(_Edinburgh Review_, July, 1835.)
It {251}is with unfeigned diffidence that we venture to give our
opinion of the last work of Sir James Mackintosh. We have in vain tried
to perform what ought to be to a critic an easy and habitual act. We
have in vain tried to separate the book from the writer, and to judge
of it as if it bore some unknown name. But it is to no purpose. All
the lines of that venerable countenance are before us. All the little
peculiar cadences of that voice from which scholars and statesmen loved
to receive the lessons of a serene and benevolent
(1) _History of the Revolution in England, in 1688.
Comprising a View of the Reign of James the Second, from his
Accession to the Enterprise of the Prince, of Orange_, by
the lute Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh; _and
completed to the Settlement of the Crown, by the Editor. To
which is prefixed a Notice of the Life, Writings, and
Speeches of Sir James Mackintosh_. 4to. London: 1834.*
* In this review, as it originally stood, the editor of the
History of the Revolution was attacked with an asperity
which neither literary’ defects nor speculative differences
can justify, and which ought to be reserved for offences
against the laws of morality and honour The reviewer was not
actuated by any feeling of personal’ malevolence: for when
he wrote this paper in a distant country, he did not know,
or even guess, whom he was assailing. His only motive was
regard for the memory of an eminent man whom he loved and
honoured, and who appeared to him to have been unworthily
treated.
The editor is now dead; and, while living, declared that he
had been misunderstood, and that he had written in no spirit
of enmity to Sir James Mackintosh, for whom he professed the
highest respect.
Many passages have therefore been softened, and some wholly
omitted. The severe censure passed on the literary execution
of the Memoir and the Continuation could not be retracted
without a violation of truth. But whatever could be
construed into an imputation on the moral character of the
editor has been carefully expunged.
{252}wisdom are in our ears. We will attempt to preserve strict
impartiality. But we are not ashamed to own that we approach this relic
of a virtuous and most accomplished man with feelings of respect and
gratitude which may possibly pervert our judgment.
It is hardly possible to avoid instituting a comparison between this
work and another celebrated Fragment. Our readers will easily guess that
we allude to Mr. Fox’s History of James the Second The two books relate
to the same subject. Both were posthumously published. Neither had
received the last corrections. The authors belonged to the same
political party, and held the same opinions concerning the merits
and defects of the English constitution, and concerning most of the
prominent characters and events in English history. Both had
thought much on the principles of government; yet they were not mere
speculators. Both had ransacked the archives of rival kingdoms, and
pored on folios which had mouldered for ages in deserted libraries; yet
they were not mere antiquaries. They had one eminent qualification for
writing history: they had spoken history, acted history, lived history.
The turns of political fortune, the ebb and flow of popular feeling, the
hidden mechanism by which parties are moved, all these things were
the subjects of their constant thought and of their most familiar
conversation. Gibbon has remarked that he owed part of his success as
a historian to the observations which he had made as an officer in the
militia and as a member of the House of Commons. The remark is most
just. We have not the smallest doubt that his campaign, though he never
saw an enemy, and his parliamentary attendance, though he never made a
speech, were of far {253}more use to him than years of retirement and
study would have been. If the time that he spent on parade and at mess
in Hampshire, or on the Treasury bench and at Brookes’s during the
storms which overthrew Lord North and Lord Shelburne, had been passed in
the Bodleian Library, he might have avoided some inaccuracies; he might
have enriched his notes with a greater number of references; but he
would never have produced so lively a picture of the court, the camp,
and the senate-house. In this respect Mr. Fox and Sir James Mackintosh
had great advantages over almost every English historian who has written
since the time of Burnet. Lord Lyttelton had indeed the same advantages;
but he was incapable of using them. Pedantry was so deeply fixed in
his nature that the hustings, the Treasury, the Exchequer, the House of
Commons, the House of Lords, left him the same dreaming schoolboy that
they found him.
When we compare the two interesting works of which we have been
speaking, we have little difficulty in giving the preference to that of
Sir James Mackintosh. Indeed the superiority of Mr. Fox to Sir Janies as
an orator is hardly more clear than the superiority of Sir James to Mr.
Fox as an historian. Mr. Fox with a pen in his hand, and Sir James on
his legs in the House of Commons, were, we think, each out of his proper
element. They were men, it is true, of far too much judgment and ability
to fail scandalously in any undertaking to which they brought the whole
power of their minds. The history of James the Second will always keep
its place in our libraries as a valuable book; and Sir James
Mackintosh succeeded in winning and maintaining a high place among the
parliamentary speakers of his time. Yet we could {254}never read a page
of Mr. Fox’s writing, we could never listen for a quarter of an hour
to the speaking of Sir James, without feeling that there was a constant
effort, a tug up hill. Nature, or habit which had become nature,
asserted its rights. Mr. Fox wrote debates. Sir James Mackintosh spoke
essays.
As far as mere diction was concerned, indeed, Mr. Fox did his best
to avoid those faults which the habit of public speaking is likely
to generate. He was so nervously apprehensive of sliding into some
colloquial incorrectness, of debasing his style by a mixture of
parliamentary slang, that he ran into the opposite error, and purified
his vocabulary with a scrupulosity unknown to any purist. “Ciceronem
Allobroga dixit.” He would not allow Addison, Bolingbroke, or Middleton
to be a sufficient authority for an expression. He declared that he
would use no word which was not to be found in Dryden. In any other
person we should have called this solicitude mere foppery; and, in spite
of all our admiration for Mr. Fox, we cannot but think that his extreme
attention to the petty niceties of language was hardly worthy of so
manly and so capacious an understanding. There were purists of this
kind at Rome; and their fastidiousness was censured by Horace, with that
perfect good sense and good taste which characterize all his writings.
There were purists of this kind at the time of the revival of letters;
and the two greatest scholars of that time raised their voices, the one
from within, the other from without the Alps, against a scrupulosity
so unreasonable. “Carent,” said Politian, “quæ scribunt isti viribus
et vita, carent actu, carent effectu, carent indole....Nisi liber
ille præsto sit ex quo quid excerpant, colligere tria verba
non possunt....Horum semper igitur oratio tremula, vacillans.
{255}infirma....Quæso ne ista superstitione te alliges....Ut bene
currere non potest qui pedem ponere studet in alienis tantum
vestigiis, ita nec bene scribere qui tanquam de præscripto non audet
egredi.”--“Post hac,” exclaims Erasmus, “non licebit episcopos appellare
patres reverendos, nec in calce literarum scribere annum a Christo nato,
quod id nusquam faciat Cicero. Quid autem ineptius quam, toto seculo
novato, religione, imperiis, magistratibus, locorum vocabulis,
ædificiis, cultu, monbus, non aliter audere loqui quam locutus est
Cicero? Si revivisceret ipse Cicero, rideret hoc Ciceronianorum genus.”
While Mr. Fox winnowed and sifted his phraseology with a care which
seems hardly consistent with the simplicity and elevation of his mind,
and of which the effect really was to debase and enfeeble his style,
he was little on his guard against those more serious improprieties of
manner into which a great orator who undertakes to write history is
in danger of falling. There is about the whole book a vehement,
contentious, replying manner. Almost every argument is put in the form
of an interrogation, an ejaculation, or a sarcasm. The writer seems
to be addressing himself to some imaginary audience, to be tearing in
pieces a defence of the Stuarts which has just been pronounced by an
imaginary Tory. Take, for example, his answer to Hume’s remarks on the
execution of Sydney; and substitute “the honourable gentleman” or
“the noble Lord” for the name of Hume. The whole passage sounds like a
powerful reply, thundered at three in the morning from the Opposition
Bench. While we read it, we can almost fancy that we see and hear the
great English debater, such as he has been described to us by the few
who can still remember the Westminster scrutiny and the {256}Oczakow
Negotiations, in the full paroxysm of inspiration, foaming, screaming,
choked by the rushing multitude of his words.
It is true that the passage to which we have referred, and several other
passages which we could point out, are admirable when considered merely
as exhibitions of mental power. We at once recognise in them that
consummate master of the whole art of intellectual gladiatorship, whose
speeches, imperfectly as they have been transmitted to us, should be
studied day and night by every man who wishes to learn the science of
logical defence. We find in several parts of the History of James the
Second fine specimens of that which we conceive to have been the great
characteristic of Demosthenes among the Greeks, and of Fox among the
orators of England, reason penetrated, and, if we may venture on
the expression, made red-hot by passion. But this is not the kind of
excellence proper to history; and it is hardly too much to say that
whatever is strikingly good in Mr. Fox’s fragment is out of place.
With Sir James Mackintosh the case was reversed. His proper place
was his library, a circle of men of letters, or a chair of moral and
political philosophy. He distinguished himself highly in Parliament. But
nevertheless Parliament was not exactly the sphere for him. The effect
of his most successful speeches was small when compared with the
quantity of ability and learning which was expended on them. We could
easily name men who, not possessing a tenth part of his intellectual
powers, hardly ever address the House of Commons without producing a
greater impression than was produced by his most splendid and elaborate
orations. His luminous and philosophical disquisition on the Reform Bill
was spoken to empty benches. {257}Those, indeed, who had the wit to keep
their seats, picked up hints which, skilfully used, made the fortune
of more than one speech. But “it was caviare to the general.” And even
those who listened to Sir James with pleasure and admiration could not
but acknowledge that he rather lectured than debated. An artist who
should waste on a panorama, or a scene, or on a transparency, the
exquisite finishing which we admire in some of the small Dutch
interiors, would not squander his powers more than this eminent man too
often did. His audience resembled the boy in the Heart of Mid-Lothian,
who pushes away the lady’s guineas with contempt, and insists on
having the white money. They preferred the silver with which they were
familiar, and which they were constantly passing about from hand to
hand, to the gold which they had never before seen, and with the value
of which they were unacquainted.
It is much to be regretted, we think, that Sir James Mackintosh did not
wholly devote his later years to philosophy and literature. His talents
were not those which enable a speaker to produce with rapidity a series
of striking but transitory impressions, and to excite the minds of five
hundred gentlemen at midnight, without saying any thing that any one of
them will be able to remember in the morning. His arguments were of a
very different texture from those which are produced in Parliament at a
moment’s notice, which puzzle a plain man who, if he had them before him
in writing, would soon detect their fallacy, and which the great debater
who employs them forgets within half an hour, and never thinks of again.
Whatever was valuable in the compositions of Sir James Mackintosh was
the ripe fruit of study and of {258}meditation. It was the same with
his conversation. In his most familiar talk there was no wildness, no
inconsistency, no amusing nonsense, no exaggeration for the sake of
momentary effect. His mind was a vast magazine, admirably arranged.
Every thing was there; and every thing was in its place. His judgments
on men, on sects, on books, had been often and carefully tested and
weighed, and had then been committed, each to his proper receptacle,
in the most capacious and accurately constructed memory that any human
being ever possessed. It would have been strange indeed if you had asked
for any thing that was not to be found in that immense storehouse. The
article which you required was not only there. It was ready. It was in
its own proper compartment.. In a moment it was brought down, unpacked,
and displayed. If those who enjoyed the privilege--for a privilege
indeed it was--of listening to Sir Janies Mackintosh, had been disposed
to find some fault in his conversation, they might perhaps have observed
that he yielded too little to the impulse of the moment. He seemed to be
recollecting, not creating. He never appeared to catch a sudden glimpse
of a subject in a new light. You never saw his opinions in the making,
still rude, still inconsistent, and requiring to be fashioned by thought
and discussion. They came forth, like the pillars of that temple in
which no sound of axes or hammers was heard, finished, rounded, and
exactly suited to their places. What Mr. Charles Lamb has said with so
much humour and some truth, of the conversation of Scotchmen in general,
was certainly true of this eminent Scotchman. He did not find, but
bring. You could not cry halves to any thing that turned up while you
were in his company. {259}The intellectual and moral qualities which are
most important in a historian, he possessed in a very high degree. He
was singularly mild, calm, and impartial in his judgments of men, and
of parties. Almost all the distinguished writers who have treated of
English history are advocates. Mr. Hallam and Sir James Mackintosh
alone are entitled to be called judges. But the extreme austerity of Mr.
Hallam takes away something from the pleasure of reading his learned,
eloquent, and judicious writings. He is a judge, but a hanging judge,
the Page or Buller of the High Court of Literary Justice. His black cap
is in constant requisition. In the long calendar of those whom he
has tried, there is hardly one who has not, in spite of evidence to
character and recommendations to mercy, been sentenced and left for
execution. Sir James, perhaps, erred a little on the other side. He
liked a maiden assize, and came away with white gloves, after sitting in
judgment on batches of the most notorious offenders. He had a quick eye
for the redeeming parts of a character, and a large toleration for the
infirmities of men exposed to strong temptations. But this lenity did
not arise from ignorance or neglect of moral distinctions. Though he
allowed perhaps too much weight to every extenuating circumstance that
could be urged in favour of the transgressor, he never disputed the
authority of the law, or showed his ingenuity by refining away its
enactments. On every occasion he showed himself firm where principles
were in question, but full of charity towards individuals.
We have no hesitation in pronouncing this Fragment decidedly the best
history now extant of the reign of James the Second. It contains much
new and curious information, of which excellent use has {260}been made.
But we are not sure that the book is not in some degree open to the
charge which the idle citizen in the Spectator brought against his
pudding; “Mem. too many plums, and no suet.” There is perhaps too much
disquisition and too little narrative; and indeed this is the fault
into which, judging from the habits of Sir James’s mind, we should have
thought him most likely to fall. What we assuredly did not anticipate
was, that the narrative would be better executed than the disquisitions.
We expected to find, and we have found, many just delineations of
character, and many digressions full of interest, such as the account of
the order of Jesuits, and of the state of prison discipline in England
a hundred and fifty years ago. We expected to find, and we have
found, many reflections breathing the spirit of a calm and benignant
philosophy. But we did not, we own, expect to find that Sir James could
tell a story as well as Voltaire or Hume. Yet such is the fact; and
if any person doubts it, we would advise him to read the account of
the events which followed the issuing of King James’s declaration,
the meeting of the clergy, the violent scene at the privy council, the
commitment, trial, and acquittal of the bishops. The most superficial
reader must be charmed, we think, by the liveliness of the narrative.
But no person who is not acquainted with that vast mass of intractable
materials of which the valuable and interesting part has been extracted
and condensed can fully appreciate the skill of the writer. Here, and
indeed throughout the book, we find many harsh and careless expressions
which the author would probably have removed if he had lived to complete
his work. But, in spite of these blemishes, we must say that we should
find it difficult to point out, {261}in any modern history, any passage
of equal length and at the same time of equal merit. We find in it
the diligence, the accuracy, and the judgment of Hallam, united to the
vivacity and the colouring of Southey. A history of England, written
throughout in this manner, would be the most fascinating book in the
language. It would be more in request at the circulating libraries than
the last novel.
Sir James was not, we think, gifted with poetical imagination. But that
lower kind of imagination which is necessary to the historian he had
in large measure. It is not the business of the historian to create new
worlds and to people them with new races of beings. He is to Homer
and Shakspeare, to Dante and Milton, what Nollekens was to Canova, or
Lawrence to Michael Angelo. The object of the historian’s imitation
is not within him; it is furnished from without. It is not a vision of
beauty and grandeur discernible only by the eye of his own mind, but a
real model which he did not make, and which he cannot alter. Yet his is
not a mere mechanical imitation. The triumph of his skill is to select
such parts as may produce the effect of the whole, to bring out strongly
all the characteristic features, and to throw the light and shade in
such a manner as may heighten the effect. This skill, as far as we can
judge, from the unfinished work now before us, Sir James Mackintosh
possessed in an eminent degree.
The style of this Fragment is weighty, manly, and unaffected. There are,
as we have said, some expressions which seem to us harsh, and some which
we think inaccurate. These would probably have been corrected, if Sir
James had lived to superintend the publication. We ought to add that the
printer has by no {262}means done his duty. One misprint, in particular,
is so serious as to require notice. Sir James Mackintosh has paid a high
and just tribute to the genius, the integrity, and the courage of a
good and great man, a distinguished ornament of English literature,
a fearless champion of English liberty, Thomas Burnet, Master of the
Charter-House, and author of that most eloquent and imaginative work,
the _Tellaris Theoria Sacra_. Wherever the name of this celebrated man
occurs, it is printed “Bennet,” both in the text and in the index.
This cannot be mere negligence. It is plain that Thomas Burnet and his
writings were never heard of by the gentleman who has been employed
to edite this volume, and who, not content with deforming Sir James
Mackintosh’s text by such blunders, has prefixed to it a bad Memoir, has
appended to it a bad Continuation, and has thus succeeded in expanding
the volume into one of the thickest, and debasing it into one of the
worst that we ever saw. Never did we fall in with so admirable an
illustration of the old Greek proverb, which tells us that half is
sometimes more than the whole. Never, did we see a case in which the
increase of the bulk was so evidently a diminution of the value.
Why such an artist was selected to deface so fine a Torso, we cannot
pretend to conjecture. We read that, when the Consul Mummius, after
the taking of Corinth, was preparing to send to Rome some works of the
greatest Grecian sculptors, he told the packers that if they broke his
Venus or his Apollo, he would force them to restore the limbs which
should be wanting. A head by a hewer of mile-stones joined to a bosom by
Praxiteles would not surprise or shock us more than this supplement.
The Memoir contains much that is worth reading; {263}for it contains
many extracts from the compositions of Sir James Mackintosh. But when we
pass from what the biographer has done with his scissors to what he has
done with his pen, we can find nothing to praise in his work. Whatever
may have been the intention with which he wrote, the tendency of his
narrative is to convey the impression that Sir James Mackintosh,
from interested motives, abandoned the doctrines of the _Vindicice
Grallicae_. Had such charges appeared in their natural place, we should
leave them to their natural fate. We would not stoop to defend Sir
James Mackintosh from the attacks of fourth-rate magazines and pothouse
newspapers. But here his own fame is turned against him. A book of which
not one copy would ever have been bought but for his name in the title
page is made the vehicle of the imputation. Under such circumstances
we cannot help exclaiming, in the words of one of the most amiable of
Homer’s heroes,
[Illustration: 0277]
We have no difficulty in admitting that, during the ten or twelve years
which followed the appearance of the _Vindicio Gallicae_, the opinions
of Sir James Mackintosh underwent some change. But did this chancre pass
on him alone? Was it not common? Was it not almost universal? Was there
one honest friend of liberty in Europe or in America whose ardour had
not been damped, whose faith in the high destinies of mankind had not
been shaken? Was there one observer to whom the French Revolution, or
revolutions in general, appeared in exactly the same light on the day
when the Bastile fell, and on the day when the Girondists were dragged
to the scaffold, the day when the Directory {264}shipped off their
principal opponents for Guiana, or the day when the Legislative Body
was driven from its hall at the point of the bayonet? We do not speak
of light-minded and enthusiastic people, of wits like Sheridan, or
poets like Alfieri; but of the most virtuous and intelligent practical
statesmen, and of the deepest, the calmest, the most impartial political
speculators of that time. What was the language and conduct of Lord
Spencer, of Lord Fitzwilliam, of Mr. Grattan? What is the tone of M.
Dumont’s Memoirs, written just at the close of the eighteenth century?
What Tory could have spoken with greater disgust and contempt of the
French Revolution and its authors? Nay, this writer, a republican, and
the most upright and zealous of republicans, has gone so far as to say
that Mr. Burke’s work on the Revolution had saved Europe. The name of M.
Dumont naturally suggests that of Mr. Bentham. He, we presume, was not
ratting for a place; and what language did he hold at that time? Look at
his little treatise entitled _Sophismes Anarchiques_. In that treatise
he says, that the atrocities of the Revolution were the natural
consequences of the absurd principles on which it was commenced; that,
while the chiefs of the constituent assembly gloried in the thought that
they were pulling down aristocracy, they never saw that their doctrines
tended to produce an evil a hundred times more formidable, anarchy; that
the theory laid down in the Declaration of the Rights of Man had, in a
great measure, produced the crimes of the Reign of ‘Terror; that none
but an eyewitness could imagine the horrors of a state of society in
which comments on that Declaration were put forth by men with no food
in their bellies, with rags on their backs, and pikes in their hands.
He praises the English Parliament for the dislike {265}which it has
always shown to abstract reasonings, and to the affirming of general
principles. In M. Dumont’s preface to the Treatise on the Principles
of Legislation, a preface written under the eye of Mr. Bentham, and
published with his sanction, are the following still more remarkable
expressions: “M. Bentham est bien loin d’attacher une. préférence
exclusive à aucune forme de gouvernement. Il pense que la meilleure
constitution pour un peuple est celle à laquelle il est accoutumé....Le
vice fondamental des théories sur les constitutions politiques, c’est de
commencer par attaquer celles qui existent, et d’exciter tout au moins
des inquiétudes et des jalousies de pouvoir. Une telle disposition n’est
point favorable au perfectionnement des lois. La seule époque où l’on
puisse entreprendre avec succès des grandes réformes de législation, est
celle où les passions publiques sont calmes, et où le gouvernement jouit
de la stabilité la plus grande. L’objet de M. Bentham, en cherchant
dans le vice des lois la cause de la plupart des maux, a été constamment
d’éloigner le pins grand de tous, le bouleversement de l’autorité, les
révolutions de propriété et de pouvoir.”
To so conservative a frame of mind had the excesses of the French
Revolution brought the most illustrious reformers of that time. And
why is one person to be singled out from among millions, and arraigned
before posterity as a traitor to his opinions, only because events
produced on him the effect which they produced on a whole generation?
People who, like Mr. Brothers in the last generation, and Mr. Percival
in this, have been favoured with revelations from heaven, may be quite
independent of the vulgar sources of knowledge. But such poor creatures
as Mackintosh, Dumont, and Bentham, {266}had nothing but observation and
reason to guide them; and they obeyed the guidance of observation and of
reason. How is it in physics? A traveller falls in with a berry which he
has never before seen. He tastes it, and finds it sweet and refreshing.
He praises it, and resolves to introduce it into his own country. But in
a few minutes he is taken violently sick; he is convulsed; he is at
the point of death. He of course changes his opinion, pronounces
this delicious food a poison, blames his own folly in tasting it, and
cautions his friends against it. After a long and violent struggle he
recovers, and finds himself much exhausted by his sufferings, but free
from some chronic complaints which had been the torment of his life.
He then changes his opinion again, and pronounces this fruit a very
powerful remedy, which ought to be employed only in extreme cases and
with great caution, but which ought not to be absolutely excluded from
the Pharmacopoeia. And would it not be the height of absurdity to call
such a man fickle and inconsistent, because he had repeatedly altered
his judgment? If he had not altered his judgment, would he have been a
rational being? It was exactly the same with the French Revolution. That
event was a new phænomenon in politics. Nothing that had gone before
enabled any person to judge with certainty of the course which affairs
might take. At first the effect was the reform of great abuses; and
honest men rejoiced. Then came commotion, proscription, confiscation,
bankruptcy, the assignats, the maximum, civil war, foreign war,
revolutionary tribunals, guillotinades, noyades, fusillades. Yet a
little while, and a military despotism rose out of the confusion, and
menaced the independence of every state in Europe. And yet again a
little while, and {267}the old dynasty returned, followed by a train of
emigrants eager to restore the old abuses. We have now, we think, the
whole before us. We should therefore be justly accused of levity or
insincerity if our language concerning those events were constantly
changing. It is our deliberate opinion that the French Revolution, in
spite of all its crimes and follies, was a great blessing to mankind.
But it was not only natural, but inevitable, that those who had only
seen the first act should be ignorant of the catastrophe, and should be
alternately elated and depressed as the plot went on disclosing
itself to them. A man who had held exactly the same opinion about the
Revolution in 1789, in 1794, in 1804, in 1814, and in 1884, would
have been either a divinely inspired prophet, or an obstinate fool.
Mackintosh was neither. He was simply a wise and good man; and the
change which passed on his mind was a change which passed on the mind
of almost every wise and good man in Europe. In fact, few of his
contemporaries changed so little. The rare moderation and calmness
of his temper preserved him alike from extravagant elation and from
extravagant despondency. He was never a Jacobin. He was never an
Antijacobin. His mind oscillated undoubtedly; but the extreme points of
the oscillation were not very remote. Herein he differed greatly from
some persons of distinguished talents who entered into life at nearly
the same time with him. Such persons we have seen rushing from one wild
extreme to another, out-Paining Paine, out-Castlereaghing Castlereagh,
Pantisocratists, Ultra-Tories, heretics, persecutors, breaking the
old laws against sedition, calling for new and sharper laws against
sedition, writing democratic dramas, writing Laureate odes, panegyrising
{268}Marten, panegyrising Land, consistent in nothing but an intolerance
which in any person would be censurable, but which is altogether
unpardonable in men who, by their own confession, have had such ample
experience of their own fallibility. We readily concede to some of these
persons the praise of eloquence and poetical invention; nor are we
by any means disposed, even where they have been gainers by their
conversion, to question their sincerity. It would be most uncandid to
attribute to sordid motives actions which admit of a less discreditable
explanation. We think that the conduct of these persons has been
precisely what was to be expected from men who were gifted with strong
imagination and quick sensibility, but who were neither accurate
observers nor logical reasoners. It was natural that such men should see
in the victory of the third estate of France the dawn of a new Saturnian
age. It was natural that the rage of their disappointment should be
proportioned to the extravagance of their hopes. Though the direction of
their passions was altered, the violence of those passions was the same.
The force of the rebound was proportioned to the force of the original
impulse. The pendulum swung furiously to the left, because it had been
drawn too far to the right.
We own that nothing gives us so high an idea of the judgment and temper
of Sir James Mackintosh as the manner in which he shaped his course
through those times. Exposed successively to two opposite infections, he
took both in their very mildest form. Hie constitution of his mind was
such that neither of the diseases which wrought such havoc all round him
could in any serious degree, or for any great length of time, derange
his intellectual health. He, {269}like every honest and enlightened man
in Europe, saw with delight the great awakening; of the French nation.
Yet he never, in the season of his wannest enthusiasm, proclaimed
doctrines inconsistent with the safety of property and the just
authority of governments. He, like almost every other honest and
enlightened man, was discouraged and perplexed by the terrible events
which followed. Yet he never in the most gloomy times abandoned the
cause of peace, of liberty, and of toleration. In that great convulsion
which overset almost every other understanding, he was indeed so much
shaken that he leaned sometimes in one direction and sometimes in the
other; but he never lost his balance. The opinions in which he at last
reposed, and to which, in spite of strong temptations, he adhered with
a firm, a disinterested, an ill-requited fidelity, were a just mean
between those which he had defended with youthful ardour and with more
than manly prowess against Mr. Burke, and those to which he had inclined
during the darkest and saddest years in the history of modern Europe.
We are much mistaken if this be the picture either of a weak or of a
dishonest mind.
What the political opinions of Sir James Mackintosh were in his later
years is written in the annals of his country. Those annals will
sufficiently refute what the Editor has ventured to assert in the
very advertisement to this work. “Sir James Mackintosh,” says he,
“was avowedly and emphatically a Whig of the Revolution: and since
the agitation of religious liberty and parliamentary reform became
a national movement, the great transaction of 1688 has been more
dispassionately, more correctly, and less highly estimated.” If these
words mean any thing, they must {270}mean that the opinions of Sir James
Mackintosh concerning religious liberty and parliamentary reform went
no further than those of the authors of the Revolution; in other words,
that Sir James Mackintosh opposed Catholic Emancipation, and approved of
the old constitution of the House of Commons. The allocation is confuted
by twenty volumes of Parliamentary Debates, nay by innumerable passages
in the very Fragment which this writer has defaced. We will venture to
say that Sir James Mackintosh often did more for religions liberty and
for parliamentary reform in a quarter of an hour, than most of those
zealots who are in the habit of depreciating him, have done or will do
in the whole course of their lives.
Nothing in the Memoir, or in the Continuation of the History, has struck
us so much as the contempt with which the writer thinks fit to speak of
all things that were done before the coming in of the very last fashions
in politics. We think that we have sometimes observed a leaning towards
the same fault in writers of a much higher order of intellect. We will
therefore take this opportunity of making a few remarks on an error
which is, we fear, becoming common, and which appears to us not
only absurd, but as pernicious as almost any error concerning the
transactions of a past age can possibly be.
We shall not, we hope, be suspected of a bigoted attachment to the
doctrines and practices of past generations. Our creed is that the
science of government is an experimental science, and that, like all
other experimental sciences, it is generally in a state of progression.
No man is so obstinate an admirer of the old times as to deny that
medicine, surgery, botany, chemistry, engineering, navigation, are
better understood {271}now than in any former age. We conceive that it
is the same with political science. Like those physical sciences
which we have mentioned, it has always been working itself clearer and
clearer, and depositing impurity after impurity. There was a time when
the most powerful of human intellects were deluded by the gibberish of
the astrologer and the alchemist; and just so there was a time when the
most enlightened and virtuous statesmen thought it the first duty of a
government to persecute heretics, to found monasteries, to make war
on Saracens. But time advances; facts accumulate; doubts arise. Faint
glimpses of truth begin to appear, and shine more and more unto the
perfect day. The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the
first to catch and to reflect the dawn. They are bright, while the
level below is still in darkness. But soon the light, which at first
illuminated only the loftiest eminences, descends on the plain and
penetrates to the deepest valley. First come hints, then fragments of
systems, then defective systems, then complete and harmonious systems.
The sound opinion, held for a time by one bold speculator, becomes the
opinion of a small minority, of a strong minority, of a majority of
mankind. Thus, the great progress goes on, till schoolboys laugh at
the jargon which imposed on Bacon, till country rectors condemn the
illiberality and intolerance of Sir Thomas More.
Seeing these things, seeing that, by the confession of the most
obstinate enemies of innovation, our race has hitherto been almost
constantly advancing in knowledge, and not seeing any reason to believe
that, precisely at the point of time at which we came into the world, a
change took place in the faculties of the human mind, or in the mode
of discovering truth, we {272}are reformers: we are on the side of
progress. From the great advances which European society lias made,
during the last four centuries, in every species of knowledge, we infer,
not that there is no more room for improvement, but that, in every
science which deserves the name, immense improvements may be confidently
expected.
But the very considerations which lead us to look for ward with sanguine
hope to the future prevent us from looking back with contempt on the
past. We do not flatter ourselves with the notion that we have attained
perfection, and that no more truth remains to be found. We believe that
we are wiser than our ancestors. We believe, also, that our posterity
will be wiser than we. It would be gross injustice in our grandchildren
to talk of us with contempt, merely because they may have surpassed us;
to call Watt a fool, because mechanical powers may be discovered which
may supersede the use of steam; to deride the efforts which have been
made in our time to improve the discipline of prisons, and to enlighten
the minds of the poor, because future philanthropists may devise better
places of confinement than Air. Bentham’s Panopticon, and better
places of education than Air. Lancaster’s Schools. As we would have our
descendants judge us, so ought we to judge our fathers. In order to form
a correct estimate of their merits, we ought to place ourselves in their
situation, to put out of our minds, for a time, all that knowledge which
they, however eager in the pursuit of truth, could not have, and which
we, however negligent we may have been, could not help having. It
was not merely difficult, but absolutely impossible, for the best and
greatest of men, two hundred years ago, to be what a very commonplace
person {273}in our days may easily be, and indeed must necessarily be.
But it is too much that the benefactors of mankind, after having been
reviled by the dunces of their own generation for going too far, should
be reviled by the dunces of the next generation for not going far
enough.
The truth lies between two absurd extremes. On one side is the bigot who
pleads the wisdom of our ancestors as a reason for not doing what they
in our place would be the first to do; who opposes the Reform Bill
because Lord Somers did not see the necessity of Parliamentary Reform;
who would have opposed the Revolution because Ridley and Cranmer
professed boundless submission to the royal prerogative; and who would
have opposed the Reformation because the Fitzwalters and Mareschals,
whose seals are set to the Great Charter, were devoted adherents to the
Church of Rome. On the other side is the sciolist who speaks with scorn
of the Great Charter, because it did not reform the Church; of the
Reformation, because it did not limit the prerogative; and of the
Revolution, because it did not purify the House of Commons. The former
of these errors we have often combated, and shall always be ready to
combat. The latter, though rapidly spreading, has not, we think, yet
come under our notice. The former error bears directly on practical
questions, and obstructs useful reforms. It may, therefore, seem to
be, and probably is, the more mischievous of the two. But the latter
is equally absurd; it is at least equally symptomatic of a shallow
understanding; and an unamiable temper: and, if it should ever become
general, it will, we are satisfied, produce very prejudicial effects.
Its tendency is to deprive the benefactors of mankind of {274}their
honest fame, and to put the best and the worst men of past times on the
same level. The author of a great reformation is almost always unpopular
in his own age. He generally passes his life in disquiet and danger. It
is therefore for the interest of the human race that the memory of
such men should be had in reverence, and that they should be supported
against the scorn and hatred of their contemporaries by the hope of
leaving a great and imperishable name. To go on the forlorn hope of
truth is a service of peril. Who will undertake it, if it be not also a
service of honour? It is easy enough, after the ramparts are carried,
to find men to plant the flag on the highest tower. The difficulty is to
find men who are ready to go first into the breach; and it would be bad
policy indeed to insult their remains because they fell in the breach,
and did not live to penetrate to the citadel.
Now here we have a book which is by no means a favourable specimen of
the English literature of the nineteenth century, a book indicating
neither extensive knowledge nor great powers of reasoning. And, if we
were to judge by the pity with which the writer speaks of the great
statesmen and philosophers of a former age, we should guess that he was
the author of the most original and important inventions in political
science. Yet not so: for men who are able to make discoveries are
generally disposed to make allowances. Men who are eagerly pressing
forward in pursuit of truth are grateful to every one who has cleared an
inch of the way for them. It is, for the most part, the man who has
just capacity enough to pick up and repeat the commonplaces which
are fashionable in his own time who looks with disdain on the very
intellects to which it is owing that those {275}commonplaces are not
still considered as startling paradoxes or damnable heresies. This
writer is just the man who, if he had lived in the seventeenth century,
would have devoutly believed that the Papists burned London, who would
have swallowed the whole of Oates’s story about the forty thousand
soldiers, disguised as pilgrims, who were to meet in Gallicia, and sail
thence to invade England, who would have carried a Protestant flail
under his coat, and who would have been angry if the story of the
warmingpan had been questioned. It is quite natural that such a man
should speak with contempt of the great reformers of that time, because
they did not know some things which he never would have known but for
the salutary effects of their exertions. The men to whom we owe it that
we have a House of Commons are sneered at because they did not suffer
the debates of the House to be published. The authors of the Toleration
Act are treated as bigots, because they did not go the whole length
of Catholic Emancipation. Just so we have heard a baby, mounted on the
shoulders of its father, cry out, “How much taller I am than Papa!”
This gentleman can never want matter for pride, if he finds it so
easily. He may boast of an indisputable superiority to all the greatest
men of all past ages. He can read and write: Homer probably did not
know a letter. He has been taught that the earth goes round the sun:
Archimedes held that the sun went round the earth. He is aware that
there is a place called New Holland: Columbus and Gama went to their
graves in ignorance of the fact. He has heard of the Georgium Sidus:
Newton was ignorant of the existence of such a planet. He is acquainted
with the use of gunpowder: Hannibal and Cæsar won their {276}victories
with sword and spear. We submit, however, that this is not the way in
which men are to be estimated.
We submit that a wooden spoon of our day would not be justified in
calling Galileo and Napier blockheads, because they never heard of the
differential calculus. We submit that Caxton’s press in Westminster
Abbey, rude as it is, ought to be looked at with quite as much respect
as the best constructed machinery that ever, in our time, impressed the
clearest type on the finest paper. Sydenham first discovered that the
cool regimen succeeded best in cases of small-pox. By this discovery he
saved the lives of hundreds of thousands; and we venerate his memory
for it, though he never heard of inoculation. Lady Mary Montague brought
inoculation into use; and we respect her for it, though she never heard
of vaccination. Jenner introduced vaccination; we admire him for it, and
we shall continue to admire him for it, although some still safer and
more agreeable preservative should be discovered. It is thus that we
ought to judge of the events and the men of other times. They were
behind us. It could not be otherwise. But the question with respect to
them is not where they were, but which way they were going. Were their
faces set in the right or in the wrong direction? Were they in the front
or in the rear of their generation? Did they exert themselves to help
onward the great movement of the human race, or to stop it? This is not
charity, but simple justice and common sense. It is the fundamental law
of the world in which we live that truth shall grow, first the blade,
then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. A person who
complains of the men of 1688 for not having been men of 1885 might just
as well complain of a projectile for describing {277}a parabola, or of
quicksilver for being heavier than water.
Undoubtedly we ought to look at ancient transactions by the light
of modern knowledge. Undoubtedly it is among the first duties of
a historian to point out the faults of the eminent men of former
generations. There are no errors which are so likely to be drawn into
precedent, and therefore none which it is so necessary to expose, as the
errors of persons who have a just title to the gratitude and admiration
of posterity. In politics, as in religion, there are devotees who show
their reverence for a departed saint by converting his tomb into a
sanctuary for crime. Receptacles of wickedness are suffered to remain
undisturbed in the neighbourhood of the church which glories in the
relics of some martyred apostle. Because he was merciful, his bones give
security to assassins. Because he was chaste, the precinct of his temple
is filled with licensed stews. Privileges of an equally absurd kind
have been set up against the jurisdiction of political philosophy. Vile
abuses cluster thick round every glorious event, round every venerable
name; and this evil assuredly calls for vigorous measures of literary
police. But the proper course is to abate the nuisance without defacing
the shrine, to drive out the gangs of thieves and prostitutes without
doing foul and cowardly wrong to the ashes of the illustrious dead.
In this respect, two historians of our own time may be proposed as
models, Sir James Mackintosh and Mr. Mill. Differing in most things, in
this they closely resemble each other. Sir James is lenient. Mr. Mill
is severe. But neither of them ever omits, in the apportioning of praise
and of censure, to make ample allowance for the state of political
science and political morality {278}in former ages. In the work before
us, Sir James Mackintosh speaks with just respect of the Whigs of the
Revolution, while he never fails to condemn the conduct of that party
towards the members of the Church of Rome. His doctrines are the liberal
and benevolent doctrines of the nineteenth century. But he never forgets
that the men whom he is describing were men of the seventeenth century.
From Mr. Mill this indulgence, or, to speak more properly, this justice,
was less to be expected. That gentleman, in some of his works, appears
to consider politics not as an experimental, and therefore a progressive
science, but as a science of which all the difficulties may be resolved
by short synthetical arguments drawn from truths of the most vulgar
notoriety. Were this opinion well founded, the people of one generation
would have little or no advantage over those of another generation.
But though Mr. Mill, in some of his Essays, has been thus misled, as we
conceive, by a fondness for neat and precise forms of demonstration,
it would be gross injustice not to admit that, in his History, he has
employed a very different method of investigation with eminent ability
and success. We know no writer who takes so much pleasure in the truly
useful, noble, and philosophical employment of tracing the progress
of sound opinions from their embryo state to their full maturity. He
eagerly culls from old despatches and minutes every expression in which
he can discern the imperfect germ of any great truth which has since
been fully developed. He never fails to bestow praise on those who,
though far from coming up to his standard of perfection, yet rose in a
small degree above the common level of their contemporaries. It is thus
that the annals of past times ought to be written. {279}It is thus,
especially, that the annals of our own country ought to be written.
The history of England is emphatically the history of progress. It is
the history of a constant movement of the public mind, of a constant
change in the institutions of a great society. We see that society, at
the beginning of the twelfth century, in a state more miserable than the
state in which the most degraded nations of the East now are. We see
it subjected to the tyranny of a handful of armed foreigners. We see a
strong distinction of caste separating the victorious Norman from the
vanquished Saxon. We see the great body of the population in a state
of personal slavery. We see the most debasing and cruel superstition
exercising boundless dominion over the most elevated and benevolent
minds. We see the multitude sunk in brutal ignorance, and the studious
few engaged in acquiring what did not deserve the name of knowledge. In
the course of seven centuries the wretched and degraded race have become
the greatest and most highly civilised people that ever the world
saw, have spread their dominion over every quarter of the globe, have
scattered the seeds of mighty empires and republics over vast continents
of which no dim intimation had ever reached Ptolemy or Strabo, have
created a maritime power which would annihilate in a quarter of an hour
the navies of Tyre, Athens, Carthage, Venice, and Genoa together,
have earned the science of healing, the means of locomotion and
correspondence, every mechanical art, every manufacture, every thing
that promotes the convenience of life, to a perfection which our
ancestors would have thought magical, have produced a literature
which may boast of works not inferior to the noblest which Greece has
{280}bequeathed to us, have discovered the laws which regulate the
motions of the heavenly bodies, have speculated with exquisite subtilty
on the operations of the human mind, have been the acknowledged leaders
of the human race in the career of political improvement. The history of
England is the history of this great change in the moral, intellectual,
and physical state of the inhabitants of our own island. There is much
amusing and instructive episodical matter; but this is the main action.
To us, we will own, nothing is so interesting and delightful as to
contemplate the steps by which the England of Domesday Book, the England
of the Curfew and the Forest Laws, the England of crusaders, monks,
schoolmen, astrologers, seifs, outlaws, became the England which we know
and love, the classic ground of liberty and philosophy, the school of
all knowledge, the mart of all trade. The Charter of Henry Beauclerk,
the Great Charter, the first assembling of the House of Commons, the
extinction of personal slavery, the separation from the See of Rome,
the Petition of Right, the Habeas Corpus Act, the Revolution, the
establishment of the liberty of unlicensed printing the abolition of
religious disabilities, the reform of the representative system, all
these seem to us to be the successive stages of one great revolution;
nor can we fully comprehend any one of these memorable events unless we
look at it in connection with those which preceded, and with those which
followed it. Each of those great and ever memorable struggles, Saxon
against Norman, Villein against Lord, Protestant against Papist,
Roundhead against Cavalier, Dissenter against Churchman, Manchester
against Old Sa-rum, was, in its own order and season, a struggle, on
the result of which were staked the dearest interests of the {281}human
race; and every man who, in the contest which, in his time, divided our
country, distinguished himself on the right side, is entitled to our
gratitude and respect.
Whatever the editor of this book may think, those persons who estimate
most correctly the value of the improvements which have recently been
made in our institutions, are precisely the persons who are least
disposed to speak slightingly of what was done in 1688. Such men
consider the Revolution as a reform, imperfect indeed, but still most
beneficial to the English people and to the human race, as a reform
which has been the fruitful parent of reforms, as a reform, the happy
effects of which are at this moment felt, not only throughout our own
country, but in half the monarchies of Europe, and in the depths of the
forests of Ohio. We shall be pardoned, we hope, if we call the attention
of our readers to the causes and to the consequences of that great
event.
We said that the history of England is the history of progress; and,
when we take a comprehensive view of it, it is so. But, when examined in
small separate portions, it may with more propriety be called a history
of actions and re-actions. We have often thought that the motion of the
public mind in our country resembles that of the sea when the tide is
rising. Each successive wave rushes forward, breaks, and rolls back; but
the great flood is steadily coming in. A person who looked on the waters
only for a moment might fancy that they were retiring. A person who
looked on them only for five minutes might fancy that they were rushing
capriciously to and fro. But when he keeps his eye on them for a
quarter of an hour, and sees one sea-mark disappear after another, it is
impossible for him to doubt of the general direction in which {282}the
ocean is moved. Just such has been the course of events in England. In
the history of the national mind, which is, in truth, the history of
the nation, we must carefully distinguish between that recoil which
regularly follows every advance and a great general ebb. If we take
short intervals, if we compare 1640 and 1660, 1680 and 1685, 1708 and
1712, 1782 and 1794, we find a retrogression. But if we take centuries,
if, for example, we compare 1794 with 1660 or with 1685, we cannot doubt
in which direction society is proceeding.
The interval which elapsed between the Restoration and the Revolution
naturally divides itself into three periods. The first extends from 1660
to 1678, the second from 1678 to 1681, the third from 1681 to 1688.
In 1660 the whole nation was mad with loyal excitement. If we had to
choose a lot from among all the multitude of those which men have drawn
since the beginning of the world, we would select that of Charles the
Second on the day of his return. He was in a situation in which the
dictates of ambition coincided with those of benevolence, in which it
was easier to be virtuous than to be wicked, to be loved, than to be
hated, to earn pure and imperishable glory than to become infamous. For
once the road of goodness was a smooth descent. He had done nothing
to merit the affection of his people. But they had paid him in advance
without measure. Elizabeth, after the destruction of the Armada, or
after the abolition of monopolies, had not excited a thousandth part of
the enthusiasm with which the young exile was welcomed home. He was
not, like Lewis the Eighteenth, imposed on his subjects by foreign
conquerors; nor did he, like Lewis the Eighteenth, come back to a
country {283}which had undergone a complete change. The house of
Bourbon was placed in Paris as a trophy of the victory of the European
confederation. The return of the ancient princes was inseparably
associated in the public mind with the cession of extensive provinces,
with the payment of an immense tribute, with the devastation of
flourishing departments, with the occupation of the kingdom by hostile
armies, with the emptiness of those niches in which the gods of Athens
and Rome had been the objects of a new idolatry, with the nakedness
of those walls on which the Transfiguration had shone with light as
glorious as that which overhung Mount Tabor. They came back to a land
in which they could recognise nothing. The seven sleepers of the legend,
who closed their eyes when the Pagans were persecuting the Christians,
and woke when the Christians were persecuting each other, did not find
themselves in a world more completely new to them. Twenty years had done
the work of twenty generations. Events had come thick. Men had lived
fast. The old institutions and the old feelings had been torn up by the
roots. There was a new Church founded and endowed by the usurper; a new
nobility whose titles were taken from fields of battle, disastrous to
the ancient line; a new chivalry whose crosses had been won by exploits
which had seemed likely to make the banishment of the emigrants
perpetual. A new code was administered by a new magistracy. A new body
of proprietors held the soil by a new tenure. The most ancient local
distinctions had been effaced. The most familiar names had become
obsolete. There was no longer a Normandy or a Burgundy, a Brittany or a
Guienne. The France of Lewis the Sixteenth had passed away as completely
as one of the Preadamite {284}worlds. Its fossil remains might now and
then excite curiosity. But it was as impossible to put life into the
old institutions as to animate the skeletons which are embedded in the
depths of primeval strata. It was as absurd to think that France could
again be placed under the feudal system, as that our globe could be
overrun by mammoths. The revolution in the laws and in the form of
government was but an outward sign of that mightier revolution which
had taken place in the heart and brain of the people, and which affected
every transaction of life, trading, farming, studying, marrying, and
giving in marriage. The French whom the emigrant prince had to govern
were no more like the French of his youth, than the French of his youth
were like the French of the Jaquerie. He came back to a people who knew
not him nor his house, to a people to whom a Bourbon was no more than a
Carlovin-gian or a Merovingian. He might substitute the white flag for
the tricolor; he might put lilies in the place of bees; he might order
the initials of the Emperor to be carefully effaced. But he could turn
his eyes nowhere without meeting some object which reminded him that he
was a stranger in the palace of his fathers. He returned to a country in
which even the passing traveller is every moment reminded that there has
lately been a great dissolution and reconstruction of the social system.
To win the hearts of a people, under such circumstances, would have been
no easy task even for Henry the Fourth.
In the English Revolution the case was altogether different. Charles was
not imposed on his countrymen, but sought by them. His restoration was
not attended by any circumstance which could inflict a wound on their
national pride. Insulated by our geographical {285}position, insulated
by our character, we had fought out our quarrels and effected our
reconciliation among ourselves. Our great internal questions had never
been mixed up with the still greater question of national independence.
The political doctrines of the Roundheads were not, like those of the
French philosophers, doctrines of universal application. Our ancestors,
for the most part, took their stand, not on a general theory, but on the
particular constitution of the realm. They asserted the rights, not of
men, but of Englishmen. Their doctrines therefore were not contagious;
and, had it been otherwise, no neighbouring country was then susceptible
of the contagion. The language in which our discussions were generally
conducted was scarcely known even to a single man of letters out of the
islands. Our local situation made it almost impossible that we should
effect great conquests on the Continent. The kings of Europe had,
therefore, no reason to fear that their subjects would follow the
example of the English Puritans, and looked with indifference, perhaps
with complacency, on the death of the monarch and the abolition of the
monarchy. Clarendon complains bitterly of their apathy. But we believe
that this apathy was of the greatest service to the royal cause. If a
French or Spanish army had invaded England, and if that army had been
cut to pieces, as we have no doubt that it would have been, on the
first day on which it came face to face with the soldiers of Preston
and Dunbar, with Colonel-Fight-the-good-Fight, and Captain
Smite-them-hip-and-thigh, the House of Cromwell would probably now
have been reigning in England. The nation would have forgotten all
the misdeeds of the man who had cleared the soil of foreign invaders.
{286}Happily for Charles, no European state, even when at war with the
Commonwealth, chose to bind up its cause with that of the wanderers who
were playing in the garrets of Paris and Cologne at being princes and
chancellors. Under the administration of Cromwell, England was more
respected and dreaded than any power in Christendom; and, even under
the ephemeral governments which followed his death, no foreign state
ventured to treat her with contempt. Thus Charles came back, not as a
mediator between his people and a victorious enemy, but as a mediator
between internal factions. He found the Scotch Covenanters and the Irish
Papists alike subdued. He found Dunkirk and Jamaica added to the empire.
He was heir to the conquests and to the influence of the able usurper
who had excluded him.
The old government of England, as it had been far milder than the
old government of France, had been far less violently and completely
subverted. The national institutions had been spared, or imperfectly
eradicated. The laws had undergone little alteration. The tenures of the
soil were still to be learned from Littleton and Coke. The Great
Charter was mentioned with as much reverence in the parliaments of
the Commonwealth as in those of any earlier or of any later age. A
new Confession of Faith and a new ritual had been introduced into the
church. But the bulk of the ecclesiastical property still remained. The
colleges still held their estates. The parson still received his
tithes. The Lords had, at a crisis of great excitement, been excluded by
military violence from their House; but they retained their titles
and an ample share of the public veneration. When a nobleman made his
appearance in the House of Commons he was received with ceremonious
{287}respect. Those few Peers who consented to assist at the
inauguration of the Protector were placed next to himself, and the most
honourable offices of the day were assigned to them. We learn from the
debates of Richard’s Parliament how strong a hold the old aristocracy
had on the affections of the people. One member of the House of Commons
went so far as to say that, unless their Lordships were peaceably
restored, the country might soon be convulsed by a war of the Barons.
There was indeed no great party hostile to the Upper House. There was
nothing exclusive in the constitution of that body. It was regularly
recruited from among the most distinguished of the country gentlemen,
the lawyers, and the clergy. The most powerful nobles of the century
which preceded the civil war, the Duke of Somerset, the Duke of
Northumberland, Lord Seymour of Sudeley, the Earl of Leicester, Lord
Burleigh, the Earl of Salisbury, the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of
Strafford, had all been commoners, and had all raised themselves, by
courtly arts or by parliamentary talents, not merely to seats in the
House of Lords, but to the first influence in that assembly. Nor had the
general conduct of the Peers been such as to make them unpopular. They
had not, indeed, in opposing arbitrary measures shown so much eagerness
and pertinacity as the Commons. But still they had opposed those
measures. They had, at the beginning of the discontents, a common
interest with the people. If Charles had succeeded in his scheme of
governing without parliaments, the consequence of the Peers would have
been grievously diminished. If he had been able to raise taxes by his
own authority, the estates of the Peers would have been as much at
his mercy as those of the merchants or the farmers. If he had obtained
{288}the power of imprisoning his subjects at his pleasure, a Peer
ran far greater risk of incurring the royal displeasure, and of being
accommodated with apartments in the Tower, than any city trader or
country squire. Accordingly Charles found that the Great Council of
Peers which he convoked at York would do nothing for him. In the most
useful reforms which were made during the first session of the Long
Parliament, the Peers concurred heartily with the Lower House; and a
large and powerful minority of the English nobles stood by the popular
side through the first years of the war. At Edgehill, Newbury, gars ton,
and Naseby, the armies of the Parliament were commanded by members
of the aristocracy. It was not forgotten that a Peer had imitated the
example of Hampden in refusing the payment of the ship-money, or that
a Peer had been among the six members of the legislature whom Charles
illegally impeached.
Thus the old constitution of England was without difficulty
reestablished; and of all the parts of the old constitution the
monarchical part was, at the time, dearest to the body of the people.
It had been injudiciously depressed, and it was in consequence unduly
exalted. From the day when Charles the First became a prisoner had
commenced a reaction in favour of his person and of his office. From the
day when the axe fell on his neck before the windows of his palace, that
reaction became rapid and violent. At the Restoration it had attained
such a point that it could go no further. The people were ready to place
at the mercy of their Sovereign all their most ancient and precious
rights. The most servile doctrines were publicly avowed. The most
moderate and constitutional opposition was condemned. Resistance was
spoken of with {289}more horror than any crime which a human being can
commit. The Commons were more eager than the King himself to avenge the
wrongs of the royal house; more desirous than the bishops themselves to
restore the church; more ready to give money than the ministers to ask
for it. They abrogated the excellent law passed in the first session
of the Long Parliament, with the general consent of all honest men, to
insure the frequent meeting of the great council of the nation. They
might probably have been induced to go further, and to restore the High
Commission and the Star Chamber. All the contemporary accounts represent
the nation as in a state of hysterical excitement, of drunken joy. In
the immense multitude which crowded the beach at Dover, and bordered the
road along which the King travelled to London, there was not one who was
not weeping. Bonfires blazed. Bells jingled. The streets were thronged
at night by boon-companions, who forced all the passers-by to swallow on
bended knees brimming glasses to the health of his Most Sacred Majesty,
and the damnation of Rednosed Noll. That tenderness to the fallen which
has, through many generations, been a marked feature of the national
character, was for a time hardly discernible. All London crowded to
shout and laugh round the gibbet where hung the rotting remains of a
prince who had made England the dread of the world, who had been the
chief founder of her maritime greatness and of her colonial empire, who
had conquered Scotland and Ireland, who had humbled Holland and Spain,
the terror of whose name had been as a guard round every English
traveller in remote countries, and round every Protestant congregation
in the heart of Catholic empires. When some of those brave and honest
{290}though misguided men who had sat in judgment on their King were
dragged on hurdles to a death of prolonged torture, their last prayers
were interrupted by the hisses and execrations of thousands.
Such was England in 1660. In 1678 the whole face of things had changed.
At the former of those epochs eighteen years of commotion had made the
majority of the people ready to buy repose at any price. At the latter
epoch eighteen years of misgovernment had made the same majority
desirous to obtain security for their liberties at any risk. The fury
of their returning loyalty had spent itself in its first outbreak. In
a very few months they had hanged and half-hanged, quartered and
embowelled enough to satisfy them. The Roundhead party seemed to be not
merely overcome, but too much broken and scattered ever to rally again.
Then commenced the reflux of public opinion. The nation began to find
out to what a man it had intrusted without conditions, all its dearest
interests, on what a man it had lavished all its fondest affection. On
the ignoble nature of the restored exile, adversity had exhausted all
her discipline in vain. He had one immense advantage over most other
princes. Though born in the purple, he was far better acquainted with
the vicissitudes of life and the diversities of character than most of
his subjects, He had known restraint, danger, penury, and dependence.
He had often suffered from ingratitude, insolence, and treachery. He
had received many signal proofs of faithful and heroic attachment He
had seen, if ever man saw, both sides of human nature. But only one side
remained in his memory. He had learned only to despise and to distrust
his species, to consider integrity in men, and modesty in women, as
mere acting; nor did he think it worth {291}while to keep his opinion to
himself. He was incapable of friendship; yet he was perpetually led by
favourites without being in the smallest degree duped by them. He knew
that their regard to his interests was all simulated; but from a
certain easiness which had no connection with humanity, he submitted,
half-laughing at himself, to be made the tool of any woman whose person
attracted him, or of any man whose tattle diverted him. He thought
little and cared less about religion. He seems to have passed his life
in dawdling suspense between Hobbism and Popery. He was crowned in
his youth with the Covenant in his hand; he died at last with the Host
sticking in his throat, and, during most of the intermediate years, was
occupied in persecuting both Covenanters and Catholics. He was not
a tyrant from the ordinary motives. He valued power for its own sake
little, and fame still less. He does not appear to have been vindictive,
or to have found any pleasing excitement in cruelty. What he wanted was
to be amused, to get through the twenty-four hours pleasantly without
sitting down to dry business. Sauntering was, as Sheffield expresses it,
the true Sultana Queen of his Majesty’s affections. A sitting in council
would have been insupportable to him if the Duke of Buckingham had not
been there to make mouths at the Chancellor. It has been said, and is
highly probable, that in his exile he was quite disposed to sell his
rights to Cromwell for a good round sum. To the last, his only quarrel
with his Parliaments was that they often gave him trouble, and would
not always give him money. If there was a person for whom he felt a real
regard, that person was his brother. If there was a point about which he
really entertained a scruple of conscience or of honour, that point
was the descent {292}of the crown. Yet he was willing to consent to the
Exclusion Bill for six hundred thousand pounds; and the negotiation was
broken off only because he insisted on being paid beforehand. To do him
justice, his temper was good; his manners agreeable; his natural
talents above mediocrity. But he was sensual, frivolous, false, and
cold-hearted, beyond almost any prince of whom history makes mention.
Under the government of such a man, the English people could not be long
in recovering from the intoxication of loyalty. They were then, as
they are still, a brave, proud, and high-spirited race, unaccustomed to
defeat, to shame, or to servitude. The splendid administration of Oliver
had taught them to consider their country as a match for the greatest
empires of the earth, as the first of maritime powers, as the head
of the Protestant interest. Though, in the day of their affectionate
enthusiasm, they might sometimes extol the royal prerogative in tenus
which would have better become the courtiers of Aurungzebe, they were
not men whom it was quite safe to take at their word. They were much
more perfect in the theory than in the practice of passive obedience.
Though they might deride the austere manners and scriptural phrases of
the Puritans they were still at heart a religious people. The majority
saw no great sin in field-sports, stage-plays, promiscuous dancing,
cards, fairs, starch, or false hair. But gross profaneness and
licentiousness were regarded with general horror; and the Catholic
religion was held in utter detestation by nine tenths of the middle
class.