by carthorses from the remotest parishes of three or four counties

to see their Sovereign. The heath was fringed by a wild gipsylike camp

of vast extent. For the hope of being able to feed on the leavings of

many sumptuous tables, and to pick up some of the guineas and crowns

which the spendthrifts of London were throwing about, attracted

thousands of peasants from a circle of many miles. [618]

William, after holding his court a few days at this joyous place, and

receiving the homage of Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and Suffolk,

proceeded to Althorpe. It seems strange that he should, in the course

of what was really a canvassing tour, have honoured with such a mark of

favour a man so generally distrusted and hated as Sunderland. But the

people were determined to be pleased. All Northamptonshire crowded to

kiss the royal hand in that fine gallery which had been embellished by

the pencil of Vandyke and made classical by the muse of Waller; and

the Earl tried to conciliate his neighbours by feasting them at eight

tables, all blazing with plate. From Althorpe the King proceeded to

Stamford. The Earl of Exeter, whose princely seat was, and still is, one

of the great sights of England, had never taken the oaths, and had, in

order to avoid an interview which must have been disagreeable, found

some pretext for going up to London, but had left directions that the

illustrious guest should be received with fitting hospitality. William

was fond of architecture and of gardening; and his nobles could not

flatter him more than by asking his opinion about the improvement of

their country seats. At a time when he had many cares pressing on his

mind he took a great interest in the building of Castle Howard; and a

wooden model of that edifice, the finest specimen of a vicious style,

was sent to Kensington for his inspection. We cannot therefore wonder

that he should have seen Burleigh with delight. He was indeed not

content with one view, but rose early on the following morning for the

purpose of examining the building a second time. From Stamford he went

on to Lincoln, where he was greeted by the clergy in full canonicals,

by the magistrates in scarlet robes, and by a multitude of baronets,

knights and esquires, from all parts of the immense plain which lies

between the Trent and the German Ocean. After attending divine service

in the magnificent cathedral, he took his departure, and journeyed

eastward. On the frontier of Nottinghamshire the Lord Lieutenant of the

county, John Holles, Duke of Newcastle, with a great following, met

the royal carriages and escorted them to his seat at Welbeck, a mansion

surrounded by gigantic oaks which scarcely seem older now than on the

day when that splendid procession passed under their shade. The house in

which William was then, during a few hours, a guest, passed long after

his death, by female descents, from the Holleses to the Harleys, and

from the Harleys to the Bentincks, and now contains the originals of

those singularly interesting letters which passed between him and his

trusty friend and servant Portland. At Welbeck the grandees of the north

were assembled. The Lord Mayor of York came thither with a train of

magistrates, and the Archbishop of York with a train of divines. William

hunted several times in that forest, the finest in the kingdom, which in

old times gave shelter to Robin Hood and Little John, and which is now

portioned out into the princely domains of Welbeck, Thoresby, Clumber

and Worksop. Four hundred gentlemen on horseback partook of his sport.

The Nottinghamshire squires were delighted to hear him say at table,

after a noble stag chase, that he hoped that this was not the last run

which he should have with them, and that he must hire a hunting

box among their delightful woods. He then turned southward. He was

entertained during one day by the Earl of Stamford at Bradgate, the

place where Lady Jane Grey sate alone reading the last words of Socrates

while the deer was flying through the park followed by the whirlwind of

hounds and hunters. On the morrow the Lord Brook welcomed his Sovereign

to Warwick Castle, the finest of those fortresses of the middle

ages which have been turned into peaceful dwellings. Guy's Tower was

illuminated. A hundred and twenty gallons of punch were drunk to His

Majesty's health; and a mighty pile of faggots blazed in the middle of

the spacious court overhung by ruins green with the ivy of centuries.

The next morning the King, accompanied by a multitude of

Warwickshire gentlemen on horseback, proceeded towards the borders of

Gloucestershire. He deviated from his route to dine with Shrewsbury at

a secluded mansion in the Wolds, and in the evening went on to Burford.

The whole population of Burford met him, and entreated him to accept a

small token of their love. Burford was then renowned for its saddles.

One inhabitant of the town, in particular, was said by the English to

be the best saddler in Europe. Two of his masterpieces were respectfully

offered to William, who received them with much grace, and ordered them

to be especially reserved for his own use. [619]

At Oxford he was received with great pomp, complimented in a Latin

oration, presented with some of the most beautiful productions of the

Academic press, entertained with music, and invited to a sumptuous feast

in the Sheldonian theatre. He departed in a few hours, pleading as

an excuse for the shortness of his stay that he had seen the colleges

before, and that this was a visit, not of curiosity, but of kindness. As

it was well known that he did not love the Oxonians and was not loved

by them, his haste gave occasion to some idle rumours which found credit

with the vulgar. It was said that he hurried away without tasting the

costly banquet which had been provided for him, because he had been

warned by an anonymous letter, that, if he ate or drank in the theatre,

he was a dead man. But it is difficult to believe that a Prince who

could scarcely be induced, by the most earnest entreaties of his

friends, to take the most common precautions against assassins of whose

designs he had trustworthy evidence, would have been scared by so silly

a hoax; and it is quite certain that the stages of his progress had been

marked, and that he remained at Oxford as long as was compatible with

arrangements previously made. [620]

He was welcomed back to his capital by a splendid show, which had been

prepared at great cost during his absence. Sidney, now Earl of Romney

and Master of the Ordnance, had determined to astonish London by an

exhibition which had never been seen in England on so large a scale.

The whole skill of the pyrotechnists of his department was employed to

produce a display of fireworks which might vie with any that had been

seen in the gardens of Versailles or on the great tank at the Hague.

Saint James's Square was selected as the place for the spectacle. All

the stately mansions on the northern, eastern and western sides were

crowded with people of fashion. The King appeared at a window of

Romney's drawing room. The Princess of Denmark, her husband and her

court occupied a neighbouring house. The whole diplomatic body assembled

at the dwelling of the minister of the United Provinces. A huge pyramid

of flame in the centre of the area threw out brilliant cascades which

were seen by hundreds of thousands who crowded the neighbouring streets

and parks. The States General were informed by their correspondent that,

great as the multitude was, the night had passed without the slightest

disturbance. [621]

By this time the elections were almost completed. In every part of the

country it had been manifest that the constituent bodies were generally

zealous for the King and for the war. The City of London, which had

returned four Tories in 1690, returned four Whigs in 1695. Of the

proceedings at Westminster an account more than usually circumstantial

has come down to us. In 1690 the electors, disgusted by the Sacheverell

Clause, had returned two Tories. In 1695, as soon as it was known that a

new Parliament was likely to be called, a meeting was held, at which it

was resolved that a deputation should be sent with an invitation to two

Commissioners of the Treasury, Charles Montague and Sir Stephen Fox. Sir

Walter Clarges stood on the Tory interest. On the day of nomination

near five thousand electors paraded the streets on horseback. They were

divided into three bands; and at the head of each band rode one of the

candidates. It was easy to estimate at a glance the comparative strength

of the parties. For the cavalcade which followed Clarges was the least

numerous of the three; and it was well known that the followers of

Montague would vote for Fox, and the followers of Fox for Montague. The

business of the day was interrupted by loud clamours. The Whigs cried

shame on the Jacobite candidate who wished to make the English go

to mass, eat frogs and wear wooden shoes. The Tories hooted the two

placemen who were raising great estates out of the plunder of the poor

overburdened nation. From words the incensed factions proceeded to

blows; and there was a riot which was with some difficulty quelled.

The High Bailiff then walked round the three companies of horsemen, and

pronounced, on the view, that Montague and Fox were duly elected. A poll

was demanded. The Tories exerted themselves strenuously. Neither money

nor ink was spared. Clarges disbursed two thousand pounds in a few

hours, a great outlay in times when the average income of a member of

Parliament was not estimated at more than eight hundred a year. In the

course of the night which followed the nomination, broadsides filled

with invectives against the two courtly upstarts who had raised

themselves by knavery from poverty and obscurity to opulence and power

were scattered all over the capital. The Bishop of London canvassed

openly against the government; for the interference of peers in

elections had not yet been declared by the Commons to be a breach of

privilege. But all was vain. Clarges was at the bottom of the poll

without hope of rising. He withdrew; and Montague was carried on the

shoulders of an immense multitude from Westminster Abbey to his office

at Whitehall. [622]

The same feeling exhibited itself in many other places. The freeholders

of Cumberland instructed their representatives to support the King, and

to vote whatever supplies might be necessary for the purpose of carrying

on the war with vigour; and this example was followed by several

counties and towns. [623] Russell did not arrive in England till after

the writs had gone out. But he had only to choose for what place he

would sit. His popularity was immense; for his villanies were secret,

and his public services were universally known. He had won the battle of

La Hogue. He had commanded two years in the Mediterranean. He had there

shut up the French fleets in the harbour of Toulon, and had stopped and

turned back the French armies in Catalonia. He had taken many vessels,

and among them two ships of the line; and he had not, during his long

absence in a remote sea, lost a single vessel either by war or by

weather. He had made the red cross of Saint George an object of terror

to all the princes and commonwealths of Italy. The effect of his

successes was that embassies were on their way from Florence, Genoa

and Venice, with tardy congratulations to William on his accession.

Russell's merits, artfully magnified by the Whigs, made such an

impression that he was returned to Parliament not only by Portsmouth

where his official situation gave him great influence, and by

Cambridgeshire where his private property was considerable, but also by

Middlesex. This last distinction, indeed, he owed chiefly to the name

which he bore. Before his arrival in England it had been generally

thought that two Tories would be returned for the metropolitan county.

Somers and Shrewsbury were of opinion that the only way to avert such a

misfortune was to conjure with the name of the most virtuous of all the

martyrs of English liberty. They entreated Lady Russell to suffer her

eldest son, a boy of fifteen, who was about to commence his studies at

Cambridge, to be put in nomination. He must, they said, drop, for one

day, his new title of Marquess of Tavistock, and call himself Lord

Russell. There will be no expense. There will be no contest. Thousands

of gentlemen on horseback will escort him to the hustings; nobody will

dare to stand against him; and he will not only come in himself, but

bring in another Whig. The widowed mother, in a letter written with

all the excellent sense and feeling which distinguished her, refused

to sacrifice her son to her party. His education, she said, would be

interrupted; his head would be turned; his triumph would be his undoing.

Just at this conjuncture the Admiral arrived. He made his appearance

before the freeholders of Middlesex assembled on the top of Hampstead

Hill, and was returned without opposition. [624]

Meanwhile several noted malecontents received marks of public

disapprobation. John Knight, the most factious and insolent of those

Jacobites who had dishonestly sworn fealty to King William in order to

qualify themselves to sit in Parliament, ceased to represent the

great city of Bristol. Exeter, the capital of the west, was violently

agitated. It had been long supposed that the ability, the eloquence, the

experience, the ample fortune, the noble descent of Seymour would make

it impossible to unseat him. But his moral character, which had

never stood very high, had, during the last three or four years, been

constantly sinking. He had been virulent in opposition till he had got

a place. While he had a place he had defended the most unpopular acts

of the government. As soon as he was out of place, he had again been

virulent in opposition.

His saltpetre contract had left a deep stain on his personal honour. Two

candidates were therefore brought forward against him; and a contest,

the longest and fiercest of that age, fixed the attention of the whole

kingdom, and was watched with interest even by foreign governments. The

poll was open five weeks. The expense on both sides was enormous. The

freemen of Exeter, who, while the election lasted, fared sumptuously

every day, were by no means impatient for the termination of their

luxurious carnival. They ate and drank heartily; they turned out

every evening with good cudgels to fight for Mother Church or for King

William; but the votes came in very slowly. It was not till the eve

of the meeting of Parliament that the return was made. Seymour was

defeated, to his bitter mortification, and was forced to take refuge in

the small borough of Totness. [625]

It is remarkable that, at this election as at the preceding election,

John Hampden failed to obtain a seat. He had, since he ceased to be a

member of Parliament, been brooding over his evil fate and his indelible

shame, and occasionally venting his spleen in bitter pamphlets against

the government. When the Whigs had become predominant at the Court and

in the House of Commons, when Nottingham had retired, when Caermarthen

had been impeached, Hampden, it should seem, again conceived the hope

that he might play a great part in public life. But the leaders of

his party, apparently, did not wish for an ally of so acrimonious and

turbulent a spirit. He found himself still excluded from the House of

Commons. He led, during a few months, a miserable life, sometimes trying

to forget his cares among the wellbred gamblers and frail beauties who

filled the drawingroom of the Duchess of Mazarine, and sometimes sunk

in religious melancholy. The thought of suicide often rose in his mind.

Soon there was a vacancy in the representation of Buckinghamshire,

the county which had repeatedly sent himself and his progenitors to

Parliament; and he expected that he should, by the help of Wharton,

whose dominion over the Buckinghamshire Whigs was absolute, be returned

without difficulty. Wharton, however, gave his interest to another

candidate. This was a final blow. The town was agitated by the news that

John Hampden had cut his throat, that he had survived his wound a few

hours, that he had professed deep penitence for his sins, had requested

the prayers of Burnet, and had sent a solemn warning to the Duchess of

Mazarine. A coroner's jury found a verdict of insanity. The wretched man

had entered on life with the fairest prospects. He bore a name which was

more than noble. He was heir to an ample estate and to a patrimony much

more precious, the confidence and attachment of hundreds of thousands

of his countrymen. His own abilities were considerable, and had been

carefully cultivated. Unhappily ambition and party spirit impelled

him to place himself in a situation full of danger. To that danger his

fortitude proved unequal. He stooped to supplications which saved him

and dishonoured him. From that moment, he never knew peace of mind.

His temper became perverse; and his understanding was perverted by

his temper. He tried to find relief in devotion and in revenge, in

fashionable dissipation and in political turmoil. But the dark shade

never passed away from his mind, till, in the twelfth year of his

humiliation, his unhappy life was terminated by an unhappy death. [626]

The result of the general election proved that William had chosen a

fortunate moment for dissolving. The number of new members was about a

hundred and sixty; and most of these were known to be thoroughly well

affected to the government. [627]

It was of the highest importance that the House of Commons should, at

that moment, be disposed to cooperate cordially with the King. For it

was absolutely necessary to apply a remedy to an internal evil which had

by slow degrees grown to a fearful magnitude. The silver coin, which was

then the standard coin of the realm, was in a state at which the boldest

and most enlightened statesmen stood aghast. [628]

Till the reign of Charles the Second our coin had been struck by a

process as old as the thirteenth century. Edward the First had invited

hither skilful artists from Florence, which, in his time, was to London

what London, in the time of William the Third, was to Moscow. During

many generations, the instruments which were then introduced into our

mint continued to be employed with little alteration. The metal was

divided with shears, and afterwards shaped and stamped by the hammer.

In these operations much was left to the hand and eye of the workman. It

necessarily happened that some pieces contained a little more and some

a little less than the just quantity of silver; few pieces were exactly

round; and the rims were not marked. It was therefore in the course of

years discovered that to clip the coin was one of the easiest and most

profitable kinds of fraud. In the reign of Elizabeth it had been thought

necessary to enact that the clipper should be, as the coiner had long

been, liable to the penalties of high treason. [629] The practice of

paring down money, however, was far too lucrative to be so checked; and,

about the time of the Restoration, people began to observe that a large

proportion of the crowns, halfcrowns and shillings which were passing

from hand to hand had undergone some slight mutilation.

That was a time fruitful of experiments and inventions in all the

departments of science. A great improvement in the mode of shaping

and striking the coin was suggested. A mill, which to a great extent

superseded the human hand, was set up in the Tower of London. This

mill was worked by horses, and would doubtless be considered by modern

engineers as a rude and feeble machine. The pieces which it produced,

however, were among the best in Europe. It was not easy to counterfeit

them; and, as their shape was exactly circular, and their edges were

inscribed with a legend, clipping was not to be apprehended. [630] The

hammered coins and the milled coins were current together. They were

received without distinction in public, and consequently in private,

payments. The financiers of that age seem to have expected that the new

money, which was excellent, would soon displace the old money which was

much impaired. Yet any man of plain understanding might have known that,

when the State treats perfect coin and light coin as of equal value, the

perfect coin will not drive the light coin out of circulation, but will

itself be driven out. A clipped crown, on English ground, went as far in

the payment of a tax or a debt as a milled crown. But the milled crown,

as soon as it had been flung into the crucible or carried across the

Channel, became much more valuable than the clipped crown. It might

therefore have been predicted, as confidently as any thing can be

predicted which depends on the human will, that the inferior pieces

would remain in the only market in which they could fetch the same price

as the superior pieces, and that the superior pieces would take some

form or fly to some place in which some advantage could be derived from

their superiority. [631]

The politicians of that age, however, generally overlooked these very

obvious considerations. They marvelled exceedingly that every body

should be so perverse as to use light money in preference to good money.

In other words, they marvelled that nobody chose to pay twelve ounces of

silver when ten would serve the turn. The horse in the Tower still paced

his rounds. Fresh waggon loads of choice money still came forth from

the mill; and still they vanished as fast as they appeared. Great masses

were melted down; great masses exported; great masses hoarded; but

scarcely one new piece was to be found in the till of a shop, or in the

leathern bag which the farmer carried home from the cattle fair. In the

receipts and payments of the Exchequer the milled money did not exceed

ten shillings in a hundred pounds. A writer of that age mentions the

case of a merchant who, in a sum of thirty-five pounds, received only a

single halfcrown in milled silver. Meanwhile the shears of the clippers

were constantly at work. The comers too multiplied and prospered; for

the worse the current money became the more easily it was imitated.

During more than thirty years this evil had gone on increasing. At first

it had been disregarded; but it had at length become an insupportable

curse to the country. It was to no purpose that the rigorous laws

against coining and clipping were rigorously executed. At every session

that was held at the Old Bailey terrible examples were made. Hurdles,

with four, five, six wretches convicted of counterfeiting or mutilating

the money of the realm, were dragged month after month up Holborn Hill.

On one morning seven men were hanged and a woman burned for clipping;

But all was vain. The gains were such as to lawless spirits seemed more

than proportioned to the risks. Some clippers were said to have made

great fortunes. One in particular offered six thousand pounds for a

pardon. His bribe was indeed rejected; but the fame of his riches did

much to counteract the effect which the spectacle of his death was

designed to produce. [632] Nay the severity of the punishment gave

encouragement to the crime. For the practice of clipping, pernicious as

it was, did not excite in the common mind a detestation resembling

that with which men regard murder, arson, robbery, nay, even theft.

The injury done by the whole body of clippers to the whole society was

indeed immense; but each particular act of clipping was a trifle. To

pass a halfcrown, after paring a pennyworth of silver from it, seemed a

minute, an almost imperceptible, fault. Even while the nation was crying

out most loudly under the distress which the state of the currency had

produced, every individual who was capitally punished for contributing

to bring the currency into that state had the general sympathy on his

side. Constables were unwilling to arrest the offenders. Justices were

unwilling to commit. Witnesses were unwilling to tell the whole truth.

Juries were unwilling to pronounce the word Guilty. It was vain to tell

the common people that the mutilators of the coin were causing far more

misery than all the highwaymen and housebreakers in the island. For,

great as the aggregate of the evil was, only an infinitesimal part of

that evil was brought home to the individual malefactor. There was,

therefore, a general conspiracy to prevent the law from taking its

course. The convictions, numerous as they might seem, were few indeed

when compared with the offences; and the offenders who were convicted

looked on themselves as murdered men, and were firm in the belief that

their sin, if sin it were, was as venial as that of a schoolboy who goes

nutting in the wood of a neighbour. All the eloquence of the ordinary

could seldom induce them to conform to the wholesome usage of

acknowledging in their dying speeches the enormity of their wickedness.

[633]

The evil proceeded with constantly accelerating velocity. At length in

the autumn of 1695 it could hardly be said that the country possessed,

for practical purposes, any measure of the value of commodities. It was

a mere chance whether what was called a shilling was really tenpence,

sixpence or a groat. The results of some experiments which were tried at

that time deserve to be mentioned. The officers of the Exchequer weighed

fifty-seven thousand two hundred pounds of hammered money which had

recently been paid in. The weight ought to have been above two hundred

and twenty thousand ounces. It proved to be under one hundred and

fourteen thousand ounces. [634] Three eminent London goldsmiths were

invited to send a hundred pounds each in current silver to be tried by

the balance. Three hundred pounds ought to have weighed about twelve

hundred ounces. The actual weight proved to be six hundred and

twenty-four ounces. The same test was applied in various parts of the

kingdom. It was found that a hundred pounds, which should have weighed

about four hundred ounces, did actually weigh at Bristol two hundred and

forty ounces, at Cambridge two hundred and three, at Exeter one hundred

and eighty, and at Oxford only one hundred and sixteen. [635] There

were, indeed, some northern districts into which the clipped money had

only begun to find its way. An honest Quaker, who lived in one of these

districts, recorded, in some notes which are still extant, the amazement

with which, when he travelled southward, shopkeepers and innkeepers

stared at the broad and heavy halfcrowns with which he paid his way.

They asked whence he came, and where such money was to be found. The

guinea which he purchased for twenty-two shillings at Lancaster bore a

different value at every stage of his journey. When he reached London

it was worth thirty shillings, and would indeed have been worth more had

not the government fixed that rate as the highest at which gold should

be received in the payment of taxes. [636]

The evils produced by this state of the currency were not such as have

generally been thought worthy to occupy a prominent place in history.

Yet it may well be doubted whether all the misery which had been

inflicted on the English nation in a quarter of a century by bad Kings,

bad Ministers, bad Parliaments and bad judges, was equal to the misery

caused in a single year by bad crowns and bad shillings. Those events

which furnish the best themes for pathetic or indignant eloquence are

not always those which most affect the happiness of the great body of

the people. The misgovernment of Charles and James, gross as it had

been, had not prevented the common business of life from going steadily

and prosperously on. While the honour and independence of the State

were sold to a foreign power, while chartered rights were invaded, while

fundamental laws were violated, hundreds of thousands of quiet, honest

and industrious families laboured and traded, ate their meals and

lay down to rest, in comfort and security. Whether Whigs or Tories,

Protestants or Jesuits were uppermost, the grazier drove his beasts to

market; the grocer weighed out his currants; the draper measured out

his broadcloth; the hum of buyers and sellers was as loud as ever in

the towns; the harvest home was celebrated as joyously as ever in the

hamlets; the cream overflowed the pails of Cheshire; the apple juice

foamed in the presses of Herefordshire; the piles of crockery glowed in

the furnaces of the Trent; and the barrows of coal rolled fast along the

timber railways of the Tyne. But when the great instrument of exchange

became thoroughly deranged, all trade, all industry, were smitten as

with a palsy. The evil was felt daily and hourly in almost every place

and by almost every class, in the dairy and on the threshing floor, by

the anvil and by the loom, on the billows of the ocean and in the depths

of the mine. Nothing could be purchased without a dispute. Over every

counter there was wrangling from morning to night. The workman and his

employer had a quarrel as regularly as the Saturday came round. On a

fair day or a market day the clamours, the reproaches, the taunts, the

curses, were incessant; and it was well if no booth was overturned

and no head broken. [637] No merchant would contract to deliver goods

without making some stipulation about the quality of the coin in which

he was to be paid. Even men of business were often bewildered by the

confusion into which all pecuniary transactions were thrown. The simple

and the careless were pillaged without mercy by extortioners whose

demands grew even more rapidly than the money shrank. The price of

the necessaries of life, of shoes, of ale, of oatmeal, rose fast. The

labourer found that the bit of metal which when he received it was

called a shilling would hardly, when he wanted to purchase a pot of beer

or a loaf of rye bread, go as far as sixpence. Where artisans of more

than usual intelligence were collected together in great numbers, as in

the dockyard at Chatham, they were able to make their complaints heard

and to obtain some redress. [638] But the ignorant and helpless peasant

was cruelly ground between one class which would give money only by

tale and another which would take it only by weight. Yet his sufferings

hardly exceeded those of the unfortunate race of authors. Of the way in

which obscure writers were treated we may easily form a judgment from

the letters, still extant, of Dryden to his bookseller Tonson. One day

Tonson sends forty brass shillings, to say nothing of clipped money.

Another day he pays a debt with pieces so bad that none of them will go.

The great poet sends them all back, and demands in their place guineas

at twenty-nine shillings each. "I expect," he says in one letter, "good

silver, not such as I have had formerly." "If you have any silver that

will go," he says in another letter, "my wife will be glad of it. I lost

thirty shillings or more by the last payment of fifty pounds." These

complaints and demands, which have been preserved from destruction only

by the eminence of the writer, are doubtless merely a fair sample of the

correspondence which filled all the mail bags of England during several

months.

In the midst of the public distress one class prospered greatly, the

bankers; and among the bankers none could in skill or in luck bear a

comparison with Charles Duncombe. He had been, not many years before, a

goldsmith of very moderate wealth. He had probably, after the fashion of

his craft, plied for customers under the arcades of the Royal Exchange,

had saluted merchants with profound bows, and had begged to be allowed

the honour of keeping their cash. But so dexterously did he now avail

himself of the opportunities of profit which the general confusion of

prices gave to a moneychanger, that, at the moment when the trade of

the kingdom was depressed to the lowest point, he laid down near ninety

thousand pounds for the estate of Helmsley in the North Riding of

Yorkshire. That great property had, in a troubled time, been bestowed by

the Commons of England on their victorious general Fairfax, and had been

part of the dower which Fairfax's daughter had brought to the brilliant

and dissolute Buckingham. Thither Buckingham, having wasted in mad

intemperance, sensual and intellectual, all the choicest bounties of

nature and of fortune, had carried the feeble ruins of his fine person

and of his fine mind; and there he had closed his chequered life under

that humble roof and on that coarse pallet which the great satirist

of the succeeding generation described in immortal verse. The spacious

domain passed to a new race; and in a few years a palace more splendid

and costly than had ever been inhabited by the magnificent Villiers rose

amidst the beautiful woods and waters which had been his, and was called

by the once humble name of Duncombe.

Since the Revolution the state of the currency had been repeatedly

discussed in Parliament. In 1689 a committee of the Commons had been

appointed to investigate the subject, but had made no report. In 1690

another committee had reported that immense quantities of silver were

carried out of the country by Jews, who, it was said, would do any thing

for profit. Schemes were formed for encouraging the importation and

discouraging the exportation of the precious metals. One foolish bill

after another was brought in and dropped. At length, in the beginning of

the year 1695, the question assumed so serious an aspect that the Houses

applied themselves to it in earnest. The only practical result of their

deliberations, however, was a new penal law which, it was hoped, would

prevent the clipping of the hammered coin and the melting and exporting

of the milled coin. It was enacted that every person who informed

against a clipper should be entitled to a reward of forty pounds, that

every clipper who informed against two clippers should be entitled to a

pardon, and that whoever should be found in possession of silver filings

or parings should be burned in the cheek with a redhot iron. Certain

officers were empowered to search for bullion. If bullion were found in

a house or on board of a ship, the burden of proving that it had never

been part of the money of the realm was thrown on the owner. If he

failed in making out a satisfactory history of every ingot he was

liable to severe penalties. This Act was, as might have been expected,

altogether ineffective. During the following summer and autumn, the

coins went on dwindling, and the cry of distress from every county in

the realm became louder and more piercing.

But happily for England there were among her rulers some who clearly

perceived that it was not by halters and branding irons that her

decaying industry and commerce could be restored to health. The state of

the currency had during some time occupied the serious attention of four

eminent men closely connected by public and private ties. Two of

them were politicians who had never, in the midst of official and

parliamentary business, ceased to love and honour philosophy; and

two were philosophers, in whom habits of abstruse meditation had not

impaired the homely good sense without which even genius is mischievous

in politics. Never had there been an occasion which more urgently

required both practical and speculative abilities; and never had the

world seen the highest practical and the highest speculative abilities

united in an alliance so close, so harmonious, and so honourable as that

which bound Somers and Montague to Locke and Newton.

It is much to be lamented that we have not a minute history of the

conferences of the men to whom England owed the restoration of her

currency and the long series of prosperous years which dates from

that restoration. It would be interesting to see how the pure gold of

scientific truth found by the two philosophers was mingled by the two

statesmen with just that quantity of alloy which was necessary for

the working. It would be curious to study the many plans which were

propounded, discussed and rejected, some as inefficacious, some as

unjust, some as too costly, some as too hazardous, till at length a

plan was devised of which the wisdom was proved by the best evidence,

complete success.

Newton has left to posterity no exposition of his opinions touching

the currency. But the tracts of Locke on this subject are happily still

extant; and it may be doubted whether in any of his writings, even in

those ingenious and deeply meditated chapters on language which form

perhaps the most valuable part of the Essay on the Human Understanding,

the force of his mind appears more conspicuously. Whether he had ever

been acquainted with Dudley North is not known. In moral character

the two men bore little resemblance to each other. They belonged to

different parties. Indeed, had not Locke taken shelter from tyranny in

Holland, it is by no means impossible that he might have been sent to

Tyburn by a jury which Dudley North had packed. Intellectually, however,

there was much in common between the Tory and the Whig. They had

laboriously thought out, each for himself, a theory of political

economy, substantially the same with that which Adam Smith afterwards

expounded. Nay, in some respects the theory of Locke and North was more

complete and symmetrical than that of their illustrious successor. Adam

Smith has often been justly blamed for maintaining, in direct opposition

to all his own principles, that the rate of interest ought to be

regulated by the State; and he is the more blamable because, long before

he was born, both Locke and North had taught that it was as absurd to

make laws fixing the price of money as to make laws fixing the price of

cutlery or of broadcloth. [639]

Dudley North died in 1693. A short time before his death he published,

without his name, a small tract which contains a concise sketch of a

plan for the restoration of the currency. This plan appears to have been

substantially the same with that which was afterwards fully developed

and ably defended by Locke.

One question, which was doubtless the subject of many anxious

deliberations, was whether any thing should be done while the war

lasted. In whatever way the restoration of the coin might be effected,

great sacrifices must be made, the whole community or by a part of the

community. And to call for such sacrifices at a time when the nation was

already paying taxes such as, ten years before, no financier would have

thought it possible to raise, was undoubtedly a course full of danger.

Timorous politicians were for delay; but the deliberate conviction of

the great Whig leaders was that something must be hazarded, or that

every thing was lost. Montague, in particular, is said to have expressed

in strong language his determination to kill or cure. If indeed there

had been any hope that the evil would merely continue to be what it was,

it might have been wise to defer till the return of peace an experiment

which must severely try the strength of the body politic. But the evil

was one which daily made progress almost visible to the eye. There might

have been a recoinage in 1691 with half the risk which must be run

in 1696; and, great as would be the risk in 1696, that risk would be

doubled if the coinage were postponed till 1698.

Those politicians whose voice was for delay gave less trouble than

another set of politicians, who were for a general and immediate

recoinage, but who insisted that the new shilling should be worth only

ninepence or ninepence halfpenny. At the head of this party was William

Lowndes, Secretary of the Treasury, and member of Parliament for the

borough of Seaford, a most respectable and industrious public servant,

but much more versed in the details of his office than in the higher

parts of political philosophy. He was not in the least aware that a

piece of metal with the King's head on it was a commodity of which the

price was governed by the same laws which govern the price of a piece of

metal fashioned into a spoon or a buckle, and that it was no more in

the power of Parliament to make the kingdom richer by calling a crown

a pound than to make the kingdom larger by calling a furlong a mile.

He seriously believed, incredible as it may seem, that, if the ounce

of silver were divided into seven shillings instead of five, foreign

nations would sell us their wines and their silks for a smaller number

of ounces. He had a considerable following, composed partly of dull men

who really believed what he told them, and partly of shrewd men who were

perfectly willing to be authorised by law to pay a hundred pounds with

eighty. Had his arguments prevailed, the evils of a vast confiscation

would have been added to all the other evils which afflicted the nation;

public credit, still in its tender and sickly infancy, would have been

destroyed; and there would have been much risk of a general mutiny of

the fleet and army. Happily Lowndes was completely refuted by Locke in

a paper drawn up for the use of Somers. Somers was delighted with this

little treatise, and desired that it might be printed. It speedily

became the text book of all the most enlightened politicians in the

kingdom, and may still be read with pleasure and profit. The effect of

Locke's forcible and perspicuous reasoning is greatly heightened by his

evident anxiety to get at the truth, and by the singularly generous

and graceful courtesy with which he treats an antagonist of powers far

inferior to his own. Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, described the

controversy well by saying that the point in dispute was whether five

was six or only five. [640]

Thus far Somers and Montague entirely agreed with Locke; but as to the

manner in which the restoration of the currency ought to be effected

there was some difference of opinion. Locke recommended, as Dudley North

had recommended, that the King should by proclamation fix a near day

after which the hammered money should in all payments pass only by

weight. The advantages of this plan were doubtless great and obvious. It

was most simple, and, at the same time, most efficient. What searching,

fining, branding, hanging, burning, had failed to do would be done in an

instant. The clipping of the hammered pieces, the melting of the milled

pieces would cease. Great quantities of good coin would come forth from

secret drawers and from behind the panels of wainscots. The mutilated

silver would gradually flow into the mint, and would come forth again in

a form which would make mutilation impossible. In a short time the

whole currency of the realm would be in a sound state, and, during the

progress of this great change, there would never at any moment be any

scarcity of money.

These were weighty considerations; and to the joint authority of North

and Locke on such a question great respect is due. Yet it must be owned

that their plan was open to one serious objection, which did not indeed

altogether escape their notice, but of which they seem to have thought

too lightly. The restoration of the currency was a benefit to the whole

community. On what principle then was the expense of restoring the

currency to be borne by a part of the community? It was most desirable

doubtless that the words pound and shilling should again have a fixed

signification, that every man should know what his contracts meant and

what his property was worth. But was it just to attain this excellent

end by means of which the effect would be that every farmer who had

put by a hundred pounds to pay his rent, every trader who had scraped

together a hundred pounds to meet his acceptances, would find his

hundred pounds reduced in a moment to fifty or sixty? It was not

the fault of such a farmer or of such a trader that his crowns and

halfcrowns were not of full weight. The government itself was to blame.

The evil which the State had caused the State was bound to repair, and

it would evidently have been wrong to throw the charge of the reparation

on a particular class, merely because that class was so situated that

it could conveniently be pillaged. It would have been as reasonable to

require the timber merchants to bear the whole cost of fitting out the

Channel fleet, or the gunsmiths to bear the whole cost of supplying arms

to the regiments in Flanders, as to restore the currency of the kingdom

at the expense of those individuals in whose hands the clipped sliver

happened at a particular moment to be.

Locke declared that he regretted the loss which, if his advice were

taken, would fall on the holders of the short money. But it appeared to

him that the nation must make a choice between evils. And in truth it

was much easier to lay down the general proposition that the expenses

of restoring the currency ought to be borne by the public than to devise

any mode in which they could without extreme inconvenience and danger be

so borne. Was it to be announced that every person who should within a

term of a year or half a year carry to the mint a clipped crown should

receive in exchange for it a milled crown, and that the difference

between the value of the two pieces should be made good out of the

public purse? That would be to offer a premium for clipping. The shears

would be more busy than ever. The short money would every day become

shorter. The difference which the taxpayers would have to make good

would probably be greater by a million at the end of the term than

at the beginning; and the whole of this million would go to reward

malefactors. If the time allowed for the bringing in of the hammered

coin were much shortened, the danger of further clipping would be

proportionally diminished; but another danger would be incurred. The

silver would flow into the mint so much faster than it could possibly

flow out, that there must during some months be a grievous scarcity of

money.

A singularly bold and ingenious expedient occurred to Somers and was

approved by William. It was that a proclamation should be prepared with

great secresy, and published at once in all parts of the kingdom. This

proclamation was to announce that hammered coins would thenceforth pass

only by weight. But every possessor of such coins was to be invited to

deliver them up within three days, in a sealed packet, to the public

authorities. The coins were to be examined, numbered, weighed, and

returned to the owner with a promissory note entitling him to receive

from the Treasury at a future time the difference between the actual

quantity of silver in his pieces and the quantity of silver which,

according to the standard, those pieces ought to have contained. [641]

Had this plan been adopted an immediate stop would have been put to

the clipping, the melting and the exporting; and the expense of the

restoration of the currency would have been borne, as was right, by the

public. The inconvenience arising from a scarcity of money would have

been of very short duration; for the mutilated pieces would have been

detained only till they could be told and weighed; they would then have

been sent back into circulation, and the recoinage would have taken

place gradually and without any perceptible suspension or disturbance

of trade. But against these great advantages were to be set off hazards,

which Somers was prepared to brave, but from which it is not strange

that politicians of less elevated character should have shrunk. The

course which he recommended to his colleagues was indeed the safest for

the country, but was by no means the safest for themselves. His plan

could not be successful unless the execution were sudden; the execution

could not be sudden if the previous sanction of Parliament were asked

and obtained; and to take a step of such fearful importance without

the previous sanction of Parliament was to run the risk of censure,

impeachment, imprisonment, ruin. The King and the Lord Keeper were

alone in the Council. Even Montague quailed; and it was determined to do

nothing without the authority of the legislature. Montague undertook to

submit to the Commons a scheme, which was not indeed without dangers and

inconveniences, but which was probably the best which he could hope to

carry.

On the twenty-second of November the Houses met. Foley was on that

day again chosen Speaker. On the following day he was presented and

approved. The King opened the session with a speech very skilfully

framed. He congratulated his hearers on the success of the campaign on

the Continent. That success he attributed, in language which must have

gratified their feelings, to the bravery of the English army. He spoke

of the evils which had arisen from the deplorable state of the coin, and

of the necessity of applying a speedy remedy. He intimated very plainly

his opinion that the expense of restoring the currency ought to be borne

by the State; but he declared that he referred the whole matter to the

wisdom of his Great Council. Before he concluded he addressed himself

particularly to the newly elected House of Commons, and warmly expressed

his approbation of the excellent choice which his people had made. The

speech was received with a low but very significant hum of assent both

from above and from below the bar, and was as favourably received by the

public as by the Parliament. [642] In the Commons an address of thanks

was moved by Wharton, faintly opposed by Musgrave, adopted without a

division, and carried up by the whole House to Kensington. At the palace

the loyalty of the crowd of gentlemen showed itself in a way which

would now be thought hardly consistent with senatorial gravity. When

refreshments were handed round in the antechamber, the Speaker filled

his glass, and proposed two toasts, the health of King William, and

confusion to King Lewis; and both were drunk with loud acclamations. Yet

near observers could perceive that, though the representatives of the

nation were as a body zealous for civil liberty and for the Protestant

religion, and though they were prepared to endure every thing rather

than see their country again reduced to vassalage, they were anxious and

dispirited. All were thinking of the state of the coin; all were saying

that something must be done; and all acknowledged that they did not know

what could be done. "I am afraid," said a member who expressed what many

felt, "that the nation can bear neither the disease nor the cure." [643]

There was indeed a minority by which the difficulties and dangers of

that crisis were seen with malignant delight; and of that minority the

keenest, boldest and most factious leader was Howe, whom poverty had

made more acrimonious than ever. He moved that the House should resolve

itself into a Committee on the State of the Nation; and the Ministry,

for that word may now with propriety be used, readily consented. Indeed

the great question touching the currency could not be brought forward

more conveniently than in such a Committee. When the Speaker had left

the chair, Howe harangued against the war as vehemently as he had in

former years harangued for it. He called for peace, peace on any terms.

The nation, he said, resembled a wounded man, fighting desperately on,

with blood flowing in torrents. During a short time the spirit might

bear up the frame; but faintness must soon come on. No moral energy

could long hold out against physical exhaustion. He found very little

support. The great majority of his hearers were fully determined to put

every thing to hazard rather than submit to France. It was sneeringly

remarked that the state of his own finances had suggested to him

the image of a man bleeding to death, and that, if a cordial were

administered to him in the form of a salary, he would trouble himself

little about the drained veins of the commonwealth. "We did not," said

the Whig orators, "degrade ourselves by suing for peace when our flag

was chased out of our own Channel, when Tourville's fleet lay at anchor

in Torbay, when the Irish nation was in arms against us, when every

post from the Netherlands brought news of some disaster, when we had to

contend against the genius of Louvois in the Cabinet and of Luxemburg in

the field. And are we to turn suppliants now, when no hostile squadron

dares to show itself even in the Mediterranean, when our arms are

victorious on the Continent, when God has removed the great statesman

and the great soldier whose abilities long frustrated our efforts, and

when the weakness of the French administration indicates, in a manner

not to be mistaken, the ascendency of a female favourite?" Howe's

suggestion was contemptuously rejected; and the Committee proceeded to

take into consideration the state of the currency. [644]

Meanwhile the newly liberated presses of the capital never rested a

moment. Innumerable pamphlets and broadsides about the coin lay on the

counters of the booksellers, and were thrust into the hands of members

of Parliament in the lobby. In one of the most curious and amusing of

these pieces Lewis and his ministers are introduced, expressing the

greatest alarm lest England should make herself the richest country in

the world by the simple expedient of calling ninepence a shilling, and

confidently predicting that, if the old standard were maintained, there

would be another revolution. Some writers vehemently objected to the

proposition that the public should bear the expense of restoring

the currency; some urged the government to take this opportunity of

assimilating the money of England to the money of neighbouring nations;

one projector was for coining guilders; another for coining dollars.

[645]

Within the walls of Parliament the debates continued during several

anxious days. At length Montague, after defeating, first those who were

for letting things remain unaltered till the peace, and then those who

were for the little shilling, carried eleven resolutions in which the

outlines of his own plan were set forth. It was resolved that the money

of the kingdom should be recoined according to the old standard both of

weight and of fineness; that all the new pieces should be milled; that

the loss on the clipped pieces should be borne by the public; that a

time should be fixed after which no clipped money should pass, except in

payments to the government; and that a later time should be fixed, after

which no clipped money should pass at all. What divisions took place in

the Committee cannot be ascertained. When the resolutions were reported

there was one division. It was on the question whether the old standard

of weight should be maintained. The Noes were a hundred and fourteen;

the Ayes two hundred and twenty-five. [646]