The progress of civilisation introduced a great change. War became a

science, and, as a necessary consequence, a trade. The great body of the

people grew every day more reluctant to undergo the inconveniences of

military service, and better able to pay others for undergoing them.

A new class of men, therefore, dependent on the Crown alone, natural

enemies of those popular rights which are to them as the dew to the

fleece of Gideon, slaves among freemen, freemen among slaves, grew into

importance. That physical force which, in the dark ages, had belonged

to the nobles and the commons, and had, far more than any charter or any

assembly, been the safeguard of their privileges, was transferred

entire to the King. {481}Monarchy gained in two ways. The sovereign was

strengthened, the subjects weakened. The great mass of the population,

destitute of all military discipline and organization, ceased to

exercise any influence by force on political transactions. There have,

indeed, during the last hundred and fifty years, been many popular

insurrections in Europe: but all have failed, except those in which the

regular army has been induced to join the disaffected.

Those legal checks which, while the sovereign remained dependent on his

subjects, had been adequate to the purpose for which they were designed,

were now found wanting. The dikes which had been sufficient while the

waters were low were not high enough to keep out the spring-tide. The

deluge passed over them; and, according to the exquisite illustration of

Butler, the formal boundaries which had excluded it, now held it in.

The old constitutions fared like the old shields and coats of mail. They

were the defences of a rude age: and they did well enough against the

weapons of a rude age. But new and more formidable means of destruction

were invented. The ancient panoply became useless; and it was thrown

aside to rust in lumber-rooms, or exhibited only as part of an idle

pageant.

Thus absolute monarchy was established on the Continent. England

escaped; but she escaped very narrowly. Happily our insular situation,

and the pacific policy of James, rendered standing armies unnecessary

here, till they had been for some time kept up in the neighbouring

kingdoms. Our public men had therefore an opportunity of watching the

effects produced by this momentous change on governments which bore a

close analogy to that established in England. Every where {482}they saw

the power of the monarch increasing, the resistance of assemblies which

were no longer supported by a national force gradually becoming more

and more feeble, and at length altogether ceasing. The friends and the

enemies of liberty perceived with equal clearness the causes of this

general decay. It is the favourite theme of Strafford. He advises the

King to procure from the Judges a recognition of his right to raise an

army at his pleasure. “This place well fortified,” says he, “for ever

vindicates the monarchy at home from under the conditions and restraints

of subjects.” We firmly believe that he was in the right. Nay; we

believe that, even if no deliberate scheme of arbitrary government had

been formed by the sovereign and his ministers, there was great reason

to apprehend a natural extinction of the Constitution. If, for example,

Charles had played the part of Gustavus Adolphus, if he had carried on

a popular war for the defence of the Protestant cause in Germany, if

he had gratified the national pride by a series of victories, if he had

formed an army of forty or fifty thousand devoted soldiers, we do not

see what chance the nation would have had of escaping from despotism.

The Judges would have given as strong a decision in favour of camp-money

as they gave in favour of ship-money. If they had been scrupulous, it

would have made little difference. An individual who resisted would have

been treated as Charles treated Eliot, and as Strafford wished to treat

Hampden. The Parliament might have been summoned once in twenty years,

to congratulate a King on his accession, or to give solemnity to some

great measure of state. Such had been the fate of legislative assemblies

as powerful, as much respected, as high-spirited, as the English Lords

and Commons. {483}The two Houses, surrounded by the ruins of so many

free constitutions overthrown or sapped by the new military system, were

required to intrust the command of an army and the conduct of the Irish

war to a King who had proposed to himself the destruction of liberty as

the great end of his policy. We are decidedly of opinion that it would

have been fatal to comply. Many of those who took the side of the King

on this question would have cursed their own loyalty, if they had seen

him return from war at the head of twenty thousand troops, accustomed to

carnage and free quarters in Ireland.

We think, with Mr. Hallam, that many of the Royalist nobility and gentry

were true friends to the Constitution, and that, but for the solemn

protestations by which the King bound himself to govern according to

the law for the future, they never would have joined his standard. But

surely they underrated the public danger. Falkland is commonly selected

as the most respectable specimen of this class. He was indeed a man of

great talents and of great virtues, but, we apprehend, infinitely too

fastidious for public life. He did not perceive that, in such times as

those on which his lot had fallen, the duty of a statesman is to choose

the better cause and to stand by it, in spite of those excesses by which

every cause, however good in itself, will be disgraced. The present

evil always seemed to him the worst. He was always going backward and

forward; but it should be remembered to his honour that it was always

from the stronger to the weaker side that he deserted. While Charles was

oppressing the people, Falkland was a resolute champion of liberty. He

attacked Strafford. He even concurred in strong measures against

Episcopacy. But the violence of his party {484}annoyed him, and drove

him to the other party, to be equally annoyed there. Dreading the

success of the cause which he had espoused, disgusted by the courtiers

of Oxford, as he had been disgusted by the patriots of Westminster, yet

bound by honour not to abandon the cause for which he was in arms, he

pined away, neglected his person, went about moaning for peace, and at

last rushed desperately on death, as the best refuge in such miserable

times. If he had lived through the scenes that followed, we have little

doubt that he would have condemned himself to share the exile and

beggary of the royal family; that he would then have returned to oppose

all their measures; that he would have been sent to the Tower by the

Commons as a stiller of the Popish Plot, and by the King as an

accomplice in the Rye-House Plot; and that, if he had escaped being

hanged, first by Scroggs, and then by Jefferies, he would, after

manfully opposing James the Second through years of tyranny, have been

seized with a fit of compassion at the very moment of the Revolution,

have voted for a regency, and died a nonjuror.

We do not dispute that the royal party contained many excellent men and

excellent citizens. But this we say, that they did not discern those

times. The peculiar glory of the Houses of Parliament is that, in the

great plague and mortality of constitutions, they took their stand

between the living and the dead. At the very crisis of our destiny, at

the very moment when the fate which had passed on every other nation was

about to pass on England, they arrested the danger.

Those who conceive that the parliamentary leaders were desirous merely

to maintain the old constitution, and those who represent them

as conspiring to subvert {485}it, are equally in error. The old

constitution, as we have attempted to show, could not be maintained. The

progress of time, the increase of wealth, the diffusion of knowledge,

the great change in the European system of war, rendered it impossible

that any of the monarchies of the middle ages should continue to

exist on the old footing. The prerogative of the crown was constantly

advancing. If the privileges of the people were to remain absolutely

stationary, they would relatively retrograde. The monarchical and

democratical parts of the government were placed in a situation not

unlike that of the two brothers in the Fairy Queen, one of whom saw the

soil of his inheritance daily washed away by the tide and joined to

that of his rival. The portions had at first been fairly meted out. By a

natural and constant transfer, the one had been extended; the other had

dwindled to nothing. A new partition, or a compensation, was necessary

to restore the original equality.

It was now, therefore, absolutely necessary to violate the formal part

of the constitution, in order to preserve its spirit. This might have

been done, as it was done at the Revolution, by expelling the reigning

family, and calling to the throne princes who, relying solely on an

elective title, would find it necessary to respect the privileges and

follow the advice of the assemblies to which they owed every thing, to

pass every bill which the Legislature strongly pressed upon them, and

to fill the offices of state with men in whom the Legislature confided.

But, as the two Houses did not choose to change the dynasty, it was

necessary that they should do directly what at the Revolution was done

indirectly. Nothing is more usual than to hear it said that, if the

Houses had contented themselves {486}with making such a reform in the

government under Charles as was afterwards made under William, they

would have had the highest claim to national gratitude: and that in

their violence they overshot the mark. But how was it possible to make

such a settlement under Charles? Charles was not, like William and the

princes of the Hanoverian line, bound by community of interests and

dangers to the Parliament. It was therefore necessary that he should be

bound by treaty and statute.

Mr. Hallam reprobates, in language which has a little surprised us, the

nineteen propositions into which the Parliament digested its scheme.

Is it possible to doubt that, if James the Second had remained in the

island, and had been suffered, as he probably would in that case have

been suffered, to keep his crown, conditions to the full as hard would

have been imposed on him? On the other hand, we fully admit that, if the

Long Parliament had pronounced the departure of Charles from London an

abdication, and had called Essex or Northumberland to the throne,

the new prince might have safely been suffered to reign without such

restrictions. His situation would have been a sufficient guarantee.

In the nineteen propositions we see very little to blame except the

articles against the Catholics. These, however, were in the spirit of

that age; and to some sturdy churchmen in our own, they may seem

to palliate even the good which the Long Parliament effected. The

regulation with respect to new creations of Peers is the only other

article about which we entertain any doubt. One of the propositions is

that the judges shall hold their offices during good behaviour. To

this surely no exception will be taken. The right of directing the

{487}education and marriage of the princes was most properly claimed by

the Parliament, on the same ground on which, after the Revolution, it

was enacted, that no king, on pain of forfeiting his throne, should

espouse a Papist. Unless we condemn the statesmen of the Revolution,

who conceived that England could not safely be governed by a sovereign

married to a Catholic queen, we can scarcely condemn the Long Parliament

because, having a sovereign so situated, they thought it necessary to

place him under strict restraints. The influence of Henrietta Maria had

already been deeply felt in political affairs. In the regulation of her

family, in the education and marriage of her children, it was still more

likely to be felt. There might be another Catholic queen; possibly, a

Catholic king. Little as we are disposed to join in the vulgar clamour

on this subject, we think that such an event ought to be, if possible,

averted; and this could only be done, if Charles was to be left on

the throne, by placing his domestic arrangements under the control of

Parliament.

A veto on the appointment of ministers was demanded. But this veto

Parliament has virtually possessed ever since the Revolution. It is

no doubt very far better that this power of the Legislature should be

exercised as it is now exercised, when any great occasion calls for

interference, than that at every change the Commons should have to

signify their approbation or disapprobation in form. But, unless a new

family had been placed on the throne, we do not see how this power could

have been exercised as it is now exercised. We again repeat, that no

restraints which could be imposed on the princes who reigned after the

Revolution could have added to the security which their title afforded.

They were compelled to court their parliaments. But {488}from Charles

nothing was to be expected whicli was not set down in the bond.

It was not stipulated that the King should give up his negative on acts

of Parliament. But the Commons had certainly shown a strong disposition

to exact this security also. “Such a doctrine,” says Mr. Hallam, “was

in this country as repugnant to the whole history of our laws, as it was

incompatible with the subsistence of the monarchy in any thing more than

a nominal preeminence.” Now this article has been as completely carried

into effect by the Revolution as if it had been formally inserted in the

Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement. We are surprised, we confess,

that Mr. Hallam should attach so much importance to a prerogative which

has not been exercised for a hundred and thirty years, which probably

will never be exercised again, and which can scarcely, in any

conceivable case, be exercised for a salutary purpose.

But the great security, the security without which every other would

have been insufficient, was the power of the sword. This both parties

thoroughly understood. The Parliament insisted on having the command

of the militia and the direction of the Irish war. “By God, not for an

hour!” exclaimed the King. “Keep the militia,” said the Queen, after the

defeat of the royal party: “Keep the militia; that will bring back every

thing.” That, by the old constitution, no military authority was lodged

in the Parliament, Mr. Hallam has clearly shown. That it is a species of

authority which ought not to be permanently lodged in large and divided

assemblies, must, we think, in fairness be conceded. Opposition,

publicity, long discussion, frequent compromise; these are the

characteristics of the proceedings of such assemblies. Unity.

{489}secrecy, decision, are the qualities which military arrangements

require. There were, therefore, serious objections to the proposition

of the Houses on this subject. But, on the other hand, to trust such

a king, at such a crisis, with the very weapon which, in hands less

dangerous, had destroyed so many free constitutions, would have been the

extreme of rashness. The jealousy with which the oligarchy of Venice and

the States of Holland regarded their generals and armies induced them

perpetually to interfere in matters of which they were incompetent to

judge. This policy secured them against military usurpation, but placed

them under great disadvantages in war. The uncontrolled power which

the King of France exercised over his troops enabled him to conquer

his enemies, but enabled him also to oppress his people. Was there any

intermediate course? None, we confess, altogether free from objection.

But on the whole, we conceive that the best measure would have been that

which the Parliament over and over proposed, namely, that for a limited

time the power of the sword should be left to the two Houses, and that

it should revert to the Crown when the constitution should be firmly

established, and when the new securities of freedom should be so far

strengthened by prescription that it would be difficult to employ even a

standing army for the purpose of subverting them.

Mr. Hallam thinks that the dispute might easily have been compromised,

by enacting that the King should have no power to keep a standing army

on foot without the consent of Parliament. He reasons as if the question

had been merely theoretical, and as if at that time no army had been

wanted. “The kingdom,” he says, “might have well dispensed, in that

{490}age, with any military organization.” Now, we think that Mr. Hallam

overlooks the most important circumstance in the whole case. Ireland

was actually in rebellion; and a great expedition would obviously he

necessary to reduce that kingdom to obedience. The Houses had therefore

to consider, not an abstract question of law, but an urgent practical

question, directly involving the safety of the state. They had to

consider the expediency of immediately giving a great army to a King

who was at least as desirous to put down the Parliament of England as to

conquer the insurgents of Ireland.

Of course we do not mean to defend all the measures of the Houses. Far

from it. There never was a perfect man. It would, therefore, be the

height of absurdity to expect a perfect party or a perfect assembly. For

large bodies are far more likely to err than individuals. The passions

are inflamed by sympathy; the fear of punishment and the sense of shame

are diminished by partition. Every day we see men do for their faction

what they would die rather than do for themselves.

Scarcely any private quarrel ever happens, in which the right and wrong

are so exquisitely divided that all the right lies on one side, and all

the wrong on the other. But here was a schism which separated a great

nation into two parties. Of these parties, each was composed of many

smaller parties. Each contained many members, who differed far less from

their moderate opponents than from their violent allies. Each reckoned

among its supporters many who were determined in their choice by some

accident of birth, of connection, or of local situation. Each of them

attracted to itself in multitudes those fierce and turbid {491}spirits,

to whom the clouds and whirlwinds of the political hurricane are

the atmosphere of life. A party, like a camp, has its sutlers and

camp-followers, as well as its soldiers. In its progress it collects

round it a vast retinue, composed of people who thrive by its custom

or are amused by its display, who may be sometimes reckoned, in an

ostentatious enumeration, as forming a part of it, but who give no aid

to its operations, and take but a languid interest in its success, who

relax its discipline and dishonour its flag by their irregularities, and

who, after a disaster, are perfectly ready to cut the throats and rifle

the baggage of their companions.

Thus it is in every great division; and thus it was in our civil war. On

both sides there was, undoubtedly, enough of crime and enough of error

to disgust any man who did not reflect that the whole history of the

species is made up of little except crimes and errors. Misanthropy is

not the temper which qualifies a man to act in great affairs, or to

judge of them.

“Of the Parliament,” says Mr. Hallam, “it may be said, I think, with

not greater severity than truth, that scarce two or three public acts

of justice, humanity, or generosity, and very few of political wisdom

or courage, are recorded of them, from their quarrel with the King, to

their expulsion by Cromwell.” Those who may agree with us in the opinion

which we have expressed as to the original demands of the Parliament

will scarcely concur in this strong censure. The propositions which the

Houses made at Oxford, at Uxbridge, and at Newcastle, were in strict

accordance with these demands. In the darkest period of the war, they

showed no disposition to concede any vital principle. In the fulness of

their success, they showed {492}no disposition to encroach beyond these

limits. In this respect we cannot but think that they showed justice and

generosity, as well as political wisdom and courage.

The Parliament was certainly far from faultless. We fully agree with

Mr. Hallam in reprobating their treatment of Laud. For the individual,

indeed, we entertain a more unmitigated contempt than for any other

character in our history. The fondness with which a portion of the

church regards his memory, can be compared only to that perversity of

affection which sometimes leads a mother to select the monster or the

idiot of the family as the object of her especial favour. Mr. Hallam

has incidentally observed, that, in the correspondence of Laud with

Strafford, there are no indications of a sense of duty towards God or

man. The admirers of the Archbishop have, in consequence, inflicted upon

the public a crowd of extracts designed to prove the contrary. Now, in

all those passages, we see nothing which a prelate as wicked as Pope

Alexander or Cardinal Dubois might not have written. Those passages

indicate no sense of duty to God or man, but simply a strong interest in

the prosperity and dignity of the order to which the writer belonged;

an interest which, when kept within certain limits, does not deserve

censure, but which can never be considered as a virtue. Laud is anxious

to accommodate satisfactorily the disputes in the University of Dublin.

He regrets to hear that a church is used as a stable, and that the

benefices of Ireland are very poor. He is desirous that, however small a

congregation may be, service should be regularly performed. He expresses

a wish that the judges of the court before which questions of tithe are

generally brought should be selected {493}with a view to the interest of

the clergy. All this may be very proper; and it may be very proper that

an alderman should stand up for the tolls of his borough; and an East

India director for the charter of his Company. But it is ridiculous to

say that these things indicate piety and benevolence. No primate, though

he were the most abandoned of mankind, could wish to see the body, with

the influence of which his own influence was identical, degraded in the

public estimation by internal dissensions, by the ruinous state of its

edifices, and by the slovenly performance of its rites. We willingly

acknowledge that the particular letters in question have very little

harm in them; a compliment which cannot often be paid either to the

writings or to the actions of Laud.

Bad as the Archbishop was, however, he was not a traitor within the

statute. Nor was he by any means so formidable as to be a proper subject

for a retrospective ordinance of the legislature. His mind had not

expansion enough to comprehend a great scheme, good or bad. His

oppressive acts were not, like those of the Earl of Strafford, parts

of an extensive system. They were the luxuries in which a mean and

irritable disposition indulges itself from day to day, the excesses

natural to a little mind in a great place. The severest punishment which

the two Houses could have inflicted on him would have been to set him at

liberty and send him to Oxford. There he might have staid, tortured by

his own diabolical temper, hungering for Puritans to pillory and mangle,

plaguing the Cavaliers, for want of somebody else to plague, with

his peevishness and absurdity, performing grimaces and antics in the

cathedral, continuing that incomparable diary, which we never sec

without forgetting the vices of his heart {494}in the imbecility of his

intellect, minuting down his dreams, counting the drops of blood which

fell from his nose, watching the direction of the salt, and listening

for the note of the screech-owls. Contemptuous mercy was the only

vengeance which it became the Parliament to take on such a ridiculous

old bigot.

The Houses, it must be acknowledged, committed great errors In the

conduct of the war, or rather one great error, which brought their

affairs into a condition requiring the most perilous expedients. The

parliamentary leaders of what may be called the first generation, Essex,

Manchester, Northumberland, Hollis, even Pym, all the most eminent men,

in short, Hampden excepted, were inclined to half measures. They dreaded

a decisive victory almost as much as a decisive overthrow. They wished

to bring the King into a situation which might render it necessary

for him to grant their just and wise demands, but not to subvert the

constitution or to change the dynasty. They were afraid of serving the

purposes of those fierce and determined enemies of monarchy, who now

began to show themselves in the lower ranks of the party. The war was,

therefore, conducted in a languid and inefficient manner. A resolute

leader might have brought it to a close in a month. At the end of three

campaigns, however, the event was still dubious; and that it had not

been decidedly unfavourable to the cause of liberty was principally

Owing to the skill and energy which the more violent Roundheads had

displayed in subordinate situations. The conduct of Fairfax and Cromwell

at Mars-ton had exhibited a remarkable contrast to that of Essex at

Edgehill, and to that of Waller at Lansdowne.

If there be any truth established by the universal experience of

nations, it is this, that to carry the spirit of {495}peace into war

is a weak and cruel policy. The time of negotiation is the time for

deliberation and delay. But when an extreme case calls for that remedy

which is in its own nature most violent, and which, in such cases, is a

remedy only because it is violent, it is idle to think of mitigating

and diluting. Languid war can do nothing which negotiation or submission

will not do better: and to act on any other principle is, not to save

blood and money, but to squander them.

This the parliamentary leaders found. The third year of hostilities was

drawing to a close; and they had not conquered the King. They had not

obtained even those advantages which they had expected from a policy

obviously erroneous in a military point of view. They had wished to

husband their resources. They now found that in enterprises like

theirs, parsimony is the worst profusion. They had hoped to effect a

reconciliation. The event taught them that the best way to conciliate

is to bring the work of destruction to a speedy termination. By their

moderation many lives and much property had been wasted. The angry

passions which, if the contest had been short, would have died away

almost as soon as they appeared, had fixed themselves in the form of

deep and lasting hatred. A military caste had grown up. Those who had

been induced to take up arms by the patriotic feelings of citizens had

begun to entertain the professional feelings of soldiers. Above all, the

leaders of the party had forfeited its confidence. If they had, by their

valour and abilities, gained a complete victory, their influence might

have been sufficient to prevent their associates from abusing it. It

was now necessary to choose more resolute and uncompromising commanders.

Unhappily the illustrious man who alone united in himself all the

{496}talents and virtues which the crisis required, who alone could have

saved his country from the present dangers without plunging her into

others, who alone could have united all the friends of liberty in

obedience to his commanding genius and his venerable name, was no more.

Something might still be done. The Houses might still avert that worst

of all evils, the triumphant return of an imperious and unprincipled

master. They might still preserve London from all the horrors of rapine,

massacre, and lust. But their hopes of a victory as spotless as their

cause, of a reconciliation which might knit together the hearts of

all honest Englishmen for the defence of the public good, of durable

tranquillity, of temperate freedom, were buried in the grave of Hampden.

The self-denying ordinance was passed, and the army was remodelled.

These measures were undoubtedly full of danger. But all that was left to

the Parliament was to take the less of two dangers. And we think that,

even if they could have accurately foreseen all that followed, their

decision ought to have been the same. Under any circumstances, we should

have preferred Cromwell to Charles. But there could be no comparison

between Cromwell and Charles victorious, Charles restored, Charles

enabled to feed fat all the hungry grudges of his smiling rancour

and his cringing pride. The next visit of his Majesty to his faithful

Commons would have been more serious than that with which he last

honoured them; more serious than that which their own General paid them

some years after. The King would scarce have been content with praying

that the Lord would deliver him from Vane, or with pulling Marten by

the cloak. If, by fatal mismanagement, nothing was left to England but a

choice of {497}tyrants, the last tyrant whom she should have chosen was

Charles.

From the apprehension of this worst evil the Houses were soon delivered

by their new leaders. The armies of Charles were every where routed, his

fastnesses stormed, his party humbled and subjugated. The King himself

fell into the hands of the Parliament; and both the King and the

Parliament soon fell into the hands of the army. The fate of both the

captives was the same. Both were treated alternately with respect and

with insult. At length the natural life of one, and the political life

of the other, were terminated by violence; and the power for which both

had struggled was united in a single hand. Men naturally sympathize with

the calamities of individuals; but they are inclined to look on a fallen

party with contempt rather than with pity. Thus misfortune turned the

greatest of Parliaments into the despised Rump, and the worst of Kings

into the Blessed Martyr.

Mr. Hallam decidedly condemns the execution of Charles; and in all that

he says on that subject we heartily agree. We fully concur with him in

thinking that a great social schism, such as the civil war, is not to be

confounded with an ordinary treason, and that the vanquished ought to be

treated according to the rules, not of municipal, but of international

law. In this case the distinction is of the less importance, because

both international and municipal law were in favour of Charles. He was a

prisoner of war by the former, a King by the latter. By neither was he a

traitor. If he had been successful, and had put his leading opponents to

death, he would have deserved severe censure; and this without reference

to the justice or injustice of his cause. Yet the opponents of

{498}Charles, it must be admitted, were technically guilty of

treason. He might have sent them to the scaffold without violating any

established principle of jurisprudence. He would not have been compelled

to overturn the whole constitution in order to reach them. Here his

own case differed widely from theirs. Not only was his condemnation in

itself a measure which only the strongest necessity could vindicate; but

it could not be procured without taking several previous steps, every

one of which would have required the strongest necessity to vindicate

it. It could not be procured without dissolving the government by

military force, without establishing precedents of the most dangerous

description, without creating difficulties which the next ten years

were spent in removing, without pulling down institutions which it soon

became necessary to reconstruct, and setting up others which almost

every man was soon impatient to destroy. It was necessary to strike the

House of Lords out of the constitution, to exclude members of the House

of Commons by force, to make a new crime, a new tribunal, a new mode of

procedure: The whole legislative and judicial systems were trampled down

for the purpose of taking a single head. Not only those parts of the

constitution which the republicans were desirous to destroy, but those

which they wished to retain and exalt, were deeply injured by these

transactions. High Courts of Justice began to usurp the functions of

juries. The remaining delegates of the people were soon driven from

their seats by the same military violence which had enabled them to

exclude their colleagues.

If Charles had been the last of his line, there would have been an

intelligible reason for putting him to death. But the blow which

terminated his life at once {499}transferred the allegiance of every

Royalist to an heir, and an heir who was at liberty. To kill the

individual was, under such circumstances, not to destroy, but to release

the King.

We detest the character of Charles; but a man ought not to be removed by

a law _ex post facto_, even constitutionally procured, merely because he

is detestable. He must also be very dangerous. We can scarcely conceive

that any danger which a state can apprehend from any individual could

justify the violent measures which were necessary to procure a sentence

against Charles. But in fact the danger amounted to nothing. There was

indeed danger from the attachment of a large party to his office. But

this danger his execution only increased. His personal influence was

little indeed. He had lost the confidence of every party. Churchmen,

Catholics, Presbyterians, Independents, his enemies, his friends, his

tools, English, Scotch, Irish, all divisions and subdivisions of his

people had been deceived by him. His most attached councillors turned

away with shame and anguish from his false and hollow policy, plot

intertwined with plot, mine sprung beneath mine, agents disowned,

promises evaded, one pledge given in private, another in public.

“Oh, Mr. Secretary,” says Clarendon, in a letter to Nicholas, “those

stratagems have given me more sad hours than all the misfortunes in war

which have befallen the King, and look like the effects of God’s anger

towards us.”

The abilities of Charles were not formidable. His taste in the fine arts

was indeed exquisite; and few modern sovereigns have written or spoken

better. But he was not fit for active life. In negotiation he was always

trying to dupe others, and duping only himself. {500}As a soldier, he

was feeble, dilatory, and miserably wanting, not in personal courage,

but in the presence of mind which his station required. His delay at

Gloucester saved the parliamentary party from destruction. At Naseby,

in the very crisis of his fortune, his want of self-possession spread

a fatal panic through his army. The story which Clarendon tells of that

affair reminds us of the excuses by which Bessus and Bobadil explain

their cudgellings. A Scotch nobleman, it seems, begged the King not to

run upon his death, took hold of his bridle, and turned his horse round.

No man who had much value for his life would have tried to perform the

same friendly office on that day for Oliver Cromwell.

One thing, and one alone, could make Charles dangerous, a violent death.

His tyranny could not break the high spirit of the English people.

His arms could not conquer, his arts could not deceive them; but his

humiliation and his execution melted them into a generous compassion.

Men who die on a scaffold for political offences almost always die well.

The eyes of thousands are fixed upon them. Enemies and admirers are

watching their demeanour. Every tone of voice, every change of colour,

is to go down to posterity. Escape is impossible. Supplication is vain.

In such a situation, pride and despair have often been known to nerve

the weakest minds with fortitude adequate to the occasion. Charles died

patiently and bravely; not more patiently or bravely, indeed, than many

other victims of political rage; not more patiently or bravely than his

own Judges, who were not only killed, but tortured; or than Vane, who

had always been considered as a timid man. However, the King’s conduct

during his trial and at his execution made a prodigious {501}impression.

His subjects began to love his memory as heartily as they had hated his

person; and posterity has estimated his character from his death rather

than from his life.

To represent Charles as a martyr in the cause of Episcopacy is absurd.

Those who put him to death cared as little for the Assembly of Divines

as for the Convocation, and would, in all probability, only have hated

him the more if he had agreed to set up the Presbyterian discipline.

Indeed, in spite of the opinion of Mr. Hallam, we are inclined to think

that the attachment of Charles to the Church of England was altogether

political. Human nature is, we admit, so capricious that there may be

a single sensitive point in a conscience which every where else is

callous. A man without truth or humanity may have some strange scruples

about a trifle. There was one devout warrior in the royal camp whose

piety bore a great resemblance to that which is ascribed to the King.

We mean Colonel Turner. That gallant Cavalier was hanged, after the

Restoration, for a flagitious burglary. At the gallows he told the crowd

that his mind received great consolation from one reflection: he had

always taken off his hat when he went into a church. The character of

Charles would scarcely rise in our estimation, if we believed that he

was pricked in conscience after the manner of this worthy loyalist, and

that while violating all the first rules of Christian morality, he was

sincerely scrupulous about church-government. But we acquit him of such

weakness. In 1641, he deliberately confirmed the Scotch Declaration

which stated that the government of the church by archbishops and

bishops was contrary to the word of God. In 1645, he appears to

have offered to set up Popery in Ireland. That a {502}King who had

established the Presbyterian religion in one kingdom, and who was

willing to establish the Catholic religion in another, should have

insurmountable scruples about the ecclesiastical constitution of the

third, is altogether incredible. He himself says in his letters that he

looks on Episcopacy as a stronger support of monarchical power than even

the army. From causes which we have already considered, the Established

Church had been, since the Reformation, the great bulwark of the

prerogative. Charles wished, therefore, to preserve it. He thought

himself necessary both to the Parliament and to the army. He did not

foresee, till too late, that, by paltering with the Presbyterians, he

should put both them and himself into the power of a fiercer and more

daring party. If he had foreseen it, we suspect that the royal blood

which still cries to Heaven, every thirtieth of January, for judgments

only to be averted by salt-fish and egg-sauce, would never have been

shed. One who had swallowed the Scotch Declaration would scarcely strain

at the Covenant.

The death of Charles and the strong measures which led to it raised

Cromwell to a height of power fatal to the infant Commonwealth. No

men occupy so splendid a place in history as those who have founded

monarchies on the ruins of republican institutions. Their glory, if not

of the purest, is assuredly of the most seductive and dazzling kind. In

nations broken to the curb, in nations long accustomed to be transferred

from one tyrant to another, a man without eminent qualities may easily

gain supreme power. The defection of a troop of guards, a conspiracy of

eunuchs, a popular tumult, might place an indolent senator or a brutal

soldier on the throne of the Roman world. Similar {503}revolutions have

often occurred in the despotic states of Asia. But a community which

has heard the voice of truth and experienced the pleasures of liberty,

in which the merits of statesmen and of systems are freely canvassed,

in which obedience is paid, not to persons but to laws, in which

magistrates are regarded, not as the lords, but as the servants of the

public, in which the excitement of party is a necessary of life, in

which political warfare is reduced to a system of tactics; such a

community is not easily reduced to servitude. Beasts of burden may

easily be managed by a new master. But will the wild ass submit to the

bonds? Will the unicorn serve and abide by the crib? Will leviathan hold

out his nostrils to the hook? The mythological conqueror of the East,

whose enchantments reduced wild beasts to the tameness of domestic

cattle, and who harnessed lions and tigers to his chariot, is but an

imperfect type of those extraordinary minds which have thrown a spell

on the fierce spirits of nations unaccustomed to control, and have

compelled raging factions to obey their reins and swell their triumph.

The enterprise, be it good or bad, is one which requires a truly great

man. It demands courage, activity, energy, wisdom, firmness, conspicuous

virtues, or vices so splendid and alluring as to resemble virtues.

Those who have succeeded in this arduous undertaking form a very small

and a very remarkable class. Parents of tyranny, heirs of freedom,

kings among citizens, citizens among kings, they unite in themselves the

characteristics of the system which springs from them, and those of the

system from which they have sprung. Their reigns shine with a double

light, the last and dearest rays of departing freedom mingled with

the first and brightest glories of empire in its {504}dawn. The high

qualities of such a prince lend to despotism itself a charm drawn from

the liberty under which they were formed, and which they have destroyed.

He resembles an European who settles within the Tropics, and carries

thither the strength and the energetic habits acquired in regions more

propitious to the constitution. He differs as widely from princes nursed

in the purple of imperial cradles, as the companions of Gama from their

dwarfish and imbecile progeny which, born in a climate unfavourable to

its growth and beauty, degenerates more and more, at every descent, from

the qualities of the original conquerors.

In this class three men stand preeminent, Cæsar, Cromwell, and

Bonaparte. The highest place in this remarkable triumvirate belongs

undoubtedly to Cæsar. He united the talents of Bonaparte to those of

Cromwell; and he possessed also, what neither Cromwell nor Bonaparte

possessed, learning, taste, wit, eloquence, the sentiments and the

manners of an accomplished gentleman.

Between Cromwell and Napoleon Mr. Hallam has instituted a parallel,

scarcely less ingenious than that which Burke has drawn between Richard

Cour de Lion and Charles the Twelfth of Sweden. In this parallel,

however, and indeed throughout his work, we think that he hardly gives

Cromwell fair measure.

“Cromwell,” says he, “far unlike his antitype, never showed any signs of

a legislative mind, or any desire to place his renown on that noblest

basis, the amelioration of social institutions.” The difference in this

respect, we conceive, was not in the character of the men, but in the

characters of the revolutions by means of which they rose to power. The

civil war in England {505}had been undertaken to defend and restore;

the republicans of France set themselves to destroy. In England, the

principles of the common law had never been disturbed, and most even of

its forms had been held sacred. In France, the law and its ministers had

been swept away together. In France, therefore, legislation necessarily

became the first business of the first settled government which rose

on the ruins of the old system. The admirers of Inigo Jones have always

maintained that his works are inferior to those of Sir Christopher Wren,

only because the great fire of London gave Wren such a field for the

display of his powers as no architect in the history of the world ever

possessed. Similar allowance must be made for Cromwell. If he

erected little that was new, it was because there had been no general

devastation to clear a space for him. As it was, he reformed the

representative system in a most judicious manner. He rendered the

administration of justice uniform throughout the island. We will quote

a passage from his speech to the Parliament in September, 1656,

which contains, we think, simple and rude as the diction is, stronger

indications of a legislative mind, than are to be found in the whole

range of orations delivered on such occasions before or since.

“There is one general grievance in the nation. It is the law. I think,

I may say it, I have as eminent judges in this land as have been had,

or that the nation has had for these many years. Truly, I could be

particular as to the executive part, to the administration; but

that would trouble you. But the truth of it is, there are wicked and

abominable laws that will be in your power to alter. To hang a man for

sixpence, threepence, I know not what,--to hang for a {506}trifle, and

pardon murder, is in the ministration of the law through the ill framing

of it. I have known in my experience abominable murders quitted; and

to see men lose their lives for petty matters! This is a thing that God

will reckon for; and I wish it may not lie upon this nation a day

longer than you have an opportunity to give a remedy; and I hope I shall

cheerfully join with you in it.”

Mr. Hallam truly says that, though it is impossible to rank Cromwell

with Napoleon as a general, yet “his exploits were as much above

the level of his contemporaries, and more the effects of an original

uneducated capacity.” Bonaparte was trained in the best military

schools; the army which he led to Italy was one of the finest that ever

existed. Cromwell passed his youth and the prime of his manhood in a

civil situation. He never looked on war till he was more than forty

years old. He had first to form himself, and then to form his troops.

Out of raw levies he created an army, the bravest and the best

disciplined, the most orderly in peace, and the most terrible in war,

that Europe had seen. He called this body into existence. He led it to

conquest. He never fought a battle without gaining it. He never

gained a battle without annihilating the force opposed to him. Yet his

victories were not the highest glory of his military system. The respect

which his troops paid to property, their attachment to the laws and

religion of their country, their submission to the civil power, their

temperance, their intelligence, their industry, are without parallel. It

was after the Restoration that the spirit which their great leader had

infused into them was most signally displayed. At the command of the

established government, an established government which {507}had no

means of enforcing obedience, fifty thousand soldiers, whose backs no

enemy had ever seen, either in domestic or in continental war, laid down

their arms, and retired into the mass of the people, thenceforward to

be distinguished only by superior diligence, sobriety, and regularity

in the pursuits of peace, from the other members of the community which

they had saved.

In the general spirit and character of his administration, we think

Cromwell far superior to Napoleon. “In civil government,” says Mr.

Hallam, “there can be no adequate parallel between one who had sucked

only the dregs of a besotted fanaticism, and one to whom the stores of

reason and philosophy were open.” These expressions, it seems to

us, convey the highest eulogium on our great countryman. Reason

and philosophy did not teach the conqueror of Europe to command his

passions, or to pursue, as a first object, the happiness of his people.

They did not prevent him from risking his fame and his power in a

frantic contest against the principles of human nature and the laws of

the physical world, against the rage of the winter and the liberty

of the sea. They did not exempt him from the influence of that most

pernicious of superstitions, a presumptuous fatalism. They did not

preserve him from the inebriation of prosperity, or restrain him from

indecent querulousness in adversity. On the other hand, the fanaticism

of Cromwell never urged him on impracticable undertakings, or confused

his perception of the public good. Our countryman, inferior to Bonaparte

in invention, was far superior to him in wisdom. The French Emperor is

among conquerors what Voltaire is among writers, a miraculous child.

His splendid genius was frequently clouded by fits of humour as absurdly

perverse as those of the pet {508}of the nursery, who quarrels with his

food, and dashes his playthings to pieces. Cromwell was emphatically a

man. He possessed, in an eminent degree, that masculine and full-grown

robustness of mind, that equally diffused intellectual health, which,

if our national partiality does not mislead us, has peculiarly

characterised the great men of England. Never was any ruler so

conspicuously born for sovereignty. The cup which has intoxicated almost

all others sobered him. His spirit, restless from its own buoyancy in

a lower sphere, reposed in majestic placidity as soon as it had reached

the level congenial to it. He had nothing in common with that large

class of men who distinguish themselves in subordinate posts, and whose

incapacity becomes obvious as soon as the public voice summons them

to take the lead. Rapidly as his fortunes grew, his mind expanded

more rapidly still. Insignificant as a private citizen, he was a great

general; he was a still greater prince. Napoleon had a theatrical

manner, in which the coarseness of a revolutionary guard-room was

blended with the ceremony of the old Court of Versailles. Cromwell,

by the confession even of his enemies, exhibited in his demeanour the

simple and natural nobleness of a man neither ashamed of his origin

nor vain of his elevation, of a man who had found his proper place in

society, and who felt secure that he was competent to fill it. Easy,

even to familiarity, where his own dignity was concerned, he was

punctilious only for his country. His own character he left to take care

of itself; he left it to be defended by his victories in war, and his

reforms in peace. But he was a jealous and implacable guardian of the

public honour. He suffered a crazy Quaker to insult him in the gallery

of Whitehall, and {509}revenged himself only by liberating him and

giving him a dinner. But he was prepared to risk the chancel of war to

avenge the blood of a private Englishman.

No sovereign ever carried to the throne so large a portion of the best

qualities of the middling orders, so strong a sympathy with the feelings

and interests of his people. He was sometimes driven to arbitrary

measures; but he had a high, stout, honest, English heart. Hence it was

that he loved to surround his throne with such men as Hale and Blake.

Hence it was that he allowed so large a share of political liberty to

his subjects, and that, even when an opposition dangerous to his power

and to his person almost compelled him to govern by the sword, he was

still anxious to leave a germ from which, at a more favourable season,

free institutions might spring. We firmly believe that, if his first

Parliament had not commenced its debates by disputing his title, his

government would have been as mild at home as it was energetic and able

abroad. He was a soldier; he had risen by war. Had his ambition been of

an impure or selfish kind, it would have been easy for him to plunge his

country into continental hostilities on a large scale, and to dazzle

the restless factions which he ruled, by the splendour of his victories.

Some of his enemies have sneeringly remarked, that in the successes

obtained under his administration he had no personal share; as if a man

who had raised himself from obscurity to empire solely by his military

talents could have any unworthy reason for shrinking from military

enterprise. This reproach is his highest glory. In the success of the

English navy he could have no selfish interest. Its triumphs added

nothing to his fame; its increase added nothing to his means of

overawing his enemies; its {510}great leader was not his friend. Yet he

took a peculiar pleasure in encouraging that noble service which, of all

the instruments employed by an English government, is the most impotent

for mischief, and the most powerful for good. His administration was

glorious, but with no vulgar glory. It was not one of those periods of

overstrained and convulsive exertion which necessarily produce debility

and langour. Its energy was natural, healthful, temperate. He placed

England at the head of the Protestant interest, and in the first rank of

Christian powers. He taught every nation to value her friendship and

to dread her enmity. But he did not squander her resources in a vain

attempt to invest her with that supremacy which no power, in the modern

system of Europe, can safely affect, or can long retain.

This noble and sober wisdom had its reward. If he did not carry the

banners of the Commonwealth in triumph to distant capitals, if he did

not adorn Whitehall with the spoils of the Stadthouse and the Louvre, if

he did not portion out Flanders and Germany into principalities for his

kinsmen and his generals, he did not, on the other hand, see his country

overrun by the armies of nations which his ambition had provoked. He did

not drag out the last years of his life an exile and a prisoner, in

an unhealthy climate and under an ungenerous gaoler, raging with the

impotent desire of vengeance, and brooding over visions of departed

glory. He went down to his grave in the fulness of power and fame; and

he left to his son an authority which any man of ordinary firmness and

prudence would have retained.

But for the weakness of that foolish Ishbosheth, the opinions which

we have been expressing would, we {511}believe, now have formed the

orthodox creed of good Englishmen. We might now be writing under the

government of his Highness Oliver the Fifth or Richard the Fourth,

Protector, by the grace of God, of the Commonwealth of England,

Scotland, and Ireland, and the dominions thereto belonging. The form

of the great founder of the dynasty, on horseback, as when he led the

charge at Naseby, or on foot, as when he took the mace from the table

of the Commons, would adorn our squares and overlook our public offices

from Charing-Cross; and sermons in his praise would be duly preached on

his lucky day, the third of September, by court-chaplains, guiltless of

the abomination of the surplice.

But, though his memory has not been taken under the patronage of any

party, though every device has been used to blacken it, though to praise

him would long have been a punishable crime, truth and merit at last

prevail. Cowards who had trembled at the very sound of his name, tools

of office who, like Downing, had been proud of the honour of lacqueying

his coach, might insult him in loyal speeches and addresses. Venal poets

might transfer to the King the same eulogies, little the worse for wear,

which they had bestowed on the Protector. A fickle multitude might crowd

to shout and scoff round the gibbeted remains of the greatest Prince

and Soldier of the age. But when the Dutch cannon startled an effeminate

tyrant in his own palace, when the conquests which had been won by the

armies of Cromwell were sold to pamper the harlots of Charles, when

Englishmen were sent to fight under foreign banners, against the

independence of Europe and the Protestant religion, many honest hearts

swelled in secret at the thought of one who had never {512}suffered

his country to be ill used by any but himself. It must indeed have been

difficult for any Englishman to see the salaried Viceroy of France, at

the most important crisis of his fate, sauntering through his harem,

yawning and talking nonsense over a dispatch, or beslobbering his

brother and his courtiers in a fit of maudlin affection, without

a respectful and tender remembrance of him before whose genius the

young-pride of Lewis and the veteran craft of Mazarin had stood rebuked,

who had humbled Spain on the land and Holland on the sea, and whose

imperial voice had arrested the sails of the Lybian pirates and the

persecuting fires of Rome. Even to the present day his character, though

constantly attacked, and scarcely ever defended, is popular with the

great body of our countrymen.

The most blameable act of his life was the execution of Charles. We have

already strongly condemned that proceeding; but we by no means consider

it as one which attaches any peculiar stigma of infamy to the names of

those who participated in it. It was an unjust and injudicious display

of violent party spirit; but it was not a cruel or perfidious measure.

It had all those features which distinguish the errors of magnanimous

and intrepid spirits from base and malignant crimes.

From the moment that Cromwell is dead and buried, we go on in almost

perfect harmony with Mr. Hallam to the end of his book. The times which

followed the Restoration peculiarly require that unsparing impartiality

which is his most distinguishing virtue. No part of our history,

during the last three centuries, presents a spectacle of such general

dreariness. The whole breed of our statesmen seems to have degenerated;

{513}and their moral and intellectual littleness strikes us with the

more disgust, because we sec it placed in immediate contrast with the

high and majestic qualities of the race which they succeeded. In the

great civil war, even the bad cause had been rendered respectable and

amiable by the purity and elevation of mind which many of its friends

displayed. Under Charles the Second, the best and noblest of ends

was disgraced by means the most cruel and sordid. The rage of faction

succeeded to the love of liberty. Loyalty died away into servility. We

look in vain among the leading politicians of either side for steadiness

of principle, or even for that vulgar fidelity to party which, in our

time, it is esteemed infamous to violate. The inconsistency, perfidy,

and baseness, which the leaders constantly practised, which their

followers defended, and which the great body of the people regarded, as

it seems, with little disapprobation, appear in the present age almost

incredible. In the age of Charles the First, they would, we believe,

have excited as much astonishment.

Man, however, is always the same. And when so marked a difference

appears between two generations, it is certain that the solution may be

found in their respective circumstances. The principal statesmen of the

reign of Charles the Second were trained during the civil war and the

revolutions which followed it. Such a period is eminently favourable to

the growth of quick and active talents. It forms a class of men, shrewd,

vigilant, inventive; of men whose dexterity triumphs over the most

perplexing combinations of circumstances, whose presaging instinct no

sign of the times can elude. But it is an unpropitious season for the

firm and masculine virtues. The statesman who enters on his career

at such a time, can form no permanent {514}connections, can make no

accurate observations on the higher parts of political science. Before

he can attach himself to a party, it is scattered. Before he can study

the nature of a government, it is overturned. The oath of abjuration

comes close on the oath of allegiance. The association which was

subscribed yesterday is burned by the hangman to-day. In the midst of

the constant eddy and change, self-preservation becomes the first object

of the adventurer. It is a task too hard for the strongest head to keep

itself from becoming giddy in the eternal whirl. Public spirit is out of

the question. A laxity of principle, without which no public man can be

eminent or even safe, becomes too common to be scandalous; and the whole

nation looks coolly on Instances of apostacy which would startle the

foulest turncoat of more settled times.

The history of France since the Revolution affords some striking

illustrations of these remarks. The same man was a servant of the

Republic, of Bonaparte, of Lewis the Eighteenth, of Bonaparte again

after his return from Elba, of Lewis again after his return from Ghent.

Yet all these manifold treasons by no means seemed to destroy his

influence, or even to fix any peculiar stain of infamy on his character.

We, to be sure, did not know what to make of him; but his countrymen

did not seem to be shocked; and in truth they had little right to be

shocked: for there was scarcely one Frenchman distinguished in the state

or in the army, who had not, according to the best of his talents and

opportunities, emulated the example. It was natural, too, that this

should be the case. The rapidity and violence with which change followed

change in the affairs of France towards the close of the last century

had taken away the reproach of inconsistency, unfixed {515}the

principles of public men, and produced in many minds a general

scepticism and indifference about principles of government.

No Englishman who has studied attentively the reign of Charles the

Second will think himself entitled to indulge in any feelings of

national superiority over the _Dictionnaire des Girouettes_. Shaftesbury

was surely a far less respectable man than Talleyrand; and it would

be injustice even to Fouché to compare him with Lauderdale. Nothing,

indeed, can more clearly show how low the standard of political

morality had fallen in this country than the fortunes of the two British

statesmen whom we have named. The government wanted a ruffian to carry

on the most atrocious system of mis-government with which any nation

was ever cursed, to extirpate Presbyterianism by fire and sword, by the

drowning of women, by the frightful torture of the boot. And they

found him among the chiefs of the rebellion and the subscribers of the

Covenant. The opposition looked for a chief to head them in the most

desperate attacks ever made, under the forms of the Constitution, on

any English administration: and they selected the minister who had the

deepest share in the worst acts of the Court, the soul of the Cabal, the

counsellor who had shut up the Exchequer and urged on the Dutch war. The

whole political drama was of the same cast. No unity of plan, no decent

propriety of character and costume, could be found in that wild

and monstrous harlequinade. The whole was made up of extravagant

transformations and burlesque contrasts; Atheists turned Puritans;

Puritans turned Atheists; republicans defending the divine right of

Kings; prostitute courtiers clamouring for the liberties of the people;

judges inflaming the rage of mobs; patriots pocketing {516}bribes from

foreign powers; a Popish prince torturing Presbyterians into Episcopacy

in one part of the island; Presbyterians cutting off the heads of Popish

noblemen and gentlemen in the other. Public opinion has its natural

flux and reflux. After a violent burst, there is commonly a reaction. But

vicissitudes so extraordinary as those which marked the reign of Charles

the Second can only be explained by supposing an utter want of principle

in the political world. On neither side was there fidelity enough to

face a reverse. Those honourable retreats from power which, in later

days, parties have often made, with loss, but still in good order, in

firm union, with unbroken spirit and formidable means of annoyance, were

utterly unknown. As soon as a check took place a total rout followed:

arms and colours were thrown away. The vanquished troops, like the

Italian mercenaries of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, enlisted

on the very field of battle, in the service of the conquerors. In a

nation proud of its sturdy justice and plain good sense, no party could

be found to take a firm middle stand between the worst of oppositions

and the worst of courts. When, on charges as wild as Mother Goose’s

tales, on the testimony of wretches who proclaimed themselves to be

spies and traitors, and whom everybody now believes to have been also

liars and murderers, the offal of gaols and brothels, the leavings of

the hangman’s whip and shears, Catholics guilty of nothing but their

religion were led like sheep to the Protestant shambles, where were the

loyal Tory gentry and the passively obedient clergy? And where, when the

time of retribution came, when laws were strained and juries packed

to destroy the leaders of the Whigs, when charters were invaded, when

Jefferies and Kirke were making {517}Somersetshire what Lauderdale and

Graham had made Scotland, where were the ten thousand brisk boys of

Shaftesbury, the members of ignoramus juries, the wearers of the Polish

medal? All-powerful to destroy others, unable to save themselves, the

members of the two parties oppressed and were oppressed, murdered and

were murdered, in their turn. No lucid interval occurred between the

frantic paroxysms of two contradictory illusions.

To the frequent changes of the government during the twenty years which

had preceded the Restoration, this unsteadiness is in a great measure to

be attributed. Other causes had also been at work. Even if the country

had been governed by the house of Cromwell or by the remains of the Long

Parliament, the extreme austerity of the Puritans would necessarily have

produced a revulsion. Towards the close of the Protectorate many signs

indicated that a time of license was at hand. But the restoration of

Charles the Second rendered the change wonderfully rapid and violent.

Profligacy became a test of orthodoxy and loyalty, a qualification for

rank and office. A deep and general taint infected the morals of the

most influential classes, and spread itself through every province

of letters. Poetry inflamed the passions; philosophy undermined the

principles; divinity itself, inculcating an abject reverence for the

Court, gave additional effect to the licentious example of the Court.

We look in vain for those qualities which lend a charm to the errors

of high and ardent natures, for the generosity, the tenderness, the

chivalrous delicacy, which ennoble appetites into passions, and impart

to vice itself a portion of the majesty of virtue. The excesses of that

age remind us of the humours of a gang of footpads, revelling with their

{518}favourite beauties at a flash-house. In the fashionable libertinism

there is a hard, cold ferocity, an impudence, a lowness, a dirtiness,

which can be paralleled only among the heroes and heroines of that

filthy and heartless literature which encouraged it. One nobleman of

great abilities wanders about as a Merry-Andrew. Another harangues the

mob stark naked from a window. A third lays an ambush to cudgel a man

who has offended him. A knot of gentlemen of high rank and influence

combine to push their fortunes at court by circulating stories intended

to ruin an innocent girl, stories which had no foundation, and which, if

they had been true, would never have passed the lips of a man of honour.

A dead child is found in the palace, the offspring of some maid of

honour by some courtier, or perhaps by Charles himself. The whole flight

of pandars and buffoons pounce upon it, and carry it in triumph to the

royal laboratory, where his Majesty, after a brutal jest, dissects it

for the amusement of the assembly, and probably of its father among

the rest. The favourite Duchess stamps about Whitehall, cursing and

swearing. The ministers employ their time at the council-board in

making mouths at each other and taking off each other’s gestures for the

amusement of the King. The Peers at a conference begin to pommel each

other and to tear collars and periwigs. A speaker in the House of

Commons gives offence to the Court. He is waylaid by a gang of bullies,

and his nose is cut to the bone. This ignominous dissoluteness, or

rather, if we may venture to designate it by the only proper word,

blackguardism of feeling and manners, could not but spread from private

to public life. The cynical sneers, the epicurean sophistry, which

had driven honour and virtue from one part of the character, extended

{519}their influence over every other. The second generation of the

statesmen of this reign were worthy pupils of the schools in which they

had been trained, of the gaming-table of Grammont, and the tiring-room

of Nell. In no other age could such a trifler as Buckingham have

exercised any political influence. In no other age could the path

to power and glory have been thrown open to the manifold infamies of

Churchill.

The history of Churchill shows, more clearly per haps than that of any

other individual, the malignity and extent of the corruption which had

eaten into the heart of the public morality. An English gentleman of

good family attaches himself to a Prince who has seduced his sister, and

accepts rank and wealth as the price of her shame and his own. He then

repays by ingratitude the benefits which he has purchased by ignominy,

betrays his patron in a manner which the best cause cannot excuse, and

commits an act, not only of private treachery, but of distinct military

desertion. To his conduct at the crisis of the fate of James, no service

in modern times has, as far as we remember, furnished any parallel. The

conduct of Ney, scandalous enough no doubt, is the very fastidiousness

of honour in comparison of it. The perfidy of Arnold approaches it

most nearly. In our age and country no talents, no services, no party

attachments, could bear any man up under such mountains of infamy. Yet,

even before Churchill had performed those great actions which in some

degree redeem his character with posterity, the load lay very lightly on

him. He had others in abundance to keep him in countenance. Godolphin,

Orford, Dauby, the trimmer Halifax, the renegade Sunderland, were all

men of the same class.

Where such was the political morality of the noble {520}and the wealthy,

it may easily be conceived that those professions which, even in the

best times, are peculiarly liable to corruption, were in a frightful

state. Such a bench and such a bar England has never seen. Jones,

Scroggs, Jefferies, North, Wright, Sawyer, Williams, are to this day the

spots and blemishes of our legal chronicles. Differing in constitution

and in situation, whether blustering or cringing, whether persecuting

Protestants or Catholics, they were equally unprincipled and inhuman.

The part which the Church played was not equally atrocious; but it must

have been exquisitely diverting to a scoffer. Never were principles so

loudly professed, and so shamelessly abandoned. The Royal prerogative

had been magnified to the skies in theological works. The doctrine

of passive obedience had been preached from innumerable pulpits. The

University of Oxford had sentenced the works of the most moderate

constitutionalists to the flames. The accession of a Catholic King, the

frightful cruelties committed in the west of England, never shook the

steady loyalty of the clergy. But did they serve the Kino; for nought?

He laid his hand on them, and they cursed him to his face. He touched

the revenue of a college and the liberty of some prelates; and the whole

profession set up a yell worthy of Hugh Peters himself. Oxford sent her

plate to an invader with more alacrity than she had shown when Charles

the First requested it. Nothing was said about the wickedness of

resistance till resistance had done its work, till the anointed

vicegerent of Heaven had been driven away, and till it had become plain

that he would never be restored, or would be restored at least under

strict limitations. The clergy went back, it must be owned, to their old

theory, as soon as they found that it would do them no harm. {521}It

is principally to the general baseness and profligacy of the times that

Clarendon is indebted for his high reputation. He was, in every respect,

a man unfit for his age, at once too good for it and too bad for it. He

seemed to be one of the ministers of Elizabeth, transplanted at once to

a state of society widely different from that in which the abilities of

such ministers had been serviceable. In the sixteenth century, the Royal

prerogative had scarcely been called in question. A Minister who held

it high was in no danger, so long as he used it well. That attachment

to the Crown, that extreme jealousy of popular encroachments, that love,

half religious half political, for the Church, which, from the

beginning of the second session of the Long Parliament, showed itself in

Clarendon, and which his sufferings, his long residence in France,

and his high station in the government, served to strengthen, would, a

hundred years earlier, have secured to him the favour of his sovereign

without rendering him odious to the people. His probity, his correctness

in private life, his decency of deportment, and his general ability,

would not have misbecome a colleague of Walsingham and Burleigh. But,

in the times on which he was cast, his errors and his virtues were alike

out of place. He imprisoned men without trial. He was accused of raising

unlawful contributions on the people for the support of the army. The

abolition of the act which ensured the frequent holding of Parliaments

was one of his favourite objects. He seems to have meditated the revival

of the Star Chamber and the High Commission Court. His zeal for the

prerogative made him unpopular; but it could not secure to him the

favour of a master far more desirous of ease and pleasure than of

power. {522}Charles would rather have lived in exile and privacy, with

abundance of money, a crowd of mimics to amuse him, and a score of

mistresses, than have purchased the absolute dominion of the world by

the privations and exertions to which Clarendon was constantly urging

him. A councillor who was always bringing him papers and giving him

advice, and who stoutly refused to compliment Lady Castlemaine and to

carry messages to Mistress Stewart, soon became more hateful to him than

ever Cromwell had been. Thus, considered by the people as an oppressor,

by the Court as a censor, the Minister fell from his high office with a

ruin more violent and destructive than could ever have been his fate, if

he had either respected the principles of the Constitution or flattered

the vices of the King.

Mr. Hallam has formed, we think, a most correct estimate of the

character and administration of Clarendon. But he scarcely makes

a sufficient allowance for the wear and tear which honesty almost

necessarily sustains in the friction of political life, and which, in

times so rough as those through which Clarendon passed, must be very

considerable. When these are fairly estimated, we think that his

integrity may be allowed to pass muster. A high-minded man he certainly

was not, either in public or in private affairs. His own account of his

conduct in the affair of his daughter is the most extraordinary passage

in autobiography. We except nothing even in the Confessions of Rousseau.

Several writers have taken a perverted and absurd pride in representing

themselves as detestable; but no other ever laboured hard to make

himself despicable and ridiculous. In one important particular Clarendon

showed as little regard to the {523}honour of his country as he had

shown to that of his family. He accepted a subsidy from France for the

relief of Portugal. But this method of obtaining money was afterwards

practised to a much greater extent, and for objects much less

respectable, both by the Court and by the Opposition.

These pecuniary transactions are commonly considered as the most

disgraceful part of the history of those times; and they were no doubt

highly reprehensible. Yet, in justice to the Whigs and to Charles

himself, we must admit that they were not so shameful or atrocious as at

the present day they appear. The effect of violent animosities between

parties has always been an indifference to the general welfare

and honour of the State. A politician, where factions run high, is

interested not for the whole people, but for his own section of it.

The rest are, in his view, strangers, enemies, or rather pirates. The

strongest aversion which he can feel to any foreign power is the ardour

of friendship, when compared with the loathing which he entertains

towards those domestic foes with whom he is cooped up in a narrow space,

with whom he lives in a constant interchange of petty injuries and

insults, and from whom, in the day of their success, he has to expect

severities far beyond any that a conqueror from a distant country would

inflict. Thus, in Greece, it was a point of honour for a man to cleave

to his party against his country. No aristocratical citizen of Samos

or Corcyra would have hesitated to call in the aid of Lacedæmon. The

multitude, on the contrary, looked every where to Athens. In the Italian

states of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, from the same cause,

no man was so much a Pisan or a Florentine as a Ghibeline or a Guelf. It

may be doubted whether {524}there was a single individual who would have

scrupled to raise his party from a state of depression, by opening

the gates of his native city to a French or an Arragonese force. The

Reformation, dividing; almost every European country into’ two

parts, produced similar effects. The Catholic was too strong for the

Englishman, the Huguenot for the Frenchman. The Protestant statesmen of

Scotland and France called in the aid of Elizabeth; and the Papists of

the League brought a Spanish army into the very heart of France. ‘The

commotions to which the French Revolution gave rise were followed by the

same consequences. The Republicans in every part of Europe were eager to

see the armies of the National Convention and the Directory appear among

them, and exulted in defeats which distressed and humbled those whom

they considered as their worst enemies, their own rulers. The princes

and nobles of France, on the other hand, did their utmost to bring

foreign invaders to Paris. A very short time has elapsed since the

Apostolical party in Spain invoked, too successfully, the support of

strangers.

The great contest which raged in England during the seventeenth century

extinguished, not indeed in the body of the people, but in those classes

which were most actively engaged in politics, almost all national

feelings. Charles the Second and many of his courtiers had passed a

large part of their lives in banishment, living on the bounty of foreign

treasuries, soliciting foreign aid to reestablish monarchy in their

native country. The King’s own brother had fought in Flanders, under the

banners of Spain, against the English armies. The oppressed Cavaliers

in England constantly looked to the Louvre and the Escurial for

{525}deliverance and revenge. Clarendon censures the continental

governments with great bitterness for not interfering in our internal

dissensions. It is not strange, therefore, that, amidst the furious

contests which followed the Restoration, the violence of party feeling

should produce effects which would probably have attended it even in

an age less distinguished by laxity of principle and indelicacy of

sentiment. It was not till a natural death had terminated the paralytic

old age of the Jacobite party that the evil was completely at an end.

The Whigs long looked to Holland, the High Tories to France. The

former concluded the Barrier Treaty; the latter entreated the Court

of Versailles to send an expedition to England. Many men who, however

erroneous their political notions might be, were unquestionably

honourable in private life, accepted money without scruple from the

foreign powers favourable to the Pretender.

Never was there less of national feeling among the higher orders than

during the reign of Charles the Second. That Prince, on the one side,

thought it better to be the deputy of an absolute king than the King

of a free people. Algernon Sydney, on the other hand, would gladly have

aided France in all her ambitious schemes, and have seen England reduced

to the condition of a province, in the wild hope that a foreign despot

would assist him to establish his darling republic. The King took the

money of France to assist him in the enterprise which he meditated

against the liberty of his subjects, with as little scruple as Frederic

of Prussia or Alexander of Russia accepted our subsidies in time of war.

The leaders of the Opposition no more thought themselves disgraced by

the presents of Lewis, than a gentleman of our own time {526}thinks

himself disgraced by the liberality of powerful and wealthy members of

his party who pay his election bill. The money which the King received

from France had been largely employed to corrupt members of Parliament.

The enemies of the court might think it fair, or even absolutely

necessary, to encounter bribery with bribery. Thus they took the French

gratuities, the needy among them for their own use, the rich probably

for the general purposes of the party, without any scruple. If we

compare their conduct not with that of English statesmen in our own

time, but with that of persons in those foreign countries which are

now situated as England then was, we shall probably see reason to abate

something of the severity of censure with which it has been the fashion

to visit those proceedings. Yet, when every allowance is made, the

transaction is sufficiently offensive. It is satisfactory to find that

Lord Russell stands free from any imputation of personal participation

in the spoil. An age so miserably poor in all the moral qualities which

render public characters respectable can ill spare the credit which it

derives from a man, not indeed conspicuous for talents or knowledge,

but honest even in his errors, respectable in every relation of life,

rationally pious, steadily and placidly brave.

The great improvement which took place in our breed of public men is

principally to be ascribed to the Revolution. Yet that memorable event,

in a great measure, took its character from the very vices which it

was the means of reforming. It was assuredly a happy revolution, and

a useful revolution; but it was not, what it has often been called, a

glorious revolution. William, and William alone, derived glory from

it. {527}The transaction was, in almost every part, discreditable to

England. That a tyrant who had violated the fundamental laws of the

country, who had attacked the rights of its greatest corporations, who

had begun to persecute the established religion of the state, who had

never respected the law either in his superstition or in his revenge,

could not be pulled down without the aid of a foreign army, is a

circumstance not very grateful to our national pride. Yet this is the

least degrading part of the story. The shameless insincerity of the

great and noble, the warm assurances of general support which James

received, down to the moment of general desertion, indicate a meanness

of spirit and a looseness of morality most disgraceful to the age. That

the enterprise succeeded, at least that it succeeded without bloodshed

or commotion, was principally owing to an act of ungrateful perfidy,

such as no soldier had ever before committed, and to those monstrous

fictions respecting the birth of the Prince of Wales which persons of

the highest rank were not ashamed to circulate. In all the proceedings

of the Convention, in the conference particularly, we see that

littleness of mind which is the chief characteristic of the times. The

resolutions on which the two Houses at last agreed were as bad as

any resolutions for so excellent a purpose could be. Their feeble and

contradictory language was evidently intended to save the credit of

the Tories, who were ashamed to name what they were not ashamed to do.

Through the whole transaction no commanding talents were displayed by

any Englishman; no extraordinary risks were run; no sacrifices were made

for the deliverance of the nation, except the sacrifice which Churchill

made of honour, and Anne of natural affection. {528}It was in some sense

fortunate, as we have already said, for the Church of England, that the

Reformation in this country was effected by men who cared little about

religion. And, in the same manner, it was fortunate for our civil

government that the Revolution was in a great measure effected by men

who cared little about their political principles. At such a crisis,

splendid talents and strong passions might have done more harm than

good. There was far greater reason to fear that too much would be

attempted, and that violent movements would produce an equally violent

reaction, than that too little would be done in the way of change. But

narrowness of intellect and flexibility of principle, though they may be

serviceable, can never be respectable.

If in the Revolution itself there was little that can properly be called

glorious, there was still less in the events which followed. In a church

which had as one man declared the doctrine of resistance unchristian,

only four hundred persons refused to take the oath of allegiance to a

government founded on resistance. In the preceding generation, both the

Episcopal and the Presbyterian clergy, rather than concede points of

conscience not more important, had resigned their livings by thousands.

The churchmen, at the time of the Revolution, justified their conduct by

all those profligate sophisms which are called Jesuitical, and which are

commonly reckoned among the peculiar sins of Popery, but which in

fact are every where the anodynes employed by minds rather subtle than

strong, to quiet those internal twinges which they cannot but feel and

which they will not obey. As the oath taken by the clergy was in the

teeth of their principles, so was their conduct {529}in the teeth of

their oath. Their constant machinations against the Government to

which they had sworn fidelity brought a reproach on their order and on

Christianity itself. A distinguished prelate has not scrupled to say

that the rapid increase of infidelity at that time was principally

produced by the disgust which the faithless conduct of his brethren

excited in men not sufficiently candid or judicious to discern the

beauties of the system amidst the vices of its ministers.

But the reproach was not confined to the Church. In every political

party, in the Cabinet itself, duplicity and perfidy abounded. The

very men whom William loaded with benefits and in whom he reposed

most confidence, with his seals of office in their hands, kept up a

correspondence with the exiled family. Orford, Leeds, and Shrewsbury

were guilty of this odious treachery. Even Devonshire is not altogether

free from suspicion. It may well be conceived that, at such a time,

such a nature as that of Marlborough would riot in the very luxury of

baseness. His former treason, thoroughly furnished with all that makes

infamy exquisite, placed him under the disadvantage which attends every

artist from the time that he produces a masterpiece. Yet his second

great stroke may excite wonder, even in those who appreciate all the

merit of the first. Lest his admirers should be able to say that at

the time of the Revolution he had betrayed his King from any other

than selfish motives, he proceeded to betray his country. He sent

intelligence to the French court of a secret expedition intended to

attack Brest. The consequence was that the expedition failed, and that

eight hundred British soldiers lost their lives from the abandoned

villany of a British general. Yet this man has been canonized by so

many eminent writers that {530}to speak of him as he deserves may seem

scarcely decent.

The reign of William the Third, as Mr. Hallam happily says, was the

Nadir of the national prosperity. It was also the Nadir of the national

character. It was the time when the rank harvest of vices sown during

thirty years of licentiousness and confusion was gathered in; but it was

also the seed-time of great virtues.

The press was emancipated from the censorship soon after the Revolution;

and the Government immediately fell under the censorship of the press.

Statesmen had a scrutiny to endure which was every day becoming more and

more severe. The extreme violence of opinions abated. The Whigs learned

moderation in office; the Tories learned the principles of liberty

in opposition. The parties almost constantly approximated, often met,

sometimes crossed each other. There were occasional bursts of violence;

but, from the time of the Revolution, those bursts were constantly

becoming less and less terrible. The severity with which the Tories, at

the close of the reign of Anne, treated some of those who had directed

public affairs during the war of the Grand Alliance, and the retaliatory

measures of the Whigs, after the accession of the House of Hanover,

cannot be justified; but they were by no means in the style of the

infuriated parties, whose alternate murders had disgraced our history

towards the close of the reign of Charles the Second. At the fall of

Walpole far greater moderation was displayed. And from that time it has

been the practice, a practice not strictly according to the theory

of our Constitution, but still most salutary, to consider the loss of

office, and the public disapprobation, as punishments sufficient for

errors in the administration not imputable to personal {531}corruption.

Nothing, we believe, has contributed more than this lenity to raise

the character of public men. Ambition is of itself a game sufficiently

hazardous and sufficiently deep to inflame the passions without adding

property, life, and liberty to the stake. Where the play runs so

desperately high as in the seventeenth century, honour is at an end.

Statesmen, instead of being as they should be, at once mild and steady,

are at once ferocious and inconsistent. The axe is for ever before their

eyes. A popular outcry sometimes unnerves them, and sometimes makes them

desperate; it drives them to unworthy compliances, or to measures of

vengeance as cruel as those which they have reason to expect. A Minister

in our times need not fear either to be firm or to be merciful. Our old

policy in this respect was as absurd as that of the king in the Eastern

tale who proclaimed that any physician who pleased might come to court

and prescribe for his diseases, but that if the remedies failed the

adventurer should lose his head. It is easy to conceive how many able

men would refuse to undertake the cure on such conditions; how much the

sense of extreme danger would confuse the perceptions, and cloud the

intellect, of the practitioner, at the very crisis which most called

for self-possession, and how strong his temptation would be, if he found

that he had committed a blunder, to escape the consequences of it by

poisoning his patient.

But in fact it would have been impossible, since the Revolution, to

punish any Minister for the general course of his policy, with the

slightest semblance of justice; for since that time no Minister has been

able to pursue any general course of policy without the approbation of

the Parliament. The most important effects of that great change were, as

Mr. Hallam has {532}most truly said and most ably shown, those which

it indirectly produced. Thenceforward it became the interest of the

executive government to protect those very doctrines which an executive

government is in general inclined to persecute. The sovereign, the

ministers, the courtiers, at last even the universities and the clergy,

were changed into advocates of the right of resistance. In the theory of

the Whigs, in the situation of the Tories, in the common interest of all

public men, the Parliamentary constitution of the country found perfect

security. The power of the House of Commons, in particular, has been

steadily on the increase. Since supplies have been granted for short

terms and appropriated to particular services, the approbation of that

House has been as necessary in practice to the executive administration

as it has al-ways been in theory to taxes and to laws.

Mr. Hallam appears to have begun with the reign of Henry the Seventh, as

the period at which what is called modern history, in contradistinction

to the history of the middle ages, is generally supposed to commence. He

has stopped at the accession of George the Third, “from unwillingness,”

as he says, “to excite the prejudices of modern politics, especially

those connected with personal character.” These two eras, we think,

deserved the distinction on other grounds. Our remote posterity, when

looking back on our history in that comprehensive manner in which remote

posterity alone can, without much danger of error, look back on it, will

probably observe those points with peculiar interest. They are, if we

mistake not, the beginning and the end of an entire and separate chapter

in our annals. The period which lies between them is a perfect cycle, a

great year of the public mind. {533}In the reign of Henry the Seventh,

all the political differences which had agitated England since the

Norman conquest seemed to be set at rest. The long and fierce struggle

between the Crown and the Barons had terminated. The grievances which

had produced the rebellions of Tyler and Cade had disappeared.

Vilanage was scarcely known. The two royal houses, whose conflicting

claims had long convulsed the kingdom, were at length united. The

claimants whose pretensions, just or unjust, had disturbed the new

settlement, were overthrown. In religion there was no open dissent, and

probably very little secret heresy. The old subjects of contention, in

short, had vanished; those which were to succeed had not yet appeared.

Soon, however, new principles were announced; principles which were

destined to keep England during two centuries and a half in a state of

commotion. The Reformation divided the people into two great parties.

The Protestants were victorious. They again subdivided themselves.

Political factions were engrafted on theological sects. The mutual

animosities of the two parties gradually emerged into the light of

public life. First came conflicts in Parliament; then civil war; then

revolutions upon revolutions, each attended by its appurtenance of

proscriptions, and persecutions, and tests; each followed by severe

measures on the part of the conquerors; each exciting a deadly and

festering hatred in the conquered. During the reign of George the

Second, things were evidently tending to repose. At the close of that

reign, the nation had completed the great revolution which commenced in

the early part of the sixteenth century, and was again at rest. The fury

of sects had died away. The Catholics themselves practically enjoyed

toleration; and more {534}than toleration they did not yet venture even

to desire. Jacobitism was a mere name. Nobody was left to fight for

that wretched cause, and very few to drink for it. The Constitution,

purchased so dearly, was on every side extolled and worshipped. Even

those distinctions of party which must almost always be found in a free

state could scarcely be traced. The two great bodies which, from the

time of the Revolution, had been gradually tending to approximation,

were now united in emulous support of that splendid Administration which

smote to the dust both the branches of the House of Bourbon. The great

battle for our ecclesiastical and civil polity had been fought and

won. The wounds had been healed. The victors and the vanquished were

rejoicing together. Every person acquainted with the political writers

of the last generation will recollect the terms in which they generally

speak of that time. It was a glimpse of a golden age of union and

glory, a short interval of rest, which had been preceded by centuries of

agitation, and which centuries of agitation were destined to follow.

How soon faction again began to ferment is well known. In the Letters of

Junius, in Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Discontents, and in many

other writings of less merit, the violent dissensions which speedily

convulsed the country are imputed to the system of favouritism which

George the Third introduced, to the influence of Bute, or to the

profligacy of those who called themselves the King’s friends. With

all deference to the eminent writers to whom we have referred, we may

venture to say that they lived too near the events of which they treated

to judge correctly. The schism which was then appearing in the nation,

and which has been from that time almost constantly {535}widening, had

little in common with those schisms which had divided it during the

reigns of the Tudors and the Stuarts. The symptoms of popular feeling,

indeed, will always be in a great measure the same; but the principle

which excited that feeling was here new. The support which was given to

Wilkes, the clamour for reform during the American war, the disaffected

conduct of large classes of people at the time of the French Revolution,

no more resembled the opposition which had been offered to the government

of Charles the Second, than that opposition resembled the contest

between the Roses.

In the political as in the natural body, a sensation is often referred

to a part widely different from that in which it really resides. A man

whose leg is cut off fancies that he feels a pain in his toe. And in the

same manner the people, in the earlier part of the late reign, sincerely

attributed their discontent to grievances which had been effectually

lopped off. They imagined that the prerogative was too strong for the

Constitution, that the principles of the Revolution were abandoned, that

the system of the Stuarts was restored. Every impartial man must now

acknowledge that these charges were groundless. The conduct of the

Government with respect to the Middlesex election would have been

contemplated with delight by the first generation of Whigs. They would

have thought it a splendid triumph of the cause of liberty that the

King and the Lords should resign to the lower House a portion of the

legislative power, and allow it to incapacitate without their consent.

This, indeed, Mr. Burke clearly perceived. “When the House of Commons,”

says he, “in an endeavour to obtain new advantages at the expense of the

other orders of the {536}state, for the benefit of the commons at large,

have pursued strong measures, if it were not just, it was at least

natural, that the constituents should connive at all their proceedings;

because we ourselves were ultimately to profit. But when this submission

is urged to us in a contest between the representatives and ourselves,

and where nothing can be put into their scale which is not taken from

ours, they fancy us to be children when they tell us that they are our

representatives, our own flesh and blood, and that all the stripes they

give us are for our good.” These sentences contain, in fact, the whole

explanation of the mystery. The conflict of the seventeenth century

was maintained by the Parliament against the Crown. The conflict which

commenced in the middle of the eighteenth century, which still remains

undecided, and in which our children and grandchildren will probably be

called to act or to suffer, is between a large portion of the people on

the one side, and the Crown and the Parliament united on the other.

The privileges of the House of Commons, those privileges which, in

1642, all London rose in arms to defend, which the people considered

as synonymous with their own liberties, and in comparison of which they

took no account of the most precious and sacred principles of English

jurisprudence, have now become nearly as odious as the rigours of

martial law. That power of committing which the people anciently loved

to see the House of Commons exercise, is now, at least when employed

against libellers, the most unpopular power in the Constitution. If the

Commons were to suffer the Lords to amend money-bills, we do not believe

that the people would care one straw about the matter. If they were to

suffer the Lords even to originate {537}money-bills, we doubt whether

such a surrender of their constitutional rights would excite half

so much dissatisfaction as the exclusion of strangers from a single

important discussion. The gallery in which the reporters sit has become

a fourth estate of the realm. The publication of the debates, a practice

which seemed to the most liberal statesman of the old school full of

danger to the great safeguards of public liberty, is now regarded by

many persons as a safeguard tantamount, and more than tantamount, to all

the rest together.

Burke, in a speech on parliamentary reform which is the more remarkable

because it was delivered long before the French Revolution, has

described, in striking language, the change in public feeling of which

we speak. “It suggests melancholy reflections,” says he, “in consequence

of the strange course we have long held, that we are now no longer

quarreling about the character, or about the conduct of men, or the

tenour of measures; but we are grown out of humour with the English

Constitution itself; this is become the object of the animosity of

Englishmen. This constitution in former days used to be the envy of the

world; it was the pattern for politicians; the theme of the eloquent;

the meditation of the philosopher in every part of the world. As to

Englishmen, it was their pride, their consolation. By it they lived, and

for it they were ready to die. Its defects, if it had any, were partly

covered by partiality, and partly borne by prudence. Now all its

excellencies are forgot, its faults are forcibly dragged into day,

exaggerated by every artifice of misrepresentation. It is despised and

rejected of men; and every device and invention of ingenuity or idleness

is set up in opposition, or in preference to it.” We neither adopt nor

condemn the {538}language of reprobation which the great orator here

employs. We call him only as a witness to the fact. That the

revolution of public feeling which he described was then in progress is

indisputable; and it is equally indisputable, we think, that it is in

progress still.

To investigate and classify the causes of so great a change would

require far more thought, and far more space, than we at present have

to bestow. But some of them are obvious. During the contest which the

Parliament carried on against the Stuarts, it had only to check and

complain. It has since had to govern. As an attacking body, it could

select its points of attack, and it naturally chose those on which it

was likely to receive public support. As a ruling body, it has neither

the same liberty of choice, nor the same motives to gratify the people.

With the power of an executive government, it has drawn to itself some

of the vices, and all the unpopularity of an executive government. On

the House of Commons above all, possessed as it is of the public purse,

and consequently of the public sword, the nation throws all the blame

of an ill conducted war, of a blundering negotiation, of a disgraceful

treaty, of an embarrassing commercial crisis. The delays of the Court of

Chancery, the misconduct of a judge at Van Diemen’s Land, any thing,

in short, which in any part of the administration any person feels as a

grievance, is attributed to the tyranny! or at least to the negligence,

of that all-powerful body. Private individuals pester it with their

wrongs and claims. A merchant appeals to it from the Courts of Rio

Janeiro or St. Petersburgh. A historical painter complains to it that

his department of art finds no encouragement. Anciently the Parliament

resembled a {539}member of opposition, from whom no places are expected,

who is not expected to confer favours and propose measures, but merely

to watch and censure, and who may, therefore, unless he is grossly

injudicious, be popular with the great body of the community. The

Parliament now resembles the same person put into office, surrounded by

petitioners whom twenty times his patronage would not satisfy, stunned

with complaints, buried in memorials, compelled by the duties of his

station to bring forward measures similar to those which he was formerly

accustomed to observe and to check, and perpetually encountered by

objections similar to those which it was formerly his business to raise.

Perhaps it may be laid down as a general rule that a legislative

assembly, not constituted on democratical principles, cannot be popular

long after it ceases to be weak. Its zeal for what the people, rightly

or wrongly, conceive to be their interests, its sympathy with their

mutable and violent passions, are merely the effects of the particular

circumstances in which it is placed. As long as it depends for existence

on the public favour, it will employ all the means in its power

to conciliate that favour. While this is the case, defects in its

constitution are of little consequence. But, as the close union of such

a body with the nation is the effect of an identity of interests not

essential but accidental, it is in some measure dissolved from the time

at which the danger which produced it ceases to exist.

Hence, before the Revolution, the question of Parliamentary reform was

of very little importance. The friends of liberty had no very ardent

wish for reform. The strongest Tories saw no objections to it. It is

remarkable that Clarendon loudly applauds the changes which Cromwell

introduced, changes far stronger than {540}the Whigs of the present day

would in general approve. There is no reason to think, however, that the

reform effected by Cromwell made any great difference in the conduct of

the Parliament. Indeed, if the House of Commons had, during the reign

of Charles the Second, been elected by universal suffrage, or if all the

seats had been put up to sale, as in the French Parliaments, it would,

we suspect, have acted very much as it did. We know how strongly the

Parliament of Paris exerted itself in favour of the people on many

important occasions; and the reason is evident. Though it did not

emanate from the people, its whole consequence depended on the support

of the people.

From the time of the Revolution the House of Commons has been gradually

becoming what it now is, a great council of state, containing many

members chosen freely by the people, and many others anxious to acquire

the favour of the people; but, on the whole, aristocratical in its

temper and interest. It is very far from being an illiberal and stupid

oligarchy; but it is equally far from being an express image of the

general feeling. It is influenced by the opinion of the people,

and influenced powerfully, but slowly and circuitously. Instead of

outrunning the public mind; as before the Revolution it frequently did,

it now follows with slow steps and at a wide distance. It is therefore

necessarily unpopular; and the more so because the good which it

produces is much less evident to common perception than the evil which

it inflicts. It bears the blame of all the mischief which is done, or

supposed to be done, by its authority or by its connivance. It does not

get the credit, on the other hand, of having prevented those innumerable

abuses which do not exist solely because the House of Commons exists.

{541}A large part of the nation is certainly desirous of a reform in the

representative system. How large that part may be, and how strong its

desires on the subject may be, it is difficult to say. It is only at

intervals that the clamour on the subject is loud and vehement. But it

seems to us that, during the remissions, the feeling gathers strength,

and that every successive burst is more violent than that which preceded

it. The public attention may be for a time diverted to the Catholic

claims or the Mercantile code; but it is probable that at no very

distant period, perhaps in the lifetime of the present generation,

all other questions will merge in that which is, in a certain degree,

connected with them all.

Already we seem to ourselves to perceive the signs of unquiet times,

the vague presentiment of something great and strange which pervades the

community, the restless and turbid hopes of those who have every thing

to gain, the dimly hinted forebodings of those who have every thing

to lose. Many indications might be mentioned, in themselves indeed as

insignificant as straws; but even the direction of a straw, to borrow

the illustration of Bacon, will show from what quarter the storm is

setting in.

A great statesman might, by judicious and timely reformations, by

reconciling the two great branches of the natural aristocracy, the

capitalists and the landowners, and by so widening the base of the

government as to interest in its defence the whole of the middle class,

that brave, honest, and sound-hearted class, which is as anxious for the

maintenance of order and the security of property, as it is hostile to

corruption and oppression, succeed in averting a struggle to which no

rational friend of liberty or of law can look forward without {542}great

apprehensions. There are those who will be contented with nothing but

demolition; and there are those who shrink from all repair. There are

innovators who long for a President and a National Convention; and there

are bigots who, while cities larger and richer than the capitals of many

great kingdoms are calling out for representatives to watch over their

interests, select some hackneyed jobber in boroughs, some peer of the

narrowest and smallest mind, as the fittest depositary of a forfeited

franchise. Between these extremes there lies a more excellent way. Time

is bringing round another crisis analogous to that which occurred in the

seventeenth century. We stand in a situation similar to that in which

our ancestors stood under the reign of James the First. It will

soon again be necessary to reform that we may preserve, to save the

fundamental principles of the Constitution by alterations in the

subordinate parts. It will then be possible, as it was possible two

hundred years ago, to protect vested rights, to secure every useful

institution, every institution endeared by antiquity and noble

associations, and, at the same time, to introduce into the system

improvements harmonizing with the original plan. It remains to be seen

whether two hundred years have made us wiser.

We know of no great revolution which might not have been prevented by

compromise early and graciously made. Firmness is a great virtue

in public affairs; but it has its proper sphere. Conspiracies and

insurrections in which small minorities are engaged, the outbreakings of

popular violence unconnected with any extensive project or any durable

principle, are best repressed by vigour and decision. To shrink from

them is to make them formidable. But no wise ruler will {543}confound

the pervading taint with the slight local irritation. No wise ruler will

treat the deeply seated discontents of a great party, as he treats the

fury of a mob which destroys mills and power-looms. The neglect of this

distinction has been fatal even to governments strong in the power of

the sword. The present time is indeed a time of peace and order. But

it is at such a time that fools are most thoughtless and wise men most

thoughtful. That the discontents which have agitated the country during

the late and the present reign, and which, though not always noisy, are

never wholly dormant, will again break forth with aggravated symptoms,

is almost as certain as that the tides and seasons will follow their

appointed course. But in all movements of the human mind which tend to

great revolutions there is a crisis at which moderate concession may

amend, conciliate, and preserve. Happy will it be for England if, at

that crisis, her interests be confided to men for whom history has not

recorded the long series of human crimes and follies in vain.

END OF VOL. 1.