days and surplices, and how any man should persecute any other man for
objecting to them. In temper he was what, in our time, is called a
Conservative, in theory he was a Republican. Even when his dread of
anarchy and his disdain for vulgar delusions led him to side for a time
with the defenders of arbitrary power, his intellect was always with
Locke and Milton. Indeed, his jests upon hereditary monarchy were
sometimes such as would have better become a member of the Calf’s Head
Club than a privy councilor of the Stuarts. In religion he was so far
from being a zealot that he was called by the uncharitable an atheist;
but this imputation he vehemently repelled; and in truth, though he
sometimes gave scandal by the way in which he exerted his rare powers
both of reasoning and of ridicule on serious subjects, he seems to have
been by no means unsusceptible of religious impressions.
He was the chief of those politicians whom the two great parties
contemptuously called trimmers. Instead of quarreling with this
nickname, he assumed it as a title of honor, and vindicated, with great
vivacity, the dignity of the appellation. Everything good, he said,
trims between extremes. The temperate zone trims between the climate in
which men are roasted and the climate in which they are frozen. The
English Church trims between the Anabaptist madness and the Papist
lethargy. The English constitution trims between Turkish despotism and
Polish anarchy. Virtue is nothing but a just temper between propensities
any one of which, if indulged to excess, becomes vice. Nay, the
perfection of the Supreme Being himself consists in the exact
equilibrium of attributes, none of which could preponderate without
disturbing the whole moral and physical order of the world.
Thus Halifax was a trimmer on principle. He was also a trimmer by the
constitution both of his head and of his heart. His understanding was
keen, skeptical, inexhaustibly fertile in distinctions and objections;
his taste refined; his sense of the ludicrous exquisite; his temper
placid and forgiving, but fastidious, and by no means prone either to
malevolence or to enthusiastic admiration. Such a man could not long be
constant to any band of political allies. He must not, however, be
confounded with the vulgar crowd of renegades. For though, like them, he
passed from side to side, his transition was always in the direction
opposite to theirs. He had nothing in common with those who fly from
extreme to extreme, and who regard the party which they have deserted
with an animosity far exceeding that of consistent enemies. His place
was on the debatable ground between the hostile divisions of the
community, and he never wandered far beyond the frontier of either. The
party to which he at any moment belonged was the party which, at that
moment, he liked least, because it was the party of which at that moment
he had the nearest view. He was, therefore, always severe upon his
violent associates, and was always in friendly relations with his
moderate opponents. Every faction in the day of its insolent and
vindictive triumph incurred his censure; and every faction, when
vanquished and persecuted, found in him a protector. To his lasting
honor it must be mentioned that he attempted to save those victims whose
fate has left the deepest stain both on the Whig and on the Tory name.
He had greatly distinguished himself in opposition, and had thus drawn
on himself the royal displeasure, which was, indeed, so strong that he
was not admitted into the Council of Thirty without much difficulty and
long altercation. As soon, however, as he had obtained a footing at
court, the charms of his manner and of his conversation made him a
favorite. He was seriously alarmed by the violence of the public
discontent. He thought that liberty was for the present safe, and that
order and legitimate authority were in danger. He therefore, as was his
fashion, joined himself to the weaker side. Perhaps his conversion was
not wholly disinterested. For study and reflection, though they had
emancipated him from many vulgar prejudices, had left him a slave to
vulgar desires. Money he did not want; and there is no evidence that he
ever obtained it by any means which, in that age, even severe censors
considered as dishonorable; but rank and power had strong attractions
for him. He pretended, indeed, that he considered titles and great
offices as baits which could allure none but fools, that he hated
business, pomp, and pageantry, and that his dearest wish was to escape
from the bustle and glitter of Whitehall to the quiet woods which
surrounded his ancient mansion in Nottinghamshire; but his conduct was
not a little at variance with his professions. In truth he wished to
command the respect at once of courtiers and of philosophers, to be
admired for attaining high dignities, and to be at the same time admired
for despising them.
More than one historian has been charged with partiality to Halifax. The
truth is that the memory of Halifax is entitled in an especial manner to
the protection of history. For what distinguishes him from all other
English statesmen is this, that through a long public life, and through
frequent and violent revolutions of public feeling, he almost invariably
took that view of the great questions of his time which history has
finally adopted. He was called inconstant, because the relative position
in which he stood to the contending factions was perpetually varying. As
well might the pole star be called inconstant because it is sometimes to
the east and sometimes to the west of the pointers. To have defended the
ancient and legal constitution of the realm against a seditious populace
at one conjuncture, and against a tyrannical government at another; to
have been the foremost champion of order in the turbulent Parliament of
1680, and the foremost champion of liberty in the servile Parliament of
1685; to have been just and merciful to Roman Catholics in the days of
the Popish Plot, and to Exclusionists in the days of the Rye House Plot;
to have done all in his power to save both the head of Strafford and the
head of Russell; this was a course which contemporaries, heated by
passion, and deluded by names and badges, might not unnaturally call
fickle, but which deserves a very different name from the late justice
of posterity.
LOUIS XIV OF FRANCE.
BY THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY.
[Grandson of Henry IV, the greatest of the French Bourbon kings,
though he himself was also called Le Grand, or The Great. Born
1638, died 1715. His reign was distinguished for the brilliant men
he gathered at his court and the unparalleled reverses which befell
his power and prosperity in his closing years.]
The reign of Louis XIV is the time to which ultra-royalists refer as the
golden age of France. It was, in truth, one of those periods which shine
with an unnatural and delusive splendor. Concerning Louis XIV himself,
the world seems at last to have formed a correct judgment. He was not a
great general; he was not a great statesman; but he was, in one sense of
the word, a great king. Never was there so consummate a master of what
our James I would have called kingcraft--of all those arts which most
advantageously display the merits of a prince and most completely hide
his defects. Though his internal administration was bad, though military
triumphs which gave splendor to the early part of his reign were not
achieved by himself, though his later years were crowded with defeats
and humiliations, though he was so ignorant that he scarcely understood
the Latin of his mass-book, though he fell under the control of a
cunning Jesuit and of a more cunning old woman, he succeeded in passing
himself off on his people as a being above humanity.
And this is the more extraordinary, because he did not seclude himself
from the public gaze, like those Oriental despots whose faces are never
seen, and whose very names it is a crime to pronounce lightly. It has
been said that no man is a hero to his valet; and all the world saw as
much of Louis XIV as his valet could see. Five hundred people assembled
to see him shave and put on his breeches in the morning. He then knelt
down by the side of his bed and said his prayer, the ecclesiastics on
their knees and the laymen with their hats before their faces. He walked
about his garden with a train of two hundred courtiers at his heels. All
Versailles came to see him dine and sup. He was put to bed at night in
the midst of a crowd as great as that which had met to see him rise in
the morning. He took his very emetics in state, and vomited majestically
in the presence of all the _grandes_ and _petites entrées_. Yet, though
he constantly exposed himself to the public gaze in situations in which
it is scarcely possible for any man to preserve much personal dignity,
he to the last impressed those who surrounded him with deepest awe and
reverence. The illusion which he produced on his worshipers can be
compared only to those illusions to which lovers are proverbially
subject during the season of courtship; it was an illusion which
affected even the senses.
The contemporaries of Louis thought him tall. Voltaire, who might have
seen him, and who had lived with some of the most distinguished members
of his court, speaks repeatedly of his majestic stature. Yet it is as
certain as any fact can be that he was rather below than above the
middle size. He had, it seems, a way of holding himself, a way of
walking, a way of swelling his chest and rearing his head, which
deceived the eyes of the multitude. Eighty years after his death the
royal cemetery was violated by the revolutionists; his coffin was
opened, his body was dragged out, and it appeared that the prince whose
majestic figure had been so extolled was, in truth, a little man. His
person and his government have had the same fate. He had the art of
making both appear grand and august, in spite of the clearest evidence
that both were below the ordinary standard. Death and time have exposed
both the deceptions. The body of the great king has been measured more
justly than it was measured by the courtiers who were afraid to look
above his shoe-tie. His public character has been scrutinized by men
free from the hopes and fears of Boileau and Molière. In the grave the
most majestic of princes is only five feet eight. In history the hero
and the politician dwindles into a vain and feeble tyrant, the slave of
priests and women; little in war, little in government, little in
everything but the art of simulating greatness.
He left to his infant successor a famished and miserable people, a
beaten and humbled army, provinces turned into deserts by misgovernment
and persecution, factions dividing the court, a schism raging in the
Church, an immense debt, an empty treasury, immeasurable palaces, an
innumerable household, inestimable palaces and furniture. All the sap
and nutriment of the state seemed to have been drawn to feed one bloated
and unwholesome excrescence. The nation was withered. The court was
morbidly flourishing. Yet it does not appear that the associations which
attached the people to the monarchy had lost strength during his reign.
He had neglected or sacrificed their dearest interests, but he had
struck their imaginations.
WILLIAM III OF ENGLAND.
BY THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
[William Henry of Nassau, Prince of Orange and Stadtholder of
Holland, born 1650, raised to the English throne as king consort
with Mary daughter of James II, in 1688, died 1702. One of the
ablest monarchs in English annals, his accession to the throne of
Great Britain was one of the turning points in modern history, and
effectually consummated those reforms in the English Constitution
inaugurated in the revolution of 1640.]
The place which William Henry, Prince of Orange-Nassau, occupies in the
history of England and of mankind is so great that it may be desirable
to portray with some minuteness the strong lineaments of his
character.[27]
He was now in his thirty-seventh year. But both in body and in mind he
was older than other men of the same age. Indeed, it might be said that
he had never been young. His external appearance is almost as well known
to us as to his own captains and counselors. Sculptors, painters, and
medallists exerted their utmost skill in the work of transmitting his
features to posterity; and his features were such that no artist could
fail to seize, and such as, once seen, could never be forgotten. His
name at once calls up before us a slender and feeble frame, a lofty and
ample forehead, a nose curved like the beak of an eagle, an eye rivaling
that of an eagle in brightness and keenness, a thoughtful and somewhat
sullen brow, a firm and somewhat peevish mouth, a cheek pale, thin, and
deeply furrowed by sickness and by care. That pensive, severe, and
solemn aspect could scarcely have belonged to a happy or a good-humored
man. But it indicates in a manner not to be mistaken capacity equal to
the most arduous enterprises, and fortitude not to be shaken by reverses
or dangers.
Nature had largely endowed William with the qualities of a great ruler,
and education had developed those qualities in no common degree. With
strong natural sense, and rare force of will, he found himself, when
first his mind began to open, a fatherless and motherless child, the
chief of a great but depressed and disheartened party, and the heir to
vast and indefinite pretensions, which excited the dread and aversion of
the oligarchy then supreme in the United Provinces. The common people,
fondly attached during three generations to his house, indicated,
whenever they saw him, in a manner not to be mistaken, that they
regarded him as their rightful head. The able and experienced ministers
of the republic, mortal enemies of his name, came every day to pay their
feigned civilities to him, and to observe the progress of his mind. The
first movements of his ambition were carefully watched; every unguarded
word uttered by him was noted down; nor had he near him any adviser on
whose judgment reliance could be placed.
He was scarcely fifteen years old when all the domestics who were
attached to his interest, or who enjoyed any share of his confidence,
were removed from under his roof by the jealous government. He
remonstrated with energy beyond his years, but in vain. Vigilant
observers saw the tears more than once rise in the eyes of the young
state prisoner. His health, naturally delicate, sank for a time under
the emotions which his desolate situation had produced. Such situations
bewilder and unnerve the weak, but call forth all the strength of the
strong. Surrounded by snares in which an ordinary youth would have
perished, William learned to tread at once warily and firmly. Long
before he reached manhood he knew how to keep secrets, how to baffle
curiosity by dry and guarded answers; how to conceal all passions under
the same show of grave tranquillity. Meanwhile he made little
proficiency in fashionable or literary accomplishments. The manners of
the Dutch nobility of that age wanted the grace which was found in the
highest perfection among the gentlemen of France, and which, in an
inferior degree, embellished the court of England; and his manners were
altogether Dutch. Even his countrymen thought him blunt. To foreigners
he often seemed churlish. In his intercourse with the world in general
he appeared ignorant or negligent of those arts which double the value
of a favor and take away the sting of a refusal. He was little
interested in letters or science. The discoveries of Newton and
Liebnitz, the poems of Dryden and Boileau, were unknown to him. Dramatic
performances tired him, and he was glad to turn away from the stage and
to talk about public affairs, while Orestes was raving, or while
Tartuffe was pressing Elmira’s hand.
He had, indeed, some talent for sarcasm, and not seldom employed, quite
unconsciously, a natural rhetoric, quaint, indeed, but vigorous and
original. He did not, however, in the least affect the character of a
wit or of an orator. His attention had been confined to those studies
which form strenuous and sagacious men of business. From a child he
listened with interest when high questions of alliance, finance, and war
were discussed. Of geometry he learned as much as was necessary for the
construction of a ravelin or a horn-work. Of languages, by the help of a
memory singularly powerful, he learned as much as was necessary to
enable him to comprehend and answer without assistance everything that
was said to him and every letter which he received. The Dutch was his
own tongue. With the French he was not less familiar. He understood
Latin, Italian, and Spanish. He spoke and wrote English and German,
inelegantly, it is true, and inexactly, but fluently and intelligibly.
No qualification could be more important to a man whose life was to be
passed in organizing great alliances, and in commanding armies assembled
from different countries.
The faculties which are necessary for the conduct of important business
ripened in him at a time of life when they have scarcely begun to
blossom in ordinary men. Since Octavius the world had seen no such
instance of precocious statesmanship. Skillful diplomatists were
surprised to hear the weighty observations which at seventeen the prince
made on public affairs, and still more surprised to see a lad, in
situations in which he might have been expected to betray strong
passion, preserve a composure as imperturbable as their own. At eighteen
he sat among the fathers of the commonwealth--grave, discreet, and
judicious as the oldest among them. At twenty-one, in a day of gloom and
terror, he was placed at the head of the administration. At twenty-three
he was renowned throughout Europe as a soldier and a politician. He had
put domestic factions under his feet; he was the soul of a mighty
coalition; and he had contended with honor in the field against some of
the greatest generals of the age.
His personal tastes were those rather of a warrior than of a statesman,
but he, like his great-grandfather, the silent prince who founded the
Batavian commonwealth, occupies a far higher place among statesmen than
among warriors. The event of battles, indeed, is not an unfailing test
of the abilities of a commander; and it would be peculiarly unjust to
apply this test to William, for it was his fortune to be almost always
opposed to captains who were consummate masters of their art, and to
troops far superior in discipline to his own. Yet there is reason to
believe that he was by no means equal, as a general in the field, to
some who ranked far below him in intellectual powers. To those whom he
trusted he spoke on this subject with the magnanimous frankness of a man
who had done great things, and could well afford to acknowledge some
deficiencies. He had never, he said, served an apprenticeship to the
military profession. He had been placed, while still a boy, at the head
of an army. Among his officers there had been none competent to instruct
him. His own blunders and their consequences had been his only lessons.
“I would give,” he once exclaimed, “a good part of my estates to have
served a few campaigns under the Prince of Condé before I had to command
against him.”
It is not improbable that the circumstance which prevented William from
attaining any eminent dexterity in strategy may have been favorable to
the general vigor of his intellect. If his battles were not those of a
great tactician, they entitled him to be called a great man. No disaster
could for one moment deprive him of his firmness or of the entire
possession of all his faculties. His defeats were repaired with such
marvelous celerity that, before his enemies had sung the Te Deum, he was
again ready for the conflict; nor did his adverse fortune ever deprive
him of the respect and confidence of his soldiers. That respect and
confidence he owed in no small measure to his personal courage. Courage,
in the degree which is necessary to carry a soldier without disgrace
through a campaign, is possessed, or might, under proper training, be
acquired by the great majority of men. But courage like that of William
is rare indeed. He was proved by every test; by war, by wounds, by
painful and depressing maladies, by raging seas, by the imminent and
constant risk of assassination--a risk which has shaken very strong
nerves, a risk which severely tried even the adamantine fortitude of
Cromwell. Yet none could ever discover what that thing was which the
Prince of Orange feared. His advisers could with difficulty induce him
to take any precaution against the pistols and daggers of conspirators.
Old sailors were amazed at the composure which he preserved amid roaring
breakers on a perilous coast. In battle his bravery made him conspicuous
even among tens of thousands of brave warriors, drew forth the generous
applause of hostile armies, and was scarcely ever questioned even by the
injustice of hostile factions.
During his first campaigns he exposed himself like a man who sought for
death, was always foremost in the charge and last in the retreat, fought
sword in hand, in the thickest press, and with a musket ball in his arm
and the blood streaming over his cuirass, still stood his ground and
waved his hat under the hottest fire. His friends adjured him to take
more care of a life invaluable to his country; and his most illustrious
antagonist, the great Condé, remarked, after the bloody day of Seneff,
that the Prince of Orange had in all things borne himself like an old
general, except in exposing himself like a young soldier. William denied
that he was guilty of temerity. It was, he said, from a sense of duty
and on a cool calculation of what the public interest required, that he
was always at the post of danger. The troops which he commanded had been
little used to war, and shrank from a close encounter with the veteran
soldiery of France. It was necessary that their leader should show them
how battles were to be won. And in truth more than one day which had
seemed hopelessly lost was retrieved by the hardihood with which he
rallied his broken battalions and cut down the cowards who set the
example of flight. Sometimes, however, it seemed that he had a strange
pleasure in venturing his person. It was remarked that his spirits were
never so high and his manners never so gracious and easy as amid the
tumult and carnage of a battle. Even in his pastimes he liked the
excitement of danger. Cards, chess, and billiards gave him no pleasure.
The chase was his favorite recreation, and he loved it most when it was
most hazardous. His leaps were sometimes such that his boldest
companions did not like to follow him. He seemed to have thought the
most hardy field sports of England effeminate, and to have pined in the
great park of Windsor for the game which he had been used to drive to
bay in the forests of Guelders--wolves and wild boars, and huge stags
with sixteen antlers.
The audacity of his spirit was the more remarkable because his physical
organization was unusually delicate. From a child he had been weak and
sickly. In the prime of manhood his complaints had been aggravated by a
severe attack of small-pox. He was asthmatic and consumptive. His
slender frame was shaken by a constant hoarse cough. He could not sleep
unless his head was propped by several pillows, and could scarcely draw
his breath in any but the purest air. Cruel headaches frequently
tortured him. Exertion soon fatigued him. The physicians constantly kept
up the hopes of his enemies by fixing some date beyond which, if there
were anything certain in medical science, it was impossible that his
broken constitution could hold out. Yet, through a life which was one
long disease, the force of his mind never failed, on any great occasion,
to bear up his suffering and languid body.