Thanatos kai Moira kichanei.”
We have no difficulty in admitting that during the ten or twelve years
which followed the appearance of the Vindicae Gallicae, the opinions of
Sir James Mackintosh underwent some change. But did this change pass on
him alone? Was it not common? Was it not almost universal? Was there one
honest friend of liberty in Europe or in America whose ardour had not
been damped, whose faith in the high destinies of mankind had not
been shaken? Was there one observer to whom the French Revolution, or
revolutions in general, appeared in exactly the same light on the day
when the Bastile fell, and on the day when the Girondists were dragged
to the scaffold, the day when the Directory shipped off their principal
opponents for Guiana, or the day when the Legislative Body was
driven from its hall at the point of the bayonet? We do not speak of
light-minded and enthusiastic people, of wits like Sheridan, or poets
like Alfieri; but of the most virtuous and intelligent practical
statesmen, and of the deepest, the calmest, the most impartial political
speculators of that time. What was the language and conduct of Lord
Spencer, of Lord Fitzwilliam, or Mr. Grattan? What is the tone of M.
Dumont’s Memoirs, written just at the close of the eighteenth century?
What Tory could have spoken with greater disgust or contempt of the
French Revolution and its authors? Nay, this writer, a republican, and
the most upright and zealous of republicans, has gone so far as to say
that Mr. Burke’s work on the Revolution had saved Europe. The name of M.
Dumont naturally suggests that of Mr. Bentham. He, we presume, was not
ratting for a place; and what language did he hold at that time? Look at
his little treatise entitled Sophismes Anarchiques. In that treatise
he says, that the atrocities of the Revolution were the natural
consequences of the absurd principles on which it was commenced; that,
while the chiefs of the constituent assembly gloried in the thought that
they were pulling down aristocracy, they never saw that their doctrines
tended to produce an evil a hundred times more formidable, anarchy; that
the theory laid down in the Declaration of the Rights of Man had, in a
great measure, produced the crimes of the Reign of Terror; that none but
an eyewitness could imagine the horrors of a state of society in which
comments on that Declaration were put forth by men with no food in their
bellies, with rags on their backs and pikes in their hands. He praises
the English Parliament for the dislike which it has always shown to
abstract reasonings, and to the affirming of general principles. In M.
Dumont’s preface to the Treatise on the Principles of Legislation, a
preface written under the eye of Mr. Bentham, and published with his
sanction, are the following still more remarkable expressions: “M.
Bentham est bien loin d’attacher une préférence exclusive a aucune forme
de gouvernement. Il pense que la meilleure constitution pour un peuple
est celle a laquelle il est accoutume... Le vice fondamental des
théories sur les constitutions politiques, c’est de commencer par
attaquer celles qui existent, et d’exciter tout au moins des inquiétudes
et des jalousies de pouvoir. Une telle disposition n’est point
favorable au perfectionnement des lois. La seule époque ou l’on puisse
entreprendre avec succes des grandes reformes de législation est celle
ou les passions publiques sont calmes, et ou le gouvernement jouit de
la stabilité la plus grande. L’objet de M. Bentham, en cherchant dans
le vice des lois la cause de la plupart des maux, a été constamment
d’éloigner le plus grand de tous, le bouleversement de l’autorite, les
révolutions de propriété et de pouvoir.”
To so conservative a frame of mind had the excesses of the French
Revolution brought the most illustrious reformers of that time. And
why is one person to be singled out from among millions, and arraigned
before posterity as a traitor to his opinions only because events
produced on him the effect which they produced on a whole generation?
People who, like Mr. Brothers in the last generation, and Mr. Percival
in this, have been favoured with revelations from heaven, may be quite
independent of the vulgar sources of knowledge. But such poor creatures
as Mackintosh, Dumont, and Bentham, had nothing but observation and
reason to guide them; and they obeyed the guidance of observation and of
reason. How is it in physics? A traveller falls in with a berry which he
has never before seen. He tastes it, and finds it sweet and refreshing.
He praises it, and resolves to introduce it into his own country. But in
a few minutes he is taken violently sick; he is convulsed; he is at
the point of death. He of course changes his opinion, denounces this
delicious food a poison, blames his own folly in tasting it, and
cautions his friends against it. After a long and violent struggle he
recovers, and finds himself much exhausted by his sufferings, but free
from some chronic complaints which had been the torment of his life.
He then changes his opinion again, and pronounces this fruit a very
powerful remedy, which ought to be employed only in extreme cases and
with great caution, but which ought not to be absolutely excluded from
the Pharmacopoeia. And would it not be the height of absurdity to call
such a man fickle and inconsistent, because he had repeatedly altered
his judgment? If he had not altered his judgment, would he have been a
rational being? It was exactly the same with the French Revolution. That
event was a new phaenomenon in politics. Nothing that had gone before
enabled any person to judge with certainty of the course which affairs
might take. At first the effect was the reform of great abuses; and
honest men rejoiced. Then came commotion, proscription, confiscation,
bankruptcy, the assignats, the maximum, civil war, foreign war,
revolutionary tribunals, guillotinades, noyades, fusillades. Yet a
little while, and a military despotism rose out of the confusion, and
menaced the independence of every state in Europe.
And yet again a little while, and the old dynasty returned, followed by
a train of emigrants eager to restore the old abuses. We have now, we
think, the whole before us. We should therefore be justly accused of
levity or insincerity if our language concerning those events were
constantly changing. It is our deliberate opinion that the French
Revolution, in spite of all its crimes and follies, was a great blessing
to mankind. But it was not only natural, but inevitable, that those who
had only seen the first act should be ignorant of the catastrophe,
and should be alternately elated and depressed as the plot went on
disclosing itself to them. A man who had held exactly the same opinion
about the Revolution in 1789, in 1794, in 1804, in 1814, and in 1834,
would have been either a divinely inspired prophet, or an obstinate
fool. Mackintosh was neither. He was simply a wise and good man; and the
change which passed on his mind was a change which passed on the mind
of almost every wise and good man in Europe. In fact, few of his
contemporaries changed so little. The rare moderation and calmness
of his temper preserved him alike from extravagant elation and from
extravagant despondency. He was never a Jacobin. He was never an
Anti-Jacobin. His mind oscillated undoubtedly, but the extreme points
of the oscillation were not very remote. Herein he differed greatly from
some persons of distinguished talents who entered into life at nearly
the same time with him. Such persons we have seen rushing from one wild
extreme to another, out-Paining Paine, out-Castlereaghing Castlereagh,
Pantisocratists, Ultra-Tories, heretics, persecutors, breaking the
old laws against sedition, calling for new and sharper laws against
sedition, writing democratic dramas, writing Laureate odes panegyrising
Marten, panegyrising Laud, consistent in nothing but an intolerance
which in any person would be censurable, but which is altogether
unpardonable in men who, by their own confession, have had such ample
experience of their own fallibility. We readily concede to some of these
persons the praise of eloquence and poetical invention; nor are we
by any means disposed, even where they have been gainers by their
conversion, to question their sincerity. It would be most uncandid to
attribute to sordid motives actions which admit of a less discreditable
explanation. We think that the conduct of these persons has been
precisely what was to be expected from men who were gifted with strong
imagination and quick sensibility, but who were neither accurate
observers nor logical reasoners. It was natural that such men should see
in the victory of the third estate of France the dawn of a new Saturnian
age. It was natural that the rage of their disappointment should be
proportioned to the extravagance of their hopes. Though the direction of
their passions was altered, the violence of those passions was the same.
The force of the rebound was proportioned to the force of the original
impulse. The pendulum swung furiously to the left, because it had been
drawn too far to the right.
We own that nothing gives us so high an idea of the judgment and temper
of Sir James Mackintosh as the manner in which he shaped his course
through those times. Exposed successively to two opposite infections, he
took both in their very mildest form. The constitution of his mind was
such that neither of the diseases which wrought such havoc all round him
could in any serious degree, or for any great length of time, derange
his intellectual health. He, like every honest and enlightened man in
Europe, saw with delight the great awakening of the French nation. Yet
he never, in the season of his warmest enthusiasm, proclaimed doctrines
inconsistent with the safety of property and the just authority of
governments. He, like almost every other honest and enlightened man, was
discouraged and perplexed by the terrible events which followed. Yet he
never in the most gloomy times abandoned the cause of peace, of liberty,
and of toleration. In that great convulsion which overset almost
every other understanding, he was indeed so much shaken that he leaned
sometimes in one direction and sometimes in the other; but he never lost
his balance. The opinions in which he at last reposed, and to which, in
spite of strong temptations, he adhered with a firm, a disinterested,
an ill-requited fidelity, were a just mean between those which he had
defended with youthful ardour and with more than manly prowess against
Mr. Burke, and those to which he had inclined during the darkest and
saddest years in the history of modern Europe. We are much mistaken if
this be the picture either of a weak or of a dishonest mind.
What the political opinions of Sir James Mackintosh were in his later
years is written in the annals of his country. Those annals will
sufficiently refute what the Editor has ventured to assert in the
very advertisement to this work. “Sir James Mackintosh,” says he,
“was avowedly and emphatically a Whig of the Revolution: and since
the agitation of religious liberty and parliamentary reform became
a national movement, the great transaction of 1688 has been more
dispassionately, more correctly, and less highly estimated.” If these
words mean anything, they must mean that the opinions of Sir James
Mackintosh concerning religious liberty and parliamentary reform went
no further than those of the authors of the Revolution; in other words,
that Sir James Mackintosh opposed Catholic Emancipation, and approved of
the old constitution of the House of Commons. The allegation is confuted
by twenty volumes of Parliamentary Debates, nay, by innumerable passages
in the very fragment which this writer has defaced. We will venture to
say that Sir James Mackintosh often did more for religious liberty and
for parliamentary reform in a quarter of an hour than most of those
zealots who are in the habit of depreciating him have done or will do in
the whole course of their lives.
Nothing in the “Memoir” or in the “Continuation of the History” has
struck us so much as the contempt with which the writer thinks fit to
speak of all things that were done before the coming in of the very last
fashions in politics. We think that we have sometimes observed a leaning
towards the same fault in writers of a much higher order of intellect.
We will therefore take this opportunity of making a few remarks on an
error which is, we fear, becoming common, and which appears to us
not only absurd, but as pernicious as almost any error concerning the
transactions of a past age can possibly be.
We shall not, we hope, be suspected of a bigoted attachment to the
doctrines and practices of past generations. Our creed is that the
science of government is an experimental science, and that, like all
other experimental sciences, it is generally in a state of progression.
No man is so obstinate an admirer of the old times as to deny that
medicine, surgery, botany, chemistry, engineering, navigation, are
better understood now than in any former age. We conceive that it is the
same with political science. Like those physical sciences which we have
mentioned, it has always been working itself clearer and clearer, and
depositing impurity after impurity. There was a time when the most
powerful of human intellects were deluded by the gibberish of the
astrologer and the alchemist; and just so there was a time when the
most enlightened and virtuous statesmen thought it the first duty of a
government to persecute heretics, to found monasteries, to make war
on Saracens. But time advances; facts accumulate; doubts arise. Faint
glimpses of truth begin to appear, and shine more and more unto the
perfect day. The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the
first to catch and to reflect the dawn. They are bright, while the
level below is still in darkness. But soon the light, which at first
illuminated only the loftiest eminences, descends on the plain and
penetrates to the deepest valley. First come hints, then fragments of
systems, then defective systems, then complete and harmonious systems.
The sound opinion, held for a time by one bold speculator, becomes the
opinion of a small minority, of a strong minority, of a majority of
mankind. Thus, the great progress goes on, till schoolboys laugh at
the jargon which imposed on Bacon, till country rectors condemn the
illiberality and intolerance of Sir Thomas More.
Seeing these things, seeing that, by the confession of the most
obstinate enemies of innovation, our race has hitherto been almost
constantly advancing in knowledge, and not seeing any reason to believe
that, precisely at the point of time at which we came into the world, a
change took place in the faculties of the human mind, or in the mode
of discovering truth, we are reformers: we are on the side of progress.
From the great advances which European society has made during the last
four centuries, in every species of knowledge, we infer, not that
there is no more room for improvement, but that, in every science which
deserves the name, immense improvements may be confidently expected.
But the very considerations which lead us to look forward with sanguine
hope to the future prevent us from looking back with contempt on the
past We do not flatter ourselves with the notion that we have attained
perfection, and that no more truth remains to be found. We believe that
we are wiser than our ancestors. We believe, also, that our posterity
will be wiser than we. It would be gross injustice in our grandchildren
to talk of us with contempt, merely because they may have surpassed us;
to call Watt a fool, because mechanical powers may be discovered which
may supersede the use of steam; to deride the efforts which have been
made in our time to improve the discipline of prisons, and to enlighten
the minds of the poor, because future philanthropists may devise better
places of confinement than Mr. Bentham’s Panopticon, and better
places of education than Mr. Lancaster’s Schools. As we would have our
descendants judge us, so ought we to judge our fathers. In order to form
a correct estimate of their merits, we ought to place ourselves in their
situation, to put out of our minds, for a time, all that knowledge which
they, however eager in the pursuit of truth, could not have, and which
we, however negligent we may have been, could not help having. It
was not merely difficult, but absolutely impossible, for the best and
greatest of men, two hundred years ago, to be what a very commonplace
person in our days may easily be, and indeed must necessarily be. But it
is too much that the benefactors of mankind, after having been reviled
by the dunces of their own generation for going too far, should be
reviled by the dunces of the next generation for not going far enough.
The truth lies between two absurd extremes. On one side is the bigot who
pleads the wisdom of our ancestors as a reason for not doing what they
in our place would be the first to do; who opposes the Reform Bill
because Lord Somers did not see the necessity of Parliamentary Reform;
who would have opposed the Revolution because Ridley and Cranmer
professed boundless submission to the royal prerogative; and who would
have opposed the Reformation because the Fitzwalters and Mareschals,
whose seals are set to the Great Charter, were devoted adherents to the
Church of Rome. On the other side is the sciolist who speaks with
scorn of the Great Charter because it did not reform the Church of
the Reformation, because it did not limit the prerogative; and of the
Revolution, because it did not purify the House of Commons. The former
of these errors we have often combated, and shall always be ready to
combat. The latter, though rapidly spreading, has not, we think, yet
come under our notice. The former error bears directly on practical
questions, and obstructs useful reforms. It may, therefore, seem to
be, and probably is, the more mischievous of the two. But the latter
is equally absurd; it is at least equally symptomatic of a shallow
understanding and an unamiable temper: and, if it should ever become
general, it will, we are satisfied, produce very prejudicial effects.
Its tendency is to deprive the benefactors of mankind of their honest
fame, and to put the best and the worst men of past times on the same
level. The author of a great reformation is almost always unpopular in
his own age. He generally passes his life in disquiet and danger. It is
therefore for the interest of the human race that the memory of such men
should be had in reverence, and that they should be supported against
the scorn and hatred of their contemporaries by the hope of leaving a
great and imperishable name. To go on the forlorn hope of truth is a
service of peril. Who will undertake it, if it be not also a service of
honour? It is easy enough, after the ramparts are carried, to find men
to plant the flag on the highest tower. The difficulty is to find men
who are ready to go first into the breach; and it would be bad policy
indeed to insult their remains because they fell in the breach, and did
not live to penetrate to the citadel.
Now here we have a book which is by no means a favourable specimen of
the English literature of the nineteenth century, a book indicating
neither extensive knowledge nor great powers of reasoning. And, if we
were to judge by the pity with which the writer speaks of the great
statesmen and philosophers of a former age, we should guess that he was
the author of the most original and important inventions in political
science. Yet not so: for men who are able to make discoveries are
generally disposed to make allowances. Men who are eagerly pressing
forward in pursuit of truth are grateful to every one who has cleared an
inch of the way for them. It is, for the most part, the man who has
just capacity enough to pick up and repeat the commonplaces which
are fashionable in his own time who looks with disdain on the very
intellects to which it is owing that those commonplaces are not still
considered as startling paradoxes or damnable heresies. This writer is
just the man who, if he had lived in the seventeenth century, would
have devoutly believed that the Papists burned London, who would have
swallowed the whole of Oates’s story about the forty thousand soldiers,
disguised as pilgrims, who were to meet in Gallicia, and sail thence
to invade England, who would have carried a Protestant flail under his
coat, and who would have been angry if the story of the warming-pan had
been questioned. It is quite natural that such a man should speak with
contempt of the great reformers of that time, because they did not know
some things which he never would have known but for the salutary effects
of their exertions. The men to whom we owe it that we have a House of
Commons are sneered at because they did not suffer the debates of the
House to be published. The authors of the Toleration Act are treated
as bigots, because they did not go the whole length of Catholic
Emancipation. Just so we have heard a baby, mounted on the shoulders of
its father, cry out, “How much taller I am than Papa!”
This gentleman can never want matter for pride, if he finds it so
easily. He may boast of an indisputable superiority to all the greatest
men of all past ages. He can read and write: Homer probably did not
know a letter. He has been taught that the earth goes round the sun:
Archimedes held that the sun went round the earth. He is aware that
there is a place called New Holland: Columbus and Gama went to their
graves in ignorance of the fact. He has heard of the Georgium Sidus:
Newton was ignorant of the existence of such a planet. He is acquainted
with the use of gunpowder: Hannibal and Caesar won their victories with
sword and spear. We submit, however, that this is not the way in which
men are to be estimated. We submit that a wooden spoon of our day would
not be justified in calling Galileo and Napier blockheads, because they
never heard of the differential calculus. We submit that Caxton’s press
in Westminster Abbey, rude as it is, ought to be looked at with quite as
much respect as the best constructed machinery that ever, in our
time, impressed the clearest type on the finest paper. Sydenham first
discovered that the cool regimen succeeded best in cases of small-pox.
By this discovery he saved the lives of hundreds of thousands; and we
venerate his memory for it, though he never heard of inoculation. Lady
Mary Montague brought inoculation into use; and we respect her for it,
though she never heard of vaccination. Jenner introduced vaccination; we
admire him for it, and we shall continue to admire him for it, although
some still safer and more agreeable preservative should be discovered.
It is thus that we ought to judge of the events and the men of other
times. They were behind us. It could not be otherwise. But the question
with respect to them is not where they were, but which way they were
going. Were their faces set in the right or in the wrong direction? Were
they in the front or in the rear of their generation? Did they exert
themselves to help onward the great movement of the human race, or to
stop it? This is not charity, but simple justice and common sense. It is
the fundamental law of the world in which we live that truth shall grow,
first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. A
person who complains of the men of 1688 for not having been men of 1835
might just as well complain of a projectile for describing a parabola,
or of quicksilver for being heavier than water.
Undoubtedly we ought to look at ancient transactions by the light
of modern knowledge. Undoubtedly it is among the first duties of
a historian to point out the faults of the eminent men of former
generations. There are no errors which are so likely to be drawn into
precedent, and therefore none which it is so necessary to expose, as the
errors of persons who have a just title to the gratitude and admiration
of posterity. In politics, as in religion, there are devotees who show
their reverence for a departed saint by converting his tomb into a
sanctuary for crime. Receptacles of wickedness are suffered to remain
undisturbed in the neighbourhood of the church which glories in the
relics of some martyred apostle. Because he was merciful, his bones give
security to assassins. Because he was chaste, the precinct of his temple
is filled with licensed stews. Privileges of an equally absurd kind
have been set up against the jurisdiction of political philosophy. Vile
abuses cluster thick round every glorious event, round every venerable
name; and this evil assuredly calls for vigorous measures of literary
police. But the proper course is to abate the nuisance without defacing
the shrine, to drive out the gangs of thieves and prostitutes without
doing foul and cowardly wrong to the ashes of the illustrious dead.
In this respect, two historians of our own time may be proposed as
models, Sir James Mackintosh and Mr. Mill. Differing in most things, in
this they closely resemble each other. Sir James is lenient. Mr. Mill
is severe. But neither of them ever omits, in the apportioning of praise
and of censure, to make ample allowance for the state of political
science and political morality in former ages. In the work before
us, Sir James Mackintosh speaks with just respect of the Whigs of the
Revolution, while he never fails to condemn the conduct of that party
towards the members of the Church of Rome. His doctrines are the liberal
and benevolent doctrines of the nineteenth century. But he never forgets
that the men whom he is describing were men of the seventeenth century.
From Mr. Mill this indulgence, or, to speak more properly, this justice,
was less to be expected. That gentleman, in some of his works, appears
to consider politics not as an experimental, and therefore a progressive
science, but as a science of which all the difficulties may be resolved
by short synthetical arguments drawn from truths of the most vulgar
notoriety. Were this opinion well founded, the people of one generation
would have little or no advantage over those of another generation.
But though Mr. Mill, in some of his Essays, has been thus misled, as we
conceive, by a fondness for neat and precise forms of demonstration,
it would be gross injustice not to admit that, in his History, he has
employed a very different method of investigation with eminent ability
and success. We know no writer who takes so much pleasure in the truly
useful, noble and philosophical employment of tracing the progress
of sound opinions from their embryo state to their full maturity. He
eagerly culls from old despatches and minutes every expression in which
he can discern the imperfect germ of any great truth which has since
been fully developed. He never fails to bestow praise on those who,
though far from coming up to his standard of perfection, yet rose in a
small degree above the common level of their contemporaries. It is
thus that the annals of past times ought to be written. It is thus,
especially, that the annals of our own country ought to be written.
The history of England is emphatically the history of progress. It is
the history of a constant movement of the public mind, of a constant
change in the institutions of a great society. We see that society, at
the beginning of the twelfth century, in a state more miserable than the
state in which the most degraded nations of the East now are. We see
it subjected to the tyranny of a handful of armed foreigners. We see a
strong distinction of caste separating the victorious Norman from the
vanquished Saxon. We see the great body of the population in a state
of personal slavery. We see the most debasing and cruel superstition
exercising boundless dominion over the most elevated and benevolent
minds. We see the multitude sunk in brutal ignorance, and the studious
few engaged in acquiring what did not deserve the name of knowledge. In
the course of seven centuries the wretched and degraded race have become
the greatest and most highly civilised people that ever the world
saw, have spread their dominion over every quarter of the globe, have
scattered the seeds of mighty empires and republics over vast continents
of which no dim intimation had ever reached Ptolemy or Strabo, have
created a maritime power which would annihilate in a quarter of an hour
the navies of Tyre, Athens, Carthage, Venice, and Genoa together,
have carried the science of healing, the means of locomotion and
correspondence, every mechanical art, every manufacture, everything that
promotes the convenience of life, to a perfection which our ancestors
would have thought magical, have produced a literature which may boast
of works not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to
us, have discovered the laws which regulate the motions of the heavenly
bodies, have speculated with exquisite subtilty on the operations of the
human mind, have been the acknowledged leaders of the human race in the
career of political improvement. The history of England is the history
of this great change in the moral, intellectual, and physical state of
the inhabitants of our own island. There is much amusing and instructive
episodical matter; but this is the main action. To us, we will own,
nothing is so interesting and delightful as to contemplate the steps by
which the England of Domesday Book, the England of the Curfew and the
Forest Laws, the England of crusaders, monks, schoolmen, astrologers,
serfs, outlaws, became the England which we know and love, the classic
ground of liberty and philosophy, the school of all knowledge, the mart
of all trade. The Charter of Henry Beauclerk, the Great Charter, the
first assembling of the House of Commons, the extinction of personal
slavery, the separation from the See of Rome, the Petition of Right, the
Habeas Corpus Act, the Revolution, the establishment of the liberty of
unlicensed printing, the abolition of religious disabilities, the reform
of the representative system, all these seem to us to be the successive
stages of one great revolution--nor can we fully comprehend any one of
these memorable events unless we look at it in connection with those
which preceded, and with those which followed it. Each of those great
and ever-memorable struggles, Saxon against Norman, Villein against
Lord, Protestant against Papist, Roundhead against Cavalier, Dissenter
against Churchman, Manchester against Old Sarum, was, in its own order
and season, a struggle, on the result of which were staked the dearest
interests of the human race; and every man who, in the contest which, in
his time, divided our country, distinguished himself on the right side,
is entitled to our gratitude and respect.
Whatever the editor of this book may think, those persons who estimate
most correctly the value of the improvements which have recently
been made in our institutions are precisely the persons who are least
disposed to speak slightingly of what was done in 1688. Such men
consider the Revolution as a reform, imperfect indeed, but still most
beneficial to the English people and to the human race, as a reform,
which has been the fruitful parent of reforms, as a reform, the happy
effects of which are at this moment felt, not only throughout our own
country, but in half the monarchies of Europe, and in the depth of the
forests of Ohio. We shall be pardoned, we hope, if we call the attention
of our readers to the causes and to the consequences of that great
event.
We said that the history of England is the history of progress; and,
when we take a comprehensive view of it, it is so. But, when examined in
small separate portions, it may with more propriety be called a history
of actions and reactions. We have often thought that the motion of the
public mind in our country resembles that of the sea when the tide is
rising. Each successive wave rushes forward, breaks, and rolls back; but
the great flood is steadily coming in. A person who looked on the waters
only for a moment might fancy that they were retiring. A person who
looked on them only for five minutes might fancy that they were rushing
capriciously to and fro. But when he keeps his eye on them for a
quarter of an hour, and sees one seamark disappear after another, it is
impossible for him to doubt of the general direction in which the ocean
is moved. Just such has been the course of events in England. In the
history of the national mind, which is, in truth, the history of
the nation, we must carefully distinguish between that recoil which
regularly follows every advance and a great general ebb. If we take
short intervals, if we compare 1640 and 1660, 1680 and 1685, 1708 and
1712, 1782 and 1794, we find a retrogression. But if we take centuries,
if, for example, we compare 1794 with 1660 or with 1685, we cannot doubt
in which direction society is proceeding.
The interval which elapsed between the Restoration and the Revolution
naturally divides itself into three periods. The first extends from 1660
to 1678, the second from 1678 to 1681, the third from 1681 to 1688.
In 1660 the whole nation was mad with loyal excitement. If we had to
choose a lot from among all the multitude of those which men have drawn
since the beginning of the world, we would select that of Charles the
Second on the day of his return. He was in a situation in which the
dictates of ambition coincided with those of benevolence, in which it
was easier to be virtuous than to be wicked, to be loved than to be
hated, to earn pure and imperishable glory than to become infamous. For
once the road of goodness was a smooth descent. He had done nothing
to merit the affection of his people. But they had paid him in advance
without measure. Elizabeth, after the destruction of the Armada, or
after the abolition of monopolies, had not excited a thousandth part of
the enthusiasm with which the young exile was welcomed home. He was
not, like Lewis the Eighteenth, imposed on his subjects by foreign
conquerors; nor did he, like Lewis the Eighteenth, come back to a
country which had undergone a complete change. The House of Bourbon
was placed in Paris as a trophy of the victory of the European
confederation. The return of the ancient princes was inseparably
associated in the public mind with the cession of extensive provinces,
with the payment of an immense tribute, with the devastation of
flourishing departments, with the occupation of the kingdom by hostile
armies, with the emptiness of those niches in which the gods of Athens
and Rome had been the objects of a new idolatry, with the nakedness
of those walls on which the Transfiguration had shone with light as
glorious as that which overhung Mount Tabor. They came back to a land
in which they could recognise nothing. The seven sleepers of the legend,
who closed their eyes when the Pagans were persecuting the Christians,
and woke when the Christians were persecuting each other, did not find
themselves in a world more completely new to them. Twenty years had done
the work of twenty generations. Events had come thick. Men had lived
fast. The old institutions and the old feelings had been torn up by the
roots. There was a new Church founded and endowed by the usurper; a new
nobility whose titles were taken from fields of battle, disastrous to
the ancient line; a new chivalry whose crosses had been won by exploits
which had seemed likely to make the banishment of the emigrants
perpetual. A new code was administered by a new magistracy. A new body
of proprietors held the soil by a new tenure. The most ancient local
distinctions had been effaced. The most familiar names had become
obsolete. There was no longer a Normandy or a Burgundy, a Brittany and a
Guienne. The France of Lewis the Sixteenth had passed away as completely
as one of the Preadamite worlds. Its fossil remains might now and then
excite curiosity. But it was as impossible to put life into the old
institutions as to animate the skeletons which are imbedded in the
depths of primeval strata. It was as absurd to think that France could
again be placed under the feudal system, as that our globe could be
overrun by Mammoths. The revolution in the laws and in the form of
government was but an outward sign of that mightier revolution which
had taken place in the heart and brain of the people, and which affected
every transaction of life, trading, farming, studying, marrying, and
giving in marriage. The French whom the emigrant prince had to govern
were no more like the French of his youth, than the French of his youth
were like the French of the Jacquerie. He came back to a people who knew
not him nor his house, to a people to whom a Bourbon was no more than
a Carlovingian or a Merovingian. He might substitute the white flag for
the tricolor; he might put lilies in the place of bees; he might order
the initials of the Emperor to be carefully effaced. But he could turn
his eyes nowhere without meeting some object which reminded him that he
was a stranger in the palace of his fathers. He returned to a country in
which even the passing traveller is every moment reminded that there has
lately been a great dissolution and reconstruction of the social system.
To win the hearts of a people under such circumstances would have been
no easy task even for Henry the Fourth.
In the English Revolution the case was altogether different. Charles was
not imposed on his countrymen, but sought by them. His restoration was
not attended by any circumstance which could inflict a wound on their
national pride. Insulated by our geographical position, insulated by
our character, we had fought out our quarrels and effected our
reconciliation among ourselves. Our great internal questions had never
been mixed up with the still greater question of national independence.
The political doctrines of the Roundheads were not, like those of the
French philosophers, doctrines of universal application. Our ancestors,
for the most part, took their stand, not on a general theory, but on the
particular constitution of the realm. They asserted the rights, not of
men, but of Englishmen. Their doctrines therefore were not contagious;
and, had it been otherwise, no neighbouring country was then susceptible
of the contagion. The language in which our discussions were generally
conducted was scarcely known even to a single man of letters out of the
islands. Our local situation made it almost impossible that we should
effect great conquests on the Continent. The kings of Europe had,
therefore, no reason to fear that their subjects would follow the
example of the English Puritans, and looked with indifference, perhaps
with complacency, on the death of the monarch and the abolition of the
monarchy. Clarendon complains bitterly of their apathy. But we believe
that this apathy was of the greatest service to the royal cause. If a
French or Spanish army had invaded England, and if that army had been
cut to pieces, as we have no doubt that it would have been, on the
first day on which it came face to face with the soldiers of Preston
and Dunbar, with Colonel Fight-the-good-Fight, and Captain
Smite-them-hip-and-thigh, the House of Cromwell would probably now
have been reigning in England. The nation would have forgotten all the
misdeeds of the man who had cleared the soil of foreign invaders.
Happily for Charles, no European state, even when at war with the
Commonwealth, chose to bind up its cause with that of the wanderers who
were playing in the garrets of Paris and Cologne at being princes and
chancellors. Under the administration of Cromwell, England was more
respected and dreaded than any power in Christendom and, even under
the ephemeral governments which followed his death, no foreign state
ventured to treat her with contempt. Thus Charles came back not as a
mediator between his people and a victorious enemy, but as a mediator
between internal factions. He found the Scotch Covenanters and the Irish
Papists alike subdued. He found Dunkirk and Jamaica added to the empire.
He was heir to the conquest and to the influence of the able usurper who
had excluded him.
The old government of England, as it had been far milder than the
old government of France, had been far less violently and completely
subverted. The national institutions had been spared, or imperfectly
eradicated. The laws had undergone little alteration. The tenures of the
soil were still to be learned from Littleton and Coke. The Great
Charter was mentioned with as much reverence in the parliaments of
the Commonwealth as in those of any earlier or of any later age. A
new Confession of Faith and a new ritual had been introduced into the
church. But the bulk of the ecclesiastical property still remained. The
colleges still held their estates. The parson still received his
tithes. The Lords had, at a crisis of great excitement, been excluded by
military violence from their House; but they retained their titles
and an ample share of the public veneration. When a nobleman made his
appearance in the House of Commons he was received with ceremonious
respect. Those few Peers who consented to assist at the inauguration
of the Protector were placed next to himself, and the most honourable
offices of the day were assigned to them. We learn from the debates of
Richard’s Parliament how strong a hold the old aristocracy had on the
affections of the people. One member of the House of Commons went so
far as to say that, unless their Lordships were peaceably restored, the
country might soon be convulsed by a war of the Barons. There was indeed
no great party hostile to the Upper House. There was nothing exclusive
in the constitution of that body. It was regularly recruited from among
the most distinguished of the country gentlemen, the lawyers, and the
clergy. The most powerful nobles of the century which preceded the civil
war, the Duke of Somerset, the Duke of Northumberland, Lord Seymour of
Sudeley, the Earl of Leicester, Lord Burleigh, the Earl of Salisbury,
the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Strafford, had all been commoners,
and had all raised themselves, by courtly arts or by parliamentary
talents, not merely to seats in the House of Lords, but to the first
influence in that assembly. Nor had the general conduct of the Peers
been such as to make them unpopular. They had not, indeed, in opposing
arbitrary measures, shown so much eagerness and pertinacity as the
Commons. But still they had opposed those measures. They had, at the
beginning of the discontents, a common interest with the people. If
Charles had succeeded in his scheme of governing without parliaments,
the consequence of the Peers would have been grievously diminished. If
he had been able to raise taxes by his own authority, the estates of the
Peers would have been as much at his mercy as those of the merchants or
the farmers. If he had obtained the power of imprisoning his subjects
at his pleasure, a Peer ran far greater risk of incurring the royal
displeasure, and of being accommodated with apartments in the Tower,
than any city trader or country squire. Accordingly Charles found that
the Great Council of Peers which he convoked at York would do nothing
for him. In the most useful reforms which were made during the first
session of the Long Parliament, the Peers concurred heartily with the
Lower House; and a large minority of the English nobles stood by the
popular side through the first years of the war. At Edgehill, Newbury,
Marston, and Naseby, the armies of the Parliament were commanded
by members of the aristocracy. It was not forgotten that a Peer
had imitated the example of Hampden in refusing the payment of the
ship-money, or that a Peer had been among the six members of the
legislature whom Charles illegally impeached.
Thus the old constitution of England was without difficulty
re-established; and of all the parts of the old constitution the
monarchical part was, at the time, dearest to the body of the people.
It had been injudiciously depressed, and it was in consequence unduly
exalted. From the day when Charles the First became a prisoner had
commenced a reaction in favour of his person and of his office. From the
day when the axe fell on his neck before the windows of his palace, that
reaction became rapid and violent. At the Restoration it had attained
such a point that it could go no further. The people were ready to place
at the mercy of their Sovereign all their most ancient and precious
rights. The most servile doctrines were publicly avowed. The most
moderate and constitutional opposition was condemned. Resistance was
spoken of with more horror than any crime which a human being can
commit. The Commons were more eager than the King himself to avenge the
wrongs of the royal house; more desirous than the bishops themselves to
restore the church; more ready to give money than the ministers to ask
for it.
They abrogated the excellent law passed in the first session of the Long
Parliament, with the general consent of all honest men, to insure the
frequent meeting of the great council of the nation. They might probably
have been induced to go further, and to restore the High Commission and
the Star-Chamber. All the contemporary accounts represent the nation
as in a state of hysterical excitement, of drunken joy. In the immense
multitude which crowded the beach at Dover, and bordered the road
along which the King travelled to London, there was not one who was not
weeping. Bonfires blazed. Bells jingled. The streets were thronged at
night by boon-companions, who forced all the passers-by to swallow on
bended knees brimming glasses to the health of his Most Sacred Majesty,
and the damnation of Red-nosed Noll. That tenderness to the fallen which
has, through many generations been a marked feature of the national
character, was for a time hardly discernible. All London crowded to
shout and laugh round the gibbet where hung the rotten remains of a
prince who had made England the dread of the world, who had been the
chief founder of her maritime greatness, and of her colonial empire, who
had conquered Scotland and Ireland, who had humbled Holland and Spain,
the terror of whose name had been as a guard round every English
traveller in remote countries, and round every Protestant congregation
in the heart of Catholic empires. When some of those brave and honest
though misguided men who had sate in judgment on their King were dragged
on hurdles to a death of prolonged torture, their last prayers were
interrupted by the hisses and execrations of thousands.
Such was England in 1660. In 1678 the whole face of things had changed.
At the former of those epochs eighteen years of commotion had made the
majority of the people ready to buy repose at any price. At the latter
epoch eighteen years of misgovernment had made the same majority
desirous to obtain security for their liberties at any risk. The fury
of their returning loyalty had spent itself in its first outbreak. In
a very few months they had hanged and half-hanged, quartered and
embowelled enough to satisfy them. The Roundhead party seemed to be not
merely overcome, but too much broken and scattered ever to rally again.
Then commenced the reflux of public opinion. The nation began to find
out to what a man it had intrusted, without conditions, all its dearest
interests, on what a man it had lavished all its fondest affection. On
the ignoble nature of the restored exile, adversity had exhausted all
her discipline in vain. He had one immense advantage over most other
princes. Though born in the purple, he was no better acquainted with the
vicissitudes of life and the diversities of character than most of his
subjects. He had known restraint, danger, penury, and dependence. He
had often suffered from ingratitude, insolence, and treachery. He had
received many signal proofs of faithful and heroic attachment. He had
seen, if ever man saw, both sides of human nature. But only one side
remained in his memory. He had learned only to despise and to distrust
his species, to consider integrity in men, and modesty in women, as mere
acting; nor did he think it worth while to keep his opinion to himself.
He was incapable of friendship; yet he was perpetually led by favourites
without being in the smallest degree duped by them. He knew that their
regard to his interests was all simulated; but, from a certain easiness
which had no connection with humanity, he submitted, half-laughing at
himself, to be made the tool of any woman whose person attracted him, or
of any man whose tattle diverted him. He thought little and cared less
about religion. He seems to have passed his life in dawdling suspense
between Hobbism and Popery. He was crowned in his youth with the
Covenant in his hand; he died at last with the Host sticking in his
throat; and during most of the intermediate years, was occupied in
persecuting both Covenanters and Catholics. He was not a tyrant from
the ordinary motives. He valued power for its own sake little, and fame
still less. He does not appear to have been vindictive, or to have found
any pleasing excitement in cruelty. What he wanted was to be amused, to
get through the twenty-four hours pleasantly without sitting down to dry
business. Sauntering was, as Sheffield expresses it, the true Sultana
Queen of his Majesty’s affections. A sitting in council would have been
insupportable to him if the Duke of Buckingham had not been there to
make mouths at the Chancellor. It has been said, and is highly probable,
that in his exile he was quite disposed to sell his rights to Cromwell
for a good round sum. To the last his only quarrel with his Parliaments
was that they often gave him trouble and would not always give him
money. If there was a person for whom he felt a real regard, that person
was his brother. If there was a point about which he really entertained
a scruple of conscience or of honour, that point was the descent of
the crown. Yet he was willing to consent to the Exclusion Bill for six
hundred thousand pounds; and the negotiation was broken off only because
he insisted on being paid beforehand. To do him justice, his temper was
good; his manners agreeable; his natural talents above mediocrity. But
he was sensual, frivolous, false, and cold-hearted, beyond almost any
prince of whom history makes mention.
Under the government of such a man, the English people could not be long
in recovering from the intoxication of loyalty. They were then, as
they are still, a brave, proud, and high-spirited race, unaccustomed to
defeat, to shame, or to servitude. The splendid administration of Oliver
had taught them to consider their country as a match for the greatest
empire of the earth, as the first of maritime powers, as the head of
the Protestant interest. Though, in the day of their affectionate
enthusiasm, they might sometimes extol the royal prerogative in terms
which would have better become the courtiers of Aurungzebe, they were
not men whom it was quite safe to take at their word. They were much
more perfect in the theory than in the practice of passive obedience.
Though they might deride the austere manners and scriptural phrases of
the Puritans they were still at heart a religious people. The majority
saw no great sin in field-sports, stage-plays, promiscuous dancing,
cards, fairs, starch, or false hair. But gross profaneness and
licentiousness were regarded with general horror; and the Catholic
religion was held in utter detestation by nine-tenths of the middle
class.
Such was the nation which, awaking from its rapturous trance, found
itself sold to a foreign, a despotic, a Popish court, defeated on its
own seas and rivers by a state of far inferior resources and placed
under the rule of pandars and buffoons. Our ancestors saw the best and
ablest divines of the age turned out of their benefices by hundreds.
They saw the prisons filled with men guilty of no other crime than
that of worshipping God according to the fashion generally prevailing
throughout Protestant Europe. They saw a Popish Queen on the throne,
and a Popish heir on the steps of the throne. They saw unjust aggression
followed by feeble war, and feeble war ending in disgraceful peace. They
saw a Dutch fleet riding triumphant in the Thames. They saw the Triple
Alliance broken, the Exchequer shut up, the public credit shaken, the
arms of England employed, in shameful subordination to France, against
a country which seemed to be the last asylum of civil and religious
liberty. They saw Ireland discontented, and Scotland in rebellion. They
saw, meantime, Whitehall swarming with sharpers and courtesans.
They saw harlot after harlot, and bastard after bastard, not only raised
to the highest honours of the peerage, but supplied out of the spoils of
the honest, industrious, and ruined public creditor, with ample means of
supporting the new dignity. The government became more odious every day.
Even in the bosom of that very House of Commons which had been elected
by the nation in the ecstasy of its penitence, of its joy, and of its
hope, an opposition sprang up and became powerful. Loyalty which
had been proof against all the disasters of the civil war, which had
survived the routs of Naseby and Worcester, which had never flinched
from sequestration and exile, which the Protector could never intimidate
or seduce, began to fail in this last and hardest trial. The storm had
long been gathering. At length it burst with a fury which threatened the
whole frame of society with dissolution.
When the general election of January 1679 took place, the nation had
retraced the path which it had been describing from 1640 to 1660. It was
again in the same mood in which it had been when, after twelve years
of misgovernment, the Long Parliament assembled. In every part of the
country, the name of courtier had become a by-word of reproach. The old
warriors of the Covenant again ventured out of those retreats in which
they had, at the time of the Restoration, hidden themselves from the
insults of the triumphant Malignants, and in which, during twenty years,
they had preserved in full vigour
“The unconquerable will
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
With courage never to submit or yield,
And what is else not to be overcome.”
Then were again seen in the streets faces which called up strange
and terrible recollections of the days when the saints, with the high
praises of God in their mouths, and a two-edged sword in their hands,
had bound kings with chains, and nobles with links of iron. Then were
again heard voices which had shouted “Privilege” by the coach of Charles
the First in the time of his tyranny, and had called for “justice” in
Westminister Hall on the day of his trial. It has been the fashion to
represent the excitement of this period as the effect of the Popish
plot. To us it seems clear that the Popish plot was rather the effect
than the cause of the general agitation. It was not the disease, but a
symptom, though, like many other symptoms, it aggravated the severity of
the disease. In 1660 or 1661 it would have been utterly out of the power
of such men as Oates or Bedloe to give any serious disturbance to the
Government. They would have been laughed at, pilloried, well pelted,
soundly whipped, and speedily forgotten. In 1678 or 1679 there would
have been an outbreak if those men had never been born. For years things
had been steadily tending to such a consummation. Society was one vast
mass of combustible matter. No mass so vast and so combustible ever
waited long for a spark.
Rational men, we suppose, are now fully agreed that by far the greater
part, if not the whole, of Oates’s story was a pure fabrication. It is
indeed highly probable that, during his intercourse with the Jesuits,
he may have heard much wild talk about the best means of re-establishing
the Catholic religion in England, and that from some of the absurd
daydreams of the zealots with whom he then associated he may have taken
hints for his narrative. But we do not believe that he was privy to
anything which deserved the name of conspiracy. And it is quite certain
that, if there be any small portion of the truth in his evidence, that
portion is so deeply buried in falsehood that no human skill can now
effect a separation. We must not, however, forget, that we see his story
by the light of much information which his contemporaries did not at
first possess. We have nothing to say for the witnesses, but something
in mitigation to offer on behalf of the public. We own that the
credulity which the nation showed on that occasion seems to us, though
censurable indeed, yet not wholly inexcusable.
Our ancestors knew, from the experience of several generations at home
and abroad, how restless and encroaching was the disposition of the
Church of Rome. The heir-apparent of the crown was a bigoted member of
that church. The reigning King seemed far more inclined to show favour
to that church than to the Presbyterians. He was the intimate ally,
or rather the hired servant, of a powerful King, who had already given
proofs of his determination to tolerate within his dominions no other
religion than that of Rome. The Catholics had begun to talk a bolder
language than formerly, and to anticipate the restoration of their
worship in all its ancient dignity and splendour. At this juncture,
it is rumoured that a Popish Plot has been discovered. A distinguished
Catholic is arrested on suspicion. It appears that he has destroyed
almost all his papers. A few letters, however, have escaped the flames;
and these letters are found to contain much alarming matter, strange
expressions about subsidies from France, allusions to a vast scheme
which would “give the greatest blow to the Protestant religion that it
had ever received,” and which “would utterly subdue a pestilent heresy.”
It was natural that those who saw these expressions, in letters which
had been overlooked, should suspect that there was some horrible
villainy in those which had been carefully destroyed. Such was the
feeling of the House of Commons: “Question, question, Coleman’s
letters!” was the cry which drowned the voices of the minority.
Just after the discovery of these papers, a magistrate who had
been distinguished by his independent spirit, and who had taken the
deposition of the informer, is found murdered, under circumstances which
make it almost incredible that he should have fallen either by robbers
or by his own hands. Many of our readers can remember the state of
London just after the murders of Marr and Williams, the terror which
was on every face, the careful barring of doors, the providing of
blunderbusses and watchmen’s rattles. We know of a shopkeeper who on
that occasion sold three hundred rattles in about ten hours. Those who
remember that panic may be able to form some notion of the state of
England after the death of Godfrey. Indeed, we must say that, after
having read and weighed all the evidence now extant on that mysterious
subject, we incline to the opinion that he was assassinated, and
assassinated by Catholics, not assuredly by Catholics of the least
weight or note, but by some of those crazy and vindictive fanatics who
may be found in every large sect, and who are peculiarly likely to
be found in a persecuted sect. Some of the violent Cameronians had
recently, under similar exasperation, committed similar crimes.
It was natural that there should be a panic; and it was natural that
the people should, in a panic, be unreasonable and credulous. It must
be remembered also that they had not at first, as we have, the means of
comparing the evidence which was given on different trials. They were
not aware of one tenth part of the contradictions and absurdities which
Oates had committed. The blunders, for example, into which he fell
before the Council, his mistake about the person of Don John of Austria,
and about the situation of the Jesuits’ College at Paris, were not
publicly known. He was a bad man; but the spies and deserters by whom
governments are informed of conspiracies axe generally bad men. His
story was strange and romantic; but it was not more strange and romantic
than a well-authenticated Popish plot, which some few people then living
might remember, the Gunpowder treason. Oates’s account of the burning of
London was in itself not more improbable than the project of blowing up
King, Lords, and Commons, a project which had not only been entertained
by very distinguished Catholics, but which had very narrowly missed of
success. As to the design on the King’s person, all the world knew that,
within a century, two kings of France and a prince of Orange had been
murdered by Catholics, purely from religious enthusiasm, that Elizabeth
had been in constant danger of a similar fate, and that such attempts,
to say the least, had not been discouraged by the highest authority of
the Church of Rome. The characters of some of the accused persons stood
high; but so did that of Anthony Babington, and that of Everard Digby.
Those who suffered denied their guilt to the last; but no persons
versed in criminal proceedings would attach any importance to this
circumstance. It was well known also that the most distinguished
Catholic casuists had written largely in defence of regicide, of mental
reservation, and of equivocation. It was not quite impossible that men
whose minds had been nourished with the writings of such casuists might
think themselves justified in denying a charge which, if acknowledged,
would bring great scandal on the Church. The trials of the accused
Catholics were exactly like all the state trials of those days; that is
to say, as infamous as they could be. They were neither fairer nor less
fair than those of Algernon Sydney, of Rosewell, of Cornish, of all the
unhappy men, in short, whom a predominant party brought to what was
then facetiously called justice. Till the Revolution purified our
institutions and our manners, a state trial was merely a murder preceded
by the uttering of certain gibberish and the performance of certain
mummeries.