and crushed the seditions of the sects, had increased the commercial
prosperity of the three kingdoms. Wealth poured in at all the ports,
and was rapidly diffused over the land; internal improvements kept
pace with foreign enterprise; and the England which long ago had been
too rich to be arbitrarily governed was now again too rich to be
kept in durance by the sour-faced hypocrisies of the Puritans. Those
lank-haired gentlemen, whose conduct had not quite answered to the
self-denying proclamations with which they had begun, were no longer
able to persuade the well-to-do citizen, and the high-waged mechanic,
and the prosperous farmer, that religion consisted in speaking through
the nose and forswearing all innocent enjoyment. The great battle
had been fought, and the fruits of it, they thought, were secure.
Were people to be debarred from social meetings and merry-makings at
Christmas, and junketings at fairs, by act of Parliament? Acts of
Parliament would first have been required strong enough to do away with
youth and health, and the power of admiring beauty, and the hopes of
marriage. [A.D. 1641-49.] The troubles had lasted seven or eight years;
and all through that period, and for some time before, while the thick
cloud was gathering, all gayety had disappeared from the land. But
by the middle of Cromwell's time there was a new generation, in the
first flush of youth,--lads and lasses who had been too young to know
any thing of the dark days of Laud and Wentworth. They were twenty
years of age now. Were they to have no cakes and ale because their
elders were so prodigiously virtuous? They had many years of weary
restraint and formalism to make up for, and in 1660 the accumulated
tide of joyousness and delight burst all barriers. A flood of dancing
and revelry, and utter abandonment to happiness, spread over the
whole country; and merriest of the dancers, loudest of the revellers,
happiest of the emancipated, was the young and brilliant king. Never
since the old times of the Feasts of Fools and the gaudy processions of
the Carnival had there been such a riotous jubilee as inaugurated the
Restoration. The reaction against Puritanism carried the nation almost
beyond Christianity and landed it in heathenism again. The saturnalia
of Rome were renewed in the banquetings of St. James's. Nothing in
those first days of relaxation seemed real. King and courtiers and
cavaliers in courtly palaces, and enthusiastic townsfolk and madly
loyal husbandmen, seemed like mummers at a play; and it was not till
the candles were burned out, and the scenes grew dingy, and daylight
poured upon that ghastly imitation of enjoyment, that England came
to its sober senses again. Then it saw how false was the parody it
had been playing. It had not been happy; it had only been drunk; and
already, while Charles was in the gloss of his recovered crown, the
second reaction began. Cromwell became respectable by comparison with
the sensual debauchee who sold the dignity of his country for a little
present enjoyment and soothed the reproaches of his people with a joke.
Give us a Man to rule over us, the English said, and not a sayer of
witty sayings and a juggler with such sleight of hand. And yet the
example of the court was so contagious, and the fashion of enjoyment
so wide-spread, that on the surface every thing appeared prosperous
and happy. The stern realities of the first recusants had been so
travestied by the exaggerated imitation of their successors that no
faith was placed in the serious earnestness of man or woman. Frivolity
was therefore adopted as a mark of sense; and if the popular literature
of a period is to be accepted as a mirror held up to show the time
its image, the old English character had undergone a perfect change.
Thousands flocked every day to the playhouses to listen to dialogues,
and watch the evolvement of plots, where all the laws of decency and
honour were held up to ridicule. Comus and his crew, which long ago had
held their poetic festival in the pure pages of Milton, were let loose,
without the purity or the poetry, in every family circle. And the worst
and most disgusting feature of the picture is that those wassailers who
were thus the missionaries of vice were persecutors for religion. While
one royal brother was leading the revels at Whitehall, surrounded by
luxury and immorality as by an atmosphere without which he could not
live, the other, as luxurious, but more moodily depraved, listened to
the groans of tortured Covenanters at Holyrood House. Charles and James
were like the two executioners of Louis the Eleventh: one laughed, and
the other groaned, but both were pitilessly cruel. A recurrence to the
dark days of the Sects, the godly wrestlings in prayer of illiterate
horsemen, and the sincere fanaticism of the Fifth-Monarchy men, would
have been a change for the better from the filth and foulness of the
reign of the Merry Monarch and the blood and misery of that of the
gloomy bigot.
But happier times were almost within view, though still hid behind the
glare of those orgies of the unclean. From 1660 to 1688 does not seem a
very long time in the annals of a nation, nor even in the life of one
of ourselves. Twenty-eight years have elapsed since the Revolution in
Paris which placed Louis Philippe upon the throne; and the young man of
twenty at that time is not very old yet. But when men or nations are
cheated in the object of their hopes, it does not take long to turn
disappointment into hatred. The Restoration of 1660 was to bring back
the golden age of the first years of James,--the prosperity without
the tyranny, the old hereditary rule without its high pretensions,
the manliness of the English yeoman without his tendency to fanatical
innovation. And instead of this Arcadia there was nothing to be
seen but a kingdom without dignity, a king without honesty, and a
people without independence. England was no longer the arbiter of
European differences, as in the earlier reigns, nor dominator of all
the nations, as when the heavy sword of Cromwell was uneasy in its
sheath. It was not even a second-rate power: its capital had been
insulted by the Dutch; its monarch was pensioned by the French; its
religion was threatened by the Pope; the old animosities between
England and Scotland were unarranged; and the point to be remembered
in your review of the Seventeenth Century is that in the years from
the Restoration to the Revolution we had touched the basest string
of humility. We were neither united at home nor respected abroad. We
had few ships, little commerce, and no public spirit. France revenged
Crecy and Poictiers and Agincourt, by dressing our kings in her livery;
and the degraded monarchs pocketed their wages without feeling their
humiliation. Therefore, as the highest point we have hitherto stood
upon was when Elizabeth saw the destruction of the Armada, the lowest
was undoubtedly that when we submitted to the buffoonery of Charles and
the bloodthirstiness of James.
But far more remarkable, as a characteristic of this century, than
the lowering of the rank of England in relation to foreign states,
is the rise, for the first time in Europe, of a figure hitherto
unknown,--a true, unshackled, and absolute king, and that in the
least likely of all positions and in the person of the least likely
man. This was the appearance on the throne of France of Louis the
Fourteenth. Other monarchs, both in England and France, had attained
supreme power,--supreme, but not independent. No one had hitherto been
irresponsible to some other portions of the State. The strongest of the
feudal kings was held in check by his nobility,--the greatest of the
Tudors by Parliament and people. Declarations, indeed, had frequently
been made that God's anointed were answerable to God alone. But of the
two loudest of these declaimers, John, who said,--
"What earthly power to interrogatory
Can tax the free breath of a Christian king?"
had shortly after this magnificent oration surrendered his crown to the
Pope; and James the First, who blustered more fiercely (if possible)
about his superiority to human law, was glad to bend before his Lords
and Commons in anticipation of a subsidy, and eat his leek in peace.
But this phenomenon of a king above all other authority occurred, we
have observed, in the most unlikely country to present so strange a
sight; for nowhere was a European throne so weak and unstable as the
throne of the house of Bourbon after the murder of Henry the Fourth.
The moment that strong hand was withdrawn from the government, all
classes broke loose. The nobles conspired against the queen, Marie de
Medicis, who relied upon foreign favourites and irritated the nation to
madness. Paris rose in insurrection, and tore the wretched Concini,
her counsellor, whom she had created Marshal D'Ancre, to pieces; and,
to glut their vengeance still more, the judges condemned his innocent
wife to be burned as a sorceress. Louis the Thirteenth, the unworthy
son of the great Henry, rejoiced in these atrocities, which he thought
freed him from all restraint. But he found it impossible to quell
the wild passions by which he profited for a while. Civil war raged
between the court and country factions, and soon became embittered into
religious animosities. [A.D. 1622.] The sight of a king marching at
the head of a Catholic army against a portion of his Reformed subjects
was looked upon by the rapidly-increasing malcontents in England with
anxious curiosity. For year by year the strange spectacle was unrolled
before their eyes of what might yet be their fate at home. Perhaps,
indeed, the success of the royal arms, and the policy of strength and
firmness introduced by Cardinal Richelieu, may have contributed in no
slight degree to the measures pursued by Wentworth and Laud in their
treatment of the English recusants. With an anticipative interest in
our Hull and Exeter, the Puritans of England looked on the resistance
made by Rochelle; and we can therefore easily imagine with what
feelings the future soldiers of Marston Moor received the tidings that
the Popish cardinal had humbled the capital of the Huguenots by the
help of fleets furnished to them by Holland and England! Richelieu,
indeed, knew how to make his enemies weaken each other throughout
his whole career. [A.D. 1627.] Those enemies were the nobility of
France, the house of Austria, and the Reformed Faith. When Rochelle
was attacked the second time, and England pretended to arm for its
defence, he contrived to win Buckingham, the chief of the expedition,
to his cause, and procured a letter from King Charles, placing the
fleet, which apparently went to the support of the Huguenots, at the
service of the King of France! After a year's siege, and the most
heroic resistance, Rochelle fell at last, in 1628. And, now that the
Huguenots were destroyed as a dangerous party, the eyes of the great
minister were turned against his other foes. He divided the nobles
into hostile ranks, degraded them by petty annoyances, terrified them
by unpitying executions of the chiefs of the oldest families, showed
their weakness by arresting marshals at the head of their armies, and
during the remaining years of his authority monopolized all the powers
of the state. To weaken Spain and Austria, we have seen how he assisted
the Protestants in the Thirty Years' War; to weaken England, which
was only great when it assumed its place as bulwark and champion of
the Protestant faith, he encouraged the court in its suicidal policy
and the oppressed population in resistance. Ever stirring up trouble
abroad, and ever busy in repressing liberty at home, the ministry of
Richelieu is the triumph of unprincipled skill. But when he died,
in 1643, there was no man left to lift up the burden he threw off.
The king himself, Louis the Thirteenth, as much a puppet as the old
descendants of Clovis under their Mayors of the Palace, left the throne
he had nominally filled, vacant in the same year; and the heir to
the dishonoured crown and exhausted country was a boy of five years
of age, under the tutelage of an unprincipled mother, and with the
old hereditary counsellors and props of his throne decimated by the
scaffold or impoverished by confiscation. The tyranny of Richelieu
had at least attained something noble by the high-handed insolence
of all his acts. If people were to be trampled on, it was a kind of
consolation to them that their oppressor was feared by others as well
as themselves. But the oppression of the doomed French nation was
to be continued by a more ignoble hand. The Cardinal Mazarin brought
every thing into greater confusion than ever. In twenty millions of
men there will always be great and overmastering spirits, if only an
opportunity is found for their development; but civil commotion is not
the element in which greatness lives. All sense of honour disappears
when conduct is regulated by the shifting motives of party politics.
[A.D. 1648-1654.] The dissensions of the Fronde, accordingly, produced
no champion to whom either side could look with unmingled respect.
The Great Condé and the famous Turenne showed military talent of
the highest order, but a want of principle and a flighty frivolity
of character counterbalanced all their virtues. The scenes of those
six years are like a series of dissolving views, or the changing
combinations of a kaleidoscope: Condé and Turenne, always on opposite
sides,--for each changed his party as often as the other; battles
prepared for by masquerades and theatricals, and celebrated on both
sides with epigrams and songs; the wildest excesses of debauchery
and vice practised by both sexes and all ranks in the State;
archbishops fighting like gladiators and intriguing like the vulgarest
conspirators; princes imprisoned with a jest, and executions attended
with cheers and laughter; and over all an Italian ecclesiastic,
grinning with satisfaction at the increase of his wealth,--caballing,
cheating, and lying, but keeping a firm grasp of power:--no country was
ever so split into faction or so denuded of great men.
It seemed, indeed, like a demoniacal caricature of our British
troubles: no sternness, no reality; love-letters and witty verses
supplying the place of the Biblical language and awful earnestness of
the words and deeds of the Covenanters and Independents; the gentlemen
of France utterly debased and frivolized; religion ridiculed; nothing
left of the old landmarks; and no Cromwell possible. But, while all
these elements of confusion were heaving and tumbling in what seemed
an inextricable chaos, Mazarin, the vainest and most selfish of
charlatans, died, and the young king, whom he had kept in distressing
dependence and the profoundest political inactivity, found himself
delivered from a master and free to choose his path. This was in
1661. Charles and Louis were equally on their recovered thrones;
for what exile had been to the one, Mazarin had been to the other.
[A.D. 1641-1660.] Charles had had the experience of nineteen years and
of various fortunes to guide him. He had seen many men and cities,
and he deceived every expectation. Louis had been studiously brought
up by his mother and her Italian favourite in the abasement of every
lofty aspiration. He was only encouraged in luxury and vice, and kept
in such painful vassalage that his shyness and awkwardness revealed
the absence of self-respect to the very pages of his court; and he,
no less than Charles, deceived all the expectations that had been
formed of his career. He found out, as if by intuition, how brightly
the monarchical principle still burned in the heart of all the French.
Even in their fights and quarrellings there was a deep reverence
entertained for the ideal of the throne. The King's name was a tower
of strength; and when the nation, in the course of the miserable years
from 1610 to 1661, saw the extinction of nobility, religion, law,
and almost of civilized society, it caught the first sound that told
it it still had a king, as an echo from the past assuring it of its
future. It forgot Louis the Thirteenth and Anne of Austria, and only
remembered that its monarch was the grandson of Henry the Fourth.
Nobody remembered that circumstance so vividly as Louis himself; but
he remembered also that his line went upwards from the Bourbons, and
included the Saint Louis of the thirteenth century and the renewer
of the Roman Empire of the ninth. He let the world know, therefore,
that his title was Most Christian King as well as foremost of European
powers. He forced Spain to yield him precedence, and, for the first
time in history, exacted a humiliating apology from the Pope. The world
is always apt to take a man at his own valuation. Louis, swelling with
pride, ambitious of fame, and madly fond of power, declared himself the
greatest, wisest, and most magnificent of men; and everybody believed
him. Every thing was soon changed throughout the land. Ministers had
been more powerful than the crown, and had held unlimited authority in
right of their appointment. A minister was nothing more to Louis than
a _valet-de-chambre_. He gave him certain work to do, and rewarded him
if he did it; if he neglected it, he discharged him. At first the few
relics of the historic names of France, the descendants of the great
vassals, who carried their heads as lofty as the Capets or Valois,
looked on with surprise at the new arrangements in camp and court.
But the people were too happy to escape the oligarchic confederacy
of those hereditary oppressors to encourage them in their haughty
disaffection. Before Louis had been three years on the unovershadowed
throne, the struggle had been fairly entered on by all the orders
of the State, which should be most slavish in its submission. Rank,
talent, beauty, science, and military fame all vied with each other in
their devotion to the king. He would have been more than mortal if he
had retained his senses unimpaired amid the intoxicating fumes of such
incense. Success in more important affairs came to the support of his
personal assumptions. Victories followed his standards everywhere.
Generals, engineers, and administrators, of abilities hitherto
unmatched in Europe, sprang up whenever his requirements called them
forth. Colbert doubled his income without increasing the burdens on his
people. Turenne, Condé, Luxembourg, and twenty others, led his armies.
Vauban strengthened his fortifications or conducted his sieges, and
the dock-yards of Toulon and Brest filled the Mediterranean and the
Atlantic with his fleets. Poets like Molière, Corneille, and Racine
ennobled his stage; while the genius of Bossuet and Fénélon inaugurated
the restoration of religion. For eight-and-twenty years his fortunes
knew no ebb. He was the object of all men's hopes and fears, and almost
of their prayers. Nothing was too great or too minute for his decision.
He was called on to arbitrate (with the authority of a master) between
sovereign States, and to regulate a point of precedence between
the duchesses of his court. Oh, the weary days and nights of that
uneasy splendour at Versailles! when his steps were watched by hungry
courtiers, and his bed itself surrounded by applicants for place and
favour. No galley-slave ever toiled harder at his oar than this monarch
of all he surveyed at the management of his unruly family. It was the
day of etiquette and form. The rights of princesses to arm-chairs or
chairs with only a back were contested with a vigour which might have
settled the succession to a throne. The rank which entitled to a seat
in the king's coach or an invitation to Marly was disputed almost with
bloodshed, and certainly with scandal and bitterness. The depth of
the bows exacted by a prince of the blood, the number of attendants
necessary for a legitimated son of La Vallière or Montespan, put the
whole court into a turmoil of angry parties; and all these important
points, and fifty more of equal magnitude, were formally submitted
to the king and decided with a gravity befitting a weightier cause.
Nothing is more remarkable in the midst of these absurd inanities than
the great fund of good common sense that is found in all the king's
judgments. He meditates, and temporizes, and reasons; and only on great
occasions, such as a quarrel about dignity between the wife of the
dauphin and the Duchess of Maine, does he put on the terrors of his
kingly frown and interpose his irresistible command. It would have been
some consolation to the foreign potentates he bullied or protected--the
Austrian and Spaniard, or Charles in Whitehall--if they had known what
a wretched and undignified life their enslaver and insulter lived at
home. It was whispered, indeed, that he was tremendously hen-pecked
by Madame de Maintenon, whom he married without having the courage
to elevate her to the throne; but none of them knew the pettinesses,
the degradations, and the miseries of his inner circle. They thought,
perhaps, he was planning some innovation in the order of affairs in
Europe,--the destruction of a kingdom, or the change of a dynasty. He
was devoting his deepest cogitations to the arrangement of a quarrel
between his sons and his daughters-in-law, the invitations to a little
supper-party in his private room, or the number of steps it was
necessary to advance at the reception of a petty Italian sovereign.
The quarrels between his children became more bitter; the little
supper-parties became more dull. Death came into the gilded chambers,
and he was growing old and desolate. Still the torturing wheel of
ceremony went round, and the father, with breaking heart, had to leave
the chamber of his deceased son, and act the part of a great king, and
go through the same tedious forms of grandeur and routine which he had
done before the calamity came. Fancy has never drawn a personage more
truly pitiable than Louis growing feeble and friendless in the midst
of all that magnificence and all that heartless crowd. You pardon him
for retiring for consolation and sympathy to the quiet apartment where
Madame de Maintenon received him without formality and continued her
needlework or her reading while he was engaged in council with his
ministers. He must have known that to all but her he was an Office
and not a Man. He yearned for somebody that he could trust in and
consult with, as entering into his thoughts and interests; and that
calm-blooded, meek-mannered, narrow-hearted woman persuaded him that in
her he had found all that his heart thirsted for in the desert of his
royalty. But in that little apartment he was now to find refuge from
more serious calamities than the falsehood of courtiers or the quarrels
of women. Even French loyalty was worn out at last. Victories had
glorified the monarch, but brought poverty and loss to the population.
Complaints arose in all parts of the country of the excess of taxation,
the grasping dishonesty of the collectors, the extravagance of the
court, and even--but this was not openly whispered--the selfishness
of the king. He had lavished ten millions sterling on the palace and
gardens of Versailles; he had enriched his sycophants with pensions
on the Treasury; he had gratified the Church with gorgeous donations,
and with the far more fatal gift of vengeance upon its opponents.
The Huguenots were in the peaceful enjoyment of the rights secured
to them by the Edict of Nantes, granted by Henry the Fourth in 1598.
But those rights included the right of worshipping God in a different
manner from the Church, and denying the distinguishing doctrines of
the Holy Catholic faith. [A.D. 1685.] The Edict of Toleration was
repealed as a blot on the purity of the throne of the Most Christian
King. Thousands of the best workmen in France were banished by this
impolitic proceeding, and Louis thought he had shown his attachment
to his religion by sending the ingenuity and wealth, and glowing
animosity, of the most valuable portion of his subjects into other
lands. Germany calculated that the depopulation caused by his wars was
more than compensated by the immigration. England could forgive him
his contemptuous behaviour to her king and Parliament when she saw the
silk-mills of Spitalfields supplied by the skilled workmen of Lyons.
Eight hundred thousand people left their homes in consequence of this
proscription of their religion, and Germany and Switzerland grew rich
with the stream of fugitives. It is said that only five thousand found
their way to this country,--enough to set the example of peaceful
industry and to introduce new methods of manufacture.