Those who put him to death cared as little for the Assembly of Divines,
as for the Convocation, and would, in all probability, only have hated
him the more if he had agreed to set up the Presbyterian discipline.
Indeed, in spite of the opinion of Mr. Hallam, we are inclined to think
that the attachment of Charles to the Church of England was altogether
political. Human nature is, we admit, so capricious that there may be
a single, sensitive point, in a conscience which everywhere else is
callous. A man without truth or humanity may have some strange scruples
about a trifle. There was one devout warrior in the royal camp whose
piety bore a great resemblance to that which is ascribed to the King.
We mean Colonel Turner. That gallant Cavalier was hanged, after the
Restoration, for a flagitious burglary. At the gallows he told the crowd
that his mind received great consolation from one reflection: he had
always taken off his hat when he went into a church. The character of
Charles would scarcely rise in our estimation, if we believed that he
was pricked in conscience after the manner of this worthy loyalist, and
that while violating all the first rules of Christian morality, he was
sincerely scrupulous about church-government. But we acquit him of such
weakness. In 1641 he deliberately confirmed the Scotch Declaration which
stated that the government of the church by archbishops and bishops was
contrary to the word of God. In 1645, he appears to have offered to set
up Popery in Ireland. That a King who had established the Presbyterian
religion in one kingdom, and who was willing to establish the Catholic
religion in another, should have insurmountable scruples about the
ecclesiastical constitution of the third, is altogether incredible. He
himself says in his letters that he looks on Episcopacy as a stronger
support of monarchical power than even the army. From causes which we
have already considered, the Established Church had been, since the
Reformation, the great bulwark of the prerogative. Charles wished,
therefore, to preserve it. He thought himself necessary both to the
Parliament and to the army. He did not foresee, till too late, that by
paltering with the Presbyterians, he should put both them and himself
into the power of a fiercer and more daring party. If he had foreseen
it, we suspect that the royal blood which still cries to Heaven every
thirtieth of January, for judgments only to be averted by salt-fish and
egg-sauce, would never have been shed. One who had swallowed the Scotch
Declaration would scarcely strain at the Covenant.
The death of Charles and the strong measures which led to it raised
Cromwell to a height of power fatal to the infant Commonwealth. No
men occupy so splendid a place in history as those who have founded
monarchies on the ruins of republican institutions. Their glory, if not
of the purest, is assuredly of the most seductive and dazzling kind. In
nations broken to the curb, in nations long accustomed to be transferred
from one tyrant to another, a man without eminent qualities may easily
gain supreme power. The defection of a troop of guards, a conspiracy of
eunuchs, a popular tumult, might place an indolent senator or a brutal
soldier on the throne of the Roman world. Similar revolutions have often
occurred in the despotic states of Asia. But a community which has heard
the voice of truth and experienced the pleasures of liberty, in which
the merits of statesmen and of systems are freely canvassed, in which
obedience is paid, not to persons, but to laws, in which magistrates are
regarded, not as the lords, but as the servants of the public, in which
the excitement of a party is a necessary of life, in which political
warfare is reduced to a system of tactics; such a community is not
easily reduced to servitude. Beasts of burden may easily be managed by a
new master. But will the wild ass submit to the bonds? Will the unicorn
serve and abide by the crib? Will leviathan hold out his nostrils to the
book? The mythological conqueror of the East, whose enchantments reduced
wild beasts to the tameness of domestic cattle, and who harnessed
lions and tigers to his chariot, is but an imperfect type of those
extraordinary minds which have thrown a spell on the fierce spirits of
nations unaccustomed to control, and have compelled raging factions to
obey their reins and swell their triumph. The enterprise, be it good
or bad, is one which requires a truly great man. It demands courage,
activity, energy, wisdom, firmness, conspicuous virtues, or vices so
splendid and alluring as to resemble virtues.
Those who have succeeded in this arduous undertaking form a very small
and a very remarkable class. Parents of tyranny, heirs of freedom,
kings among citizens, citizens among kings, they unite in themselves the
characteristics of the system which springs from them, and those of the
system from which they have sprung. Their reigns shine with a double
light, the last and dearest rays of departing freedom mingled with the
first and brightest glories of empire in its dawn. The high qualities
of such a prince lend to despotism itself a charm drawn from the
liberty under which they were formed, and which they have destroyed.
He resembles an European who settles within the Tropics, and carries
thither the strength and the energetic habits acquired in regions more
propitious to the constitution. He differs as widely from princes nursed
in the purple of imperial cradles, as the companions of Gama from their
dwarfish and imbecile progeny, which, born in a climate unfavourable to
its growth and beauty, degenerates more and more, at every descent, from
the qualities of the original conquerors.
In this class three men stand pre-eminent, Caesar, Cromwell, and
Bonaparte. The highest place in this remarkable triumvirate belongs
undoubtedly to Caesar. He united the talents of Bonaparte to those of
Cromwell; and he possessed also, what neither Cromwell nor Bonaparte
possessed, learning, taste, wit, eloquence, the sentiments and the
manners of an accomplished gentleman.
Between Cromwell and Napoleon Mr. Hallam has instituted a parallel,
scarcely less ingenious than that which Burke has drawn between Richard
Coeur de Lion and Charles the Twelfth of Sweden. In this parallel,
however, and indeed throughout his work, we think that he hardly gives
Cromwell fair measure. “Cromwell,” says he, “far unlike his antitype,
never showed any signs of a legislative mind, or any desire to place his
renown on that noblest basis, the amelioration of social institutions.”
The difference in this respect, we conceive, was not in the character of
the men, but in the character of the revolutions by means of which they
rose to power. The civil war in England had been undertaken to defend
and restore; the republicans of France set themselves to destroy. In
England, the principles of the common law had never been disturbed, and
most even of its forms had been held sacred. In France, the law and
its ministers had been swept away together. In France, therefore,
legislation necessarily became the first business of the first settled
government which rose on the ruins of the old system. The admirers of
Inigo Jones have always maintained that his works are inferior to those
of Sir Christopher Wren, only because the great fire of London gave
Wren such a field for the display of his powers as no architect in the
history of the world ever possessed. Similar allowance must be made for
Cromwell. If he erected little that was new, it was because there had
been no general devastation to clear a space for him. As it was, he
reformed the representative system in a most judicious manner. He
rendered the administration of justice uniform throughout the island.
We will quote a passage from his speech to the Parliament in September
1656, which contains, we think, simple and rude as the diction is,
stronger indications of a legislative mind, than are to be found in the
whole range of orations delivered on such occasions before or since.
“There is one general grievance in the nation. It is the law. I think,
I may say it, I have as eminent judges in this land as have been had,
or that the nation has had for these many years. Truly, I could be
particular as to the executive part, to the administration; but
that would trouble you. But the truth of it is, there are wicked and
abominable laws that will be in your power to alter. To hang a man for
sixpence, threepence, I know not what,--to hang for a trifle, and pardon
murder, is in the ministration of the law through the ill framing of it.
I have known in my experience abominable murders quitted; and to see men
lose their lives for petty matters! This is a thing that God will reckon
for; and I wish it may not lie upon this nation a day longer than you
have an opportunity to give a remedy; and I hope I shall cheerfully join
with you in it.”
Mr. Hallam truly says that, though it is impossible to rank Cromwell
with Napoleon as a general, “yet his exploits were as much above
the level of his contemporaries, and more the effects of an original
uneducated capacity.” Bonaparte was trained in the best military
schools; the army which he led to Italy was one of the finest that ever
existed. Cromwell passed his youth and the prime of his manhood in a
civil situation. He never looked on war till he was more than forty
years old. He had first to form himself, and then to form his troops.
Out of raw levies he created an army, the bravest and the best
disciplined, the most orderly in peace, and the most terrible in war,
that Europe had seen. He called this body into existence. He led it to
conquest. He never fought a battle without gaining it. He never gained a
battle without annihilating the force opposed to him. Yet his victories
were not the highest glory of his military system. The respect which his
troops paid to property, their attachment to the laws and religion of
their country, their submission to the civil power, their temperance,
their intelligence, their industry, are without parallel. It was after
the Restoration that the spirit which their great leader had infused
into them was most signally displayed. At the command of the established
government, an established government which had no means of enforcing
obedience, fifty thousand soldiers whose backs no enemy had ever seen,
either in domestic or in continental war, laid down their arms, and
retired into the mass of the people, thenceforward to be distinguished
only by superior diligence, sobriety, and regularity in the pursuits, of
peace, from the other members of the community which they had saved.
In the general spirit and character of his administration, we think
Cromwell far superior to Napoleon. “In the civil government,” says Mr.
Hallam, “there can be no adequate parallel between one who had sucked
only the dregs of a besotted fanaticism, and one to whom the stores of
reason and philosophy were open.” These expressions, it seems to
us, convey the highest eulogium on our great countryman. Reason
and philosophy did not teach the conqueror of Europe to command his
passions, or to pursue, as a first object, the happiness of his people.
They did not prevent him from risking his fame and his power in a
frantic contest against the principles of human nature and the laws of
the physical world, against the rage of the winter and the liberty
of the sea. They did not exempt him from the influence of that most
pernicious of superstitions, a presumptuous fatalism. They did not
preserve him from the inebriation of prosperity, or restrain him from
indecent querulousness in adversity. On the other hand, the fanaticism
of Cromwell never urged him on impracticable undertakings, or confused
his perception of the public good. Our countryman, inferior to Bonaparte
in invention, was far superior to him in wisdom. The French Emperor is
among conquerors what Voltaire is among writers, a miraculous child.
His splendid genius was frequently clouded by fits of humour as absurdly
perverse as those of the pet of the nursery, who quarrels with his food,
and dashes his playthings to pieces. Cromwell was emphatically a man.
He possessed, in an eminent degree, that masculine and full-grown
robustness of mind, that equally diffused intellectual health, which,
if our national partiality does not mislead us, has peculiarly
characterised the great men of England. Never was any ruler so
conspicuously born for sovereignty. The cup which has intoxicated almost
all others, sobered him. His spirit, restless from its own buoyancy in
a lower sphere, reposed in majestic placidity as soon as it had reached
the level congenial to it. He had nothing in common with that large
class of men who distinguish themselves in subordinate posts, and whose
incapacity becomes obvious as soon as the public voice summons them
to take the lead. Rapidly as his fortunes grew, his mind expanded
more rapidly still. Insignificant as a private citizen, he was a great
general; he was a still greater prince. Napoleon had a theatrical
manner, in which the coarseness of a revolutionary guard-room was
blended with the ceremony of the old Court of Versailles. Cromwell,
by the confession even of his enemies, exhibited in his demeanour the
simple and natural nobleness of a man neither ashamed of his origin
nor vain of his elevation, of a man who had found his proper place in
society, and who felt secure that he was competent to fill it. Easy,
even to familiarity, where his own dignity was concerned, he was
punctilious only for his country. His own character he left to take care
of itself; he left it to be defended by his victories in war, and his
reforms in peace. But he was a jealous and implacable guardian of the
public honour. He suffered a crazy Quaker to insult him in the gallery
of Whitehall, and revenged himself only by liberating him and giving him
a dinner. But he was prepared to risk the chances of war to avenge the
blood of a private Englishman.
No sovereign ever carried to the throne so large a portion of the best
qualities of the middling orders, so strong a sympathy with the feelings
and interests of his people. He was sometimes driven to arbitrary
measures; but he had a high, stout, honest, English heart. Hence it was
that he loved to surround his throne with such men as Hale and Blake.
Hence it was that he allowed so large a share of political liberty to
his subjects, and that, even when an opposition dangerous to his power
and to his person almost compelled him to govern by the sword, he was
still anxious to leave a germ from which, at a more favourable season,
free institutions might spring. We firmly believe that, if his first
Parliament had not commenced its debates by disputing his title, his
government would have been as mild at home as it was energetic and able
abroad. He was a soldier; he had risen by war. Had his ambition been of
an impure or selfish kind, it would have been easy for him to plunge his
country into continental hostilities on a large scale, and to dazzle
the restless factions which he ruled, by the splendour of his victories.
Some of his enemies have sneeringly remarked, that in the successes
obtained under his administration he had no personal share; as if a man
who had raised himself from obscurity to empire solely by his military
talents could have any unworthy reason for shrinking from military
enterprise. This reproach is his highest glory. In the success of the
English navy he could have no selfish interest. Its triumphs added
nothing to his fame; its increase added nothing to his means of
overawing his enemies; its great leader was not his friend. Yet he took
a peculiar pleasure in encouraging that noble service which, of all the
instruments employed by an English government, is the most impotent
for mischief, and the most powerful for good. His administration was
glorious, but with no vulgar glory. It was not one of those periods of
overstrained and convulsive exertion which necessarily produce debility
and languor. Its energy was natural, healthful, temperate. He placed
England at the head of the Protestant interest, and in the first rank of
Christian powers. He taught every nation to value her friendship and
to dread her enmity. But he did not squander her resources in a vain
attempt to invest her with that supremacy which no power, in the modern
system of Europe, can safely affect, or can long retain.
This noble and sober wisdom had its reward. If he did not carry the
banners of the Commonwealth in triumph to distant capitals, if he did
not adorn Whitehall with the spoils of the Stadthouse and the Louvre, if
he did not portion out Flanders and Germany into principalities for his
kinsmen and his generals, he did not, on the other hand, see his country
overrun by the armies of nations which his ambition had provoked. He did
not drag out the last years of his life an exile and a prisoner, in
an unhealthy climate and under an ungenerous gaoler, raging with the
impotent desire of vengeance, and brooding over visions of departed
glory. He went down to his grave in the fulness of power and fame; and
he left to his son an authority which any man of ordinary firmness and
prudence would have retained.
But for the weakness of that foolish Ishbosheth, the opinions which we
have been expressing would, we believe, now have formed the orthodox
creed of good Englishmen. We might now be writing under the government
of his Highness Oliver the Fifth or Richard the Fourth, Protector, by
the grace of God, of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland,
and the dominions thereto belonging. The form of the great founder of
the dynasty, on horseback, as when he led the charge at Naseby or on
foot, as when he took the mace from the table of the Commons, would
adorn our squares and over look our public offices from Charing Cross;
and sermons in his praise would be duly preached on his lucky day, the
third of September, by court-chaplains, guiltless of the abomination of
the surplice.
But, though his memory has not been taken under the patronage of any
party, though every device has been used to blacken it, though to praise
him would long have been a punishable crime, truth and merit at last
prevail. Cowards who had trembled at the very sound of his name, tools
of office, who, like Downing, had been proud of the honour of lacqueying
his coach, might insult him in loyal speeches and addresses. Venal poets
might transfer to the king the same eulogies little the worse for wear,
which they had bestowed on the Protector. A fickle multitude might crowd
to shout and scoff round the gibbeted remains of the greatest Prince
and Soldier of the age. But when the Dutch cannon startled an effeminate
tyrant in his own palace, when the conquests which had been won by the
armies of Cromwell were sold to pamper the harlots of Charles, when
Englishmen were sent to fight under foreign banners, against the
independence of Europe and the Protestant religion, many honest hearts
swelled in secret at the thought of one who had never suffered his
country to be ill-used by any but himself. It must indeed have been
difficult for any Englishman to see the salaried viceroy of France, at
the most important crisis of his fate, sauntering through his haram,
yawning and talking nonsense over a despatch, or beslobbering his
brother and his courtiers in a fit of maudlin affection, without a
respectful and tender remembrance of him before whose genius the young
pride of Louis and the veteran craft of Mazarine had stood rebuked, who
had humbled Spain on the land and Holland on the sea, and whose imperial
voice had arrested the sails of the Libyan pirates and the persecuting
fires of Rome. Even to the present day his character, though constantly
attacked, and scarcely ever defended, is popular with the great body of
our countrymen.
The most blameable act of his life was the execution of Charles. We have
already strongly condemned that proceeding; but we by no means consider
it as one which attaches any peculiar stigma of infamy to the names of
those who participated in it. It was an unjust and injudicious display
of violent party spirit; but it was not a cruel or perfidious measure.
It had all those features which distinguish the errors of magnanimous
and intrepid spirits from base and malignant crimes.
From the moment that Cromwell is dead and buried, we go on in almost
perfect harmony with Mr. Hallam to the end of his book. The times which
followed the Restoration peculiarly require that unsparing impartiality
which is his most distinguishing virtue. No part of our history,
during the last three centuries, presents a spectacle of such general
dreariness. The whole breed of our statesmen seems to have degenerated;
and their moral and intellectual littleness strikes us with the more
disgust, because we see it placed in immediate contrast with the high
and majestic qualities of the race which they succeeded. In the great
civil war, even the bad cause had been rendered respectable and amiable
by the purity and elevation of mind which many of its friends displayed.
Under Charles the Second, the best and noblest of ends was disgraced by
means the most cruel and sordid. The rage of faction succeeded to the
love of liberty. Loyalty died away into servility. We look in vain among
the leading politicians of either side for steadiness of principle,
or even for that vulgar fidelity to party which, in our time, it is
esteemed infamous to violate. The inconsistency, perfidy, and baseness,
which the leaders constantly practised, which their followers defended,
and which the great body of the people regarded, as it seems, with
little disapprobation, appear in the present age almost incredible. In
the age of Charles the First, they would, we believe, have excited as
much astonishment.
Man, however, is always the same. And when so marked a difference
appears between two generations, it is certain that the solution may be
found in their respective circumstances. The principal statesmen of the
reign of Charles the Second were trained during the civil war and the
revolutions which followed it. Such a period is eminently favourable to
the growth of quick and active talents. It forms a class of men, shrewd,
vigilant, inventive; of men whose dexterity triumphs over the most
perplexing combinations of circumstances, whose presaging instinct no
sign of the times can elude. But it is an unpropitious season for the
firm and masculine virtues. The statesman who enters on his career at
such a time, can form no permanent connections, can make no accurate
observations on the higher parts of political science. Before he can
attach himself to a party, it is scattered. Before he can study the
nature of a government, it is overturned. The oath of abjuration comes
close on the oath of allegiance. The association which was subscribed
yesterday is burned by the hangman to-day. In the midst of the constant
eddy and change, self-preservation becomes the first object of the
adventurer. It is a task too hard for the strongest head to keep itself
from becoming giddy in the eternal whirl. Public spirit is out of the
question. A laxity of principle, without which no public man can be
eminent or even safe, becomes too common to be scandalous; and the whole
nation looks coolly on instances of apostasy which would startle the
foulest turncoat of more settled times.
The history of France since the Revolution affords some striking
illustrations of these remarks. The same man was a servant of the
Republic, of Bonaparte, of Lewis the Eighteenth, of Bonaparte again
after his return from Elba, of Lewis again after his return from Ghent.
Yet all these manifold treasons by no means seemed to destroy his
influence, or even to fix any peculiar stain of infamy on his character.
We, to be sure, did not know what to make of him; but his countrymen
did not seem to be shocked; and in truth they had little right to be
shocked: for there was scarcely one Frenchman distinguished in the state
or in the army, who had not, according to the best of his talents and
opportunities, emulated the example. It was natural, too, that this
should be the case. The rapidity and violence with which change followed
change in the affairs of France towards the close of the last century
had taken away the reproach of inconsistency, unfixed the principles
of public men, and produced in many minds a general scepticism and
indifference about principles of government.
No Englishman who has studied attentively the reign of Charles the
Second, will think himself entitled to indulge in any feelings of
national superiority over the Dictionnaire des Girouttes. Shaftesbury
was surely a far less respectable man than Talleyrand; and it would
be injustice even to Fouche to compare him with Lauderdale. Nothing,
indeed, can more clearly show how low the standard of political
morality had fallen in this country than the fortunes of the two British
statesmen whom we have named. The government wanted a ruffian to carry
on the most atrocious system of misgovernment with which any nation
was ever cursed, to extirpate Presbyterianism by fire and sword, by the
drowning of women, by the frightful torture of the boot. And they
found him among the chiefs of the rebellion and the subscribers of the
Covenant. The opposition looked for a chief to head them in the most
desperate attacks ever made, under the forms of the Constitution, on
any English administration; and they selected the minister who had the
deepest share in the worst acts of the Court, the soul of the Cabal, the
counsellor who had shut up the Exchequer and urged on the Dutch war. The
whole political drama was of the same cast. No unity of plan, no decent
propriety of character and costume, could be found in that wild
and monstrous harlequinade. The whole was made up of extravagant
transformations and burlesque contrasts; Atheists turned Puritans;
Puritans turned Atheists; republicans defending the divine right of
kings; prostitute courtiers clamouring for the liberties of the people;
judges inflaming the rage of mobs; patriots pocketing bribes from
foreign powers; a Popish prince torturing Presbyterians into Episcopacy
in one part of the island; Presbyterians cutting off the heads of Popish
noblemen and gentlemen in the other. Public opinion has its natural flux
and reflux. After a violent burst, there is commonly a reaction. But
vicissitudes so extraordinary as those which marked the reign of Charles
the Second can only be explained by supposing an utter want of principle
in the political world. On neither side was there fidelity enough to
face a reverse. Those honourable retreats from power which, in later
days, parties have often made, with loss, but still in good order, in
firm union, with unbroken spirit and formidable means of annoyance, were
utterly unknown. As soon as a check took place a total rout followed:
arms and colours were thrown away. The vanquished troops, like the
Italian mercenaries of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, enlisted
on the very field of battle, in the service of the conquerors. In a
nation proud of its sturdy justice and plain good sense, no party could
be found to take a firm middle stand between the worst of oppositions
and the worst of courts. When on charges as wild as Mother Goose’s
tales, on the testimony of wretches who proclaimed themselves to be
spies and traitors, and whom everybody now believes to have been also
liars and murderers, the offal of gaols and brothels, the leavings of
the hangman’s whip and shears, Catholics guilty of nothing but their
religion were led like sheep to the Protestant shambles, where were the
loyal Tory gentry and the passively obedient clergy? And where, when the
time of retribution came, when laws were strained and juries packed
to destroy the leaders of the Whigs, when charters were invaded, when
Jeffreys and Kirke were making Somersetshire what Lauderdale and
Graham had made Scotland, where were the ten thousand brisk boys of
Shaftesbury, the members of ignoramus juries, the wearers of the Polish
medal? All-powerful to destroy others, unable to save themselves, the
members of the two parties oppressed and were oppressed, murdered and
were murdered, in their turn. No lucid interval occurred between the
frantic paroxysms of two contradictory illusions.
To the frequent changes of the government during the twenty years which
had preceded the Restoration, this unsteadiness is in a great measure to
be attributed. Other causes had also been at work. Even if the country
had been governed by the house of Cromwell or by the remains of the Long
Parliament, the extreme austerity of the Puritans would necessarily have
produced a revulsion. Towards the close of the Protectorate many signs
indicated that a time of licence was at hand. But the restoration of
Charles the Second rendered the change wonderfully rapid and violent.
Profligacy became a test of orthodoxy, and loyalty a qualification for
rank and office. A deep and general taint infected the morals of the
most influential classes, and spread itself through every province
of letters. Poetry inflamed the passions; philosophy undermined the
principles; divinity itself, inculcating an abject reverence for the
Court, gave additional effect to the licentious example of the Court.
We look in vain for those qualities which lend a charm to the errors
of high and ardent natures, for the generosity, the tenderness, the
chivalrous delicacy, which ennoble appetites into passions, and impart
to vice itself a portion of the majesty of virtue. The excesses of that
age remind us of the humours of a gang of footpads, revelling with their
favourite beauties at a flash-house In the fashionable libertinism there
is a hard, cold ferocity, an impudence, a lowness, a dirtiness, which
can be paralleled only among the heroes and heroines of that filthy
and heartless literature which encouraged it. One nobleman of great
abilities wanders about as a Merry-Andrew. Another harangues the mob
stark naked from a window. A third lays an ambush to cudgel a man who
has offended him. A knot of gentlemen of high rank and influence combine
to push their fortunes at Court by circulating stories intended to ruin
an innocent girl, stones which had no foundation, and which, if they had
been true, would never have passed the lips of a man of honour. A dead
child is found in the palace, the offspring of some maid of honour
by some courtier, or perhaps by Charles himself. The whole flight of
pandars and buffoons pounce upon it, and carry it in triumph to the
royal laboratory, where his Majesty, after a brutal jest, dissects it
for the amusement of the assembly, and probably of its father among
the rest. The favourite Duchess stamps about Whitehall, cursing and
swearing. The ministers employ their time at the council-board in
making mouths at each other and taking off each other’s gestures for the
amusement of the King. The Peers at a conference begin to pommel each
other and to tear collars and periwigs. A speaker in the House of
Commons gives offence to the Court. He is waylaid by a gang of bullies,
and his nose is cut to the bone. This ignominious dissoluteness, or
rather, if we may venture to designate it by the only proper word,
blackguardism of feeling and manners, could not but spread from private
to public life. The cynical sneers, and epicurean sophistry, which had
driven honour and virtue from one part of the character, extended their
influence over every other. The second generation of the statesmen of
this reign were worthy pupils of the schools in which they had been
trained, of the gaming-table of Grammont, and the tiring-room of Nell.
In no other age could such a trifler as Buckingham have exercised any
political influence. In no other age could the path to power and glory
have been thrown open to the manifold infamies of Churchill.
The history of Churchill shows, more clearly perhaps than that of any
other individual, the malignity and extent of the corruption which had
eaten into the heart of the public morality. An English gentleman of
good family attaches himself to a Prince who has seduced his sister, and
accepts rank and wealth as the price of her shame and his own. He then
repays by ingratitude the benefits which he has purchased by ignominy,
betrays his patron in a manner which the best cause cannot excuse, and
commits an act, not only of private treachery, but of distinct military
desertion. To his conduct at the crisis of the fate of James, no service
in modern times has, as far as we remember, furnished any parallel. The
conduct of Ney, scandalous enough no doubt, is the very fastidiousness
of honour in comparison of it. The perfidy of Arnold approaches it
most nearly. In our age and country no talents, no services, no party
attachments, could bear any man up under such mountains of infamy. Yet,
even before Churchill had performed those great actions which in some
degree redeem his character with posterity, the load lay very lightly on
him. He had others in abundance to keep him in countenance. Godolphin,
Orford, Danby, the trimmer Halifax, the renegade Sunderland, were all
men of the same class.
Where such was the political morality of the noble and the wealthy, it
may easily be conceived that those professions which, even in the best
times, are peculiarly liable to corruption, were in a frightful state.
Such a bench and such a bar England has never seen. Jones, Scroggs,
Jeffreys, North, Wright, Sawyer, Williams, are to this day the spots
and blemishes of our legal chronicles. Differing in constitution and
in situation, whether blustering or cringing, whether persecuting
Protestant or Catholics, they were equally unprincipled and inhuman. The
part which the Church played was not equally atrocious; but it must have
been exquisitely diverting to a scoffer. Never were principles so loudly
professed, and so shamelessly abandoned. The Royal prerogative had been
magnified to the skies in theological works. The doctrine of passive
obedience had been preached from innumerable pulpits. The University of
Oxford had sentenced the works of the most moderate constitutionalists
to the flames. The accession of a Catholic King, the frightful cruelties
committed in the west of England, never shook the steady loyalty of
the clergy. But did they serve the King for nought? He laid his hand
on them, and they cursed him to his face. He touched the revenue of a
college and the liberty of some prelates; and the whole profession set
up a yell worthy of Hugh Peters himself. Oxford sent her plate to an
invader with more alacrity than she had shown when Charles the First
requested it. Nothing was said about the wickedness of resistance till
resistance had done its work, till the anointed vicegerent of Heaven had
been driven away, and till it had become plain that he would never be
restored, or would be restored at least under strict limitations. The
clergy went back, it must be owned, to their old theory, as soon as they
found that it would do them no harm.
It is principally to the general baseness and profligacy of the times
that Clarendon is indebted for his high reputation. He was, in every
respect, a man unfit for his age, at once too good for it and too bad
for it. He seemed to be one of the ministers of Elizabeth, transplanted
at once to a state of society widely different from that in which the
abilities of such ministers had been serviceable. In the sixteenth
century, the Royal prerogative had scarcely been called in question. A
Minister who held it high was in no danger, so long as he used it
well. That attachment to the Crown, that extreme jealousy of popular
encroachments, that love, half religious half political, for the Church,
which, from the beginning of the second session of the Long Parliament,
showed itself in Clarendon, and which his sufferings, his long residence
in France, and his high station in the government, served to strengthen,
would a hundred years earlier, have secured to him the favour of his
sovereign without rendering him odious to the people. His probity, his
correctness in private life, his decency of deportment, and his
general ability, would not have misbecome a colleague of Walsingham and
Burleigh. But, in the times on which he was cast, his errors and his
virtues were alike out of place. He imprisoned men without trial. He was
accused of raising unlawful contributions on the people for the support
of the army. The abolition of the act which ensured the frequent holding
of Parliaments was one of his favourite objects. He seems to have
meditated the revival of the Star-Chamber and the High Commission Court.
His zeal for the prerogative made him unpopular; but it could not secure
to him the favour of a master far more desirous of ease and pleasure
than of power. Charles would rather have lived in exile and privacy,
with abundance of money, a crowd of mimics to amuse him, and a score of
mistresses, than have purchased the absolute dominion of the world by
the privations and exertions to which Clarendon was constantly urging
him. A councillor who was always bringing him papers and giving him
advice, and who stoutly refused to compliment Lady Castlemaine and to
carry messages to Mistress Stewart, soon became more hateful to him than
ever Cromwell had been. Thus, considered by the people as an oppressor,
by the Court as a censor, the Minister fell from his high office with a
ruin more violent and destructive than could ever have been his fate, if
he had either respected the principles of the Constitution or flattered
the vices of the King.
Mr. Hallam has formed, we think, a most correct estimate of the
character and administration of Clarendon. But he scarcely makes
a sufficient allowance for the wear and tear which honesty almost
necessarily sustains in the friction of political life, and which, in
times so rough as those through which Clarendon passed, must be very
considerable. When these are fairly estimated, we think that his
integrity may be allowed to pass muster. A high-minded man he certainly
was not, either in public or in private affairs. His own account of his
conduct in the affair of his daughter is the most extraordinary passage
in autobiography. We except nothing even in the Confessions of Rousseau.
Several writers have taken a perverted and absurd pride in representing
themselves as detestable; but no other ever laboured hard to make
himself despicable and ridiculous. In one important particular Clarendon
showed as little regard to the honour of his country as he had shown to
that of his family. He accepted a subsidy from France for the relief of
Portugal. But this method of obtaining money was afterwards practised to
a much greater extent and for objects much less respectable, both by the
Court and by the Opposition.
These pecuniary transactions are commonly considered as the most
disgraceful part of the history of those times: and they were no doubt
highly reprehensible. Yet, in justice to the Whigs and to Charles
himself, we must admit that they were not so shameful or atrocious as at
the present day they appear. The effect of violent animosities between
parties has always been an indifference to the general welfare
and honour of the State. A politician, where factions run high, is
interested not for the whole people, but for his own section of it.
The rest are, in his view, strangers, enemies, or rather pirates. The
strongest aversion which he can feel to any foreign power is the ardour
of friendship, when compared with the loathing which he entertains
towards those domestic foes with whom he is cooped up in a narrow space,
with whom he lives in a constant interchange of petty injuries and
insults, and from whom, in the day of their success, he has to expect
severities far beyond any that a conqueror from a distant country would
inflict. Thus, in Greece, it was a point of honour for a man to cleave
to his party against his country. No aristocratical citizen of Samos
or Corcyra would have hesitated to call in the aid of Lacedaemon. The
multitude, on the contrary, looked everywhere to Athens. In the Italian
states of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, from the same cause,
no man was so much a Pisan or a Florentine as a Ghibelline or a Guelf.
It may be doubted whether there was a single individual who would have
scrupled to raise his party from a state of depression, by opening
the gates of his native city to a French or an Arragonese force. The
Reformation, dividing almost every European country into two parts,
produced similar effects. The Catholic was too strong for the
Englishman, the Huguenot for the Frenchman. The Protestant statesmen of
Scotland and France called in the aid of Elizabeth; and the Papists of
the League brought a Spanish army into the very heart of France. The
commotions to which the French Revolution gave rise were followed by the
same consequences. The Republicans in every part of Europe were eager to
see the armies of the National Convention and the Directory appear among
them, and exalted in defeats which distressed and humbled those whom
they considered as their worst enemies, their own rulers. The princes
and nobles of France, on the other hand, did their utmost to bring
foreign invaders to Paris. A very short time has elapsed since the
Apostolical party in Spain invoked, too successfully, the support of
strangers.
The great contest which raged in England during the seventeenth century
extinguished, not indeed in the body of the people, but in those classes
which were most actively engaged in politics, almost all national
feelings. Charles the Second and many of his courtiers had passed a
large part of their lives in banishment, living on the bounty of foreign
treasuries, soliciting foreign aid to re-establish monarchy in their
native country. The King’s own brother had fought in Flanders, under the
banners of Spain, against the English armies. The oppressed Cavaliers in
England constantly looked to the Louvre and the Escurial for deliverance
and revenge. Clarendon censures the continental governments with great
bitterness for not interfering in our internal dissensions. It is not
strange, therefore, that, amidst the furious contests which followed the
Restoration, the violence of party feeling should produce effects which
would probably have attended it even in an age less distinguished by
laxity of principle and indelicacy of sentiment. It was not till a
natural death had terminated the paralytic old age of the Jacobite
party that the evil was completely at an end. The Whigs long looked to
Holland, the High Tories to France. The former concluded the Barrier
Treaty; the latter entreated the Court of Versailles to send an
expedition to England. Many men, who, however erroneous their political
notions might be, were unquestionably honourable in private life,
accepted money without scruple from the foreign powers favourable to the
Pretender.
Never was there less of national feeling among the higher orders than
during the reign of Charles the Second. That Prince, on the one side,
thought it better to be the deputy of an absolute king than the King
of a free people. Algernon Sydney, on the other hand, would gladly have
aided France in all her ambitious schemes, and have seen England reduced
to the condition of a province, in the wild hope that a foreign despot
would assist him to establish his darling republic. The King took the
money of France to assist him in the enterprise which he meditated
against the liberty of his subjects, with as little scruple as Frederic
of Prussia or Alexander of Russia accepted our subsidies in time of war.
The leaders of the Opposition no more thought themselves disgraced by
the presents of Lewis, than a gentleman of our own time thinks himself
disgraced by the liberality of powerful and wealthy members of his party
who pay his election bill. The money which the King received from France
had been largely employed to corrupt members of Parliament. The enemies
of the court might think it fair, or even absolutely necessary, to
encounter bribery with bribery. Thus they took the French gratuities,
the needy among them for their own use, the rich probably for the
general purposes of the party, without any scruple. If we compare their
conduct not with that of English statesmen in our own time, but with
that of persons in those foreign countries which are now situated as
England then was, we shall probably see reason to abate something of the
severity of censure with which it has been the fashion to visit those
proceedings. Yet when every allowance is made, the transaction is
sufficiently offensive. It is satisfactory to find that Lord Russell
stands free from any imputation of personal participation in the spoil.
An age so miserably poor in all the moral qualities which render public
characters respectable can ill spare the credit which it derives from a
man, not indeed conspicuous for talents or knowledge, but honest even
in his errors, respectable in every relation of life, rationally pious,
steadily and placidly brave.
The great improvement which took place in our breed of public men is
principally to be ascribed to the Revolution. Yet that memorable event,
in a great measure, took its character from the very vices which it
was the means of reforming. It was assuredly a happy revolution, and
a useful revolution; but it was not, what it has often been called, a
glorious revolution. William, and William alone, derived glory from it.
The transaction was, in almost every part, discreditable to England.
That a tyrant who had violated the fundamental laws of the country, who
had attacked the rights of its greatest corporations, who had begun to
persecute the established religion of the state, who had never respected
the law either in his superstition or in his revenge, could not be
pulled down without the aid of a foreign army, is a circumstance not
very grateful to our national pride. Yet this is the least degrading
part of the story. The shameless insincerity of the great and noble,
the warm assurances of general support which James received, down to
the moment of general desertion, indicate a meanness of spirit and a
looseness of morality most disgraceful to the age. That the enterprise
succeeded, at least that it succeeded without bloodshed or commotion,
was principally owing to an act of ungrateful perfidy, such as no
soldier had ever before committed, and to those monstrous fictions
respecting the birth of the Prince of Wales which persons of the highest
rank were not ashamed to circulate. In all the proceedings of the
convention, in the conference particularly, we see that littleness of
mind which is the chief characteristic of the times. The resolutions on
which the two Houses at last agreed were as bad as any resolutions for
so excellent a purpose could be. Their feeble and contradictory language
was evidently intended to save the credit of the Tories, who were
ashamed to name what they were not ashamed to do. Through the whole
transaction no commanding talents were displayed by any Englishman;
no extraordinary risks were run; no sacrifices were made for the
deliverance of the nation, except the sacrifice which Churchill made of
honour, and Anne of natural affection.
It was in some sense fortunate, as we have already said, for the Church
of England, that the Reformation in this country was effected by men who
cared little about religion. And, in the same manner, it was fortunate
for our civil government that the Revolution was in a great measure
effected by men who cared little about their political principles. At
such a crisis, splendid talents and strong passions might have done more
harm than good. There was far greater reason to fear that too much
would be attempted, and that violent movements would produce an equally
violent reaction, than that too little would be done in the way of
change. But narrowness of intellect, and flexibility of principle,
though they may be serviceable, can never be respectable.
If in the Revolution itself, there was little that can properly be
called glorious, there was still less in the events which followed. In
a church which had as one man declared the doctrine of resistance
unchristian, only four hundred persons refused to take the oath of
allegiance to a government founded on resistance. In the preceding
generation, both the Episcopal and the Presbyterian clergy, rather than
concede points of conscience not more important, had resigned their
livings by thousands.
The churchmen, at the time of the Revolution, justified their conduct by
all those profligate sophisms which are called Jesuitical, and which are
commonly reckoned among the peculiar sins of Popery, but which, in fact,
are everywhere the anodynes employed by minds rather subtle than strong,
to quiet those internal twinges which they cannot but feel and which
they will not obey. As the oath taken by the clergy was in the teeth of
their principles, so was their conduct in the teeth of their oath. Their
constant machinations against the Government to which they had sworn
fidelity brought a reproach on their order and on Christianity itself. A
distinguished prelate has not scrupled to say that the rapid increase
of infidelity at that time was principally produced by the disgust which
the faithless conduct of his brethren excited in men not sufficiently
candid or judicious to discern the beauties of the system amidst the
vices of its ministers.
But the reproach was not confined to the Church. In every political
party in the Cabinet itself, duplicity and perfidy abounded. The very
men whom William loaded with benefits and in whom he reposed most
confidence, with his seals of office in their hands, kept up a
correspondence with the exiled family. Orford, Leeds, and Shrewsbury
were guilty of this odious treachery. Even Devonshire is not altogether
free from suspicion. It may well be conceived that, at such a time,
such a nature as that of Marlborough would riot in the very luxury of
baseness. His former treason, thoroughly furnished with all that makes
infamy exquisite, placed him under the disadvantage which attends every
artist from the time that he produces a masterpiece. Yet his second
great stroke may excite wonder, even in those who appreciate all the
merit of the first. Lest his admirers should be able to say that at
the time of the Revolution he had betrayed his King from any other
than selfish motives, he proceeded to betray his country. He sent
intelligence to the French Court of a secret expedition intended to
attack Brest. The consequence was that the expedition failed, and that
eight hundred British soldiers lost their lives from the abandoned
villainy of a British general. Yet this man has been canonized by
so many eminent writers that to speak of him as he deserves may seem
scarcely decent.
The reign of William the Third, as Mr. Hallam happily says, was the
Nadir of the national prosperity. It was also the Nadir of the national
character. It was the time when the rank harvest of vices sown during
thirty years of licentiousness and confusion was gathered in; but it was
also the seed-time of great virtues.
The press was emancipated from the censorship soon after the Revolution;
and the Government immediately fell under the censorship of the press.
Statesmen had a scrutiny to endure which was every day becoming more and
more severe. The extreme violence of opinions abated. The Whigs learned
moderation in office; the Tories learned the principles of liberty
in opposition. The parties almost constantly approximated, often met,
sometimes crossed each other. There were occasional bursts of violence;
but, from the time of the Revolution, those bursts were constantly
becoming less and less terrible. The severity with which the Tories, at
the close of the reign of Anne, treated some of those who had directed
the public affairs during the war of the Grand Alliance, and the
retaliatory measures of the Whigs, after the accession of the House of
Hanover, cannot be justified; but they were by no means in the style
of the infuriated parties, whose alternate murders had disgraced our
history towards the close of the reign of Charles the Second. At the
fall of Walpole far greater moderation was displayed. And from that
time it has been the practice, a practice not strictly according to the
theory of our Constitution, but still most salutary, to consider the
loss of office, and the public disapprobation, as punishments sufficient
for errors in the administration not imputable to personal corruption.
Nothing, we believe, has contributed more than this lenity to raise
the character of public men. Ambition is of itself a game sufficiently
hazardous and sufficiently deep to inflame the passions without adding
property, life, and liberty to the stake. Where the play runs so
desperately high as in the seventeenth century, honour is at an end.
Statesmen instead of being, as they should be, at once mild and steady,
are at once ferocious and inconsistent. The axe is for ever before their
eyes. A popular outcry sometimes unnerves them, and sometimes makes them
desperate; it drives them to unworthy compliances, or to measures of
vengeance as cruel as those which they have reason to expect. A Minister
in our times need not fear either to be firm or to be merciful. Our old
policy in this respect was as absurd as that of the king in the Eastern
tale who proclaimed that any physician who pleased might come to court
and prescribe for his diseases, but that if the remedies failed the
adventurer should lose his head. It is easy to conceive how many able
men would refuse to undertake the cure on such conditions; how much the
sense of extreme danger would confuse the perceptions, and cloud the
intellect of the practitioner, at the very crisis which most called for
self-possession, and how strong his temptation would be, if he found
that he had committed a blunder, to escape the consequences of it by
poisoning his patient.
But in fact it would have been impossible, since the Revolution, to
punish any Minister for the general course of his policy, with the
slightest semblance of justice; for since that time no Minister has been
able to pursue any general course of policy without the approbation of
the Parliament. The most important effects of that great change were,
as Mr. Hallam has most truly said, and most ably shown, those which
it indirectly produced. Thenceforward it became the interest of the
executive government to protect those very doctrines which an executive
government is in general inclined to persecute. The sovereign, the
ministers, the courtiers, at last even the universities and the clergy,
were changed into advocates of the right of resistance. In the theory of
the Whigs, in the situation of the Tories, in the common interest of all
public men, the Parliamentary constitution of the country found perfect
security. The power of the House of Commons, in particular, has been
steadily on the increase. Since supplies have been granted for short
terms and appropriated to particular services, the approbation of that
House has been as necessary in practice to the executive administration
as it has always been in theory to taxes and to laws.
Mr. Hallam appears to have begun with the reign of Henry the Seventh, as
the period at which what is called modern history, in contradistinction
to the history of the middle ages, is generally supposed to commence. He
has stopped at the accession of George the Third, “from unwillingness”
as he says, “to excite the prejudices of modern politics, especially
those connected with personal character.” These two eras, we think,
deserved the distinction on other grounds. Our remote posterity, when
looking back on our history in that comprehensive manner in which remote
posterity alone can, without much danger of error, look back on it, will
probably observe those points with peculiar interest. They are, if we
mistake not, the beginning and the end of an entire and separate chapter
in our annals. The period which lies between them is a perfect cycle, a
great year of the public mind.
In the reign of Henry the Seventh, all the political differences which
had agitated England since the Norman conquest seemed to be set at
rest. The long and fierce struggle between the Crown and the Barons had
terminated. The grievances which had produced the rebellions of Tyler
and Cade had disappeared. Villanage was scarcely known. The two royal
houses, whose conflicting claims had long convulsed the kingdom, were
at length united. The claimants whose pretensions, just or unjust, had
disturbed the new settlement, were overthrown. In religion there was no
open dissent, and probably very little secret heresy. The old subjects
of contention, in short, had vanished; those which were to succeed had
not yet appeared.
Soon, however, new principles were announced; principles which were
destined to keep England during two centuries and a half in a state of
commotion. The Reformation divided the people into two great parties.
The Protestants were victorious. They again subdivided themselves.
Political factions were engrafted on theological sects. The mutual
animosities of the two parties gradually emerged into the light of
public life. First came conflicts in Parliament; then civil war; then
revolutions upon revolutions, each attended by its appurtenance of
proscriptions, and persecutions, and tests; each followed by severe
measures on the part of the conquerors; each exciting a deadly and
festering hatred in the conquered. During the reign of George the
Second, things were evidently tending to repose. At the close of that
reign, the nation had completed the great revolution which commenced in
the early part of the sixteenth century, and was again at rest, The fury
of sects had died away. The Catholics themselves practically enjoyed
toleration; and more than toleration they did not yet venture even to
desire. Jacobitism was a mere name. Nobody was left to fight for
that wretched cause, and very few to drink for it. The Constitution,
purchased so dearly, was on every side extolled and worshipped. Even
those distinctions of party which must almost always be found in a free
state could scarcely be traced. The two great bodies which, from the
time of the Revolution, had been gradually tending to approximation,
were now united in emulous support of that splendid Administration which
smote to the dust both the branches of the House of Bourbon. The great
battle for our ecclesiastical and civil polity had been fought and
won. The wounds had been healed. The victors and the vanquished were
rejoicing together. Every person acquainted with the political writers
of the last generation will recollect the terms in which they generally
speak of that time. It was a glimpse of a golden age of union and
glory, a short interval of rest, which had been preceded by centuries of
agitation, and which centuries of agitation were destined to follow.
How soon faction again began to ferment is well known. The Letters of
Junius, in Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Discontents, and in many
other writings of less merit, the violent dissensions which speedily
convulsed the country are imputed to the system of favouritism which
George the Third introduced, to the influence of Bute, or to the
profligacy of those who called themselves the King’s friends. With
all deference to the eminent writers to whom we have referred, we may
venture to say that they lived too near the events of which they treated
to judge correctly. The schism which was then appearing in the nation,
and which has been from that time almost constantly widening, had little
in common with those schisms which had divided it during the reigns of
the Tudors and the Stuarts. The symptoms of popular feeling, indeed,
will always be in a great measure the same; but the principle which
excited that feeling was here new. The support which was given to
Wilkes, the clamour for reform during the American war, the disaffected
conduct of large classes of people at the time of the French Revolution,
no more resembled the opposition which had been offered to the
government of Charles the Second, than that opposition resembled the
contest between the Roses.
In the political as in the natural body, a sensation is often referred
to a part widely different from that in which it really resides. A man
whose leg is cut off fancies that he feels a pain in his toe. And in the
same manner the people, in the earlier part of the late reign, sincerely
attributed their discontent to grievances which had been effectually
lopped off. They imagined that the prerogative was too strong for the
Constitution, that the principles of the Revolution were abandoned, that
the system of the Stuarts was restored. Every impartial man must now
acknowledge that these charges were groundless. The conduct of the
Government with respect to the Middlesex election would have been
contemplated with delight by the first generation of Whigs. They would
have thought it a splendid triumph of the cause of liberty that the
King and the Lords should resign to the lower House a portion of the
legislative power, and allow it to incapacitate without their consent.
This, indeed, Mr. Burke clearly perceived. “When the House of Commons,”
says he, “in an endeavour to obtain new advantages at the expense of the
other orders of the state, for the benefit of the commons at large, have
pursued strong measures, if it were not just, it was at least natural,
that the constituents should connive at all their proceedings; because
we ourselves were ultimately to profit. But when this submission is
urged to us in a contest between the representatives and ourselves, and
where nothing can be put into their scale which is not taken from
ours, they fancy us to be children when they tell us that they are our
representatives, our own flesh and blood, and that all the stripes they
give us are for our good.” These sentences contain, in fact, the whole
explanation of the mystery. The conflict of the seventeenth century
was maintained by the Parliament against the Crown. The conflict which
commenced in the middle of the eighteenth century, which still remains
undecided, and in which our children and grandchildren will probably be
called to act or to suffer, is between a large portion of the people on
the one side, and the Crown and the Parliament united on the other.
The privileges of the House of Commons, those privileges which, in
1642, all London rose in arms to defend, which the people considered
as synonymous with their own liberties, and in comparison of which they
took no account of the most precious and sacred principles of English
jurisprudence, have now become nearly as odious as the rigours of
martial law. That power of committing which the people anciently loved
to see the House of Commons exercise, is now, at least when employed
against libellers, the most unpopular power in the Constitution. If the
Commons were to suffer the Lords to amend money-bills, we do not believe
that the people would care one straw about the matter. If they were to
suffer the Lords even to originate money-bills, we doubt whether such
a surrender of their constitutional rights would excite half so much
dissatisfaction as the exclusion of strangers from a single important
discussion. The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth
estate of the realm. The publication of the debates, a practice which
seemed to the most liberal statesmen of the old school full of danger to
the great safeguards of public liberty, is now regarded by many persons
as a safeguard tantamount, and more than tantamount, to all the rest
together.
Burke, in a speech on parliamentary reform which is the more remarkable
because it was delivered long before the French Revolution, has
described, in striking language, the change in public feeling of which
we speak. “It suggests melancholy reflections,” says he, “in consequence
of the strange course we have long held, that we are now no longer
quarrelling about the character, or about the conduct of men, or the
tenor of measures; but we are grown out of humour with the English
Constitution itself; this is become the object of the animosity of
Englishmen. This constitution in former days used to be the envy of the
world; it was the pattern for politicians; the theme of the eloquent;
the meditation of the philosopher in every part of the world. As to
Englishmen, it was their pride, their consolation. By it they lived, and
for it they were ready to die. Its defects, if it had any, were partly
covered by partiality, and partly borne by prudence. Now all its
excellencies are forgot, its faults are forcibly dragged into day,
exaggerated by every artifice of misrepresentation. It is despised and
rejected of men; and every device and invention of ingenuity or idleness
is set up in opposition, or in preference to it.” We neither adopt nor
condemn the language of reprobation which the great orator here employs.
We call him only as a witness to the fact. That the revolution of public
feeling which he described was then in progress is indisputable; and it
is equally indisputable, we think, that it is in progress still.
To investigate and classify the causes of so great a change would
require far more thought, and far more space, than we at present have
to bestow. But some of them are obvious. During the contest which the
Parliament carried on against the Stuarts, it had only to cheek and
complain. It has since had to govern. As an attacking body, it could
select its points of attack, and it naturally chose those on which it
was likely to receive public support. As a ruling body, it has neither
the same liberty of choice, nor the same motives to gratify the people.
With the power of an executive government, it has drawn to itself some
of the vices, and all the unpopularity of an executive government. On
the House of Commons above all, possessed as it is of the public purse,
and consequently of the public sword, the nation throws all the blame
of an ill-conducted war, of a blundering negotiation, of a disgraceful
treaty, of an embarrassing commercial crisis. The delays of the Court of
Chancery, the misconduct of a judge at Van Diemen’s Land, any thing,
in short, which in any part of the administration any person feels as a
grievance, is attributed to the tyranny, or at least to the negligence,
of that all-powerful body. Private individuals pester it with their
wrongs and claims. A merchant appeals to it from the Courts of Rio
Janeiro or St. Petersburg. A historical painter complains to it that
his department of art finds no encouragement. Anciently the Parliament
resembled a member of opposition, from whom no places are expected, who
is not expected to confer favours and propose measures, but merely
to watch and censure, and who may, therefore, unless he is grossly
injudicious, be popular with the great body of the community. The
Parliament now resembles the same person put into office, surrounded by
petitioners whom twenty times his patronage would not satisfy, stunned
with complaints, buried in memorials, compelled by the duties of his
station to bring forward measures similar to those which he was formerly
accustomed to observe and to check, and perpetually encountered by
objections similar to those which it was formerly his business to raise.
Perhaps it may be laid down as a general rule that a legislative
assembly, not constituted on democratical principles, cannot be popular
long after it ceases to be weak. Its zeal for what the people, rightly
or wrongly, conceive to be their interests, its sympathy with their
mutable and violent passions, are merely the effects of the particular
circumstances in which it is placed. As long as it depends for existence
on the public favour, it will employ all the means in its power
to conciliate that favour. While this is the case, defects in its
constitution are of little consequence. But, as the close union of such
a body with the nation is the effect of an identity of interests not
essential but accidental, it is in some measure dissolved from the time
at which the danger which produced it ceases to exist.
Hence, before the Revolution, the question of Parliamentary reform was
of very little importance. The friends of liberty had no very ardent
wish for reform. The strongest Tories saw no objections to it. It is
remarkable that Clarendon loudly applauds the changes which Cromwell
introduced, changes far stronger than the Whigs of the present day
would in general approve. There is no reason to think, however, that the
reform effected by Cromwell made any great difference in the conduct of
the Parliament. Indeed, if the House of Commons had, during the reign
of Charles the Second, been elected by universal suffrage, or if all the
seats had been put up to sale, as in the French Parliaments, it would,
we suspect, have acted very much as it did. We know how strongly the
Parliament of Paris exerted itself in favour of the people on many
important occasions; and the reason is evident. Though it did not
emanate from the people, its whole consequence depended on the support
of the people.
From the time of the Revolution the House of Commons has been gradually
becoming what it now is, a great council of state, containing many
members chosen freely by the people, and many others anxious to acquire
the favour of the people; but, on the whole, aristocratical in its
temper and interest. It is very far from being an illiberal and stupid
oligarchy; but it is equally far from being an express image of the
general feeling. It is influenced by the opinion of the people,
and influenced powerfully, but slowly and circuitously. Instead of
outrunning the public mind, as before the Revolution it frequently did,
it now follows with slow steps and at a wide distance. It is therefore
necessarily unpopular; and the more so because the good which it
produces is much less evident to common perception than the evil which
it inflicts. It bears the blame of all the mischief which is done, or
supposed to be done, by its authority or by its connivance. It does not
get the credit, on the other hand, of having prevented those innumerable
abuses which do not exist solely because the House of Commons exists.
A large part of the nation is certainly desirous of a reform in the
representative system. How large that part may be, and how strong its
desires on the subject may be, it is difficult to say. It is only at
intervals that the clamour on the subject is loud and vehement. But it
seems to us that, during the remissions, the feeling gathers strength,
and that every successive burst is more violent than that which preceded
it. The public attention may be for a time diverted to the Catholic
claims or the Mercantile code but it is probable that at no very distant
period, perhaps in the lifetime of the present generation, all other
questions will merge in that which is, in a certain degree, connected
with them all.
Already we seem to ourselves to perceive the signs of unquiet times the
vague presentiment of something great and strange which pervades the
community, the restless and turbid hopes of those who have everything to
gain, the dimly hinted forebodings of those who have everything to
lose. Many indications might be mentioned, in themselves indeed as
insignificant as straws; but even the direction of a straw, to borrow
the illustration of Bacon, will show from what quarter the storm in
setting in.
A great statesman might, by judicious and timely reformations by
reconciling the two great branches of the natural aristocracy, the
capitalists and the landowners, and by so widening the base of the
government as to interest in its defence the whole of the middle class
that brave, honest, and sound-hearted class, which is as anxious for the
maintenance of order and the security of property, as it is hostile to
corruption and oppression, succeed in averting a struggle to which no
rational friend of liberty or of law can look forward without great
apprehensions. There are those who will be contented with nothing but
demolition; and there are those who shrink from all repair. There are
innovators who long for a President and a National Convention; and there
are bigots who, while cities larger and richer than the capitals of many
great kingdoms are calling out for representatives to watch over their
interests, select some hackneyed jobber in boroughs, some peer of the
narrowest and smallest mind, as the fittest depository of a forfeited
franchise. Between these extremes there lies a more excellent way. Time
is bringing round another crisis analogous to that which occurred in the
seventeenth century. We stand in a situation similar to that in which
our ancestors stood under the reign of James the First. It will
soon again be necessary to reform that we may preserve, to save the
fundamental principles of the Constitution by alterations in the
subordinate parts. It will then be possible, as it was possible two
hundred years ago, to protect vested rights, to secure every useful
institution, every institution endeared by antiquity and noble
associations, and, at the same time, to introduce into the system
improvements harmonizing with the original plan. It remains to be seen
whether two hundred years have made us wiser.
We know of no great revolution which might not have been prevented by
compromise early and graciously made. Firmness is a great virtue
in public affairs; but it has its proper sphere. Conspiracies and
insurrections in which small minorities are engaged, the outbreakings of
popular violence unconnected with any extensive project or any durable
principle, are best repressed by vigour and decision. To shrink from
them is to make them formidable. But no wise ruler will confound the
pervading taint with the slight local irritation. No wise ruler will
treat the deeply seated discontents of a great party, as he treats the
fury of a mob which destroys mills and power-looms. The neglect of this
distinction has been fatal even to governments strong in the power of
the sword. The present time is indeed a time of peace and order. But
it is at such a time that fools are most thoughtless and wise men most
thoughtful. That the discontents which have agitated the country during
the late and the present reign, and which, though not always noisy, are
never wholly dormant, will again break forth with aggravated symptoms,
is almost as certain as that the tides and seasons will follow their
appointed course. But in all movements of the human mind which tend to
great revolutions there is a crisis at which moderate concession may
amend, conciliate, and preserve. Happy will it be for England if, at
that crisis her interests be confided to men for whom history has not
recorded the long series of human crimes and follies in vain.