itself sold to a foreign, a despotic, a Popish court, defeated on its
own seas and rivers {293}by a state of far inferior resources, and
placed under the rule of pandars and buffoons. Our ancestors saw the
best and ablest divines of the age turned out of their benefices by
hundreds. They saw the prisons filled with men guilty of no other
crime than that of worshipping God according to the fashion generally
prevailing throughout Protestant Europe. They saw a Popish Queen on the
throne, and a Popish heir on the steps of the throne. They saw unjust
aggression followed by feeble war, and feeble war ending in disgraceful
peace. They saw a Dutch fleet riding triumphant in the Thames. They saw
the Triple Alliance broken, the Exchequer shut up, the public credit
shaken, the arms of England employed, in shameful subordination to
France, against a country which seemed to be the last asylum of civil
and religious liberty. They saw Ireland discontented, and Scotland in
rebellion. They saw, meantime, Whitehall swarming with sharpers and
courtesans. They saw harlot after harlot, and bastard after bastard, not
only raised to the highest honours of the peerage, but supplied out of
the spoils of the honest, industrious, and ruined public creditor, with
ample means of supporting the new dignity. The government became more
odious every day. Even in the bosom of that very House of Commons which
had been elected by the nation in the ecstasy of its penitence, of
its joy, and of its hope, an opposition sprang up and became powerful.
Loyalty which had been proof against all the disasters of the civil war,
which had survived the routs of Naseby and Worcester, which had never
flinched from sequestration and exile, which the Protector could never
intimidate or seduce, began to fail in this last and hardest trial. The
storm had long been gathering. At {294}length it burst with a fury which
threatened the whole frame of society with dissolution.
When the general election of January, 1679, took place, the nation had
retraced the path which it had been describing from 1640 to 1660. It was
again in the same mood in which it had been when, after twelve years
of misgovernment, the Long Parliament assembled. In every part of the
country, the name of courtier had become a by-word of reproach. The old
warriors of the Covenant again ventured out of those retreats in which
they had, at the time of the Restoration, hidden themselves from the
insults of the triumphant Malignants, and in which, during twenty rears,
they had preserved in full vigour
“The unconquerable will
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
With courage never to submit or yield,
And what is else not to be overcome.”
Then were again seen in the streets faces which called up strange
and terrible recollections of the days when the saints, with the high
praises of God in their mouths, and a two-edged sword in their hands,
had bound kings with chains, and nobles with links of iron. Then were
again heard voices which had shouted “Privilege” by the coach of
Charles I. in the time of his tyranny, and had called for “Justice” in
Westminster Hall on the day of his trial. It has been the fashion to
represent the excitement of this period as the effect of the Popish
plot. To us it seems clear that the Popish plot was rather the effect
than the cause of the general agitation. It was not the disease, but a
symptom, though, like many other symptoms, it aggravated the severity of
the disease. In 1660 or 1661 it would have been utterly out of {295}the
power of such men as Oates or Bedloe to give any serious disturbance to
the Government. They would have been laughed at, pilloried, well pelted,
soundly whipped, and speedily forgotten. In 1678 or 1679 there would
have been an outbreak, if those men had never been born. For years
things had been steadily tending to such a consummation. Society was one
vast mass of combustible matter. No mass so vast and so combustible ever
waited long for a spark.
Rational men, we suppose, are now fully agreed that by far the greater
part, if not the whole, of Oates’s story was a pure fabrication. It is
indeed highly probable that, during his intercourse with the Jesuits, he
may have heard much wild talk about the best means of reestablishing the
Catholic religion in England, and that from some of the absurd daydreams
of the zealots with whom he then associated he may have taken hints
for his narrative. But we do not believe that he was privy to any thing
which deserved the name of conspiracy. And it is quite certain that, if
there be any small portion of truth in his evidence, that portion is
so deeply buried in falsehood that no human skill can now effect a
separation. We must not, however, forget, that we see his story by the
light of much information which his contemporaries did not at first
possess. We have nothing to say for the witnesses, but something in
mitigation to offer on behalf of the public. We own that the credulity
which the nation showed on that occasion seems to us, though censurable
indeed, yet not wholly inexcusable.
Our ancestors knew, from the experience of several generations at home
and abroad, how restless and encroaching was the disposition of the
Church of Rome. {296}The heir-apparent of the crown was a bigoted member
of that church. The reigning King seemed far more inclined to show
favour to that church than to the Presbyterians. He was the intimate
ally, or rather the hired servant, of a powerful King, who had already
given proofs of his determination to tolerate within his dominions no
other religion than that of Rome. The Catholics had begun to talk a
bolder language than formerly, and to anticipate the restoration
of their worship in all its ancient dignity and splendour. At this
juncture, it is rumoured that a Popish plot has been discovered. A
distinguished Catholic is arrested on suspicion. It appears that he has
destroyed almost all his papers. A few letters, however, have escaped
the flames; and these letters are found to contain much alarming matter,
strange expressions about subsidies from France, allusions to a vast
scheme which would “give the greatest blow to the Protestant religion
that it had ever received,” and which “would utterly subdue a pestilent
heresy.” It was natural that those who saw these expressions, in letters
which had been overlooked, should suspect that there was some horrible
villany in those which had been carefully destroyed. Such was the
feeling of the House of Commons: “Question, question, Coleman’s
letters!” was the cry which drowned the voices of the minority.
Just after the discovery of these papers, a magistrate who had
been distinguished by his independent spirit, and who had taken the
deposition of the informer, is found murdered, under circumstances which
make it almost incredible that he should have fallen either by robbers
or by his own hands. Many of our readers can remember the state of
London just after the murders {297}of Mar and Williamson, the terror
which was on every face, the careful barring of doors, the providing
of blunderbusses and watchmen’s rattles. We know of a shopkeeper who on
that occasion sold three hundred rattles in about ten hours. Those who
remember that panic may be able to form some notion of the state of
England after the death of Godfrey. Indeed, we must say that, after
having read and weighed all the evidence now extant on that mysterious
subject, we incline to the opinion that he was assassinated, and
assassinated by Catholics, not assuredly by Catholics of the least
weight or note, but by some of those crazy and vindictive fanatics who
may be found in every large sect, and who are peculiarly likely to
be found in a persecuted sect. Some of the violent Cameronians had
recently, under similar exasperation, committed similar crimes.
It was natural that there should be a panic; and it was natural that
the people should, in a panic, be unreasonable and credulous. It must
be remembered also that they had not at first, as we have, the means of
comparing the evidence which was given on different trials. They were
not aware of one tenth part of the contradictions and absurdities which
Oates had committed. The blunders, for example, into which he fell
before the Council, his mistake about the person of Don John of Austria,
and about the situation of the Jesuits’ College at Paris, were not
publicly known. He was a bad man; but the spies and deserters by whom
governments are informed of conspiracies are generally bad men. His
story was strange and romantic; but it was not more strange or romantic
than a well-authenticated Popish plot, which some few people then living
might remember, the Gunpowder treason. Oates’s account of the burning
of London was in itself not more im {298}probable than the project of
blowing up King, Lords, and Commons, a project which had not only been
entertained by very distinguished Catholics, but which had very narrowly
missed of success. As to the design on the King’s person, all the world
knew that, within a century, two kings of France and a prince of Orange
had been murdered by Catholics, purely from religious enthusiasm, that
Elizabeth had been in constant danger of a similar fate, and that such
attempts, to say the least, had not been discouraged by the highest
authority of the Church of Rome. The characters of some of the accused
persons stood high; but so did that of Anthony Babington, and that of
Everard Digby. Those who suffered denied their guilt to the last; but
no persons versed in criminal proceedings would attach any importance
to this circumstance. It was well known also that the most distinguished
Catholic casuists had written largely in defence of regicide, of mental
reservation and of equivocation. It was not quite impossible that men
whose minds had been nourished with the writings of such casuists might
think themselves justified in denying a charge which, if acknowledged,
would bring great scandal on the Church. The trials of the accused
Catholics were exactly like all the state trials of those days; that is
to say, as infamous as they could be. They were neither fairer nor less
fair than those of Algernon Sydney, of Rosewell, of Cornish, of all the
unhappy men, in short, whom a predominant party brought to what was
then facetiously called justice. Till the Revolution purified our
institutions and our manners, a state-trial was merely a murder preceded
by the uttering of certain gibberish and the performance of certain
mummeries.
The Opposition had now the great body of the {299}nation with them.
Thrice the King dissolved the Parliament; and thrice the constituent
body sent him back representatives fully determined to keep strict watch
on all his measures, and to exclude his brother from the throne. Had
the character of Charles resembled that of his father, this intestine
discord would infallibly have ended in a civil war. Obstinacy and
passion would have been his ruin. His levity and apathy were his
security. He resembled one of those light Indian boats which are safe
because they are pliant, which yield to the impact of every wave, and
which therefore bound without danger through a surf in which a vessel
ribbed with heart of oak would inevitably perish. The only thing about
which his mind was unalterably made up was that, to use his own phrase,
he would not go on his travels again for any body or for any thing. His
easy, indolent behaviour produced all the effects of the most artful
policy. He suffered things to take their course; and if Achitophel had
been at one of his ears, and Machiavel at the other, they could have
given him no better advice than to let things take their course. He gave
way to the violence of the movement, and waited for the corresponding
violence of the rebound. He exhibited himself to his subjects in the
interesting character of an oppressed king, who was ready to do any
thing to please them, and who asked of them in return, only some
consideration for his conscientious scruples and for his feelings of
natural affection, who was ready to accept any ministers, to grant any
guarantees to public liberty, but who could not find it in his heart to
take away his brother’s birthright. Nothing more was necessary. He had
to deal with a people whose noble weakness it has always been not to
press too hardly on {300}the vanquisher, with a people the lowest and
most brutal of whom cry “Shame!” if they see a man struck when he is on
the ground. The resentment which the nation had felt towards the Court
began to abate as soon as the Court was manifestly unable to offer
any resistance. The panic which Godfrey’s death had excited gradually
subsided. Every day brought to light some new falsehood or contradiction
in the stories of Oates and Bedloe. The people were glutted with the
blood of Papists, as they had, twenty years before, been glutted with
the blood of regicides. When the first sufferers in the plot were
brought to the bar, the witnesses for the defence were in danger of
being torn in pieces by the mob. Judges, jurors, and spectators seemed
equally indifferent to justice, and equally eager for revenge. Lord
Stafford, the last sufferer, was pronounced not guilty by a large
minority of his peers; and when he protested his innocence on the
scaffold, the people cried out, “God bless you, my lord; we believe you,
my lord.” The attempt to make a son of Lucy Waters King of England was
alike offensive to the pride of the nobles and to the moral feeling
of the middle class. The old Cavalier party, the great majority of the
landed gentry, the clergy and the universities almost to a man, began to
draw together, and to form in close array round the throne.
A similar reaction had begun to take place in favour of Charles the
First during the second session of the Long Parliament; and, if that
prince had been holiest or sagacious enough to keep himself strictly
within the limits of the law, we have not the smallest doubt that he
would in a few months have found himself at least as powerful as his
best friends, Lord Falkland, Culpeper, {301}or Hyde, would have wished
to see him. By illegally impeaching the leaders of the Opposition, and
by making in person a wicked attempt on the House of Commons, he stopped
and turned back that tide of loyal feeling which was just beginning to
run strongly. The son, quite as little restrained by law or by honour
as the father, was, luckily for himself, a man of a lounging, careless
temper, and, from temper, we believe, rather than from policy, escaped
that great error which cost the father so dear. Instead of trying to
pluck the fruit before it was ripe, he lay still till it fell mellow
into his very mouth. If he had arrested Lord Shaftesbury and Lord
Russell in a manner not warranted by law, it is not improbable that he
would have ended his life in exile. He took the sure course. He employed
only his legal prerogatives, and he found them amply sufficient for his
purpose.
During the first eighteen or nineteen years of his reign, he had been
playing the game of his enemies. From 1678 to 1681, his enemies had
played his game. They owed their power to his misgovernment. He owed the
recovery of his power to their violence. The great body of the people
came back to him after their estrangement with impetuous affection. He
had scarcely been more popular when he landed on the coast of Kent than
when, after several years of restraint and humiliation, he dissolved his
last Parliament.
Nevertheless, while this flux and reflux of opinion went on, the cause
of public liberty was steadily gaining. There had been a great reaction
in favour of the throne at the Restoration. But the Star-Chamber, the
High Commission, the Ship-money, had forever disappeared. There was
now another similar reaction. But the Habeas-Corpus Act had been passed
during {302}the short predominance of the Opposition, and it was not
repealed.
The King, however, supported as he was by the nation, was quite strong
enough to inflict a terrible revenge on the party which had lately held
him in bondage. In 1681 commenced the third of those periods into which
we have divided the history of England from the Restoration to the
Revolution. During this period a third great reaction took place. The
excesses of tyranny restored to the cause of liberty the hearts which
had been alienated from that cause by the excesses of faction. In 1681,
the King had almost his enemies at his feet. In 1688, the King was an
exile in a strange land.
The whole of that machinery which had lately been in motion against the
Papists was now put in motion against the Whigs, browbeating judges,
packed juries, lying witnesses, clamorous spectators. The ablest chief
of the party fled to a foreign country and died there. The most virtuous
man of the party was beheaded. Another of its most distinguished members
preferred a voluntary death to the shame of a public execution. The
boroughs on which the government could not depend were, by means of
legal quibbles, deprived of their charters; and their constitution
was remodelled in such a manner as almost to insure the return of
representatives devoted to the Court. All parts of the kingdom emulously
sent up the most extravagant assurances of the love which they bore to
their sovereign, and of the abhorrence with which they regarded those
who questioned the divine origin or the boundless extent of his power.
It is scarcely necessary to say that, in this hot competition of bigots
and slaves, the University of Oxford had the unquestioned preeminence.
{303}The glory of being farther behind the age than any other portion of
the British people, is one which that learned body acquired early, and
has never lost.
Charles died, and his brother came to the throne; but, though the person
of the sovereign was changed, the love and awe with which the office was
regarded were undiminished. Indeed, it seems that, of the two princes,
James was, in spite of his religion, rather the favourite of the High
Church party. He had been specially singled out as the mark of the
Whigs; and this circumstance sufficed to make him the idol of the
Tories. He called a parliament. The loyal gentry of the counties and the
packed voters of the remodelled boroughs gave him a parliament such as
England had not seen for a century, a parliament beyond all comparison
the most obsequious that ever sat under a prince of the House of Stuart.
One insurrectionary movement, indeed, took place in England and another
in Scotland. Both were put down with ease, and punished with tremendous
severity. Even after that bloody circuit, which will never be forgotten
while the English race exists in any part of the globe, no member of
the House of Commons ventured to whisper even the mildest censure
on Jeffreys. Edmund Waller, emboldened by his great age and his high
reputation, attacked the cruelty of the military chiefs; and this is the
brightest part of his long and checkered public life. But even Waller
did not venture to arraign the still more odious cruelty of the Chief
Justice. It is hardly too much to say that James, at that time, had
little reason to envy the extent of authority possessed by Lewis the
Fourteenth.
By what means this vast power was in three years {304}broken down, by
what perverse and frantic misgovernment the tyrant revived the spirit
of the vanquished Whigs, turned to fixed hostility the neutrality of the
trimmers, and drove from him the landed gentry, the Church, the army,
his own creatures, his own children, is well known to our readers. But
we wish to say something about one part of the question, which in our
own time has a little puzzled some very worthy men, and about which the
author of the Continuation before us has said much with which we can by
no means concur.
James, it is said, declared himself a supporter of toleration. If
he violated the constitution, he at least violated it for one of the
noblest ends that any statesman ever had in view. His object was to free
millions of his subjects from penal laws and disabilities which hardly
any person now considers as just. He ought, therefore, to be regarded as
blameless, or, at worst, as guilty only of employing irregular means
to effect a most praiseworthy purpose. A very ingenious man, whom we
believe to be a Catholic, Mr. Banim, has written a historical novel, of
the literary merit of which we cannot speak very highly, for the purpose
of inculcating this opinion. The editor of Mackintosh’s Fragment assures
us, that the standard of James bore the nobler inscription, and so
forth; the meaning of which is, that William and the other authors of
the Revolution were vile Whigs who drove out James for being a Radical:
that the crime of the King; was his going farther in liberality than
his subjects; that he was the real champion of freedom; and that Somers,
Locke, Newton, and other narrow-minded people of the same sort, were the
real bigots and oppressors.
Now, we admit that if the premises can be made out, {305}the conclusion
follows. If it can be shown that James did sincerely wish to establish
perfect freedom of conscience, we shall think his conduct deserving
of indulgence, if not of praise. We shall not be inclined to censure
harshly even his illegal acts. We conceive that so noble and salutary an
object would have justified resistance on the part of subjects. We can
therefore scarcely deny that it would at least excuse encroachment on
the part of a king. But it can be proved, we think, by the strongest
evidence, that James had no such object in view; and that, under the
pretence of establishing perfect religious liberty, he was trying to
establish the ascendency and the exclusive dominion of the Church of
Rome.
It is true that he professed himself a supporter of toleration. Every
sect clamours for toleration when it is down. We have not the smallest
doubt that, when Bonner was in the Marshalsea, he thought it a very hard
thing that a man should be locked up in a gaol for not being able to
understand the words, “This is my body,” in the same way with the lords
of the council. It would not be very wise to conclude that a beggar is
full of Christian charity, because he assures you that God will reward
you if you give him a penny; or that a soldier is humane, because he
cries out lustily for quarter when a bayonet is at his throat. The
doctrine which, from the very first origin of religious dissensions, has
been held by all bigots of all sects, when condensed into a few words,
and stripped of rhetorical disguise, is simply this: I am in the
right, and you are in the wrong. When you are the stronger you ought to
tolerate me; for it is your duty to tolerate truth. But when I am the
stronger, I shall persecute you; for it is my duty to persecute error.
{306}The Catholics lay under severe restraints in England. James wished
to remove those restraints; and therefore he held a language favourable
to liberty of conscience. But the whole history of his life proves
that this was a mere pretence. In 1679 he held similar language, in a
conversation with the magistrates of Amsterdam; and the author of the
Continuation refers to this circumstance as a proof that the King had
long entertained a strong feeling on the subject. Unhappily it proves
only the utter insincerity of all the King’s later professions. If he
had pretended to be converted to the doctrines of toleration after his
accession to the throne, some credit might have been due to him. But we
know most certainly that, in 1679, and long after that year, James was a
most bloody and remorseless persecutor. After 1679, he was placed at
the head of the government of Scotland. And what had been his conduct
in that country? He had hunted down the scattered remnant of the
Covenanters with a barbarity of which no other prince of modern times,
Philip the Second excepted, had ever shown himself capable. He had
indulged himself in the amusement of seeing the torture of the Boot
inflicted on the wretched enthusiasts whom persecution had driven to
resistance. After his accession, almost his first act was to obtain
from the servile parliament of Scotland a law for inflicting death on
preachers at conventicles held within houses, and on both preachers and
hearers at conventicles held in the open air. All this he had done for a
religion which was not his own. All this he had done, not in defence
of truth against error, but in defence of one damnable error against
another, in defence of the Episcopalian against the Presbyterian
apostasy. Lewis the Fourteenth is justly censured for {307}trying to
dragoon his subjects to heaven. But it was reserved for James to torture
and murder for the difference between two roads to hell. And this man,
so deeply imbued with the poison of intolerance that, rather than not
persecute at all, he would persecute people out of one heresy into
another, this man is held up as the champion of religious liberty. This
man, who persecuted in the cause of the unclean panther, would not, we
are told, have persecuted for the sake of the milk-white and immortal
hind.
And what was the conduct of James at the very time when he was
professing zeal for the rights of conscience? Was he not even then
persecuting to the very best of his power? Was he not employing all his
legal prerogatives, and many prerogatives which were not legal, for
the purpose of forcing his subjects to conform to his creed? While he
pretended to abhor the laws which excluded Dissenters from office, was
he not himself dismissing from office his ablest, his most experienced,
his most faithful servants, on account of their religious opinions? For
what offence was Lord Rochester driven from the Treasury? He was closely
connected with the Royal House. He was at the head of the Tory party. He
had stood firmly by James in the most trying emergencies. But he would
not change his religion, and he was dismissed. That we may not be
suspected of overstating the case, Dr. Lingard, a very competent, and
assuredly not a very willing witness, shall speak for us. “The King,”
says that able but partial writer, “was disappointed: he complained
to Barillon of the obstinacy and insincerity of the treasurer; and the
latter received from the French envoy a very intelligible hint that
the loss of office would result from his adhesion to his religious
{308}creed. He was, however, inflexible; and James, after a long delay,
communicated to him, but with considerable embarrassment and many tears,
his final determination. He had hoped, he said, that Rochester, by
conforming to the Church of Rome, would have spared him the unpleasant
task; but kings must sacrifice their feelings to their duty.” And this
was the King who wished to have all men of all sects rendered alike
capable of holding office. These proceedings were alone sufficient to
take away all credit from his liberal professions; and such, as we learn
from the despatches of the Papal Nuncio, was really the effect. “Pare,”
says D’Adda, writing a few days after the retirement of Rochester, “pare
che gli animi sono inaspriti della voce che corrtrà il popolo, d’esser
cacciato il detto ministre per non essere Cattolico, perciô tirarsi al
esterminio de Protestanti.” Was it ever denied that the favours of
the Crown were constantly bestowed and withheld purely on account of the
religious opinions of the claimants? And if these things were done in
the green tree, what would have been done in the dry? If James acted
thus when he had the strongest motives to court his Protestant subjects,
what course was he likely to follow when he had obtained from them all
that he asked?
Who again was his closest ally? And what was the policy of that ally?
The subjects of James, it is true, did not know half the infamy of their
sovereign. They did not know, as we know, that, while he was
lecturing them on the blessings of equal toleration, he was constantly
congratulating his good brother Lewis on the success of that intolerant
policy which had turned the fairest tracts of France into deserts,
and driven into exile myriads of the most peaceable, industrious, and
skilful artisans in the world. But {309}the English did know that the
two princes were bound together in the closest union. They saw their
sovereign with toleration on his lips, separating himself from those
states which had first set the example of toleration, and connecting
himself by the strongest ties with the most faithless and merciless
persecutor who could then be found on any continental throne.
By what advice again was James guided? Who were the persons in whom he
placed the greatest confidence, and who took the warmest interest in his
schemes? The ambassador of France, the Nuncio of Rome, and Father Petre
the Jesuit. And is not this enough to prove that the establishment of
equal toleration was not his plan? Was Lewis for toleration? Was the
Vatican for toleration? Was the order of Jesuits for toleration? We know
that the liberal professions of James were highly approved by those
very governments, by those very societies, whose theory and practice it
notorious was to keep no faith with heretics and to give no quarter to
heretics. And are we, in order to save James’s reputation for sincerity,
to believe that all at once those governments and those societies had
changed their nature, had discovered the criminality of all their former
conduct, had adopted principles far more liberal than those of Locke, of
Leighton, or of Tillotson? Which is the more probable supposition,
that the King who had revoked the edict of Nantes, the Pope under whose
sanction the Inquisition was then imprisoning and burning, the religious
order which, in every controversy in which it had ever been engaged, had
called in the aid either of the magistrate or of the assassin, should
have become as thorough-going friends to religious liberty as Dr.
Franklin and Mr. Jefferson, or that {310}a Jesuit-ridden bigot should be
induced to disemble for the good of the Church?
The game which the Jesuits were playing was no new game. A hundred years
before they had preached up political freedom, just as they were now
preaching up religious freedom. They had tried to raise the republicans
against Henry the Fourth and Elizabeth, just as they were now trying to
raise the Protestant Dissenters against the Established Church. In
the sixteenth century, the tools of Philip the Second were constantly
preaching doctrines that bordered on Jacobinism, constantly insisting on
the right of the people to cashier kings, and of every private
citizen to plunge his dagger into the heart of a wicked ruler. In the
seventeenth century, the persecutors of the Huguenots were crying
out against the tyranny of the Established Church of England, and
vindicating with the utmost fervour the right of every man to adore God
after his own fashion. In both cases they were alike insincere. In both
cases the fool who had trusted them would have found himself miserably
duped. A good and wise man would doubtless disapprove of the arbitrary
measures of Elizabeth. Put would he have really served the interests of
political liberty, if he had put faith in the professions of the Romish
casuists, joined their party, and taken a share in Northumberland’s
revolt, or in Babington’s conspiracy? Would he not have been assisting
to establish a far worse tyranny than that which he was trying to put
down? In the same manner, a good and wise man would doubtless see
very much to condemn in the conduct of the Church of England under the
Stuarts. But was he therefore to join the King and the Catholics against
that Church? {311}And was it not plain that, by so doing, he would
assist in setting up a spiritual despotism, compared with which the
despotism of the Establishment was as a little finger to the loins, as a
rod of whips to a rod of scorpions?
Lewis had a far stronger mind than James. He had at least an equally
high sense of honour. He was in a much less degree the slave of his
priests. His Protestant subjects had all the security for their rights
of conscience which law and solemn compact could give. Had that security
been found sufficient? And was not one such instance enough for one
generation?
The plan of James seems to us perfectly intelligible. The toleration
which, with the concurrence and applause of all the most cruel
persecutors in Europe, he was offering to his people, was meant simply
to divide them. This is the most obvious and vulgar of political
artifices. We have seen it employed a hundred times within our own
memory. At this moment we see the Carlists in France hallooing on the
Extreme Left against the Centre Left. Four years ago the same trick was
practised in England. We heard old buyers and sellers of boroughs, men
who had been seated in the House of Commons by the unsparing use of
ejectments, and who had, through their whole lives, opposed every
measure which tended to increase the power of the democracy, abusing
the Reform Bill as not democratic enough, appealing to the labouring
classes, execrating the tyranny of the ten-pound householders, and
exchanging compliments and caresses with the most noted incendiaries of
our time. The cry of universal toleration was employed by James, just
as the cry of universal suffrage was lately employed by some veteran
Tories. The object of the mock democrats of our {312}time was to produce
a conflict between the middle classes and the multitude, and thus
to prevent all reform. The object of James was to produce a conflict
between the Church and the Protestant Dissenters, and thus to facilitate
the victory of the Catholics over both.
We do not believe that he could have succeeded. But we do not think his
plan so utterly frantic and hopeless as it has generally been thought;
and we are sure that, if he had been allowed to gain his first point,
the people would have had no remedy left but an appeal to physical
force, which would have been made under most unfavourable circumstances.
He conceived that the Tories, hampered by their professions of
passive obedience, would have submitted to his pleasure, and that the
Dissenters, seduced by his delusive promises of relief, would have given
him strenuous support. In this way he hoped to obtain a law, nominally
for the removal of all religious disabilities, but really for the
excluding of all Protestants from all offices. It is never to be
forgotten that a prince who has all the patronage of the state in his
hands can, without violating the letter of the law, establish whatever
test he chooses. And, from the whole conduct of James, we have not the
smallest doubt that he would have availed himself of his power to the
utmost. The statute-book might declare all Englishmen equally capable
of holding office; but to what end, if all offices were in the gift of
a sovereign resolved not to employ a single heretic? We firmly believe
that not one post in the government, in the army, in the navy, on
the bench, or at the bar, not one peerage, nay not one ecclesiastical
benefice in the royal gift, would have been bestowed on any Protestant
{313}of any persuasion. Even while the King had still strong motives to
dissemble, he had made a Catholic Dean of Christ Church and a Catholic
President of Magdalen College. There seems to be no doubt that the See
of York was kept vacant for another Catholic. If James had been suffered
to follow this course for twenty years, every military man from a
general to a drummer, every officer of a ship, every judge, every King’s
counsel, every lord-lieutenant of a county, every justice of the peace,
every ambassador, every minister of state, every person employed in the
royal household, in the custom-house, in the postoffice, in the excise,
would have been a Catholic. The Catholics would have had a majority in
the House of Lords, even if that majority had been made, as Sunderland
threatened, by bestowing coronets on a whole troop of the Guards.
Catholics would have had, we believe, the chief weight even in the
Convocation. Every bishop, every dean, every holder of a crown living,
every head of every college which was subject to the royal power, would
have belonged to the Church of Rome. Almost all the places of liberal
education would have been under the direction of Catholics. The whole
power of licensing books would have been in the hands of Catholics. All
this immense mass of power would have been steadily supported by the
arms and by the gold of France, and would have descended to an heir
whose whole education would have been conducted with a view to one
single end, the complete reestablishment of the Catholic religion. The
House of Commons would have been the only legal obstacle. But the rights
of a great portion of the electors were at the mercy of the courts of
law; and the courts of law were absolutely {314}dependent on the Crown.
We cannot therefore think it altogether impossible that a house might
have been packed which would have restored the days of Mary.
We certainly do not believe that this would have been tamely borne.
But we do believe that, if the nation had been deluded by the King’s
professions of toleration, all this would have been attempted, and could
have been averted only by a most bloody and destructive contest, in
which the whole Protestant population would have been opposed to the
Catholics. On the one side would have been a vast numerical superiority.
But on the other side would have been the whole organization of an
eminent, and two great disciplined armies, that of James, and that
of Lewis. We do not doubt that the nation would have achieved its
deliverance. But we believe that the struggle would have shaken the
whole fabric of society, and that the vengeance of the conquerors would
have been terrible and unsparing.
But James was stopped at the outset. He thought himself secure of the
Tories, because they professed to consider all resistance as sinful, and
of the Protestant Dissenters, because he offered them relief. He was in
the wrong as to both. The error into which he fell about the Dissenters
was very natural. But the confidence which he placed in the loyal
assurances of the High Church party, was the most exquisitely ludicrous
proof of folly that a politician ever gave.
Only imagine a man acting for one single day on the supposition that
all his neighbours believe all that they profess, and act up to all that
they believe. Imagine a man acting on the supposition that he may safely
offer the deadliest injuries and insults to everybody who {315}says
that revenge is sinful; or that he may safely intrust all his property
without security to any person who says that it is wrong to steal. Such
a character would be too absurd for the wildest farce. Yet the folly of
James did not stop short of this incredible extent. Because the clergy
had declared that resistance to oppression was in no case lawful,
he conceived that he might oppress them exactly as much as he chose,
without the smallest danger of resistance. He quite forgot that, when
they magnified the royal prerogative, the prerogative was exerted on
their side, that, when they preached endurance, they had nothing to
endure, that, when they declared it unlawful to resist evil, none but
Whigs and Dissenters suffered any evil. It had never occurred to
him that a man feels the calamities of his enemies with one sort of
sensibility, and his own with quite a different sort. It had never
occurred to him as possible that a reverend divine might think it the
duty of Baxter and Bunyan to bear insults and to lie in dungeons without
murmuring, and yet, when he saw the smallest chance that his own prebend
might be transferred to some sly Father from Italy or Flanders, might
begin to discover much matter for useful meditation in the texts
touching Ehud’s knife and Jael’s hammer. His majesty was not aware, it
should seem, that people do sometimes reconsider their opinions; and
that nothing more disposes a man to reconsider his opinions than a
suspicion, that, if he adheres to them, he is very likely to be a beggar
or a martyr. Yet it seems strange that these truths should have escaped
the royal mind Those Churchmen who had signed the Oxford Declaration in
favour of passive obedience had also signed the thirty-nine Articles.
And yet the very man who confidently expected that, by a little coaxing
and bullying, {316}he should induce them to renounce the Articles, was
thunderstruck when he found that they were disposed to soften down the
doctrines of the Declaration. Nor did it necessarily follow that,
even if the theory of the Tories had undergone no modification, their
practice would coincide with their theory. It might, one should think,
have crossed the mind of a man of fifty, who had seen a great deal of
the world, that people sometimes do what they think wrong. Though a
prelate might hold that Paul directs us to obey even a Nero, it might
not on that account he perfectly safe to treat the Right Reverend Father
in God after the fashion of Nero, in the hope that he would continue
to obey on the principles of Paul. The King indeed had only to look at
home. He was at least as much attached to the Catholic Church as any
Tory gentleman or clergyman could be to the Church of England. Adultery
was at least as clearly and strongly condemned by his Church as
resistance by the Church of England. Yet his priests could not keep him
from Arabella Sedley. While he was risking his crown for the sake of his
soul, he was risking his soul for the sake of an ugly, dirty mistress.
There is something delightfully grotesque in the spectacle of a man
who, while living in the habitual violation of his own known duties, is
unable to believe that any temptation can draw any other person aside
from the path of virtue.
James was disappointed in all his calculations. His hope was that the
Tories would follow their principles, and that the Non-conformists would
follow their interests. Exactly the reverse took place. The great
body of the Tories sacrificed the principle of non-resistance to their
interests; the great body of Non-conformists rejected the delusive
offers of the King, and stood {317}firmly by their principles. The two
parties whose strife had convulsed the empire during half a century
were united for a moment; and all the vast royal power which three
years before had seemed immovably fixed vanished at once like chaff in a
hurricane.
The very great length to which this article has already been extended
makes it impossible for us to discuss, as we had meant to do, the
characters and conduct of the leading English statesmen at this crisis.
But we must offer a few remarks on the spirit and tendency of the
Revolution of 1688.
The editor of this volume quotes the Declaration of Right, and tells us
that, by looking at it, we may “judge at a glance whether the authors of
the Revolution achieved all they might and ought, in their position, to
have achieved; whether the Commons of England did their duty to their
constituents, their country, posterity, and universal freedom.” We
are at a loss to imagine how he can have read and transcribed the
Declaration of Right, and yet have so utterly misconceived its nature.
That famous document is, as its very name imports, declaratory, and
not remedial. It was never meant to be a measure of reform. It
neither contained, nor was designed to contain, any allusion to those
innovations which the authors of the Revolution considered as desirable,
and which they speedily proceeded to make. The Declaration was merely a
recital of certain old and wholesome laws which had been violated by
the Stuarts, and a solemn protest against the validity of any precedent
which might be set up in opposition to those laws. The words run thus:
“They do claim, demand, and insist upon all and singular the premises
as their undoubted rights and liberties.” Before a man begins to make
improvements on his estate, {318}he must know its boundaries. Before a
legislature sits down to reform a constitution, it is fit to ascertain
what that constitution really is. This is all that the Declaration
was intended to do; and to quarrel with it because it did not directly
introduce any beneficial changes is to quarrel with meat for not being
fuel.
The principle on which the authors of the Revolution acted cannot be
mistaken. They were perfectly aware that the English institutions stood
in need of reform. But they also knew that an important point was gained
if they could settle once for all, by a solemn compact, the matters
which had, during several generations, been in controversy between the
Parliament and the Crown. They therefore most judiciously abstained from
mixing up the irritating and perplexing question of what ought to be the
law with the plain question of what was the law. As to the claims set
forth in the Declaration of Right, there was little room for debate.
Whigs and Tories were generally agreed as to the illegality of the
dispensing power and of taxation imposed by the royal prerogative.
The articles were therefore adjusted in a very few days. But if the
Parliament had determined to revise the whole constitution, and to
provide new securities against misgovemment, before proclaiming the new
sovereigns, months would have been lost in disputes. The coalition which
had delivered the country would have been instantly dissolved. The Whigs
would have quarrelled with the Tories, the Lords with the Commons, the
Church with the Dissenters; and all this storm of conflicting interests
and conflicting theories would have been raging round a vacant throne.
In the mean time, the greatest power on the Continent was attacking
our allies, and meditating a descent on our own territories. Dundee was
preparing {319}to raise the Highlands. The authority of James was still
owned by the Irish. If the authors of the Revolution had been fools
enough to take this course, we have little doubt that Luxembourg would
have been upon them in the midst of their constitution-making. They
might probably have been interrupted in a debate on Filmer’s and
Sydney’s theories of government by the entrance of the musqueteers of
Lewis’s household, and have been marched off, two and two, to frame
imaginary monarchies and commonwealths in the Tower. We have had in our
own time abundant experience of the effects of such folly. We have seen
nation after nation enslaved, because the friends of liberty wasted in
discussions upon abstract questions the time which ought to have been
employed in preparing for vigorous national defence. This editor,
apparently, would have had the English Revolution of 1688 end as the
Revolutions of Spain and Naples ended in our days. Thank God, our
deliverers were men of a very different order from the Spanish and
Neapolitan legislators. They might, on many subjects, hold opinions
which, in the nineteenth century, would not be considered as liberal.
But they were not dreaming pedants. They were statesmen accustomed
to the management of great affairs. Their plans of reform were not so
extensive as those of the lawgivers of Cadiz; but what they planned,
that they effected; and what they effected, that they maintained against
the fiercest hostility at home and abroad.
Their first object was to seat William on the throne; and they were
right. We say this without any reference to the eminent personal
qualities of William, or to the follies and crimes of James. If the two
princes had interchanged characters, our opinion would still {320}have
been the same. It was even more necessary to England at that time that
her king should be a usurper than that he should be a hero. There could
be no security for good government without a change of dynasty. The
reverence for hereditary right and the doctrine of passive obedience had
taken such a hold on the minds of the Tories, that, if James had been
restored to power on any conditions, their attachment to him would in
all probability have revived, as the indignation which recent oppression
had produced faded from their minds. It had become indispensable to have
a sovereign whose title to his throne was strictly bound up with the
title of the nation to its liberties. In the compact between the Prince
of Orange and the Convention, there was one most important article
which, though not expressed, was perfectly understood by both parties,
and for the performance of which the country had securities far better
than all the engagements that Charles the First or Ferdinand the Seventh
ever took in the day of their weakness, and broke in the day of their
power. The article to which we allude was this, that William would in
all things conform himself to what should appear to be the fixed and
deliberate sense of his Parliament. The security for the performance
was this, that he had no claim to the throne except the choice of
Parliament, and no means of maintaining himself on the throne but the
support of Parliament. All the great and inestimable reforms which
speedily followed the Revolution were implied in those simple
words; “The Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, assembled at
Westminster, do resolve that William and Mary, Prince and Princess of
Orange, be, and be declared King and Queen of England.”
And what were the reforms of which we speak? We {321}will shortly
recount some which we think the most important; and we will then leave
our readers to judge whether those who consider the Revolution as a mere
change of dynasty, beneficial to a few aristocrats, but useless to
the body of the people, or those who consider it as a happy era in the
history of the British nation and of the human species, have judged more
correctly of its nature.
Foremost in the list of the benefits which our country owes to the
Revolution we place the Toleration Act. It is true that this measure
fell short of the wishes of the leading Whigs. It is true also that,
where Catholics were concerned, even the most enlightened of the leading
Whigs held opinions by no means so liberal as those which are happily
common at the present day. Those distinguished statesmen did however
make a noble, and, in some respects, a successful straggle for the
rights of conscience. Their wish was to bring the great body of the
Protestant Dissenters within the pale of the Church by judicious
alterations in the Liturgy and the Articles, and to grant to those who
still remained without that pale the most ample toleration. They framed
a plan of comprehension which would have satisfied a great majority of
the seceders; and they proposed the complete abolition of that absurd
and odious test which, after having been, during a century and a half, a
scandal to the pious and a laughing-stock to the profane, was at length
removed in our own time. The immense power of the Clergy and of the Tory
gentry frustrated these excellent designs. The Whigs, however, did
much. They succeeded in obtaining a law in the provisions of which
a philosopher will doubtless find much to condemn, but which had the
practical effect of enabling almost every Protestant Nonconformist
{322}to follow the dictates of his own conscience without molestation.
Scarcely a law in the statute-book is theoretically more objectionable
than the Toleration Act. But we question whether in the whole of that
vast mass of legislation, from the Great Charter downwards, there be
a single law which has so much diminished the sum of human suffering,
which has done so much to allay bad passions, which has put an end to so
much petty tyranny and vexation, which has brought gladness, peace, and
a sense of security to so many private dwellings.
The second of those great reforms which the Revolution produced was the
final establishment of the Presbyterian Kirk in Scotland. We shall not
now inquire whether the Episcopal or the Calvinistic form of Church
government be more agreeable to primitive practice. Far be it from us to
disturb with our doubts the repose of any Oxonian Bachelor of Divinity
who conceives that the English prelates with their baronies and palaces,
their purple and their fine linen, their mitred carriages and their
sumptuous tables, are the true successors of those ancient bishops who
lived by catching fish and mending tents. We say only that the Scotch,
doubtless from their own inveterate stupidity and malice, were not
Episcopalians; that they could not be made Episcopalians; that the
whole power of government had been in vain employed for the purpose
of converting them; that the fullest instruction on the mysterious
questions of the Apostolical succession and the imposition of hands had
been imparted by the very logical process of putting the legs of the
students into wooden boots, and driving two or more wedges between their
knees; that a course of divinity lectures, of the most edifying kind,
had been given in {323}the grass-market of Edinburgh; yet that, in spite
of all the exertions of those great theological professors, Lauderdale
and Dundee, the Covenanters were as obstinate as ever. To the contest
between the Scotch nation and the Anglican Church are to be ascribed
near thirty years of the most frightful misgovernment ever seen in any
part of Great Britain. If the Revolution had produced no other effect
than that of freeing the Scotch from the yoke of an establishment which
they detested, and giving them one to which they were attached, it would
have been one of the happiest events in our history.
The third great benefit which the country derived from the Revolution
was the alteration in the mode of granting the supplies. It had been the
practice to settle on every prince, at the commencement of his reign,
the produce of certain taxes which, it was supposed, would yield a
sum sufficient to defray the ordinary expenses of government. The
distribution of the revenue was left wholly to the sovereign. He might
be forced by a war, or by his own profusion, to ask for an extraordinary
grant. But, if his policy were economical and pacific, he might reign
many years without once being under the necessity of summoning his
Parliament, or of taking their advice when he had summoned them. This
was not all. The natural tendency of every society in which property
enjoys tolerable security is to increase in wealth. With the national
wealth, the produce of the customs, of the excise, and of the
post-office, would of course increase; and thus it might well happen
that taxes which, at the beginning of a long reign, were barely
sufficient to support a frugal government in time of peace, might,
before the end of that reign, enable the {324}sovereign to imitate the
extravagance of Nero or Heliogabalus, to raise great armies, to carry
on expensive wars. Something of this sort had actually happened under
Charles the Second, though his reign, reckoned from the Restoration,
lasted only twenty-five years. His first Parliament settled on him taxes
estimated to produce twelve hundred thousand pounds a year. This they
thought sufficient, as they allowed nothing for a standing army in time
of peace. At the time of Charles’s death, the annual produce of these
taxes considerably exceeded a million and a half; and the King
who, during the years which immediately followed his accession, was
perpetually in distress, and perpetually asking his Parliaments for
money, was at last able to keep a body of regular troops without any
assistance from the House of Commons. If his reign had been as long as
that of George the Third, he would probably, before the close of it,
have been in the annual receipt of several millions over and above
what the ordinary expenses of civil government required; and of those
millions he would have been as absolutely master as the King now is
of the sum allotted for his privy-purse. He might have spent them in
luxury, in corruption, in paying troops to overawe his people, or in
carrying into effect wild schemes of foreign conquest. The authors of
the Revolution applied a remedy to this great abuse. They settled on the
King, not the fluctuating produce of certain fixed taxes, but a fixed
sum sufficient for the support of his own royal state. They established
it as a rule that all the expenses of the army, the navy, and the
ordnance, should be brought annually under the review of the House
of Commons, and that every sum voted should be applied to the service
specified in the vote. The direct effect of this {325}change was
important. The indirect effect has been more important still. From that
time the House of Commons has been really the paramount power in the
state. It has, in truth, appointed and removed ministers, declared war,
and concluded peace. No combination of the King and the Lords has ever
been able to effect any thing against the Lower House, backed by its
constituents. Three or four times, indeed, the sovereign has been able
to break the force of an opposition by dissolving the Parliament. But
if that experiment should fail, if the people should be of the same mind
with their representatives, he would clearly have no course left but to
yield, to abdicate, or to fight.
The next great blessing which we owe to the Revolution is the
purification of the administration of justice in political cases. Of the
importance of this change no person can judge who is not well acquainted
with the earlier volumes of the State Trials. These volumes are, we do
not hesitate to say, the most frightful record of baseness and depravity
that is extant in the world. Our hatred is altogether turned away from
the crimes and the criminals, and directed against the law and its
ministers. We see villanies as black as ever were imputed to any
prisoner at any bar daily committed on the bench and in the jury-box.
The worst of the bad acts which brought discredit on the old Parliaments
of France, the condemnation of Lally, for example, or even that of
Calas, may seem praiseworthy when compared with the atrocities which
follow each other in endless succession as we turn over that huge
chronicle of the shame of England. The magistrates of Paris and Toulouse
were blinded by prejudice, passion, or bigotry. But the abandoned judges
of our own country committed murder with their eyes open. {326}The cause
of this is plain. In France there was no constitutional opposition. If
a man held language offensive to the government, he was at once sent to
the Bastile or to Vincennes. But in England, at least after the days
of the Long Parliament, the King could not, by a mere act of his
prerogative, rid himself of a troublesome politician. He was forced to
remove those who thwarted him by means of perjured witnesses, packed
juries, and corrupt, hard-hearted, browbeating judges. The Opposition
naturally retaliated whenever they had the upper hand. Every time that
the power passed from one party to the other, there was a proscription
and a massacre, thinly disguised under the forms of judicial procedure.
The tribunals ought to be sacred places of refuge, where, in all the
vicissitudes of public affairs, the innocent of all parties may find
shelter. They were, before the Revolution, an unclean public shambles,
to which each party in its turn dragged its opponents, and where each
found the same venal and ferocious butchers waiting for its custom.
Papist or Protestant, Tory or Whig, Priest or Alderman, all was one to
those greedy and savage natures, provided only there was money to earn,
and blood to shed.
Of course, these worthless judges soon created around them, as was
natural, a breed of informers more wicked, if possible, than themselves.
The trial by jury afforded little or no protection to the innocent. The
juries were nominated by the sheriffs. The sheriffs were in most
parts of England nominated by the Crown. In London, the great scene
of political contention, those officers were chosen by the people. The
fiercest parliamentary election of our time will give but a faint notion
of the storm which raged in the city on {327}the day when two interested
parties, each bearing its badge, met to select the men in whose hands
were to be the issues of life and death for the coming year. On that
day, nobles of the highest descent did not think it beneath them to
canvass and marshal the livery, to head the procession, and to watch
the poll. On that day, the great chiefs of parties waited in an agony
of suspense for the messenger who was to bring from Guildhall the news
whether their lives and estates were, for the next twelve months, to
be at the mercy of a friend or of a foe. In 1681, Whig sheriffs were
chosen; and Shaftesbury defied the whole power of the government. In
1682 the sheriffs were Tories.
Shaftesbury fled to Holland. The other chiefs of the party broke up
their councils, and retired in haste to their country-seats. Sydney
on the scaffold told those sheriffs that his blood was on their heads.
Neither of them could deny the charge; and one of them wept with shame
and remorse.
Thus every man who then meddled with public affairs, took his life in
his hand. The consequence was that men of gentle natures stood aloof
from contests in which they could not engage without hazarding their own
necks and the fortunes of their children. This was the course adopted by
Sir William Temple, by Evelyn, and by many other men who were, in every
respect, admirably qualified to serve the State. On the other hand,
those resolute and enterprising men who put their heads and lands to
hazard in the game of politics naturally acquired, from the habit of
playing for so deep a stake, a reckless and desperate turn of mind.
It was, we seriously believe, as safe to be a highwayman as to be a
distinguished leader of Opposition. This may serve to explain, and in
some degree {328}to excuse, the violence with which the factions of that
age are justly reproached. They were fighting, not merely for office,
but for life. It they reposed for a moment from the work of agitation,
if they suffered the public excitement to flag, they were lost men.
Hume, in describing this state of things, has employed an image which
seems hardly to suit the general simplicity of his style, but which
is by no means too strong for the occasion. “Thus,” says he, “the two
parties actuated by mutual rage, but cooped up within the narrow limits
of the law, levelled with poisoned daggers the most deadly blows against
each other’s breast, and buried in their factious divisions all regard
to truth, honour, and humanity.”
From this terrible evil the Revolution set us free. The law which
secured to the judges them seats during life or good behaviour did
something. The law subsequently passed for regulating trials in cases
of treason did much more. The provisions of that law show, indeed, very
little legislative skill. It is not framed on the principle of securing
the innocent, but on the principle of giving a great chance of escape to
the accused, whether innocent or guilty. This, however, is decidedly a
fault on the right side. The evil produced by the occasional escape of
a bad citizen is not to be compared with the evils of that Reign of
Terror, for such it was, which preceded the Revolution. Since the
passing of this law scarcely one single person has suffered death
in England as a traitor, who had not been convicted on overwhelming
evidence, to the satisfaction of all parties, of the highest crime
against the State. Attempts have been made in times of great excitement,
to bring in persons guilty of high treason for acts which, though
sometimes highly blamable, did {329}not necessarily imply a design
falling within the legal definition of treason. All those attempts have
failed. During a hundred and forty years no statesman, while engaged in
constitutional opposition to a government, has had the axe before his
eyes. The smallest minorities, struggling against the most powerful
majorities, in the most agitated times, have felt themselves perfectly
secure. Pulteney and Fox were the two most distinguished leaders of
Opposition since the Revolution. Both were personally obnoxious to the
Court. But the utmost harm that the utmost anger of the Court could
do to them was to strike off the “Right Honourable” from before their
names.
But of all the reforms produced by the Revolution, perhaps the most
important was the full establishment of the liberty of unlicensed
printing. The Censorship which, under some form or other, had existed,
with rare and short intermissions, under every government, monarchical
or republican, from the time of Henry the Eighth downwards, expired, and
has never since been renewed.
We are aware that the great improvements which we have recapitulated
were, in many respects, imperfectly and unskilfully executed. The
authors of those improvements sometimes, while they removed or mitigated
a great practical evil, continued to recognise the erroneous principle
from which that evil had sprung. Sometimes when they had adopted a sound
principle, they shrank from following it to all the conclusions to
which it would have led them. Sometimes they failed to perceive that the
remedies which they applied to one disease of the State were certain to
generate another disease, and to render another remedy necessary. Their
knowledge was inferior to ours: nor were they {330}always able to act
up to their knowledge. The pressure of circumstances, the necessity of
compromising differences of opinion, the power and violence of the party
which was altogether hostile to the new settlement, must be taken into
the account. When these things are fairly weighed, there will, we think,
be little difference of opinion among liberal and right-minded men as to
the real value of what the great events of 1688 did for this country.
We have recounted what appear to us the most important of those changes
which the Revolution produced in our laws. The changes which it produced
in our laws, however, were not more important than the change which
it indirectly produced in the public mind. The Whig party had during
seventy years, an almost uninterrupted possession of power. It had
always been the fundamental doctrine of that party, that power is a
trust for the people; that it is given to magistrates, not for
their own, but for the public advantage; that, where it is abused by
magistrates, even by the highest of all, it may lawfully be withdrawn.
It is perfectly true, that the Whigs were not more exempt than other men
from the vices and infirmities of our nature, and that, when they had
power, they sometimes abused it. But still they stood firm to their
theory. That theory was the badge of their party. It was something more.
It was the foundation on which rested the power of the houses of Nassau
and Brunswick. Thus, there was a government interested in propagating a
class of opinions which most governments are interested in discouraging,
a government which looked with complacency on all speculations
favourable to public liberty, and with extreme aversion on all
speculations {331}favourable to arbitrary power. There was a King who
decidedly preferred a republican to a believer in the divine right
of kings; who considered every attempt to exalt his prerogative as an
attack on his title; and who reserved all his favours for those who
declaimed on the natural equality of men, and the popular origin of
government. This was the state of things from the Revolution till
the death of George the Second. The effect was what might have been
expected. Even in that profession which has generally been most disposed
to magnify the prerogative, a great change took place. Bishopric
after bishopric and deanry after deanry were bestowed on Whigs
and Latitudinarians. The consequence was that Whiggism and
Latitudinarianism were professed by the ablest and most aspiring
churchmen.
Hume complained bitterly of this at the close of his history. “The Whig
party,” says he, “for a course of near seventy years, has almost without
interruption enjoyed the whole authority of government, and no honours
or offices could be obtained but by their countenance and protection.
But this event, which in some particulars has been advantageous to
the state, has proved destructive to the truth of history, and has
established many gross falsehoods, which it is unaccountable how any
civilised nation could have embraced, with regard to its domestic
occurrences. Compositions the most despicable, both for style and
matter,”--in a note he instances the writings of Locke, Sydney, Hoadley,
and Rapin,--“have been extolled and propagated and read as if they had
equalled the most celebrated remains of antiquity. And forgetting that
a regard to liberty, though a laudable passion, ought commonly to
be subservient {332}to a reverence for established government, the
prevailing faction has celebrated only the partisans of the former.” We
will not here enter into an argument about the merit of Rapin’s History
or Locke’s political speculations. We call Hume merely as evidence to
a fact well known to all reading men, that the literature patronised by
the English Court and the English ministry, during the first half of
the eighteenth century, was of that kind which courtiers and ministers
generally do all in their power to discountenance, and tended to
inspire zeal for the liberties of the people rather than respect for the
authority of the government.
There was still a very strong Tory party in England. But that party was
in opposition. Many of its members still held the doctrine of passive
obedience. But they did not admit that the existing dynasty had any
claim to such obedience. They condemned resistance. But by resistance
they meant the keeping out of James the Third, and not the turning out
of George the Second. No Radical of our times could grumble more at the
expenses of the royal household, could exert himself more strenuously
to reduce the military establishment, could oppose with more earnestness
every proposition for arming the executive with extraordinary powers, or
could pour more unmitigated abuse on placemen and courtiers If a writer
were now, in a massive Dictionary, to define a Pensioner as a traitor
and a slave, the Excise as a hateful tax, the Commissioners of the
Excise as wretches, if he were to write a satire full of reflections on
men who receive “the price of boroughs and of souls,” who “explain their
country’s dear-bought rights away,” {333}or
“whom pensions can incite
To vote a patriot black, a courtier white,”
we should set him down for something more democratic than a Whig. Yet
this was the language which Johnson, the most bigoted of Tories and High
Churchmen, held under the administration of Walpole and Pelham.
Thus doctrines favourable to public liberty were inculcated alike by
those who were in power and by those who were in opposition. It was by
means of these doctrines alone that the former could prove that they
had a King _de jure_. The servile theories of the latter did not prevent
them from offering every molestation to one whom they considered as
merely a King _de facto_. The attachment of one party to the House of
Hanover, of the other to that of Stuart, induced both to talk a language
much more favourable to popular rights than to monarchical power. What
took place at the first representation of Cato is no bad illustration
of the way in which the two great sections of the community almost
invariably acted. A play, the whole merit of which consists in its
stately rhetoric, a rhetoric sometimes not unworthy of Lucan, about
hating tyrants and dying for freedom, is brought on the stage in a time
of great political excitement. Both parties crowd to the theatre. Each
affects to consider every line as a compliment to itself, and an
attack on its opponents. The curtain falls amidst an unanimous roar of
applause. The Whigs of the Kit Cat embrace the author, and assure
him that he has rendered an inestimable service to liberty. The Tory
secretary of state presents a purse to the chief actor for defending the
cause of liberty so well. The history of that night was, in miniature,
the history of two generations. {334}We well know how much sophistry
there was in the reasonings, and how much exaggeration in the
declamations of both parties. But when we compare the state in which
political science was at the close of the reign of George the Second
with the state in which it had been when James the Second came to the
throne, it is impossible not to admit that a prodigious improvement had
taken place. We are no admirers of the political doctrines laid down in
Blackstone’s Commentaries. But if we consider that those Commentaries
were read with great applause in the very schools where, seventy or
eighty years before, books had been publicly burned by order of the
University of Oxford for containing the damnable doctrine that the
English monarchy is limited and mixed, we cannot deny that a salutary
change had taken place. “The Jesuits,” says Pascal, in the last of
his incomparable letters, “have obtained a Papal decree, condemning
Galileo’s doctrine about the motion of the earth. It is all in vain. If
the world is really turning round, all mankind together will not be able
to keep it from turning, or to keep themselves from turning with it.”
The decrees of Oxford were as ineffectual to stay the great moral and
political revolution as those of the Vatican to stay the motion of our
globe. That learned University found itself not only unable to keep the
mass from moving, but unable to keep itself from moving along with the
mass. Nor was the effect of the discussions and speculations of that
period confined to our own country. While the Jacobite party was in
the last dotage and weakness of its paralytic old age, the political
philosophy of England began to produce a mighty effect on France, and,
through France, on Europe.
Here another vast field opens itself before us. But {335}we must
resolutely turn away from it. We will conclude by advising all our
readers to study Sir James Mackintosh’s valuable Fragment, and by
expressing our hope that they will soon be able to study it without
those accompaniments which have hitherto impeded its circulation.