CHAPTER III.

I INTEND, in this chapter, to give a description of the state in which

England was at the time when the crown passed from Charles the Second

to his brother. Such a description, composed from scanty and dispersed

materials, must necessarily be very imperfect. Yet it may perhaps

correct some false notions which would make the subsequent narrative

unintelligible or uninstructive.

If we would study with profit the history of our ancestors, we must be

constantly on our guard against that delusion which the well known

names of families, places, and offices naturally produce, and must never

forget that the country of which we read was a very different country

from that in which we live. In every experimental science there is a

tendency towards perfection. In every human being there is a wish to

ameliorate his own condition. These two principles have often

sufficed, even when counteracted by great public calamities and by

bad institutions, to carry civilisation rapidly forward. No ordinary

misfortune, no ordinary misgovernment, will do so much to make a

nation wretched, as the constant progress of physical knowledge and the

constant effort of every man to better himself will do to make a nation

prosperous. It has often been found that profuse expenditure, heavy

taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous

wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundations, have

not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private

citizens have been able to create it. It can easily be proved that, in

our own land, the national wealth has, during at least six centuries,

been almost uninterruptedly increasing; that it was greater under

the Tudors than under the Plantagenets; that it was greater under the

Stuarts than under the Tudors; that, in spite of battles, sieges, and

confiscations, it was greater on the day of the Restoration than on the

day when the Long Parliament met; that, in spite of maladministration,

of extravagance, of public bankruptcy, of two costly and unsuccessful

wars, of the pestilence and of the fire, it was greater on the day of

the death of Charles the Second than on the day of his Restoration. This

progress, having continued during many ages, became at length, about the

middle of the eighteenth century, portentously rapid, and has proceeded,

during the nineteenth, with accelerated velocity. In consequence partly

of our geographical and partly of our moral position, we have, during

several generations, been exempt from evils which have elsewhere impeded

the efforts and destroyed the fruits of industry. While every part of

the Continent, from Moscow to Lisbon, has been the theatre of bloody

and devastating wars, no hostile standard has been seen here but as a

trophy. While revolutions have taken place all around us, our government

has never once been subverted by violence. During more than a hundred

years there has been in our island no tumult of sufficient importance to

be called an insurrection; nor has the law been once borne down either

by popular fury or by regal tyranny: public credit has been held sacred:

the administration of justice has been pure: even in times which might

by Englishmen be justly called evil times, we have enjoyed what almost

every other nation in the world would have considered as an ample

measure of civil and religious freedom. Every man has felt entire

confidence that the state would protect him in the possession of what

had been earned by his diligence and hoarded by his selfdenial. Under

the benignant influence of peace and liberty, science has flourished,

and has been applied to practical purposes on a scale never before

known. The consequence is that a change to which the history of the old

world furnishes no parallel has taken place in our country. Could the

England of 1685 be, by some magical process, set before our eyes,

we should not know one landscape in a hundred or one building in ten

thousand. The country gentleman would not recognise his own fields. The

inhabitant of the town would not recognise his own street. Everything

has been changed, but the great features of nature, and a few

massive and durable works of human art. We might find out Snowdon and

Windermere, the Cheddar Cliffs and Beachy Head. We might find out here

and there a Norman minster, or a castle which witnessed the wars of the

Roses. But, with such rare exceptions, everything would be strange to

us. Many thousands of square miles which are now rich corn land and

meadow, intersected by green hedgerows and dotted with villages and

pleasant country seats, would appear as moors overgrown with furze, or

fens abandoned to wild ducks. We should see straggling huts built of

wood and covered with thatch, where we now see manufacturing towns and

seaports renowned to the farthest ends of the world. The capital itself

would shrink to dimensions not much exceeding those of its present

suburb on the south of the Thames. Not less strange to us would be the

garb and manners of the people, the furniture and the equipages, the

interior of the shops and dwellings. Such a change in the state of

a nation seems to be at least as well entitled to the notice of a

historian as any change of the dynasty or of the ministry. [26]

One of the first objects of an inquirer, who wishes to form a correct

notion of the state of a community at a given time, must be to ascertain

of how many persons that community then consisted. Unfortunately the

population of England in 1685, cannot be ascertained with perfect

accuracy. For no great state had then adopted the wise course of

periodically numbering the people. All men were left to conjecture for

themselves; and, as they generally conjectured without examining facts,

and under the influence of strong passions and prejudices, their guesses

were often ludicrously absurd. Even intelligent Londoners ordinarily

talked of London as containing several millions of souls. It was

confidently asserted by many that, during the thirty-five years

which had elapsed between the accession of Charles the First and the

Restoration the population of the City had increased by two millions.

[27] Even while the ravages of the plague and fire were recent, it was

the fashion to say that the capital still had a million and a half of

inhabitants. [28] Some persons, disgusted by these exaggerations,

ran violently into the opposite extreme. Thus Isaac Vossius, a man of

undoubted parts and learning, strenuously maintained that there were

only two millions of human beings in England, Scotland, and Ireland

taken together. [29]

We are not, however, left without the means of correcting the wild

blunders into which some minds were hurried by national vanity and

others by a morbid love of paradox. There are extant three computations

which seem to be entitled to peculiar attention. They are entirely

independent of each other: they proceed on different principles; and yet

there is little difference in the results.

One of these computations was made in the year 1696 by Gregory King,

Lancaster herald, a political arithmetician of great acuteness and

judgment. The basis of his calculations was the number of houses

returned in 1690 by the officers who made the last collection of the

hearth money. The conclusion at which he arrived was that the population

of England was nearly five millions and a half. [30]

About the same time King William the Third was desirous to ascertain the

comparative strength of the religious sects into which the community

was divided. An inquiry was instituted; and reports were laid before

him from all the dioceses of the realm. According to these reports the

number of his English subjects must have been about five million two

hundred thousand. [31]

Lastly, in our own days, Mr. Finlaison, an actuary of eminent skill,

subjected the ancient parochial registers of baptisms, marriages, and

burials, to all the tests which the modern improvements in statistical

science enabled him to apply. His opinion was, that, at the close of the

seventeenth century, the population of England was a little under five

million two hundred thousand souls. [32]

Of these three estimates, framed without concert by different persons

from different sets of materials, the highest, which is that of King,

does not exceed the lowest, which is that of Finlaison, by one twelfth.

We may, therefore, with confidence pronounce that, when James the Second

reigned, England contained between five million and five million five

hundred thousand inhabitants. On the very highest supposition she then

had less than one third of her present population, and less than three

times the population which is now collected in her gigantic capital.

The increase of the people has been great in every part of the kingdom,

but generally much greater in the northern than in the southern shires.

In truth a large part of the country beyond Trent was, down to the

eighteenth century, in a state of barbarism. Physical and moral causes

had concurred to prevent civilisation from spreading to that region. The

air was inclement; the soil was generally such as required skilful and

industrious cultivation; and there could be little skill or industry in

a tract which was often the theatre of war, and which, even when

there was nominal peace, was constantly desolated by bands of Scottish

marauders. Before the union of the two British crowns, and long after

that union, there was as great a difference between Middlesex and

Northumberland as there now is between Massachusetts and the settlements

of those squatters who, far to the west of the Mississippi, administer a

rude justice with the rifle and the dagger. In the reign of Charles the

Second, the traces left by ages of slaughter and pillage were distinctly

perceptible, many miles south of the Tweed, in the face of the country

and in the lawless manners of the people. There was still a large class

of mosstroopers, whose calling was to plunder dwellings and to drive

away whole herds of cattle. It was found necessary, soon after the

Restoration, to enact laws of great severity for the prevention of

these outrages. The magistrates of Northumberland and Cumberland were

authorised to raise bands of armed men for the defence of property and

order; and provision was made for meeting the expense of these levies by

local taxation. [33] The parishes were required to keep bloodhounds for

the purpose of hunting the freebooters. Many old men who were living in

the middle of the eighteenth century could well remember the time when

those ferocious dogs were common. [34] Yet, even with such auxiliaries,

it was often found impossible to track the robbers to their retreats

among the hills and morasses. For the geography of that wild country was

very imperfectly known. Even after the accession of George the Third,

the path over the fells from Borrowdale to Ravenglas was still a secret

carefully kept by the dalesmen, some of whom had probably in their youth

escaped from the pursuit of justice by that road. [35] The seats of the

gentry and the larger farmhouses were fortified. Oxen were penned at

night beneath the overhanging battlements of the residence, which was

known by the name of the Peel. The inmates slept with arms at their

sides. Huge stones and boiling water were in readiness to crush and

scald the plunderer who might venture to assail the little garrison. No

traveller ventured into that country without making his will. The Judges

on circuit, with the whole body of barristers, attorneys, clerks, and

serving men, rode on horseback from Newcastle to Carlisle, armed and

escorted by a strong guard under the command of the Sheriffs. It was

necessary to carry provisions; for the country was a wilderness which

afforded no supplies. The spot where the cavalcade halted to dine, under

an immense oak, is not yet forgotten. The irregular vigour with which

criminal justice was administered shocked observers whose lives had been

passed in more tranquil districts. Juries, animated by hatred and by a

sense of common danger, convicted housebreakers and cattle stealers with

the promptitude of a court martial in a mutiny; and the convicts were

hurried by scores to the gallows. [36] Within the memory of some whom

this generation has seen, the sportsman who wandered in pursuit of game

to the sources of the Tyne found the heaths round Keeldar Castle peopled

by a race scarcely less savage than the Indians of California, and heard

with surprise the half naked women chaunting a wild measure, while the

men with brandished dirks danced a war dance. [37]

Slowly and with difficulty peace was established on the border. In the

train of peace came industry and all the arts of life. Meanwhile it was

discovered that the regions north of the Trent possessed in their coal

beds a source of wealth far more precious than the gold mines of Peru.

It was found that, in the neighbourhood of these beds, almost every

manufacture might be most profitably carried on. A constant stream of

emigrants began to roll northward. It appeared by the returns of 1841

that the ancient archiepiscopal province of York contained two-sevenths

of the population of England. At the time of the Revolution that

province was believed to contain only one seventh of the population.

[38] In Lancashire the number of inhabitants appear to have increased

ninefold, while in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Northamptonshire it has hardly

doubled. [39]

Of the taxation we can speak with more confidence and precision than of

the population. The revenue of England, when Charles the Second

died, was small, when compared with the resources which she even then

possessed, or with the sums which were raised by the governments of the

neighbouring countries. It had, from the time of the Restoration, been

almost constantly increasing, yet it was little more than three fourths

of the revenue of the United Provinces, and was hardly one fifth of the

revenue of France.

The most important head of receipt was the excise, which, in the last

year of the reign of Charles, produced five hundred and eighty-five

thousand pounds, clear of all deductions. The net proceeds of the

customs amounted in the same year to five hundred and thirty thousand

pounds. These burdens did not lie very heavy on the nation. The tax on

chimneys, though less productive, call forth far louder murmurs. The

discontent excited by direct imposts is, indeed, almost always out of

proportion to the quantity of money which they bring into the Exchequer;

and the tax on chimneys was, even among direct imposts, peculiarly

odious: for it could be levied only by means of domiciliary visits; and

of such visits the English have always been impatient to a degree which

the people of other countries can but faintly conceive. The poorer

householders were frequently unable to pay their hearth money to the

day. When this happened, their furniture was distrained without mercy:

for the tax was farmed; and a farmer of taxes is, of all creditors,

proverbially the most rapacious. The collectors were loudly accused of

performing their unpopular duty with harshness and insolence. It was

said that, as soon as they appeared at the threshold of a cottage, the

children began to wail, and the old women ran to hide their earthenware.

Nay, the single bed of a poor family had sometimes been carried away

and sold. The net annual receipt from this tax was two hundred thousand

pounds. [40]

When to the three great sources of income which have been mentioned

we add the royal domains, then far more extensive than at present,

the first fruits and tenths, which had not yet been surrendered to the

Church, the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, the forfeitures, and the

fines, we shall find that the whole annual revenue of the crown may

be fairly estimated at about fourteen hundred thousand pounds. Of this

revenue part was hereditary; the rest had been granted to Charles for

life; and he was at liberty to lay out the whole exactly as he thought

fit. Whatever he could save by retrenching from the expenditure of

the public departments was an addition to his privy purse. Of the Post

Office more will hereafter be said. The profits of that establishment

had been appropriated by Parliament to the Duke of York.

The King's revenue was, or rather ought to have been, charged with the

payment of about eighty thousand pounds a year, the interest of the sum

fraudulently destined in the Exchequer by the Cabal. While Danby was at

the head of the finances, the creditors had received dividends, though

not with the strict punctuality of modern times: but those who had

succeeded him at the treasury had been less expert, or less solicitous

to maintain public faith. Since the victory won by the court over the

Whigs, not a farthing had been paid; and no redress was granted to the

sufferers, till a new dynasty had been many years on the throne. There

can be no greater error than to imagine that the device of meeting the

exigencies of the state by loans was imported into our island by

William the Third. What really dates from his reign is not the system

of borrowing, but the system of funding. From a period of immemorable

antiquity it had been the practice of every English government to

contract debts. What the Revolution introduced was the practice of

honestly paying them. [41]

By plundering the public creditor, it was possible to make an income of

about fourteen hundred thousand pounds, with some occasional help from

Versailles, support the necessary charges of the government and the

wasteful expenditure of the court. For that load which pressed most

heavily on the finances of the great continental states was here

scarcely felt. In France, Germany, and the Netherlands, armies, such

as Henry the Fourth and Philip the Second had never employed in time

of war, were kept up in the midst of peace. Bastions and raveling

were everywhere rising, constructed on principles unknown to Parma and

Spinola. Stores of artillery and ammunition were accumulated, such as

even Richelieu, whom the preceding generation had regarded as a worker

of prodigies, would have pronounced fabulous. No man could journey many

leagues in those countries without hearing the drums of a regiment

on march, or being challenged by the sentinels on the drawbridge of a

fortress. In our island, on the contrary, it was possible to live long

and to travel far without being once reminded, by any martial sight or

sound, that the defence of nations had become a science and a calling.

The majority of Englishmen who were under twenty-five years of age had

probably never seen a company of regular soldiers. Of the cities which,

in the civil war, had valiantly repelled hostile armies, scarcely one

was now capable of sustaining a siege The gates stood open night and

day. The ditches were dry. The ramparts had been suffered to fall into

decay, or were repaired only that the townsfolk might have a pleasant

walk on summer evenings. Of the old baronial keeps many had been

shattered by the cannon of Fairfax and Cromwell, and lay in heaps of

ruin, overgrown with ivy. Those which remained had lost their martial

character, and were now rural palaces of the aristocracy. The moats were

turned into preserves of carp and pike. The mounds were planted with

fragrant shrubs, through which spiral walks ran up to summer houses

adorned with mirrors and paintings. [42] On the capes of the sea coast,

and on many inland hills, were still seen tall posts, surmounted by

barrels. Once those barrels had been filled with pitch. Watchmen had

been set round them in seasons of danger; and, within a few hours after

a Spanish sail had been discovered in the Channel, or after a thousand

Scottish mosstroopers had crossed the Tweed, the signal fires were

blazing fifty miles off, and whole counties were rising in arms. But

many years had now elapsed since the beacons had been lighted; and they

were regarded rather as curious relics of ancient manners than as parts

of a machinery necessary to the safety of the state. [43]

The only army which the law recognised was the militia. That force had

been remodelled by two Acts of Parliament, passed shortly after the

Restoration. Every man who possessed five hundred pounds a year derived

from land, or six thousand pounds of personal estate, was bound to

provide, equip, and pay, at his own charge, one horseman. Every man

who had fifty pounds a year derived from land, or six hundred pounds

of personal estate, was charged in like manner with one pikemen or

musketeer. Smaller proprietors were joined together in a kind of

society, for which our language does not afford a special name, but

which an Athenian would have called a Synteleia; and each society was

required to furnish, according to its means, a horse soldier or a foot

soldier. The whole number of cavalry and infantry thus maintained was

popularly estimated at a hundred and thirty thousand men. [44]

The King was, by the ancient constitution of the realm, and by the

recent and solemn acknowledgment of both Houses of Parliament, the sole

Captain General of this large force. The Lords Lieutenants and their

Deputies held the command under him, and appointed meetings for drilling

and inspection. The time occupied by such meetings, however, was not

to exceed fourteen days in one year. The Justices of the Peace were

authorised to inflict severe penalties for breaches of discipline. Of

the ordinary cost no part was paid by the crown: but when the trainbands

were called out against an enemy, their subsistence became a charge on

the general revenue of the state, and they were subject to the utmost

rigour of martial law.

There were those who looked on the militia with no friendly eye. Men

who had travelled much on the Continent, who had marvelled at the stern

precision with which every sentinel moved and spoke in the citadels

built by Vauban, who had seen the mighty armies which poured along all

the roads of Germany to chase the Ottoman from the Gates of Vienna, and

who had been dazzled by the well ordered pomp of the household troops of

Lewis, sneered much at the way in which the peasants of Devonshire and

Yorkshire marched and wheeled, shouldered muskets and ported pikes. The

enemies of the liberties and religion of England looked with aversion on

a force which could not, without extreme risk, be employed against

those liberties and that religion, and missed no opportunity of throwing

ridicule on the rustic soldiery. [45] Enlightened patriots, when they

contrasted these rude levies with the battalions which, in time of war,

a few hours might bring to the coast of Kent or Sussex, were forced

to acknowledge that, dangerous as it might be to keep up a permanent

military establishment, it might be more dangerous still to stake

the honour and independence of the country on the result of a contest

between plowmen officered by Justices of the Peace, and veteran warriors

led by Marshals of France. In Parliament, however, it was necessary

to express such opinions with some reserve; for the militia was an

institution eminently popular. Every reflection thrown on it excited the

indignation of both the great parties in the state, and especially of

that party which was distinguished by peculiar zeal for monarchy and

for the Anglican Church. The array of the counties was commanded almost

exclusively by Tory noblemen and gentlemen. They were proud of their

military rank, and considered an insult offered to the service to which

they belonged as offered to themselves. They were also perfectly

aware that whatever was said against a militia was said in favour of a

standing army; and the name of standing army was hateful to them. One

such army had held dominion in England; and under that dominion the King

had been murdered, the nobility degraded, the landed gentry plundered,

the Church persecuted. There was scarcely a rural grandee who could

not tell a story of wrongs and insults suffered by himself, or by his

father, at the hands of the parliamentary soldiers. One old Cavalier had

seen half his manor house blown up. The hereditary elms of another had

been hewn down. A third could never go into his parish church without

being reminded by the defaced scutcheons and headless statues of his

ancestry, that Oliver's redcoats had once stabled their horses there.

The consequence was that those very Royalists, who were most ready

to fight for the King themselves, were the last persons whom he could

venture to ask for the means of hiring regular troops.

Charles, however, had, a few months after his restoration, begun to form

a small standing army. He felt that, without some better protection

than that of the trainbands and beefeaters, his palace and person would

hardly be secure, in the vicinity of a great city swarming with warlike

Fifth Monarchy men who had just been disbanded. He therefore, careless

and profuse as he was, contrived to spare from his pleasures a sum

sufficient to keep up a body of guards. With the increase of trade and

of public wealth his revenues increased; and he was thus enabled,

in spite of the occasional murmurs of the Commons, to make gradual

additions to his regular forces. One considerable addition was made

a few months before the close of his reign. The costly, useless, and

pestilential settlement of Tangier was abandoned to the barbarians who

dwelt around it; and the garrison, consisting of one regiment of horse

and two regiments of foot, was brought to England.

The little army formed by Charles the Second was the germ of that great

and renowned army which has, in the present century, marched triumphant

into Madrid and Paris, into Canton and Candahar. The Life Guards, who

now form two regiments, were then distributed into three troops, each of

which consisted of two hundred carabineers, exclusive of officers. This

corps, to which the safety of the King and royal family was confided,

had a very peculiar character. Even the privates were designated as

gentlemen of the Guard. Many of them were of good families, and had held

commissions in the civil war. Their pay was far higher than that of

the most favoured regiment of our time, and would in that age have been

thought a respectable provision for the younger son of a country squire.

Their fine horses, their rich housings, their cuirasses, and their

buff coats adorned with ribands, velvet, and gold lace, made a splendid

appearance in Saint James's Park. A small body of grenadier dragoons,

who came from a lower class and received lower pay, was attached to each

troop. Another body of household cavalry distinguished by blue coats

and cloaks, and still called the Blues, was generally quartered in the

neighbourhood of the capital. Near the capital lay also the corps which

is now designated as the first regiment of dragoons, but which was

then the only regiment of dragoons on the English establishment. It had

recently been formed out of the cavalry which had returned from Tangier.

A single troop of dragoons, which did not form part of any regiment, was

stationed near Berwick, for the purpose of keeping, the peace among the

mosstroopers of the border. For this species of service the dragoon

was then thought to be peculiarly qualified. He has since become a

mere horse soldier. But in the seventeenth century he was accurately

described by Montecuculi as a foot soldier who used a horse only in

order to arrive with more speed at the place where military service was

to be performed.

The household infantry consisted of two regiments, which were then,

as now, called the first regiment of Foot Guards, and the Coldstream

Guards. They generally did duty near Whitehall and Saint James's Palace.

As there were then no barracks, and as, by the Petition of Right, it

had been declared unlawful to quarter soldiers on private families, the

redcoats filled all the alehouses of Westminster and the Strand.

There were five other regiments of foot. One of these, called the

Admiral's Regiment, was especially destined to service on board of the

fleet. The remaining four still rank as the first four regiments of the

line. Two of these represented two brigades which had long sustained on

the Continent the fame of British valour. The first, or Royal regiment,

had, under the great Gustavus, borne a conspicuous part in the

deliverance of Germany. The third regiment, distinguished by

fleshcoloured facings, from which it had derived the well known name of

the Buffs, had, under Maurice of Nassau, fought not less bravely for the

deliverance of the Netherlands. Both these gallant bands had at length,

after many vicissitudes, been recalled from foreign service by Charles

the Second, and had been placed on the English establishment.

The regiments which now rank as the second and fourth of the line

had, in 1685, just returned from Tangier, bringing with them cruel and

licentious habits contracted in a long course of warfare with the

Moors. A few companies of infantry which had not been regimented lay in

garrison at Tilbury Fort, at Portsmouth, at Plymouth, and at some other

important stations on or near the coast.

Since the beginning of the seventeenth century a great change had taken

place in the arms of the infantry. The pike had been gradually giving

place to the musket; and, at the close of the reign of Charles the

Second, most of his foot were musketeers. Still, however, there was a

large intermixture of pikemen. Each class of troops was occasionally

instructed in the use of the weapon which peculiarly belonged to the

other class. Every foot soldier had at his side a sword for close fight.

The musketeer was generally provided with a weapon which had, during

many years, been gradually coming into use, and which the English then

called a dagger, but which, from the time of William the Third, has been

known among us by the French name of bayonet. The bayonet seems not

to have been then so formidable an instrument of destruction as it

has since become; for it was inserted in the muzzle of the gun; and in

action much time was lost while the soldier unfixed his bayonet in

order to fire, and fixed it again in order to charge. The dragoon, when

dismounted, fought as a musketeer.

The regular army which was kept up in England at the beginning of the

year 1685 consisted, all ranks included, of about seven thousand foot,

and about seventeen hundred cavalry and dragoons. The whole charge

amounted to about two hundred and ninety thousand pounds a year, less

then a tenth part of what the military establishment of France then cost

in time of peace. The daily pay of a private in the Life Guards was

four shillings, in the Blues two shillings and sixpence, in the Dragoons

eighteen pence, in the Foot Guards tenpence, and in the line eightpence.

The discipline was lax, and indeed could not be otherwise. The common

law of England knew nothing of courts martial, and made no distinction,

in time of peace, between a soldier and any other subject; nor could

the government then venture to ask even the most loyal Parliament for

a Mutiny Bill. A soldier, therefore, by knocking down his colonel,

incurred only the ordinary penalties of assault and battery, and by

refusing to obey orders, by sleeping on guard, or by deserting his

colours, incurred no legal penalty at all. Military punishments were

doubtless inflicted during the reign of Charles the Second; but they

were inflicted very sparingly, and in such a manner as not to attract

public notice, or to produce an appeal to the courts of Westminster

Hall.

Such an army as has been described was not very likely to enslave five

millions of Englishmen. It would indeed have been unable to suppress

an insurrection in London, if the trainbands of the City had joined the

insurgents. Nor could the King expect that, if a rising took place in

England, he would obtain effectual help from his other dominions.

For, though both Scotland and Ireland supported separate military

establishments, those establishments were not more than sufficient to

keep down the Puritan malecontents of the former kingdom and the Popish

malecontents of the latter. The government had, however, an important

military resource which must not be left unnoticed. There were in the

pay of the United Provinces six fine regiments, of which three had

been raised in England and three in Scotland. Their native prince had

reserved to himself the power of recalling them, if he needed their

help against a foreign or domestic enemy. In the meantime they were

maintained without any charge to him, and were kept under an excellent

discipline to which he could not have ventured to subject them. [46]

If the jealousy of the Parliament and of the nation made it impossible

for the King to maintain a formidable standing army, no similar

impediment prevented him from making England the first of maritime

powers. Both Whigs and Tories were ready to applaud every step tending

to increase the efficiency of that force which, while it was the best

protection of the island against foreign enemies, was powerless against

civil liberty. All the greatest exploits achieved within the memory of

that generation by English soldiers had been achieved in war against

English princes. The victories of our sailors had been won over foreign

foes, and had averted havoc and rapine from our own soil. By at least

half the nation the battle of Naseby was remembered with horror, and the

battle of Dunbar with pride chequered by many painful feelings: but the

defeat of the Armada, and the encounters of Blake with the Hollanders

and Spaniards were recollected with unmixed exultation by all parties.

Ever since the Restoration, the Commons, even when most discontented

and most parsimonious, had always been bountiful to profusion where the

interest of the navy was concerned. It had been represented to them,

while Danby was minister, that many of the vessels in the royal fleet

were old and unfit for sea; and, although the House was, at that time,

in no giving mood, an aid of near six hundred thousand pounds had been

granted for the building of thirty new men of war.

But the liberality of the nation had been made fruitless by the vices of

the government. The list of the King's ships, it is true, looked well.

There were nine first rates, fourteen second rates, thirty-nine third

rates, and many smaller vessels. The first rates, indeed, were less than

the third rates of our time; and the third rates would not now rank

as very large frigates. This force, however, if it had been efficient,

would in those days have been regarded by the greatest potentate as

formidable. But it existed only on paper. When the reign of Charles

terminated, his navy had sunk into degradation and decay, such as would

be almost incredible if it were not certified to us by the independent

and concurring evidence of witnesses whose authority is beyond

exception. Pepys, the ablest man in the English Admiralty, drew up,

in the year 1684, a memorial on the state of his department, for the

information of Charles. A few months later Bonrepaux, the ablest man in

the French Admiralty, having visited England for the especial purpose

of ascertaining her maritime strength, laid the result of his inquiries

before Lewis. The two reports are to the same effect. Bonrepaux declared

that he found everything in disorder and in miserable condition, that

the superiority of the French marine was acknowledged with shame and

envy at Whitehall, and that the state of our shipping and dockyards

was of itself a sufficient guarantee that we should not meddle in

the disputes of Europe. [47] Pepys informed his master that the naval

administration was a prodigy of wastefulness, corruption, ignorance,

and indolence, that no estimate could be trusted, that no contract was

performed, that no check was enforced. The vessels which the recent

liberality of Parliament had enabled the government to build, and which

had never been out of harbour, had been made of such wretched timber

that they were more unfit to go to sea than the old hulls which had been

battered thirty years before by Dutch and Spanish broadsides. Some

of the new men of war, indeed, were so rotten that, unless speedily

repaired, they would go down at their moorings. The sailors were paid

with so little punctuality that they were glad to find some usurer who

would purchase their tickets at forty per cent. discount. The commanders

who had not powerful friends at court were even worse treated. Some

officers, to whom large arrears were due, after vainly importuning the

government during many years, had died for want of a morsel of bread.

Most of the ships which were afloat were commanded by men who had not

been bred to the sea. This, it is true, was not an abuse introduced by

the government of Charles. No state, ancient or modern, had, before that

time, made a complete separation between the naval and military service.

In the great civilised nations of antiquity, Cimon and Lysander, Pompey

and Agrippa, had fought battles by sea as well as by land. Nor had the

impulse which nautical science received at the close of the fifteenth

century produced any new division of labour. At Flodden the right wing

of the victorious army was led by the Admiral of England. At Jarnac and

Moncontour the Huguenot ranks were marshalled by the Admiral of France.

Neither John of Austria, the conqueror of Lepanto, nor Lord Howard of

Effingham, to whose direction the marine of England was confided when

the Spanish invaders were approaching our shores, had received the

education of a sailor. Raleigh, highly celebrated as a naval commander,

had served during many years as a soldier in France, the Netherlands,

and Ireland. Blake had distinguished himself by his skilful and valiant

defence of an inland town before he humbled the pride of Holland and

of Castile on the ocean. Since the Restoration the same system had been

followed. Great fleets had been entrusted to the direction of Rupert

and Monk; Rupert, who was renowned chiefly as a hot and daring cavalry

officer, and Monk, who, when he wished his ship to change her course,

moved the mirth of his crew by calling out, "Wheel to the left!"

But about this time wise men began to perceive that the rapid

improvement, both of the art of war and of the art of navigation, made

it necessary to draw a line between two professions which had hitherto

been confounded. Either the command of a regiment or the command of

a ship was now a matter quite sufficient to occupy the attention of

a single mind. In the year 1672 the French government determined to

educate young men of good family from a very early age especially for

the sea service. But the English government, instead of following this

excellent example, not only continued to distribute high naval commands

among landsmen, but selected for such commands landsmen who, even on

land, could not safely have been put in any important trust. Any lad

of noble birth, any dissolute courtier for whom one of the King's

mistresses would speak a word, might hope that a ship of the line, and

with it the honour of the country and the lives of hundreds of brave

men, would be committed to his care. It mattered not that he had never

in his life taken a voyage except on the Thames, that he could not

keep his feet in a breeze, that he did not know the difference between

latitude and longitude. No previous training was thought necessary; or,

at most, he was sent to make a short trip in a man of war, where he was

subjected to no discipline, where he was treated with marked respect,

and where he lived in a round of revels and amusements. If, in the

intervals of feasting, drinking, and gambling, he succeeded in learning

the meaning of a few technical phrases and the names of the points

of the compass, he was thought fully qualified to take charge of a

three-decker. This is no imaginary description. In 1666, John Sheffield,

Earl of Mulgrave, at seventeen years of age, volunteered to serve at sea

against the Dutch. He passed six weeks on board, diverting himself, as

well as he could, in the society of some young libertines of rank, and

then returned home to take the command of a troop of horse. After this

he was never on the water till the year 1672, when he again joined

the fleet, and was almost immediately appointed Captain of a ship

of eighty-four guns, reputed the finest in the navy. He was then

twenty-three years old, and had not, in the whole course of his life,

been three months afloat. As soon as he came back from sea he was made

Colonel of a regiment of foot. This is a specimen of the manner in which

naval commands of the highest importance were then given; and a very

favourable specimen; for Mulgrave, though he wanted experience, wanted

neither parts nor courage. Others were promoted in the same way who not

only were not good officers, but who were intellectually and morally

incapable of ever becoming good officers, and whose only recommendation

was that they had been ruined by folly and vice. The chief bait which

allured these men into the service was the profit of conveying bullion

and other valuable commodities from port to port; for both the Atlantic

and the Mediterranean were then so much infested by pirates from Barbary

that merchants were not willing to trust precious cargoes to any custody

but that of a man of war. A Captain might thus clear several thousands

of pounds by a short voyage; and for this lucrative business he too

often neglected the interests of his country and the honour of his

flag, made mean submissions to foreign powers, disobeyed the most direct

injunctions of his superiors, lay in port when he was ordered to chase

a Sallee rover, or ran with dollars to Leghorn when his instructions

directed him to repair to Lisbon. And all this he did with impunity.

The same interest which had placed him in a post for which he was unfit

maintained him there. No Admiral, bearded by these corrupt and dissolute

minions of the palace, dared to do more than mutter something about a

court martial. If any officer showed a higher sense of duty than his

fellows, he soon found out he lost money without acquiring honor. One

Captain, who, by strictly obeying the orders of the Admiralty, missed a

cargo which would have been worth four thousand pounds to him, was told

by Charles, with ignoble levity, that he was a great fool for his pains.

The discipline of the navy was of a piece throughout. As the courtly

Captain despised the Admiralty, he was in turn despised by his crew.

It could not be concealed that he was inferior in Seamanship to every

foremast man on board. It was idle to expect that old sailors, familiar

with the hurricanes of the tropics and with the icebergs of the Arctic

Circle, would pay prompt and respectful obedience to a chief who knew no

more of winds and waves than could be learned in a gilded barge between

Whitehall Stairs and Hampton Court. To trust such a novice with the

working of a ship was evidently impossible. The direction of the

navigation was therefore taken from the Captain and given to the Master;

but this partition of authority produced innumerable inconveniences.

The line of demarcation was not, and perhaps could not be, drawn

with precision. There was therefore constant wrangling. The Captain,

confident in proportion to his ignorance, treated the Master with

lordly contempt. The Master, well aware of the danger of disobliging

the powerful, too often, after a struggle, yielded against his better

judgment; and it was well if the loss of ship and crew was not the

consequence. In general the least mischievous of the aristocratical

Captains were those who completely abandoned to others the direction of

the vessels, and thought only of making money and spending it. The way

in which these men lived was so ostentatious and voluptuous that, greedy

as they were of gain, they seldom became rich. They dressed as if for

a gala at Versailles, ate off plate, drank the richest wines, and kept

harems on board, while hunger and scurvy raged among the crews, and

while corpses were daily flung out of the portholes.

Such was the ordinary character of those who were then called gentlemen

Captains. Mingled with them were to be found, happily for our country,

naval commanders of a very different description, men whose whole life

had been passed on the deep, and who had worked and fought their way

from the lowest offices of the forecastle to rank and distinction. One

of the most eminent of these officers was Sir Christopher Mings, who

entered the service as a cabin boy, who fell fighting bravely against

the Dutch, and whom his crew, weeping and vowing vengeance, carried to

the grave. From him sprang, by a singular kind of descent, a line of

valiant and expert sailors. His cabin boy was Sir John Narborough; and

the cabin boy of Sir John Narborough was Sir Cloudesley Shovel. To the

strong natural sense and dauntless courage of this class of men England

owes a debt never to be forgotten. It was by such resolute hearts that,

in spite of much maladministration, and in spite of the blunders and

treasons of more courtly admirals, our coasts were protected and the

reputation of our flag upheld during many gloomy and perilous years. But

to a landsman these tarpaulins, as they were called, seemed a strange

and half savage race. All their knowledge was professional; and their

professional knowledge was practical rather than scientific. Off their

own element they were as simple as children. Their deportment was

uncouth. There was roughness in their very good nature; and their talk,

where it was not made up of nautical phrases, was too commonly made

up of oaths and curses. Such were the chiefs in whose rude school were

formed those sturdy warriors from whom Smollett, in the next age, drew

Lieutenant Bowling and Commodore Trunnion. But it does not appear that

there was in the service of any of the Stuarts a single naval officer

such as, according to the notions of our times, a naval officer ought

to be, that is to say, a man versed in the theory and practice of his

calling, and steeled against all the dangers of battle and tempest, yet

of cultivated mind and polished manners. There were gentlemen and there

were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not

gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.

The English navy at that time might, according to the most exact

estimates which have come down to us, have been kept in an efficient

state for three hundred and eighty thousand pounds a year. Four hundred

thousand pounds a year was the sum actually expended, but expended, as

we have seen, to very little purpose. The cost of the French marine was

nearly the same the cost of the Dutch marine considerably more. [48]

The charge of the English ordnance in the seventeenth century was, as

compared with other military and naval charges, much smaller than at

present. At most of the garrisons there were gunners: and here and

there, at an important post, an engineer was to be found. But there was

no regiment of artillery, no brigade of sappers and miners, no college

in which young soldiers could learn the scientific part of the art of

war. The difficulty of moving field pieces was extreme. When, a few

years later, William marched from Devonshire to London, the apparatus

which he brought with him, though such as had long been in constant use

on the Continent, and such as would now be regarded at Woolwich as rude

and cumbrous, excited in our ancestors an admiration resembling that

which the Indians of America felt for the Castilian harquebusses. The

stock of gunpowder kept in the English forts and arsenals was boastfully

mentioned by patriotic writers as something which might well impress

neighbouring nations with awe. It amounted to fourteen or fifteen

thousand barrels, about a twelfth of the quantity which it is now

thought necessary to have in store. The expenditure under the head of

ordnance was on an average a little above sixty thousand pounds a year.

[49]

The whole effective charge of the army, navy, and ordnance, was about

seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds. The noneffective charge, which

is now a heavy part of our public burdens, can hardly be said to have

existed. A very small number of naval officers, who were not employed

in the public service, drew half pay. No Lieutenant was on the list, nor

any Captain who had not commanded a ship of the first or second rate. As

the country then possessed only seventeen ships of the first and second

rate that had ever been at sea, and as a large proportion of the persons

who had commanded such ships had good posts on shore, the expenditure

under this head must have been small indeed. [50] In the army, half pay

was given merely as a special and temporary allowance to a small number

of officers belonging to two regiments, which were peculiarly situated.

[51] Greenwich Hospital had not been founded. Chelsea Hospital was

building: but the cost of that institution was defrayed partly by

a deduction from the pay of the troops, and partly by private

subscription. The King promised to contribute only twenty thousand

pounds for architectural expenses, and five thousand a year for the

maintenance of the invalids. [52] It was no part of the plan that there

should be outpensioners. The whole noneffective charge, military and

naval, can scarcely have exceeded ten thousand pounds a year. It now

exceeds ten thousand pounds a day.

Of the expense of civil government only a small portion was defrayed by

the crown. The great majority of the functionaries whose business was to

administer justice and preserve order either gave their services to the

public gratuitously, or were remunerated in a manner which caused no

drain on the revenue of the state. The Sheriffs, mayors, and aldermen

of the towns, the country gentlemen who were in the commission of the

peace, the headboroughs, bailiffs, and petty constables, cost the King

nothing. The superior courts of law were chiefly supported by fees.

Our relations with foreign courts had been put on the most economical

footing. The only diplomatic agent who had the title of Ambassador

resided at Constantinople, and was partly supported by the Turkish

Company. Even at the court of Versailles England had only an Envoy; and

she had not even an Envoy at the Spanish, Swedish, and Danish courts.

The whole expense under this head cannot, in the last year of the reign

of Charles the Second, have much exceeded twenty thousand pounds. [53]

In this frugality there was nothing laudable. Charles was, as usual,

niggardly in the wrong place, and munificent in the wrong place. The

public service was starved that courtiers might be pampered. The expense

of the navy, of the ordnance, of pensions to needy old officers, of

missions to foreign courts, must seem small indeed to the present

generation. But the personal favourites of the sovereign, his ministers,

and the creatures of those ministers, were gorged with public money.

Their salaries and pensions, when compared with the incomes of the

nobility, the gentry, the commercial and professional men of that age,

will appear enormous. The greatest estates in the kingdom then

very little exceeded twenty thousand a year. The Duke of Ormond had

twenty-two thousand a year. [54] The Duke of Buckingham, before his

extravagance had impaired his great property, had nineteen thousand

six hundred a year. [55] George Monk, Duke of Albemarle, who had been

rewarded for his eminent services with immense grants of crown land,

and who had been notorious both for covetousness and for parsimony, left

fifteen thousand a year of real estate, and sixty thousand pounds in

money which probably yielded seven per cent. [56] These three Dukes

were supposed to be three of the very richest subjects in England. The

Archbishop of Canterbury can hardly have had five thousand a year.

[57] The average income of a temporal peer was estimated, by the best

informed persons, at about three thousand a year, the average income of

a baronet at nine hundred a year, the average income of a member of the

House of Commons at less than eight hundred a year. [58] A thousand a

year was thought a large revenue for a barrister. Two thousand a year

was hardly to be made in the Court of King's Bench, except by the crown

lawyers. [59] It is evident, therefore, that an official man would have

been well paid if he had received a fourth or fifth part of what would

now be an adequate stipend. In fact, however, the stipends of the

higher class of official men were as large as at present, and not seldom

larger. The Lord Treasurer, for example, had eight thousand a year,

and, when the Treasury was in commission, the junior Lords had sixteen

hundred a year each. The Paymaster of the Forces had a poundage,

amounting, in time of peace, to about five thousand a year, on all the

money which passed through his hands. The Groom of the Stole had five

thousand a year, the Commissioners of the Customs twelve hundred a

year each, the Lords of the Bedchamber a thousand a year each. [60]

The regular salary, however, was the smallest part of the gains of an

official man at that age. From the noblemen who held the white staff and

the great seal, down to the humblest tidewaiter and gauger, what would

now be called gross corruption was practiced without disguise and

without reproach. Titles, places, commissions, pardons, were daily sold

in market overt by the great dignitaries of the realm; and every

clerk in every department imitated, to the best of his power, the evil

example.

During the last century no prime minister, however powerful, has become

rich in office; and several prime ministers have impaired their private

fortune in sustaining their public character. In the seventeenth

century, a statesman who was at the head of affairs might easily, and

without giving scandal, accumulate in no long time an estate amply

sufficient to support a dukedom. It is probable that the income of the

prime minister, during his tenure of power, far exceeded that of any

other subject. The place of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was popularly

reported to be worth forty thousand pounds a year. [61] The gains of the

Chancellor Clarendon, of Arlington, of Lauderdale, and of Danby, were

certainly enormous. The sumptuous palace to which the populace of London

gave the name of Dunkirk Mouse, the stately pavilions, the fishponds,

the deer park and the orangery of Euston, the more than Italian luxury

of Ham, with its busts, fountains, and aviaries, were among the many

signs which indicated what was the shortest road to boundless wealth.

This is the true explanation of the unscrupulous violence with which the

statesmen of that day struggled for office, of the tenacity with which,

in spite of vexations, humiliations and dangers, they clung to it, and

of the scandalous compliances to which they stooped in order to retain

it. Even in our own age, formidable as is the power of opinion, and

high as is the standard of integrity, there would be great risk of a

lamentable change in the character of our public men, if the place of

First Lord of the Treasury or Secretary of State were worth a hundred

thousand pounds a year. Happy for our country the emoluments of the

highest class of functionaries have not only not grown in proportion to

the general growth of our opulence, but have positively diminished.

The fact that the sum raised in England by taxation has, in a time not

exceeding two long lives, been multiplied forty-fold, is strange, and

may at first sight seem appalling. But those who are alarmed by the

increase of the public burdens may perhaps be reassured when they have

considered the increase of the public resources. In the year 1685, the

value of the produce of the soil far exceeded the value of all the

other fruits of human industry. Yet agriculture was in what would now

be considered as a very rude and imperfect state. The arable land and

pasture land were not supposed by the best political arithmeticians of

that age to amount to much more than half the area of the kingdom. [62]

The remainder was believed to consist of moor, forest, and fen. These

computations are strongly confirmed by the road books and maps of the

seventeenth century. From those books and maps it is clear that many

routes which now pass through an endless succession of orchards,

cornfields, hayfields, and beanfields, then ran through nothing but

heath, swamp, and warren. [63] In the drawings of English landscapes

made in that age for the Grand Duke Cosmo, scarce a hedgerow is to be

seen, and numerous tracts; now rich with cultivation, appear as bare as

Salisbury Plain. [64] At Enfield, hardly out of sight of the smoke of

the capital, was a region of five and twenty miles in circumference,

which contained only three houses and scarcely any enclosed fields.

Deer, as free as in an American forest, wandered there by thousands.

[65] It is to be remarked, that wild animals of large size were then far

more numerous than at present. The last wild boars, indeed, which had

been preserved for the royal diversion, and had been allowed to ravage

the cultivated land with their tusks, had been slaughtered by the

exasperated rustics during the license of the civil war. The last wolf

that has roamed our island had been slain in Scotland a short time

before the close of the reign of Charles the Second. But many breeds,

now extinct, or rare, both of quadrupeds and birds, were still common.

The fox, whose life is now, in many counties, held almost as sacred as

that of a human being, was then considered as a mere nuisance. Oliver

Saint John told the Long Parliament that Strafford was to be regarded,

not as a stag or a hare, to whom some law was to be given, but as a fox,

who was to be snared by any means, and knocked on the head without pity.

This illustration would be by no means a happy one, if addressed to

country gentlemen of our time: but in Saint John's days there were not

seldom great massacres of foxes to which the peasantry thronged with all

the dogs that could be mustered. Traps were set: nets were spread: no

quarter was given; and to shoot a female with cub was considered as a

feat which merited the warmest gratitude of the neighbourhood. The red

deer were then as common in Gloucestershire and Hampshire, as they now

are among the Grampian Hills. On one occasion Queen Anne, travelling to

Portsmouth, saw a herd of no less than five hundred. The wild bull with

his white mane was still to be found wandering in a few of the southern

forests. The badger made his dark and tortuous hole on the side of every

hill where the copsewood grew thick. The wild cats were frequently heard

by night wailing round the lodges of the rangers of whittlebury and

Needwood. The yellow-breasted martin was still pursued in Cranbourne

Chase for his fur, reputed inferior only to that of the sable. Fen

eagles, measuring more than nine feet between the extremities of the

wings, preyed on fish along the coast of Norfolk. On all the downs,

from the British Channel to Yorkshire huge bustards strayed in troops

of fifty or sixty, and were often hunted with greyhounds. The marshes of

Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire were covered during some months of every

year by immense clouds of cranes. Some of these races the progress of

cultivation has extirpated. Of others the numbers are so much diminished

that men crowd to gaze at a specimen as at a Bengal tiger, or a Polar

bear. [66]

The progress of this great change can nowhere be more clearly traced

than in the Statute Book. The number of enclosure acts passed since King

George the Second came to the throne exceeds four thousand. The area

enclosed under the authority of those acts exceeds, on a moderate

calculation, ten thousand square miles. How many square miles, which

were formerly uncultivated or ill cultivated, have, during the same

period, been fenced and carefully tilled by the proprietors without any

application to the legislature, can only be conjectured. But it seems

highly probable that a fourth part of England has been, in the course of

little more than a century, turned from a wild into a garden.

Even in those parts of the kingdom which at the close of the reign of

Charles the Second were the best cultivated, the farming, though greatly

improved since the civil war, was not such as would now be thought

skilful. To this day no effectual steps have been taken by public

authority for the purpose of obtaining accurate accounts of the produce

of the English soil. The historian must therefore follow, with some

misgivings, the guidance of those writers on statistics whose reputation

for diligence and fidelity stands highest. At present an average crop of

wheat, rye, barley, oats, and beans, is supposed considerably to exceed

thirty millions of quarters. The crop of wheat would be thought wretched

if it did not exceed twelve millions of quarters. According to the

computation made in the year 1696 by Gregory King, the whole quantity of

wheat, rye, barley, oats, and beans, then annually grown in the kingdom,

was somewhat less than ten millions of quarters. The wheat, which was

then cultivated only on the strongest clay, and consumed only by those

who were in easy circumstances, he estimated at less than two millions

of quarters. Charles Davenant, an acute and well informed though most

unprincipled and rancorous politician, differed from King as to some

of the items of the account, but came to nearly the same general

conclusions. [67]

The rotation of crops was very imperfectly understood. It was known,

indeed, that some vegetables lately introduced into our island,

particularly the turnip, afforded excellent nutriment in winter to sheep

and oxen: but it was not yet the practice to feed cattle in this manner.

It was therefore by no means easy to keep them alive during the season

when the grass is scanty. They were killed and salted in great numbers

at the beginning of the cold weather; and, during several months, even

the gentry tasted scarcely any fresh animal food, except game and

river fish, which were consequently much more important articles

in housekeeping than at present. It appears from the Northumberland

Household Book that, in the reign of Henry the Seventh, fresh meat was

never eaten even by the gentlemen attendant on a great Earl, except

during the short interval between Midsummer and Michaelmas. But in

the course of two centuries an improvement had taken place; and under

Charles the Second it was not till the beginning of November that

families laid in their stock of salt provisions, then called Martinmas

beef. [68]

The sheep and the ox of that time were diminutive when compared with

the sheep and oxen which are now driven to our markets. [69] Our native

horses, though serviceable, were held in small esteem, and fetched low

prices. They were valued, one with another, by the ablest of those who

computed the national wealth, at not more than fifty shillings each.

Foreign breeds were greatly preferred. Spanish jennets were regarded

as the finest chargers, and were imported for purposes of pageantry and

war. The coaches of the aristocracy were drawn by grey Flemish mares,

which trotted, as it was thought, with a peculiar grace, and endured

better than any cattle reared in our island the work of dragging a

ponderous equipage over the rugged pavement of London. Neither the

modern dray horse nor the modern race horse was then known. At a

much later period the ancestors of the gigantic quadrupeds, which all

foreigners now class among the chief wonders of London, were brought

from the marshes of Walcheren; the ancestors of Childers and Eclipse

from the sands of Arabia. Already, however, there was among our nobility

and gentry a passion for the amusements of the turf. The importance of

improving our studs by an infusion of new blood was strongly felt; and

with this view a considerable number of barbs had lately been brought

into the country. Two men whose authority on such subjects was held in

great esteem, the Duke of Newcastle and Sir John Fenwick, pronounced

that the meanest hack ever imported from Tangier would produce a diner

progeny than could be expected from the best sire of our native breed.

They would not readily have believed that a time would come when the

princes and nobles of neighbouring lands would be as eager to obtain

horses from England as ever the English had been to obtain horses from

Barbary. [70]

The increase of vegetable and animal produce, though great, seems small

when compared with the increase of our mineral wealth. In 1685 the tin

of Cornwall, which had, more than two thousand years before, attracted

the Tyrian sails beyond the pillars of Hercules, was still one of the

most valuable subterranean productions of the island. The quantity

annually extracted from the earth was found to be, some years later,

sixteen hundred tons, probably about a third of what it now is. [71] But

the veins of copper which lie in the same region were, in the time of

Charles the Second, altogether neglected, nor did any landowner take

them into the account in estimating the value of his property. Cornwall

and Wales at present yield annually near fifteen thousand tons of

copper, worth near a million and a half sterling; that is to say, worth

about twice as much as the annual produce of all English mines of all

descriptions in the seventeenth century. [72] The first bed of rock salt

had been discovered in Cheshire not long after the Restoration, but

does not appear to have been worked till much later. The salt which

was obtained by a rude process from brine pits was held in no high

estimation. The pans in which the manufacture was carried on exhaled a

sulphurous stench; and, when the evaporation was complete, the substance

which was left was scarcely fit to be used with food. Physicians

attributed the scorbutic and pulmonary complaints which were common

among the English to this unwholesome condiment. It was therefore

seldom used by the upper and middle classes; and there was a regular and

considerable importation from France. At present our springs and mines

not only supply our own immense demand, but send annually more than

seven hundred millions of pounds of excellent salt to foreign countries.

[73]

Far more important has been the improvement of our iron works. Such

works had long existed in our island, but had not prospered, and had

been regarded with no favourable eye by the government and by the

public. It was not then the practice to employ coal for smelting the

ore; and the rapid consumption of wood excited the alarm of politicians.

As early as the reign of Elizabeth, there had been loud complaints that

whole forests were cut down for the purpose of feeding the furnaces; and

the Parliament had interfered to prohibit the manufacturers from burning

timber. The manufacture consequently languished. At the close of the

reign of Charles the Second, great part of the iron which was used in

this country was imported from abroad; and the whole quantity cast here

annually seems not to have exceeded ten thousand tons. At present the

trade is thought to be in a depressed state if less than a million of

tons are produced in a year. [74]

One mineral, perhaps more important than iron itself, remains to be

mentioned. Coal, though very little used in any species of manufacture,

was already the ordinary fuel in some districts which were fortunate

enough to possess large beds, and in the capital, which could easily be

supplied by water carriage, It seems reasonable to believe that at least

one half of the quantity then extracted from the pits was consumed in

London. The consumption of London seemed to the writers of that age

enormous, and was often mentioned by them as a proof of the greatness of

the imperial city. They scarcely hoped to be believed when they affirmed

that two hundred and eighty thousand chaldrons that is to say, about

three hundred and fifty thousand tons, were, in the last year of the

reign of Charles the Second, brought to the Thames. At present three

millions and a half of tons are required yearly by the metropolis; and

the whole annual produce cannot, on the most moderate computation, be

estimated at less than thirty millions of tons. [75]

While these great changes have been in progress, the rent of land has,

as might be expected, been almost constantly rising. In some districts

it has multiplied more than tenfold. In some it has not more than

doubled. It has probably, on the average, quadrupled.

Of the rent, a large proportion was divided among the country gentlemen,

a class of persons whose position and character it is most important

that we should clearly understand; for by their influence and by their

passions the fate of the nation was, at several important conjunctures,

determined.

We should be much mistaken if we pictured to ourselves the squires of

the seventeenth century as men bearing a close resemblance to their

descendants, the county members and chairmen of quarter sessions with

whom we are familiar. The modern country gentleman generally receives a

liberal education, passes from a distinguished school to a distinguished

college, and has ample opportunity to become an excellent scholar. He

has generally seen something of foreign countries. A considerable

part of his life has generally been passed in the capital; and the

refinements of the capital follow him into the country. There is perhaps

no class of dwellings so pleasing as the rural seats of the English

gentry. In the parks and pleasure grounds, nature, dressed yet not

disguised by art, wears her most alluring form. In the buildings, good

sense and good taste combine to produce a happy union of the comfortable

and the graceful. The pictures, the musical instruments, the library,

would in any other country be considered as proving the owner to be

an eminently polished and accomplished man. A country gentleman who

witnessed the Revolution was probably in receipt of about a fourth

part of the rent which his acres now yield to his posterity. He was,

therefore, as compared with his posterity, a poor man, and was generally

under the necessity of residing, with little interruption, on his

estate. To travel on the Continent, to maintain an establishment in

London, or even to visit London frequently, were pleasures in which only

the great proprietors could indulge. It may be confidently affirmed that

of the squires whose names were then in the Commissions of Peace and

Lieutenancy not one in twenty went to town once in five years, or had

ever in his life wandered so far as Paris. Many lords of manors had

received an education differing little from that of their menial

servants. The heir of an estate often passed his boyhood and youth

at the seat of his family with no better tutors than grooms and

gamekeepers, and scarce attained learning enough to sign his name to

a Mittimus. If he went to school and to college, he generally returned

before he was twenty to the seclusion of the old hall, and there,

unless his mind were very happily constituted by nature, soon forgot his

academical pursuits in rural business and pleasures. His chief serious

employment was the care of his property. He examined samples of grain,

handled pigs, and, on market days, made bargains over a tankard with

drovers and hop merchants. His chief pleasures were commonly derived

from field sports and from an unrefined sensuality. His language and

pronunciation were such as we should now expect to hear only from the

most ignorant clowns. His oaths, coarse jests, and scurrilous terms of

abuse, were uttered with the broadest accent of his province. It was

easy to discern, from the first words which he spoke, whether he came

from Somersetshire or Yorkshire. He troubled himself little about

decorating his abode, and, if he attempted decoration, seldom produced

anything but deformity. The litter of a farmyard gathered under the

windows of his bedchamber, and the cabbages and gooseberry bushes grew

close to his hall door. His table was loaded with coarse plenty; and

guests were cordially welcomed to it. But, as the habit of drinking to

excess was general in the class to which he belonged, and as his fortune

did not enable him to intoxicate large assemblies daily with claret

or canary, strong beer was the ordinary beverage. The quantity of beer

consumed in those days was indeed enormous. For beer then was to the

middle and lower classes, not only all that beer is, but all that wine,

tea, and ardent spirits now are. It was only at great houses, or on

great occasions, that foreign drink was placed on the board. The ladies

of the house, whose business it had commonly been to cook the repast,

retired as soon as the dishes had been devoured, and left the gentlemen

to their ale and tobacco. The coarse jollity of the afternoon was often

prolonged till the revellers were laid under the table.

It was very seldom that the country gentleman caught glimpses of the

great world; and what he saw of it tended rather to confuse than

to enlighten his understanding. His opinions respecting religion,

government, foreign countries and former times, having been derived,

not from study, from observation, or from conversation with enlightened

companions, but from such traditions as were current in his own small

circle, were the opinions of a child. He adhered to them, however, with

the obstinacy which is generally found in ignorant men accustomed to be

fed with flattery. His animosities were numerous and bitter. He

hated Frenchmen and Italians, Scotchmen and Irishmen, Papists and

Presbyterians, Independents and Baptists, Quakers and Jews. Towards

London and Londoners he felt an aversion which more than once produced

important political effects. His wife and daughter were in tastes and

acquirements below a housekeeper or a stillroom maid of the present day.

They stitched and spun, brewed gooseberry wine, cured marigolds, and

made the crust for the venison pasty.

From this description it might be supposed that the English esquire of

the seventeenth century did not materially differ from a rustic miller

or alehouse keeper of our time. There are, however, some important

parts of his character still to be noted, which will greatly modify this

estimate. Unlettered as he was and unpolished, he was still in some most

important points a gentleman. He was a member of a proud and powerful

aristocracy, and was distinguished by many both of the good and of the

bad qualities which belong to aristocrats. His family pride was beyond

that of a Talbot or a Howard. He knew the genealogies and coats of

arms of all his neighbours, and could tell which of them had assumed

supporters without any right, and which of them were so unfortunate as

to be greatgrandsons of aldermen. He was a magistrate, and, as

such, administered gratuitously to those who dwelt around him a rude

patriarchal justice, which, in spite of innumerable blunders and of

occasional acts of tyranny, was yet better than no justice at all. He

was an officer of the trainbands; and his military dignity, though it

might move the mirth of gallants who had served a campaign in Flanders,

raised his character in his own eyes and in the eyes of his neighbours.

Nor indeed was his soldiership justly a subject of derision. In every

county there were elderly gentlemen who had seen service which was no

child's play. One had been knighted by Charles the First, after the

battle of Edgehill. Another still wore a patch over the scar which he

had received at Naseby. A third had defended his old house till

Fairfax had blown in the door with a petard. The presence of these

old Cavaliers, with their old swords and holsters, and with their old

stories about Goring and Lunsford, gave to the musters of militia an

earnest and warlike aspect which would otherwise have been wanting. Even

those country gentlemen who were too young to have themselves exchanged

blows with the cuirassiers of the Parliament had, from childhood, been

surrounded by the traces of recent war, and fed with stories of the

martial exploits of their fathers and uncles. Thus the character of

the English esquire of the seventeenth century was compounded of

two elements which we seldom or never find united. His ignorance and

uncouthness, his low tastes and gross phrases, would, in our time, be

considered as indicating a nature and a breeding thoroughly plebeian.

Yet he was essentially a patrician, and had, in large measure both the

virtues and the vices which flourish among men set from their birth

in high place, and used to respect themselves and to be respected by

others. It is not easy for a generation accustomed to find chivalrous

sentiments only in company with liberal Studies and polished manners

to image to itself a man with the deportment, the vocabulary, and

the accent of a carter, yet punctilious on matters of genealogy and

precedence, and ready to risk his life rather than see a stain cast on

the honour of his house. It is however only by thus joining together

things seldom or never found together in our own experience, that we can

form a just idea of that rustic aristocracy which constituted the main

strength of the armies of Charles the First, and which long supported,

with strange fidelity, the interest of his descendants.

The gross, uneducated; untravelled country gentleman was commonly a

Tory; but, though devotedly attached to hereditary monarchy, he had no

partiality for courtiers and ministers. He thought, not without reason,

that Whitehall was filled with the most corrupt of mankind, and that of

the great sums which the House of Commons had voted to the crown since

the Restoration part had been embezzled by cunning politicians, and part

squandered on buffoons and foreign courtesans. His stout English heart

swelled with indignation at the thought that the government of his

country should be subject to French dictation. Being himself generally

an old Cavalier, or the son of an old Cavalier, he reflected with bitter

resentment on the ingratitude with which the Stuarts had requited their

best friends. Those who heard him grumble at the neglect with which he

was treated, and at the profusion with which wealth was lavished on the

bastards of Nell Gwynn and Madam Carwell, would have supposed him ripe

for rebellion. But all this ill humour lasted only till the throne was

really in danger. It was precisely when those whom the sovereign had

loaded with wealth and honours shrank from his side that the country

gentlemen, so surly and mutinous in the season of his prosperity,

rallied round him in a body. Thus, after murmuring twenty years at the

misgovernment of Charles the Second, they came to his rescue in his

extremity, when his own Secretaries of State and the Lords of his own

Treasury had deserted him, and enabled him to gain a complete victory

over the opposition; nor can there be any doubt that they would have

shown equal loyalty to his brother James, if James would, even at the

last moment, have refrained from outraging their strongest feeling. For

there was one institution, and one only, which they prized even more

than hereditary monarchy; and that institution was the Church of

England. Their love of the Church was not, indeed, the effect of study

or meditation. Few among them could have given any reason, drawn from

Scripture or ecclesiastical history, for adhering to her doctrines, her

ritual, and her polity; nor were they, as a class, by any means strict

observers of that code of morality which is common to all Christian

sects. But the experience of many ages proves that men may be ready to

fight to the death, and to persecute without pity, for a religion

whose creed they do not understand, and whose precepts they habitually

disobey. [76]

The rural clergy were even more vehement in Toryism than the rural

gentry, end were a class scarcely less important. It is to be observed,

however, that the individual clergyman, as compared with the individual

gentleman, then ranked much lower than in our days. The main support of

the Church was derived from the tithe; and the tithe bore to the rent a

much smaller ratio than at present. King estimated the whole income

of the parochial and collegiate clergy at only four hundred and eighty

thousand pounds a year; Davenant at only five hundred and forty-four

thousand a year. It is certainly now more than seven times as great

as the larger of these two sums. The average rent of the land has not,

according to any estimate, increased proportionally. It follows that

the rectors and vicars must have been, as compared with the neighbouring

knights and squires, much poorer in the seventeenth than in the

nineteenth century.

The place of the clergyman in society had been completely changed by the

Reformation. Before that event, ecclesiastics had formed the majority

of the House of Lords, had, in wealth and splendour, equalled, and

sometimes outshone, the greatest of the temporal barons, and had

generally held the highest civil offices. Many of the Treasurers, and

almost all the Chancellors of the Plantagenets were Bishops. The Lord

Keeper of the Privy Seal and the Master of the Rolls were ordinarily

churchmen. Churchmen transacted the most important diplomatic business.

Indeed all that large portion of the administration which rude and

warlike nobles were incompetent to conduct was considered as especially

belonging to divines. Men, therefore, who were averse to the life of

camps, and who were, at the same time, desirous to rise in the state,

commonly received the tonsure. Among them were sons of all the most

illustrious families, and near kinsmen of the throne, Scroops and

Nevilles, Bourchiers, Staffords and Poles. To the religious houses

belonged the rents of immense domains, and all that large portion of

the tithe which is now in the hands of laymen. Down to the middle of the

reign of Henry the Eighth, therefore, no line of life was so attractive

to ambitious and covetous natures as the priesthood. Then came a violent

revolution. The abolition of the monasteries deprived the Church at once

of the greater part of her wealth, and of her predominance in the Upper

House of Parliament. There was no longer an Abbot of Glastonbury or

an Abbot of Reading, seated among the peers, and possessed of revenues

equal to those of a powerful Earl. The princely splendour of William of

Wykeham and of William of Waynflete had disappeared. The scarlet hat of

the Cardinal, the silver cross of the Legate, were no more. The clergy

had also lost the ascendency which is the natural reward of superior

mental cultivation. Once the circumstance that a man could read had

raised a presumption that he was in orders. But, in an age which

produced such laymen as William Cecil and Nicholas Bacon, Roger Ascham

and Thomas Smith, Walter Mildmay and Francis Walsingham, there was

no reason for calling away prelates from their dioceses to negotiate

treaties, to superintend the finances, or to administer justice. The

spiritual character not only ceased to be a qualification for high civil

office, but began to be regarded as a disqualification. Those worldly

motives, therefore, which had formerly induced so many able, aspiring,

and high born youths to assume the ecclesiastical habit, ceased to

operate. Not one parish in two hundred then afforded what a man of

family considered as a maintenance. There were still indeed prizes in

the Church: but they were few; and even the highest were mean, when

compared with the glory which had once surrounded the princes of the

hierarchy. The state kept by Parker and Grindal seemed beggarly to

those who remembered the imperial pomp of Wolsey, his palaces, which had

become the favorite abodes of royalty, Whitehall and Hampton Court, the

three sumptuous tables daily spread in his refectory, the forty-four

gorgeous copes in his chapel, his running footmen in rich liveries, and

his body guards with gilded poleaxes. Thus the sacerdotal office lost

its attraction for the higher classes. During the century which followed

the accession of Elizabeth, scarce a single person of noble descent took

orders. At the close of the reign of Charles the Second, two sons of

peers were Bishops; four or five sons of peers were priests, and held

valuable preferment: but these rare exceptions did not take away the

reproach which lay on the body. The clergy were regarded as, on the

whole, a plebeian class. [77] And, indeed, for one who made the figure

of a gentleman, ten were mere menial servants. A large proportion of

those divines who had no benefices, or whose benefices were too small to

afford a comfortable revenue, lived in the houses of laymen. It had

long been evident that this practice tended to degrade the priestly

character. Laud had exerted himself to effect a change; and Charles the

First had repeatedly issued positive orders that none but men of

high rank should presume to keep domestic chaplains. [78] But these

injunctions had become obsolete. Indeed during the domination of the

Puritan, many of the ejected ministers of the Church of England could

obtain bread and shelter only by attaching themselves to the households

of royalist gentlemen; and the habits which had been formed in those

times of trouble continued long after the reestablishment of monarchy

and episcopacy. In the mansions of men of liberal sentiments and

cultivated understandings, the chaplain was doubtless treated with

urbanity and kindness. His conversation, his literary assistance, his

spiritual advice, were considered as an ample return for his food, his

lodging, and his stipend. But this was not the general feeling of the

country gentlemen. The coarse and ignorant squire, who thought that it

belonged to his dignity to have grace said every day at his table by an

ecclesiastic in full canonicals, found means to reconcile dignity with

economy. A young Levite--such was the phrase then in use--might be had

for his board, a small garret, and ten pounds a year, and might not

only perform his own professional functions, might not only be the most

patient of butts and of listeners, might not only be always ready in

fine weather for bowls, and in rainy weather for shovelboard, but

might also save the expense of a gardener, or of a groom. Sometimes the

reverend man nailed up the apricots; and sometimes he curried the coach

horses. He cast up the farrier's bills. He walked ten miles with a

message or a parcel. He was permitted to dine with the family; but he

was expected to content himself with the plainest fare. He might fill

himself with the corned beef and the carrots: but, as soon as the tarts

and cheesecakes made their appearance, he quitted his seat, and stood

aloof till he was summoned to return thanks for the repast, from a great

part of which he had been excluded. [79]