famous league; still it is certain that the world then, and long after,
believed that he was so stopped, and that this was the prevailing
impression in France as well as in other countries. Temple, therefore,
at the very least, succeeded in raising the credit of his country,
and in lowering the credit of a rival power. Here there is no room for
controversy. No grubbing among old state-papers will ever bring to light
any document which will shake these facts; that Europe believed the
ambition of France to have been curbed by the three powers; that
England, a few months before the last among the nations, forced to
abandon her own seas, unable to defend the mouths of her own rivers,
regained almost as high a place in the estimation of her neighbours as
she had held in the times of Elizabeth and Oliver; and that all this
change of opinion was produced in five days by wise and resolute
counsels, without the firing of a single gun. That the Triple Alliance
effected this will hardly be disputed; and therefore, even if it
effected nothing else, it must still be regarded as a masterpiece of
diplomacy.
Considered as a measure of domestic policy, this treaty seems to be
equally deserving of approbation. It did much to allay discontents,
to reconcile the sovereign with a people who had, under his wretched
administration, become ashamed of him and of themselves. It was a kind
of pledge for internal good government. The foreign relations of the
kingdom had at that time the closest connection with our domestic
policy. From the Restoration to the accession of the House of Hanover,
Holland and France were to England what the right-hand horseman and the
left-hand horseman in Burger’s fine ballad were to the Wildgraf, the
good and the evil counsellor, the angel of light and the angel of
darkness. The ascendency of France was as inseparably connected with the
prevalence of tyranny in domestic affairs. The ascendency of Holland was
as inseparably connected with the prevalence of political liberty and
of mutual toleration among Protestant sects. How fatal and degrading an
influence Lewis was destined to exercise on the British counsels, how
great a deliverance our country was destined to owe to the States, could
not be foreseen when the Triple Alliance was concluded. Yet even
then all discerning men considered it as a good omen for the English
constitution and the reformed religion, that the Government had attached
itself to Holland, and had assumed a firm and somewhat hostile attitude
towards France. The fame of this measure was the greater, because it
stood so entirely alone. It was the single eminently good act performed
by the Government during the interval between the Restoration and the
Revolution. [“The only good public thing that hath been done since the
King came into England.”--PEPYS’S Diary, February 14, 1667-8.] Every
person who had the smallest part in it, and some who had no part in
it at all, battled for a share of the credit. The most parsimonious
republicans were ready to grant money for the purpose of carrying into
effect the provisions of this popular alliance; and the great Tory poet
of that age, in his finest satires, repeatedly spoke with reverence of
the “triple bond.”
This negotiation raised the fame of Temple both at home and abroad to
a great height, to such a height, indeed, as seems to have excited the
jealousy of his friend Arlington. While London and Amsterdam resounded
with acclamations of joy, the Secretary, in very cold official language,
communicated to his friend the approbation of the King; and, lavish
as the Government was of titles and of money, its ablest servant was
neither ennobled nor enriched.
Temple’s next mission was to Aix-la-Chapelle, where a general congress
met for the purpose of perfecting the work of the Triple Alliance. On
his road he received abundant proofs of the estimation in which he was
held. Salutes were fired from the walls of the towns through which lie
passed; the population poured forth into the streets to see him; and the
magistrates entertained him with speeches and banquets. After the close
of the negotiations at Aix he was appointed Ambassador at the Hague. But
in both these missions he experienced much vexation from the rigid, and,
indeed, unjust parsimony of the Government. Profuse to many unworthy
applicants, the Ministers were niggardly to him alone. They secretly
disliked his politics; and they seem to have indemnified themselves for
the humiliation of adopting his measures, by cutting down his salary and
delaying the settlement of his outfit.
At the Hague he was received with cordiality by De Witt, and with the
most signal marks of respect by the States-General. His situation was
in one point extremely delicate. The Prince of Orange, the hereditary
chief of the faction opposed to the administration of De Witt, was
the nephew of Charles. To preserve the confidence of the ruling party,
without showing any want of respect to so near a relation of his own
master, was no easy task, But Temple acquitted himself so well that he
appears to have been in great favour, both with the Grand Pensionary and
with the Prince.
In the main, the years which he spent at the Hague seem, in spite of
some pecuniary difficulties occasioned by the ill-will of the English
Ministers, to have passed very agreeably. He enjoyed the highest
personal consideration. He was surrounded by objects interesting in the
highest degree to a man of his observant turn of mind. He had no wearing
labour, no heavy responsibility; and, if he had no opportunity of adding
to his high reputation, he ran no risk of impairing it.
But evil times were at hand. Though Charles had for a moment deviated
into a wise and dignified policy, his heart had always been with France;
and France employed every means of seduction to lure him back. His
impatience of control, his greediness for money, his passion for beauty,
his family affections, all his tastes, all his feelings, were practised
on with the utmost dexterity. His interior Cabinet was now composed of
men such as that generation, and that generation alone, produced; of men
at whose audacious profligacy the renegades and jobbers of our own time
look with the same sort of admiring despair with which our sculptors
contemplate the Theseus, and our painters the Cartoons. To be a real,
hearty, deadly enemy of the liberties and religion of the nation was,
in that dark conclave, an honourable distinction, a distinction which
belonged only to the daring and impetuous Clifford. His associates
were men to whom all creeds and all constitutions were alike; who were
equally ready to profess the faith of Geneva, of Lambeth, and of
Rome; who were equally ready to be tools of power without any sense of
loyalty, and stirrers of sedition without any zeal for freedom.
It was hardly possible even for a man so penetrating as De Witt
to foresee to what depths of wickedness and infamy this execrable
administration would descend. Yet, many signs of the great woe which was
coming on Europe, the visit of the Duchess of Orleans to her brother,
the unexplained mission of Buckingham to Paris, the sudden occupation of
Lorraine by the French, made the Grand Pensionary uneasy, and his alarm
increased when he learned that Temple had received orders to repair
instantly to London. De Witt earnestly pressed for an explanation.
Temple very sincerely replied that he hoped that the English Ministers
would adhere to the principles of the Triple Alliance. “I can answer,”
he said, “only for myself. But that I can do. If a new system is to be
adopted, I will never have any part in it. I have told the King so; and
I will make my words good. If I return you will know more: and if I do
not return you will guess more.” De Witt smiled, and answered that he
would hope the best, and would do all in his power to prevent others
from forming unfavourable surmises.
In October 1670, Temple reached London; and all his worst suspicions
were immediately more than confirmed. He repaired to the Secretary’s
house, and was kept an hour and a half waiting in the ante-chamber,
whilst Lord Ashley was closeted with Arlington. When at length the doors
were thrown open, Arlington was dry and cold, asked trifling questions
about the voyage, and then, in order to escape from the necessity of
discussing business, called in his daughter, an engaging little girl of
three years old, who was long after described by poets “as dressed in
all the bloom of smiling nature,” and whom Evelyn, one of the witnesses
of her inauspicious marriage, mournfully designated as “the sweetest,
hopefullest, most beautiful, child, and most virtuous too.” Any
particular conversation was impossible: and Temple, who with all his
constitutional or philosophical indifference, was sufficiently sensitive
on the side of vanity, felt this treatment keenly. The next day he
offered himself to the notice of the King, who was snuffing up the
morning air and feeding his ducks in the Mall. Charles was civil, but,
like Arlington, carefully avoided all conversation on politics. Temple
found that all his most respectable friends were entirely excluded from
the secrets of the inner council, and were awaiting in anxiety and dread
for what those mysterious deliberations might produce. At length he
obtained a glimpse of light. The bold spirit and fierce passions of
Clifford made him the most unfit of all men to be the keeper of a
momentous secret. He told Temple, with great vehemence, that the States
had behaved basely, that De Witt was a rogue and a rascal, that it was
below the King of England, or any other king, to have anything to do
with such wretches; that this ought to be made known to all the world,
and that it was the duty of the Minister of the Hague to declare it
publicly. Temple commanded his temper as well as he could, and replied
calmly and firmly, that he should make no such declaration, and that,
if he were called upon to give his opinion of the States and their
Ministers, he would say exactly what he thought.
He now saw clearly that the tempest was gathering fast, that the great
alliance which he had formed and over which he had watched with parental
care was about to be dissolved, that times were at hand when it would be
necessary for him, if he continued in public life, either to take part
decidedly against the Court, or to forfeit the high reputation which he
enjoyed at home and abroad. He began to make preparations for retiring
altogether from business. He enlarged a little garden which he had
purchased at Sheen, and laid out some money in ornamenting his house
there. He was still nominally ambassador to Holland; and the English
Ministers continued during some months to flatter the States with the
hope that he would speedily return. At length, in June 1671, the
designs of the Cabal were ripe. The infamous treaty with France had been
ratified. The season of deception was past, and that of insolence and
violence had arrived. Temple received his formal dismission, kissed
the King’s hand, was repaid for his services with some of those vague
compliments and promises which cost so little to the cold heart, the
easy temper, and the ready tongue of Charles, and quietly withdrew to
his little nest, as he called it, at Sheen.
There he amused himself with gardening, which he practised so
successfully that the fame of his fruit-trees soon spread far and wide.
But letters were his chief solace. He had, as we have mentioned, been
from his youth in the habit of diverting himself with composition. The
clear and agreeable language of his despatches had early attracted the
notice of his employers; and, before the peace of Breda, he had, at the
request of Arlington, published a pamphlet on the war, of which nothing
is now known, except that it had some vogue at the time, and that
Charles, not a contemptible judge, pronounced it to be very well
written. Temple had also, a short time before he began to reside at the
Hague, written a treatise on the state of Ireland, in which he showed
all the feelings of a Cromwellian. He had gradually formed a style
singularly lucid and melodious, superficially deformed, indeed, by
Gallicisms and Hispanicisms, picked up in travel or in negotiation, but
at the bottom pure English, which generally flowed along with careless
simplicity, but occasionally rose even into Ciceronian magnificence.
The length of his sentences has often been remarked. But in truth
this length is only apparent. A critic who considers as one sentence
everything that lies between two full stops will undoubtedly call
Temple’s sentences long. But a critic who examines them carefully will
find that they are not swollen by parenthetical matter, that their
structure is scarcely ever intricate, that they are formed merely by
accumulation, and that, by the simple process of now and then leaving
out a conjunction, and now and then substituting a full stop for a
semicolon, they might, without any alteration in the order of the words,
be broken up into very short periods with no sacrifice except that of
euphony. The long sentences of Hooker and Clarendon, on the contrary,
are really long sentences, and cannot be turned into short ones, without
being entirely taken to pieces.
The best known of the works which Temple composed during his first
retreat from official business are an Essay on Government, which seems
to us exceedingly childish, and an Account of the United Provinces,
which we value as a masterpiece in its kind. Whoever compares these two
treatises will probably agree with us in thinking that Temple was not a
very deep or accurate reasoner, but was an excellent observer, that he
had no call to philosophical speculation, but that he was qualified to
excel as a writer of Memoirs and Travels.
While Temple was engaged in these pursuits, the great storm which had
long been brooding over Europe burst with such fury as for a moment
seemed to threaten ruin to all free governments and all Protestant
churches. France and England, without seeking for any decent pretext,
declared war against Holland. The immense armies of Lewis poured across
the Rhine, and invaded the territory of the United Provinces. The Dutch
seemed to be paralysed by terror. Great towns opened their gates to
straggling parties. Regiments flung down their arms without seeing an
enemy. Guelderland, Overyssel, Utrecht were overrun by the conquerors.
The fires of the French camp were seen from the walls of Amsterdam.
In the first madness of despair the devoted people turned their rage
against the most illustrious of their fellow-citizens. De Ruyter was
saved with difficulty from assassins. De Witt was torn to pieces by an
infuriated rabble. No hope was left to the Commonwealth, save in the
dauntless, the ardent, the indefatigable, the unconquerable spirit which
glowed under the frigid demeanour of the young Prince of Orange.
That great man rose at once to the full dignity of his part, and
approved himself a worthy descendant of the line of heroes who had
vindicated the liberties of Europe against the house of Austria. Nothing
could shake his fidelity to his country, not his close connection with
the royal family of England, not the most earnest solicitations, not the
most tempting offers. The spirit of the nation, that spirit which had
maintained the great conflict against the gigantic power of Philip,
revived in all its strength. Counsels, such as are inspired by a
generous despair, and are almost always followed by a speedy dawn of
hope, were gravely concerted by the statesmen of Holland. To open their
dykes, to man their ships, to leave their country, with all its miracles
of art and industry, its cities, its canals, its villas, its pastures,
and its tulip gardens, buried under the waves of the German ocean, to
bear to a distant climate their Calvinistic faith and their old Batavian
liberties, to fix, perhaps with happier auspices, the new Stadthouse of
their Commonwealth, under other stars, and amidst a strange vegetation,
in the Spice Islands of the Eastern seas; such were the plans which they
had the spirit to form; and it is seldom that men who have the spirit to
form such plans are reduced to the necessity of executing them.
The Allies had, during a short period, obtained success beyond their
hopes. This was their auspicious moment. They neglected to improve it.
It passed away; and it returned no more. The Prince of Orange arrested
the progress of the French armies. Lewis returned to be amused and
flattered at Versailles. The country was under water. The winter
approached. The weather became stormy. The fleets of the combined kings
could no longer keep the sea. The republic had obtained a respite; and
the circumstances were such that a respite was, in a military view,
important, in a political view almost decisive.
The alliance against Holland, formidable as it was, was yet of such a
nature that it could not succeed at all, unless it succeeded at once.
The English Ministers could not carry on the war without money. They
could legally obtain money only from the Parliament and they were most
unwilling to call the Parliament together. The measures which Charles
had adopted at home were even more unpopular than his foreign policy.
He had bound himself by a treaty with Lewis to re-establish the Catholic
religion in England; and, in pursuance of this design, he had entered on
the same path which his brother afterwards trod with greater obstinacy
to a more fatal end. The King had annulled, by his own sole authority,
the laws against Catholics and other dissenters. The matter of the
Declaration of Indulgence exasperated one-half of his subjects, and
the manner the other half. Liberal men would have rejoiced to see
a toleration granted, at least to all Protestant sects. Many High
Churchmen had no objection to the King’s dispensing power. But a
tolerant act done in an unconstitutional way excited the opposition of
all who were zealous either for the Church or for the privileges of the
people, that is to say, of ninety-nine Englishmen out of a hundred. The
Ministers were, therefore, most unwilling to meet the Houses. Lawless
and desperate as their counsels were, the boldest of them had too much
value for his neck to think of resorting to benevolences, privy-seals,
ship-money, or any of the other unlawful modes of extortion which had
been familiar to the preceding age. The audacious fraud of shutting up
the Exchequer furnished them with about twelve hundred thousand pounds,
a sum which, even in better hands than theirs, would not have sufficed
for the war-charges of a single year. And this was a step which could
never be repeated, a step which, like most breaches of public faith, was
speedily found to have caused pecuniary difficulties greater than those
which it removed. All the money that could be raised was gone; Holland
was not conquered; and the King had no resource but in a Parliament.
Had a general election taken place at this crisis, it is probable that
the country would have sent up representatives as resolutely hostile to
the Court as those who met in November 1640; that the whole domestic and
foreign policy of the Government would have been instantly changed; and
that the members of the Cabal would have expiated their crimes on Tower
Hill. But the House of Commons was still the same which had been elected
twelve years before, in the midst of the transports of joy, repentance,
and loyalty which followed the Restoration; and no pains had been spared
to attach it to the Court by places, pensions, and bribes. To the great
mass of the people it was scarcely less odious than the Cabinet itself.
Yet, though it did not immediately proceed to those strong measures
which a new House would in all probability have adopted, it was sullen
and unmanageable, and undid, slowly indeed, and by degrees, but
most effectually, all that the Ministers had done. In one session it
annihilated their system of internal government. In a second session it
gave a death-blow to their foreign policy.
The dispensing power was the first object of attack. The Commons would
not expressly approve the war; but neither did they as yet expressly
condemn it; and they were even willing to grant the King a supply
for the purpose of continuing hostilities, on condition that he would
redress internal grievances, among which the Declaration of Indulgence
held the foremost place.
Shaftesbury, who was Chancellor, saw that the game was up, that he had
got all that was to be got by siding with despotism and Popery, and that
it was high time to think of being a demagogue and a good Protestant.
The Lord Treasurer Clifford was marked out by his boldness, by his
openness, by his zeal for the Catholic religion, by something which,
compared with the villainy of his colleagues, might almost be called
honesty, to be the scapegoat of the whole conspiracy. The King came
in person to the House of Peers for the purpose of requesting
their Lordships to mediate between him and the Commons touching the
Declaration of Indulgence. He remained in the House while his speech was
taken into consideration; a common practice with him; for the debates
amused his sated mind, and were sometimes, he used to say, as good as a
comedy. A more sudden turn his Majesty had certainly never seen in any
comedy of intrigue, either at his own play-house, or at the Duke’s, than
that which this memorable debate produced. The Lord Treasurer spoke with
characteristic ardour and intrepidity in defence of the Declaration.
When he sat down, the Lord Chancellor rose from the woolsack, and, to
the amazement of the King and of the House, attacked Clifford, attacked
the Declaration for which he had himself spoken in Council, gave up the
whole policy of the Cabinet, and declared himself on the side of the
House of Commons. Even that age had not witnessed so portentous a
display of impudence.
The King, by the advice of the French Court, which cared much more
about the war on the Continent than about the conversion of the English
heretics, determined to save his foreign policy at the expense of his
plans in favour of the Catholic church. He obtained a supply; and in
return for this concession he cancelled the Declaration of Indulgence,
and made a formal renunciation of the dispensing power before he
prorogued the Houses.
But it was no more in his power to go on with the war than to maintain
his arbitrary system at home. His Ministry, betrayed within, and
fiercely assailed from without, went rapidly to pieces. Clifford threw
down the white staff, and retired to the woods of Ugbrook, vowing, with
bitter tears, that he would never again see that turbulent city, and
that perfidious Court. Shaftesbury was ordered to deliver up the Great
Seal, and instantly carried over his front of brass and his tongue of
poison to the ranks of the Opposition. The remaining members of the
Cabal had neither the capacity of the late Chancellor, nor the courage
and enthusiasm of the late Treasurer. They were not only unable to carry
on their former projects, but began to tremble for their own lands and
heads. The Parliament, as soon as it again met, began to murmur against
the alliance with France and the war with Holland; and the murmur
gradually swelled into a fierce and terrible clamour. Strong resolutions
were adopted against Lauderdale and Buckingham. Articles of impeachment
were exhibited against Arlington. The Triple Alliance was mentioned with
reverence in every debate; and the eyes of all men were turned towards
the quiet orchard, where the author of that great league was amusing
himself with reading and gardening.
Temple was ordered to attend the King, and was charged with the office
of negotiating a separate peace with Holland. The Spanish Ambassador to
the Court of London had been empowered by the States-General to treat
in their name. With him Temple came to a speedy agreement; and in three
days a treaty was concluded.
The highest honours of the State were now within Temple’s reach. After
the retirement of Clifford, the white staff had been delivered to Thomas
Osborne, soon after created Earl of Danby, who was related to Lady
Temple, and had, many years earlier, travelled and played tennis with
Sir William. Danby was an interested and dishonest man, but by no means
destitute of abilities or of judgment. He was, indeed, a far better
adviser than any in whom Charles had hitherto reposed confidence.
Clarendon was a man of another generation, and did not in the least
understand the society which he had to govern. The members of the
Cabal were ministers of a foreign power, and enemies of the Established
Church; and had in consequence raised against themselves and their
master an irresistible storm of national and religious hatred. Danby
wished to strengthen and extend the prerogative; but he had the sense to
see that this could be done only by a complete change of system. He knew
the English people and the House of Commons; and he knew that the course
which Charles had recently taken, if obstinately pursued, might well end
before the windows of the Banqueting-House. He saw that the true policy
of the Crown was to ally itself, not with the feeble, the hated, the
downtrodden Catholics, but with the powerful, the wealthy, the popular,
the dominant Church of England; to trust for aid not to a foreign Prince
whose name was hateful to the British nation, and whose succours could
be obtained only on terms of vassalage, but to the old Cavalier party,
to the landed gentry, the clergy, and the universities. By rallying
round the throne the whole strength of the Royalists and High Churchmen,
and by using without stint all the resources of corruption, he flattered
himself that he could manage the Parliament. That he failed is to
be attributed less to himself than to his master. Of the disgraceful
dealings which were still kept up with the French Court, Danby deserved
little or none of the blame, though he suffered the whole punishment.
Danby, with great parliamentary talents, had paid little attention to
European politics, and wished for the help of some person on whom he
could rely in the foreign department. A plan was accordingly arranged
for making Temple Secretary of State. Arlington was the only member of
the Cabal who still held office in England. The temper of the House of
Commons made it necessary to remove him, or rather to require him to
sell out; for at that time the great offices of State were bought and
sold as commissions in the army now are. Temple was informed that he
should have the Seals if he would pay Arlington six thousand pounds. The
transaction had nothing in it discreditable, according to the notions of
that age, and the investment would have been a good one; for we imagine
that at that time the gains which a Secretary of State might make,
without doing any thing considered as improper, were very considerable.
Temple’s friends offered to lend him the money; but he was fully
determined not to take a post of so much responsibility in times so
agitated, and under a Prince on whom so little reliance could be placed,
and accepted the embassy to the Hague, leaving Arlington to find another
purchaser.
Before Temple left England he had a long audience of the King, to
whom he spoke with great severity of the measures adopted by the late
Ministry. The King owned that things had turned out ill. “But,” said he,
“if I had been well served, I might have made a good business of it.”
Temple was alarmed at this language, and inferred from it that the
system of the Cabal had not been abandoned, but only suspended. He
therefore thought it his duty to go, as he expresses it, “to the bottom
of the matter.” He strongly represented to the King the impossibility
of establishing either absolute government, or the Catholic religion in
England; and concluded by repeating an observation which he had heard at
Brussels from M. Gourville, a very intelligent Frenchman well known to
Charles: “A king of England,” said Gourville, “who is willing to be the
man of his people, is the greatest king in the world, but if he wishes
to be more, by heaven he is nothing at all!” The King betrayed some
symptoms of impatience during this lecture; but at last he laid his
hand kindly on Temple’s shoulder, and said, “You are right, and so is
Gourville; and I will be the man of my people.”
With this assurance Temple repaired to the Hague in July 1674. Holland
was now secure, and France was surrounded on every side by enemies.
Spain and the Empire were in arms for the purpose of compelling Lewis
to abandon all that he had acquired since the treaty of the Pyrenees.
A congress for the purpose of putting an end to the war was opened at
Nimeguen under the mediation of England in 1675; and to that congress
Temple was deputed. The work of conciliation however, went on very
slowly. The belligerent powers were still sanguine, and the mediating
power was unsteady and insincere.
In the meantime the Opposition in England became more and more
formidable, and seemed fully determined to force the King into a war
with France. Charles was desirous of making some appointments which
might strengthen the administration and conciliate the confidence of the
public. No man was more esteemed by the nation than Temple; yet he had
never been concerned in any opposition to any government. In July 1677,
he was sent for from Nimeguen. Charles received him with caresses,
earnestly pressed him to accept the seals of Secretary of State, and
promised to bear half the charge of buying out the present holder.
Temple was charmed by the kindness and politeness of the King’s manner,
and by the liveliness of his Majesty’s conversation; but his prudence
was not to be so laid asleep. He calmly and steadily excused himself.
The King affected to treat his excuses as mere jest, and gaily said,
“Go; get you gone to Sheen. We shall have no good of you till you have
been there; and when you have rested yourself, come up again.” Temple
withdrew and stayed two days at his villa, but returned to town in the
same mind; and the King was forced to consent at least to a delay.
But while Temple thus carefully shunned the responsibility of bearing a
part in the general direction of affairs, he gave a signal proof of
that never-failing sagacity which enabled him to find out ways of
distinguishing himself without risk. He had a principal share in
bringing about an event which was at the time hailed with general
satisfaction, and which subsequently produced consequences of the
highest importance. This was the marriage of the Prince of Orange and
the Lady Mary.
In the following year Temple returned to the Hague; and thence he was
ordered, in the close of 1678, to repair to Nimeguen, for the purpose of
signing the hollow and unsatisfactory treaty by which the distractions
of Europe were for a short time suspended. He grumbled much at being
required to affix his name to bad articles which he had not framed,
and still more at having to travel in very cold weather. After all, a
difficulty of etiquette prevented him from signing, and he returned to
the Hague. Scarcely had he arrived there when he received intelligence
that the King, whose embarrassments were now far greater than ever, was
fully resolved immediately to appoint him Secretary of State. He a
third time declined that high post, and began to make preparations for
a journey to Italy; thinking, doubtless, that he should spend his time
much more pleasantly among pictures and ruins than in such a whirlpool
of political and religious frenzy as was then raging in London.
But the King was in extreme necessity, and was no longer to be so easily
put off. Temple received positive orders to repair instantly to England.
He obeyed, and found the country in a state even more fearful than that
which he had pictured to himself.
Those are terrible conjunctures, when the discontents of a nation,
not light and capricious discontents, but discontents which have been
steadily increasing during a long series of years, have attained
their full maturity. The discerning few predict the approach of these
conjunctures, but predict in vain. To the many, the evil season comes as
a total eclipse of the sun at noon comes to a people of savages. Society
which, but a short time before, was in a state of perfect repose, is on
a sudden agitated with the most fearful convulsions, and seems to be
on the verge of dissolution; and the rulers who, till the mischief
was beyond the reach of all ordinary remedies, had never bestowed one
thought on its existence, stand bewildered and panic-stricken, without
hope or resource, in the midst of the confusion. One such conjuncture
this generation has seen. God grant that we may never see another! At
such a conjuncture it was that Temple landed on English ground in the
beginning of 1679.
The Parliament had obtained a glimpse of the King’s dealings with
France; and their anger had been unjustly directed against Danby, whose
conduct as to that matter had been, on the whole, deserving rather of
praise than of censure. The Popish plot, the murder of Godfrey, the
infamous inventions of Oates, the discovery of Colman’s letters, had
excited the nation to madness. All the disaffection which had been
generated by eighteen years of misgovernment had come to the birth
together. At this moment the King had been advised to dissolve that
Parliament which had been elected just after his restoration, and which,
though its composition had since that time been greatly altered, was
still far more deeply imbued with the old cavalier spirit than any that
had preceded, or that was likely to follow it. The general election had
commenced, and was proceeding with a degree of excitement never before
known. The tide ran furiously against the Court. It was clear that a
majority of the new House of Commons would be, to use a word which came
into fashion a few months later, decided Whigs. Charles had found it
necessary to yield to the violence of the public feeling. The Duke of
York was on the point of retiring to Holland. “I never,” says Temple,
who had seen the abolition of monarchy, the dissolution of the Long
Parliament, the fall of the Protectorate, the declaration of Monk
against the Rump, “I never saw greater disturbance in men’s minds.”
The King now with the utmost urgency besought Temple to take the
seals. The pecuniary part of the arrangement no longer presented any
difficulty; and Sir William was not quite so decided in his refusal
as he had formerly been. He took three days to consider the posture of
affairs, and to examine his own feelings; and he came to the conclusion
that “the scene was unfit for such an actor as he knew himself to be.”
Yet he felt that, by refusing help to the King at such a crisis, he
might give much offence and incur much censure. He shaped his course
with his usual dexterity. He affected to be very desirous of a seat in
Parliament; yet he contrived to be an unsuccessful candidate; and, when
all the writs were returned, he represented that it would be useless for
him to take the seals till he could procure admittance to the House of
Commons; and in this manner he succeeded in avoiding the greatness which
others desired to thrust upon him.
The Parliament met; and the violence of its proceedings surpassed all
expectation. The Long Parliament itself, with much greater provocation,
had at its commencement been less violent. The Treasurer was instantly
driven from office, impeached, sent to the Tower. Sharp and vehement
votes were passed on the subject of the Popish Plot. The Commons were
prepared to go much further, to wrest from the King his prerogative of
mercy in cases of high political crimes, and to alter the succession to
the Crown. Charles was thoroughly perplexed and dismayed. Temple saw him
almost daily and thought him impressed with a deep sense of his errors,
and of the miserable state into which they had brought him. Their
conferences became longer and more confidential; and Temple began to
flatter himself with the hope that he might be able to reconcile parties
at home as he had reconciled hostile States abroad; that he might be
able to suggest a plan which should allay all heats, efface the memory
of all past grievances, secure the nation from misgovernment, and
protect the Crown against the encroachments of Parliament.
Temple’s plan was that the existing Privy Council, which consisted of
fifty members, should be dissolved, that there should no longer be
a small interior council, like that which is now designated as the
Cabinet, that a new Privy Council of thirty members should be appointed,
and that the King should pledge himself to govern by the constant advice
of this body, to suffer all his affairs of every kind to be freely
debated there, and not to reserve any part of the public business for a
secret committee.
Fifteen of the members of this new council were to be great officers of
State. The other fifteen were to be independent noblemen and gentlemen
of the greatest weight in the country. In appointing them particular
regard was to be had to the amount of their property. The whole annual
income of the counsellors was estimated at £300,000. The annual income
of all the members of the House of Commons was not supposed to exceed
£400,000 The appointment of wealthy counsellors Temple describes as “a
chief regard, necessary to this constitution.”
This plan was the subject of frequent conversation between the King and
Temple. After a month passed in discussions to which no third person
appears to have been privy, Charles declared himself satisfied of
the expediency of the proposed measure, and resolved to carry it into
effect.
It is much to be regretted that Temple has left us no account of these
conferences. Historians have, therefore, been left to form their own
conjectures as to the object of this very extraordinary plan, “this
Constitution,” as Temple himself calls it. And we cannot say that any
explanation which has yet been given seems to us quite satisfactory.
Indeed, almost all the writers whom we have consulted appear to consider
the change as merely a change of administration, and so considering it,
they generally applaud it. Mr. Courtenay, who has evidently examined
this subject with more attention than has often been bestowed upon it,
seems to think Temple’s scheme very strange, unintelligible, and absurd.
It is with very great diffidence that we offer our own solution of what
we have always thought one of the great riddles of English history. We
are strongly inclined to suspect that the appointment of the new Privy
Council was really a much more remarkable event than has generally been
supposed, and that what Temple had in view was to effect, under colour
of a change of administration, a permanent change in the Constitution.
The plan, considered merely as a plan for the formation of a Cabinet,
is so obviously inconvenient, that we cannot easily believe this to have
been Temple’s chief object. The number of the new Council alone would be
a most serious objection. The largest Cabinets of modern times have not,
we believe, consisted of more than fifteen members. Even this number has
generally been thought too large. The Marquess Wellesley, whose judgment
on a question of executive administration is entitled to as much respect
as that of any statesman that England ever produced, expressed, during
the ministerial negotiations of the year 1812, his conviction that even
thirteen was an inconveniently large number. But in a Cabinet of
thirty members what chance could there be of finding unity, secrecy,
expedition, any of the qualities which such a body ought to possess?
If, indeed, the members of such a Cabinet were closely bound together
by interest, if they all had a deep stake in the permanence of the
Administration, if the majority were dependent on a small number of
leading men, the thirty might perhaps act as a smaller number would
act, though more slowly, more awkwardly, and with more risk of improper
disclosures. But the Council which Temple proposed was so framed that
if, instead of thirty members, it had contained only ten, it would still
have been the most unwieldy and discordant Cabinet that ever sat. One
half of the members were to be persons holding no office, persons who
had no motive to compromise their opinions, or to take any share of the
responsibility of an unpopular measure, persons, therefore, who might be
expected as often as there might be a crisis requiring the most cordial
co-operation, to draw off from the rest, and to throw every difficulty
in the way of the public business. The circumstance that they were men
of enormous private wealth only made the matter worse. The House of
Commons is a checking body; and therefore it is desirable that it
should, to a great extent, consist of men of independent fortune,
who receive nothing and expect nothing from the Government. But with
executive boards the case is quite different. Their business is not
to check, but to act. The very same things, therefore, which are the
virtues of Parliaments may be vices in Cabinets. We can hardly conceive
a greater curse to the country than an Administration, the members of
which should be as perfectly independent of each other, and as little
under the necessity of making mutual concessions, as the representatives
of London and Devonshire in the House of Commons are and ought to be.
Now Temple’s new Council was to contain fifteen members who were to
hold no offices, and the average amount of whose private estates was ten
thousand pounds a year, an income which, in proportion to the wants of a
man of rank of that period, was at least equal to thirty thousand a year
in our time. Was it to be expected that such men would gratuitously
take on themselves the labour and responsibility of Ministers, and the
unpopularity which the best Ministers must sometimes be prepared to
brave? Could there be any doubt that an Opposition would soon be formed
within the Cabinet itself, and that the consequence would be disunion,
altercation, tardiness in operations, the divulging of secrets,
everything most alien from the nature of an executive council?
Is it possible to imagine that considerations so grave and so obvious
should have altogether escaped the notice of a man of Temple’s sagacity
and experience? One of two things appears to us to be certain, either
that his project has been misunderstood, or that his talents for public
affairs have been overrated.
We lean to the opinion that his project has been misunderstood. His new
Council, as we have shown, would have been an exceedingly bad Cabinet.
The inference which we are inclined to draw is this, that he meant
his Council to serve some other purpose than that of a mere Cabinet.
Barillon used four or five words which contain, we think, the key of the
whole mystery. Mr. Courtenay calls them pithy words; but he does not,
if we are right, apprehend their whole force. “Ce sont,” said Barillon,
“des Etats, non des conseils.”
In order clearly to understand what we imagine to have been Temple’s
views, the reader must remember that the Government of England was at
that moment, and had been during nearly eighty years, in a state of
transition. A change, not the less real or the less extensive because
disguised under ancient names and forms, was in constant progress. The
theory of the Constitution, the fundamental laws which fix the powers
of the three branches of the legislature, underwent no material change
between the time of Elizabeth and the time of William the Third. The
most celebrated laws of the seventeenth century on those subjects, the
Petition of Right, the Declaration of Right, are purely declaratory.
They purport to be merely recitals of the old polity of England. They do
not establish free government as a salutary improvement, but claim it as
an undoubted and immemorial inheritance. Nevertheless, there can be
no doubt that, during the period of which we speak, all the mutual
relations of all the orders of the State did practically undergo an
entire change. The letter of the law might be unaltered; but, at the
beginning of the seventeenth century, the power of the Crown was, in
fact, decidedly predominant in the State; and at the end of that century
the power of Parliament, and especially of the Lower House, had become,
in fact, decidedly predominant. At the beginning of the century, the
sovereign perpetually violated, with little or no opposition, the clear
privileges of Parliament. At the close of the century, the Parliament
had virtually drawn to itself just as much as it chose of the
prerogative of the Crown. The sovereign retained the shadow of
that authority of which the Tudors had held the substance. He had
a legislative veto which he never ventured to exercise, a power of
appointing Ministers, whom an address of the Commons could at any
moment force him to discard, a power of declaring war which, without
Parliamentary support, could not be carried on for a single day. The
Houses of Parliament were now not merely legislative assemblies, not
merely checking assemblies; they were great Councils of State, whose
voice, when loudly and firmly raised, was decisive on all questions of
foreign and domestic policy. There was no part of the whole system
of Government with which they had not power to interfere by advice
equivalent to command; and, if they abstained from intermeddling with
some departments of the executive administration, they were withheld
from doing so only by their own moderation, and by the confidence which
they reposed in the Ministers of the Crown. There is perhaps no other
instance in history of a change so complete in the real constitution of
an empire, unaccompanied by any corresponding change in the theoretical
constitution. The disguised transformation of the Roman commonwealth
into a despotic monarchy, under the long administration of Augustus, is
perhaps the nearest parallel.
This great alteration did not take place without strong and constant
resistance on the part of the kings of the house of Stuart. Till 1642,
that resistance was generally of an open, violent, and lawless nature.
If the Commons refused supplies, the sovereign levied a benevolence.
If the Commons impeached a favourite minister, the sovereign threw the
chiefs of the Opposition into prison. Of these efforts to keep down the
Parliament by despotic force, without the pretext of law, the last, the
most celebrated, and the most wicked was the attempt to seize the five
members. That attempt was the signal for civil war, and was followed by
eighteen years of blood and confusion.
The days of trouble passed by; the exiles returned; the throne was again
set up in its high place; the peerage and the hierarchy recovered their
ancient splendour. The fundamental laws which had been recited in the
Petition of Right were again solemnly recognised. The theory of the
English constitution was the same on the day when the hand of Charles
the Second was kissed by the kneeling Houses at Whitehall as on the day
when his father set up the royal standard at Nottingham. There was a
short period of doting fondness, a hysterica passio of loyal repentance
and love. But emotions of this sort are transitory; and the interests
on which depends the progress of great societies are permanent.
The transport of reconciliation was soon over; and the old struggle
recommenced.
The old struggle recommenced; but not precisely after the old fashion.
The Sovereign was not indeed a man whom any common warning would have
restrained from the grossest violations of law. But it was no common
warning that he had received. All around him were the recent signs of
the vengeance of an oppressed nation, the fields on which the noblest
blood of the island had been poured forth, the castles shattered by
the cannon of the Parliamentary armies, the hall where sat the stern
tribunal to whose bar had been led, through lowering ranks of pikemen,
the captive heir of a hundred kings, the stately pilasters before which
the great execution had been so fearlessly done in the face of heaven
and earth. The restored Prince, admonished by the fate of his father,
never ventured to attack his Parliaments with open and arbitrary
violence. It was at one time by means of the Parliament itself, at
another time by means of the courts of law, that he attempted to regain
for the Crown its old predominance. He began with great advantages. The
Parliament of 1661 was called while the nation was still full of joy
and tenderness. The great majority of the House of Commons were zealous
royalists. All the means of influence which the patronage of the Crown
afforded were used without limit. Bribery was reduced to a system. The
King, when he could spare money from his pleasures for nothing else,
could spare it for purposes of corruption. While the defence of the
coasts was neglected, while ships rotted, while arsenals lay empty,
while turbulent crowds of unpaid seamen swarmed in the streets of the
seaports, something could still be scraped together in the Treasury
for the members of the House of Commons. The gold of France was largely
employed for the same purpose. Yet it was found, as indeed might have
been foreseen, that there is a natural limit to the effect which can be
produced by means like these. There is one thing which the most corrupt
senates are unwilling to sell; and that is the power which makes them
worth buying. The same selfish motives which induced them to take a
price for a particular vote induce them to oppose every measure of which
the effect would be to lower the importance, and consequently the price,
of their votes. About the income of their power, so to speak, they are
quite ready to make bargains. But they are not easily persuaded to part
with any fragment of the principal. It is curious to observe how, during
the long continuance of this Parliament, the Pensionary Parliament, as
it was nicknamed by contemporaries, though every circumstance seemed
to be favourable to the Crown, the power of the Crown was constantly
sinking, and that of the Commons constantly rising. The meetings of the
Houses were more frequent than in former reigns; their interference was
more harassing to the Government than in former reigns; they had begun
to make peace, to make war; to pull down, if they did not set up,
administrations. Already a new class of statesmen had appeared, unheard
of before that time, but common ever since. Under the Tudors and the
earlier Stuarts, it was generally by courtly arts, or by official skill
and knowledge, that a politician raised himself to power. From the
time of Charles the Second down to our own days a different species
of talent, parliamentary talent, has been the most valuable of all the
qualifications of an English statesman. It has stood in the place of all
other acquirements. It has covered ignorance, weakness, rashness,
the most fatal maladministration. A great negotiator is nothing when
compared with a great debater; and a Minister who can make a successful
speech need trouble himself little about an unsuccessful expedition.
This is the talent which has made judges without law, and diplomatists
without French, which has sent to the Admiralty men who did not know the
stern of a ship from her bowsprit, and to the India Board men who did
not know the difference between a rupee and a pagoda, which made a
foreign secretary of Mr. Pitt, who, as George the Second said, had
never opened Vattel, and which was very near making a Chancellor of the
Exchequer of Mr. Sheridan, who could not work a sum in long division.
This was the sort of talent which raised Clifford from obscurity to
the head of affairs. To this talent Osborne, by birth a simple country
gentleman, owed his white staff, his garter, and his dukedom. The
encroachment of the power of the Parliament on the power of the Crown
resembled a fatality, or the operation of some great law of nature. The
will of the individual on the throne, or of the individuals in the two
Houses, seemed to go for nothing. The King might be eager to encroach;
yet something constantly drove him back. The Parliament might be loyal,
even servile; yet something constantly urged them forward.
These things were done in the green tree. What then was likely to be
done in the dry? The Popish Plot and the general election came together,
and found a people predisposed to the most violent excitation. The
composition of the House of Commons was changed. The Legislature
was filled with men who leaned to Republicanism in politics, and to
Presbyterianism in religion. They no sooner met than they commenced
an attack on the Government, which, if successful, must have made them
supreme in the State.
Where was this to end? To us who have seen the solution the question
presents few difficulties. But to a statesman of the age of Charles the
Second, to a statesman, who wished, without depriving the Parliament of
its privileges, to maintain the monarch in his old supremacy, it must
have appeared very perplexing.
Clarendon had, when Minister, struggled honestly, perhaps, but, as was
his wont, obstinately, proudly, and offensively, against the growing
power of the Commons. He was for allowing them their old authority, and
not one atom more. He would never have claimed for the Crown a right to
levy taxes from the people without the consent of Parliament. But
when the Parliament, in the first Dutch war, most properly insisted on
knowing how it was that the money which they had voted had produced so
little effect, and began to inquire through what hands it had passed,
and on what services it had been expended, Clarendon considered this as
a monstrous innovation. He told the King, as he himself says, “that
he could not be too indulgent in the defence of the privileges of
Parliament, and that he hoped he would never violate any of them; but
he desired him to be equally solicitous to prevent the excesses in
Parliament, and not to suffer them to extend their jurisdiction to cases
they have nothing to do with; and that to restrain them within their
proper bounds and limits is as necessary as it is to preserve them
from being invaded; and that this was such a new encroachment as had no
bottom.” This is a single instance. Others might easily be given.
The bigotry, the strong passions, the haughty and disdainful temper,
which made Clarendon’s great abilities a source of almost unmixed evil
to himself and to the public, had no place in the character of Temple.
To Temple, however, as well as to Clarendon, the rapid change which
was taking place in the real working of the Constitution gave
great disquiet; particularly as Temple had never sat in the English
Parliament, and therefore regarded it with none of the predilection
which men naturally feel for a body to which they belong, and for a
theatre on which their own talents have been advantageously displayed.
To wrest by force from the House of Commons its newly acquired powers
was impossible; nor was Temple a man to recommend such a stroke, even
if it had been possible. But was it possible that the House of Commons
might be induced to let those powers drop? Was it possible that, as a
great revolution had been effected without any change in the outward
form of the Government, so a great counter-revolution might be effected
in the same manner? Was it possible that the Crown and the Parliament
might be placed in nearly the same relative position in which they had
stood in the reign of Elizabeth, and that this might be done without one
sword drawn, without one execution, and with the general acquiescence of
the nation?
The English people--it was probably thus that Temple argued--will not
bear to be governed by the unchecked power of the Sovereign, nor ought
they to be so governed. At present there is no check but the Parliament.
The limits which separate the power of checking those who govern from
the power of governing are not easily to be defined. The Parliament,
therefore, supported by the nation, is rapidly drawing to itself all the
powers of Government. If it were possible to frame some other check on
the power of the Crown, some check which might be less galling to the
Sovereign than that by which he is now constantly tormented, and yet
which might appear to the people to be a tolerable security against
maladministration, Parliaments would probably meddle less; and they
would be less supported by public opinion in their meddling. That the
King’s hands may not be rudely tied by others, he must consent to tie
them lightly himself. That the executive administration may not be
usurped by the checking body, something of the character of a
checking body must be given to the body which conducts the executive
administration. The Parliament is now arrogating to itself every day
a larger share of the functions of the Privy Council. We must stop the
evil by giving to the Privy Council something of the constitution of a
Parliament. Let the nation see that all the King’s measures are directed
by a Cabinet composed of representatives of every order in the State,
by a Cabinet which contains, not placemen alone, but independent and
popular noblemen and gentlemen who have large estates and no salaries,
and who are not likely to sacrifice the public welfare in which they
have a deep stake, and the credit which they have obtained with the
country, to the pleasure of a Court from which they receive nothing.
When the ordinary administration is in such hands as these, the people
will be quite content to see the Parliament become, what it formerly
was, an extraordinary check. They will be quite willing that the House
of Commons should meet only once in three years for a short session, and
should take as little part in matters of state as it did a hundred years
ago.
Thus we believe that Temple reasoned: for on this hypothesis his scheme
is intelligible; and on any other hypothesis his scheme appears to us,
as it does to Mr. Courtenay, exceedingly absurd and unmeaning. This
Council was strictly what Barillon called it, an Assembly of States.
There are the representatives of all the great sections of the
community, of the Church, of the Law, of the Peerage, of the Commons.
The exclusion of one half of the counsellors from office under the
Crown, an exclusion which is quite absurd when we consider the Council
merely as an executive board, becomes at once perfectly reasonable when
we consider the Council as a body intended to restrain the Crown as well
as to exercise the powers of the Crown, to perform some of the functions
of a Parliament as well as the functions of a Cabinet. We see, too,
why Temple dwelt so much on the private wealth of the members, why he
instituted a comparison between their united incomes and the united
incomes of the members of the House of Commons. Such a parallel
would have been idle in the case of a mere Cabinet. It is extremely
significant in the case of a body intended to supersede the House of
Commons in some very important functions.
We can hardly help thinking that the notion of this Parliament on a
small scale was suggested to Temple by what he had himself seen in the
United Provinces. The original Assembly of the States-General consisted,
as he tells us, of above eight hundred persons. But this great body was
represented by a smaller Council of about thirty, which bore the name
and exercised the powers of the States-General. At last the real States
altogether ceased to meet; and their power, though still a part of the
theory of the Constitution, became obsolete in practice. We do not, of
course, imagine that Temple either expected or wished that Parliaments
should be thus disused; but he did expect, we think, that something like
what had happened in Holland would happen in England, and that a large
portion of the functions lately assumed by Parliament would be quietly
transferred to the miniature Parliament which he proposed to create.
Had this plan, with some modifications, been tried at an earlier period,
in a more composed state of the public mind, and by a better sovereign,
we are by no means certain that it might not have effected the purpose
for which it was designed. The restraint imposed on the King by the
Council of thirty, whom he had himself chosen, would have been feeble
indeed when compared with the restraint imposed by Parliament. But it
would have been more constant. It would have acted every year, and all
the year round; and before the Revolution the sessions of Parliament
were short and the recesses long. The advice of the Council would
probably have prevented any very monstrous and scandalous measures;
and would consequently have prevented the discontents which follow such
measures, and the salutary laws which are the fruit of such discontents.
We believe, for example, that the second Dutch war would never have been
approved by such a Council as that which Temple proposed. We are quite
certain that the shutting up of the Exchequer would never even have
been mentioned in such a Council. The people, pleased to think that Lord
Russell, Lord Cavendish, and Mr. Powle, unplaced and unpensioned, were
daily representing their grievances and defending their rights in the
Royal presence, would not have pined quite so much for the meeting of
Parliaments. The Parliament, when it met, would have found fewer and
less glaring abuses to attack. There would have been less misgovernment
and less reform. We should not have been cursed with the Cabal, or
blessed with the Habeas Corpus Act. In the mean time the Council,
considered as an executive Council, would, unless some at least of its
powers had been delegated to a smaller body, have been feeble, dilatory,
divided, unfit for everything that requires secrecy and despatch, and
peculiarly unfit for the administration of war.
The Revolution put an end, in a very different way, to the long contest
between the King and the Parliament. From that time, the House of
Commons has been predominant in the State. The Cabinet has really been,
from that time, a committee nominated by the Crown out of the prevailing
party in Parliament. Though the minority in the Commons are constantly
proposing to condemn executive measures, or to call for papers which may
enable the House to sit in judgment on such measures, these propositions
are scarcely ever carried; and, if a proposition of this kind is carried
against the Government, a change of Ministry almost necessarily follows.
Growing and struggling power always gives more annoyance and is
more unmanageable than established power. The House of Commons gave
infinitely more trouble to the Ministers of Charles the Second than to
any Ministers of later times; for, in the time of Charles the Second,
the House was checking Ministers in whom it did not confide. Now that
its ascendency is fully established, it either confides in Ministers or
turns them out. This is undoubtedly a far better state of things than
that which Temple wished to introduce. The modern Cabinet is a far
better Executive Council than his. The worst House of Commons that
has sate since the Revolution was a far more efficient check on
misgovernment than his fifteen independent counsellors would have been.
Yet, everything considered, it seems to us that his plan was the work of
an observant, ingenious, and fertile mind.
On this occasion, as on every occasion on which he came prominently
forward, Temple had the rare good fortune to please the public as well
as the Sovereign. The general exultation was great when it was known
that the old Council, made up of the most odious tools of power, was
dismissed, that small interior committees, rendered odious by the recent
memory of the Cabal, were to be disused, and that the King would adopt
no measure till it had been discussed and approved by a body, of which
one half consisted of independent gentlemen and noblemen, and in which
such persons as Russell, Cavendish, and Temple himself had seats. Town
and country were in a ferment of joy. The bells were rung; bonfires were
lighted; and the acclamations of England were echoed by the Dutch, who
considered the influence obtained by Temple as a certain omen of good
for Europe. It is, indeed, much to the honour of his sagacity that every
one of his great measures should, in such times, have pleased every
party which he had any interest in pleasing. This was the case with the
Triple Alliance, with the treaty which concluded the second Dutch
war, with the marriage of the Prince of Orange, and, finally, with the
institution of this new Council.
The only people who grumbled were those popular leaders of the House of
Commons who were not among the Thirty; and, if our view of the measure
be correct, they were precisely the people who had good reason to
grumble. They were precisely the people whose activity and whose
influence the new Council was intended to destroy.
But there was very soon an end of the bright hopes and loud applauses
with which the publication of this scheme had been hailed. The
perfidious levity of the King and the ambition of the chiefs of parties
produced the instant, entire, and irremediable failure of a plan which
nothing but firmness, public spirit, and self-denial on the part of all
concerned in it could conduct to a happy issue. Even before the project
was divulged, its author had already found reason to apprehend that it
would fail. Considerable difficulty was experienced in framing the list
of counsellors. There were two men in particular about whom the King and
Temple could not agree, two men deeply tainted with the vices common to
the English statesman of that age, but unrivalled in talents, address,
and influence. These were the Earl of Shaftesbury, and George Savile
Viscount Halifax.
It was a favourite exercise among the Greek sophists to write panegyrics
on characters proverbial for depravity. One professor of rhetoric sent
to Isocrates a panegyric on Busiris; and Isocrates himself wrote another
which has come down to us. It is, we presume, from an ambition of the
same kind that some writers have lately shown a disposition to eulogise
Shaftesbury. But the attempt is vain. The charges against him rest on
evidence not to be invalidated by any arguments which human wit can
devise, or by any information which may be found in old trunks and
escritoires.
It is certain that, just before the Restoration, he declared to the
Regicides that he would be damned, body and soul, rather than suffer a
hair of their heads to be hurt, and that, just after the Restoration, he
was one of the judges who sentenced them to death. It is certain that he
was a principal member of the most profligate Administration ever known,
and that he was afterwards a principal member oft the most profligate
Opposition ever known. It is certain that, in power, he did not scruple
to violate the great fundamental principle of the Constitution, in order
to exalt the Catholics, and that, out of power, he did not scruple to
violate every principle of justice, in order to destroy them. There were
in that age some honest men, such as William Penn, who valued toleration
so highly that they would willingly have seen it established even by
an illegal exertion of the prerogative. There were many honest men who
dreaded arbitrary power so much that, on account of the alliance between
Popery and arbitrary power, they were disposed to grant no toleration to
Papists. On both those classes we look with indulgence, though we think
both in the wrong. But Shaftesbury belonged to neither class. He united
all that was worst in both. From the misguided friends of toleration
he borrowed their contempt for the Constitution, and from the misguided
friends of civil liberty their contempt for the rights of conscience. We
never can admit that his conduct as a member of the Cabal was redeemed
by his conduct as a leader of Opposition. On the contrary, his life was
such that every part of it, as if by a skilful contrivance, reflects
infamy on every other. We should never have known how abandoned a
prostitute he was in place, if we had not known how desperate an
incendiary he was out of it. To judge of him fairly, we must bear in
mind that the Shaftesbury who, in office, was the chief author of the
Declaration of Indulgence, was the same Shaftesbury who, out of office,
excited and kept up the savage hatred of the rabble of London against
the very class to whom that Declaration of Indulgence was intended to
give illegal relief.
It is amusing to see the excuses that are made for him. We will give two
specimens. It is acknowledged that he was one of the Ministry which made
the alliance with France against Holland, and that this alliance was
most pernicious. What, then, is the defence? Even this, that he betrayed
his master’s counsels to the Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg, and
tried to rouse all the Protestant powers of Germany to defend the
States. Again, it is acknowledged that he was deeply concerned in the
Declaration of Indulgence, and that his conduct on this occasion was not
only unconstitutional, but quite inconsistent with the course which he
afterwards took respecting the professors of the Catholic faith. What,
then, is the defence? Even this, that he meant only to allure concealed
Papists to avow themselves, and thus to become open marks for the
vengeance of the public. As often as he is charged with one treason,
his advocates vindicate him by confessing two. They had better leave him
where they find him. For him there is no escape upwards. Every outlet
by which he can creep out of his present position, is one which lets
him down into a still lower and fouler depth of infamy. To whitewash
an Ethiopian is a proverbially hopeless attempt; but to whitewash an
Ethiopian by giving him a new coat of blacking is an enterprise more
extraordinary still. That in the course of Shaftesbury’s dishonest and
revengeful opposition to the Court he rendered one or two most useful
services to his country we admit. And he is, we think, fairly entitled,
if that be any glory, to have his name eternally associated with the
Habeas Corpus Act in the same way in which the name of Henry the Eighth
is associated with the reformation of the Church, and that of Jack
Wilkes with the most sacred rights of electors.
While Shaftesbury was still living, his character was elaborately
drawn by two of the greatest writers of the age, by Butler, with
characteristic brilliancy of wit, by Dryden, with even more than
characteristic energy and loftiness, by both with all the inspiration of
hatred. The sparkling illustrations of Butler have been thrown into the
shade by the brighter glory of that gorgeous satiric Muse, who comes
sweeping by in sceptred pall, borrowed from her most august sisters. But
the descriptions well deserve to be compared. The reader will at once
perceive a considerable difference between Butler’s
“politician,
With more beads than a beast in vision,”
and the Achitophel of Dryden. Butler dwells on Shaftesbury’s
unprincipled versatility; on his wonderful and almost instinctive skill
in discerning the approach of a change of fortune; and on the dexterity
with which he extricated himself from the snares in which he left his
associates to perish.
“Our state-artificer foresaw Which way the world began to draw. For as
old sinners have all points O’ th’ compass in their bones and joints,
Can by their pangs and aches find All turns and changes of the wind,
And better than by Napier’s bones Feel in their own the age of moons:
So guilty sinners in a state Can by their crimes prognosticate, And
in their consciences feel pain Some days before a shower of rain. He,
therefore, wisely cast about All ways he could to ensure his throat.”
In Dryden’s great portrait, on the contrary, violent passion, implacable
revenge, boldness amounting to temerity, are the most striking features.
Achitophel is one of the “great wits to madness near allied.” And
again--
“A daring pilot in extremity, Pleased with the danger when the waves
went high, He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit, Would steer too
near the sands to boast his wit.”
[It has never, we believe, been remarked, that two of the most striking
lines in the description of Achitophel are borrowed from a most obscure
quarter. In Knolles’s History of the Turks, printed more than sixty
years before the appearance of Absalom and Achitophel, are the following
verses, under a portrait of the Sultan Mustapha the First:
“Greatnesse on goodnesse loves to slide, not stand,
And leaves for Fortune’s ice Vertue’s firme land.”