Altered Position of the Ministry--The Elections--First Partition
Treaty--Domestic Discontent--Littleton chosen Speaker--King's Speech;
Proceedings relating to the Amount of the Land Force--Unpopularity of
Montague--Bill for Disbanding the Army--The King's Speech--Death of
the Electoral Prince of Bavaria.--Renewed Discussion of the
Army Question--Naval Administration--Commission on Irish
Forfeitures.--Prorogation of Parliament--Changes in the Ministry and
Household--Spanish Succession--Darien
THE Gazette which informed the public that the King had set out for
Holland announced also the names of the first members returned, in
obedience to his writ, by the constituent bodies of the Realm. The
history of those times has been so little studied that few persons are
aware how remarkable an epoch the general election of 1698 is in the
history of the English Constitution.
We have seen that the extreme inconvenience which had resulted from the
capricious and headstrong conduct of the House of Commons during the
years immediately following the Revolution had forced William to resort
to a political machinery which had been unknown to his predecessors, and
of which the nature and operation were but very imperfectly understood
by himself or by his ablest advisers. For the first time the
administration was confided to a small body of statesmen, who, on
all grave and pressing questions, agreed with each other and with the
majority of the representatives of the people. The direction of war and
of diplomacy the King reserved to himself; and his servants, conscious
that they were less versed than he in military affairs and in foreign
affairs, were content to leave to him the command of the army, and to
know only what he thought fit to communicate about the instructions
which he gave to his own ambassadors and about the conferences which he
held with the ambassadors of other princes. But, with these important
exceptions, the government was entrusted to what then began to be called
the Ministry.
The first English ministry was gradually formed; nor is it possible to
say quite precisely when it began to exist. But, on the whole, the date
from which the era of ministries may most properly be reckoned is the
day of the meeting of the Parliament after the general election of 1695.
That election had taken place at a time when peril and distress had
called forth all the best qualities of the nation. The hearts of men
were in the struggle against France for independence, for liberty, and
for the Protestant religion. Everybody knew that such a struggle could
not be carried on without large establishments and heavy taxes. The
government therefore could hardly ask for more than the country was
ready to give. A House of Commons was chosen in which the Whig party had
a decided preponderance. The leaders of that party had presently been
raised, one by one, to the highest executive offices. The majority,
therefore, readily arranged itself in admirable order under the
ministers, and during three sessions gave them on almost every occasion
a cordial support. The consequence was that the country was rescued
from its dangerous position, and, when that Parliament had lived out
its three years, enjoyed prosperity after a terrible commercial crisis,
peace after a long and sanguinary war, and liberty united with order
after civil troubles which had lasted during two generations, and
in which sometimes order and sometimes liberty had been in danger of
perishing.
Such were the fruits of the general election of 1695. The ministers had
flattered themselves that the general election of 1698 would be equally
favourable to them, and that in the new Parliament the old Parliament
would revive. Nor is it strange that they should have indulged such a
hope. Since they had been called to the direction of affairs every thing
had been changed, changed for the better, and changed chiefly by their
wise and resolute policy, and by the firmness with which their party
had stood by them. There was peace abroad and at home. The sentinels had
ceased to watch by the beacons of Dorsetshire and Sussex. The merchant
ships went forth without fear from the Thames and the Avon. Soldiers had
been disbanded by tens of thousands. Taxes had been remitted. The value
of all public and private securities had risen. Trade had never been
so brisk. Credit had never been so solid. All over the kingdom the
shopkeepers and the farmers, the artisans and the ploughmen, relieved,
beyond all hope, from the daily and hourly misery of the clipped silver,
were blessing the broad faces of the new shillings and half crowns. The
statesmen whose administration had been so beneficent might be pardoned
if they expected the gratitude and confidence which they had fairly
earned. But it soon became clear that they had served their country only
too well for their own interest. In 1695 adversity and danger had made
men amenable to that control to which it is the glory of free nations to
submit themselves, the control of superior minds. In 1698 prosperity
and security had made men querulous, fastidious and unmanageable.
The government was assailed with equal violence from widely different
quarters. The opposition, made up of Tories many of whom carried Toryism
to the length of Jacobitism, and of discontented Whigs some of whom
carried Whiggism to the length of republicanism, called itself the
Country party, a name which had been popular before the words Whig and
Tory were known in England. The majority of the late House of Commons,
a majority which had saved the State, was nicknamed the Court party.
The Tory gentry, who were powerful in all the counties, had special
grievances. The whole patronage of the government, they said, was in
Whig hands. The old landed interest, the old Cavalier interest, had now
no share in the favours of the Crown. Every public office, every bench
of justice, every commission of Lieutenancy, was filled with Roundheads.
The Tory rectors and vicars were not less exasperated. They accused the
men in power of systematically protecting and preferring Presbyterians,
Latitudinarians, Arians, Socinians, Deists, Atheists. An orthodox
divine, a divine who held high the dignity of the priesthood and the
mystical virtue of the sacraments, who thought schism as great a sin as
theft and venerated the Icon as much as the Gospel, had no more chance
of a bishopric or a deanery than a Papist recusant. Such complaints
as these were not likely to call forth the sympathy of the Whig
malecontents. But there were three war cries in which all the enemies of
the government, from Trenchard to Seymour, could join: No standing
army; No grants of Crown property; and No Dutchmen. Multitudes of honest
freeholders and freemen were weak enough to believe that, unless the
land force, which had already been reduced below what the public safety
required, were altogether disbanded, the nation would be enslaved, and
that, if the estates which the King had given away were resumed, all
direct taxes might be abolished. The animosity to the Dutch mingled
itself both with the animosity to standing armies and with the animosity
to Crown grants. For a brigade of Dutch troops was part of the military
establishment which was still kept up; and it was to Dutch favourites
that William had been most liberal of the royal domains.
The elections, however, began auspiciously for the government. The first
great contest was in Westminster. It must be remembered that Westminster
was then by far the greatest city in the island, except only the
neighbouring city of London, and contained more than three times as
large a population as Bristol or Norwich, which came next in size. The
right of voting at Westminster was in the householders paying scot and
lot; and the householders paying scot and lot were many thousands. It
is also to be observed that their political education was much further
advanced than that of the great majority of the electors of the kingdom.
A burgess in a country town, or a forty shilling freeholder in an
agricultural district, then knew little about public affairs except
what he could learn from reading the Postman at the alehouse, and from
hearing, on the 30th of January, the 29th of May or the 5th of November,
a sermon in which questions of state were discussed with more zeal than
sense. But the citizen of Westminster passed his days in the vicinity of
the palace, of the public offices, of the houses of parliament, of the
courts of law. He was familiar with the faces and voices of ministers,
senators and judges. In anxious times he walked in the great Hall to
pick up news. When there was an important trial, he looked into the
Court of King's Bench, and heard Cowper and Harcourt contending, and
Holt moderating between them. When there was an interesting debate, in
the House of Commons, he could at least squeeze himself into the lobby
or the Court of Requests, and hear who had spoken, and how and what were
the numbers on the division. He lived in a region of coffeehouses, of
booksellers' shops, of clubs, of pamphlets, of newspapers, of theatres
where poignant allusions to the most exciting questions of the day
perpetually called forth applause and hisses, of pulpits where the
doctrines of the High Churchman, of the Low Churchman, of the Nonjuror,
of the Nonconformist, were explained and defended every Sunday by the
most eloquent and learned divines of every persuasion. At that time,
therefore, the metropolitan electors were, as a class, decidedly
superior in intelligence and knowledge to the provincial electors.
Montague and Secretary Vernon were the ministerial candidates for
Westminster. They were opposed by Sir Henry Colt, a dull, surly,
stubborn professor of patriotism, who tired everybody to death with
his endless railing at standing armies and placemen. The electors were
summoned to meet on an open space just out of the streets. The first
Lord of the Treasury and the Secretary of State appeared at the head of
three thousand horsemen. Colt's followers were almost all on foot.
He was a favourite with the keepers of pot-houses, and had enlisted a
strong body of porters and chairmen. The two parties, after exchanging
a good deal of abuse, came to blows. The adherents of the ministers were
victorious, put the adverse mob to the rout, and cudgelled Colt himself
into a muddy ditch. The poll was taken in Westminster Hall. From the
first there was no doubt of the result. But Colt tried to prolong the
contest by bringing up a voter an hour. When it became clear that this
artifice was employed for the purpose of causing delay, the returning
officer took on himself the responsibility of closing the books, and of
declaring Montague and Vernon duly elected.
At Guildhall the junto was less fortunate. Three ministerial Aldermen
were returned. But the fourth member, Sir John Fleet, was not only
a Tory, but was Governor of the old East India Company, and had
distinguished himself by the pertinacity with which he had opposed the
financial and commercial policy of the first Lord of the Treasury. While
Montague suffered the mortification of finding that his empire over the
city was less absolute than he had imagined, Wharton, notwithstanding
his acknowledged preeminence in the art of electioneering, underwent a
succession of defeats in boroughs and counties for which he had expected
to name the members. He failed at Brackley, at Malmesbury and at
Cockermouth. He was unable to maintain possession even of his own
strongholds, Wycombe and Aylesbury. He was beaten in Oxfordshire. The
freeholders of Buckinghamshire, who had been true to him during many
years, and who in 1685, when the Whig party was in the lowest state of
depression, had, in spite of fraud and tyranny, not only placed him at
the head of the poll but put their second votes at his disposal, now
rejected one of his candidates, and could hardly be induced to return
the other, his own brother, by a very small majority.
The elections for Exeter appear to have been in that age observed by
the nation with peculiar interest. For Exeter was not only one of
the largest and most thriving cities in the Kingdom, but was also the
capital of the West of England, and was much frequented by the gentry of
several counties. The franchise was popular. Party spirit ran high; and
the contests were among the fiercest and the longest of which there
is any record in our history. Seymour had represented Exeter in the
Parliament of James, and in the two first Parliaments of William.
In 1695, after a struggle of several weeks which had attracted much
attention not only here but on the Continent, he had been defeated by
two Whig candidates, and forced to take refuge in a small borough.
But times had changed. He was now returned in his absence by a large
majority; and with him was joined another Tory less able and, if
possible, more unprincipled than himself, Sir Bartholomew Shower. Shower
had been notorious as one of the hangmen of James. When that cruel King
was bent on punishing with death soldiers who deserted from the army
which he kept up in defiance of the constitution, he found that he could
expect no assistance from Holt, who was the Recorder of London. Holt was
accordingly removed. Shower was made Recorder, and showed his gratitude
for his promotion by sending to Tyburn men who, as every barrister in
the Inns of Court knew, were guilty of no offence at all. He richly
deserved to have been excepted from the Act of Grace, and left to the
vengeance of the laws which he had so foully perverted. The return which
he made for the clemency which spared him was most characteristic. He
missed no opportunity of thwarting and damaging the Government which had
saved him from the gallows. Having shed innocent blood for the purpose
of enabling James to keep up thirty thousand troops without the consent
of Parliament, he now pretended to think it monstrous that William
should keep up ten thousand with the consent of Parliament. That a great
constituent body should be so forgetful of the past and so much out of
humour with the present as to take this base and hardhearted pettifogger
for a patriot was an omen which might well justify the most gloomy
prognostications.
When the returns were complete, it appeared that the new House of
Commons contained an unusual number of men about whom little was known,
and on whose support neither the government nor the opposition could
with any confidence reckon. The ranks of the staunch ministerial Whigs
were certainly much thinned; but it did not appear that the Tory ranks
were much fuller than before. That section of the representative body
which was Whiggish without being ministerial had gamed a great accession
of strength, and seemed likely to have, during some time, the fate of
the country in its hands. It was plain that the next session would be
a trying one. Yet it was not impossible that the servants of the Crown
might, by prudent management, succeed in obtaining a working majority.
Towards the close of August the statesmen of the junto, disappointed and
anxious but not hopeless, dispersed in order to lay in a stock of health
and vigour for the next parliamentary campaign. There were races at
that season in the neighbourhood of Winchenden, Wharton's seat in
Buckinghamshire; and a large party assembled there. Orford, Montague and
Shrewsbury repaired to the muster. But Somers, whose chronic maladies,
aggravated by sedulous application to judicial and political business,
made it necessary for him to avoid crowds and luxurious banquets,
retired to Tunbridge Wells, and tried to repair his exhausted frame with
the water of the springs and the air of the heath. Just at this moment
despatches of the gravest importance arrived from Guelders at Whitehall.
The long negotiation touching the Spanish succession had at length been
brought to a conclusion. Tallard had joined William at Loo, and had
there met Heinsius and Portland. After much discussion, the price in
consideration of which the House of Bourbon would consent to waive all
claim to Spain and the Indies, and to support the pretensions of the
Electoral Prince of Bavaria, was definitively settled. The Dauphin was
to have the Province of Guipuscoa, Naples, Sicily and some small Italian
islands which were part of the Spanish monarchy. The Milanese was
allotted to the Archduke Charles. As the Electoral Prince was still a
child, it was agreed that his father, who was then governing the Spanish
Netherlands as Viceroy, should be Regent of Spain during the minority.
Such was the first Partition Treaty, a treaty which has been during five
generations confidently and noisily condemned, and for which scarcely
any writer has ventured to offer even a timid apology, but which it may
perhaps not be impossible to defend by grave and temperate argument.
It was said, when first the terms of the Partition Treaty were made
public, and has since been many times repeated, that the English and
Dutch Governments, in making this covenant with France, were guilty of
a violation of plighted faith. They had, it was affirmed, by a secret
article of a Treaty of Alliance concluded in 1689, bound themselves to
support the pretensions of the Emperor to the Spanish throne; and they
now, in direct defiance of that article, agreed to an arrangement by
which he was excluded from the Spanish throne. The truth is that the
secret article will not, whether construed according to the letter or
according to the spirit, bear the sense which has generally been put
upon it. The stipulations of that article were introduced by a preamble,
in which it was set forth that the Dauphin was preparing to assert by
arms his claim to the great heritage which his mother had renounced, and
that there was reason to believe that he also aspired to the dignity of
King of the Romans. For these reasons, England and the States General,
considering the evil consequences which must follow if he should succeed
in attaining either of his objects, promised to support with all their
power his Caesarean Majesty against the French and their adherents.
Surely we cannot reasonably interpret this engagement to mean that,
when the dangers mentioned in the preamble had ceased to exist, when the
eldest Archduke was King of the Romans, and when the Dauphin had, for
the sake of peace, withdrawn his claim to the Spanish Crown, England
and the United Provinces would be bound to go to war for the purpose of
supporting the cause of the Emperor, not against the French but against
his own grandson, against the only prince who could reign at Madrid
without exciting fear and jealousy throughout all Christendom.
While some persons accused William of breaking faith with the House
of Austria, others accused him of interfering unjustly in the internal
affairs of Spain. In the most ingenious and humorous political satire
extant in our language, Arbuthnot's History of John Bull, England and
Holland are typified by a clothier and a linendraper, who take upon
themselves to settle the estate of a bedridden old gentleman in their
neighbourhood. They meet at the corner of his park with paper and
pencils, a pole, a chain and a semicircle, measure his fields, calculate
the value of his mines, and then proceed to his house in order to take
an inventory of his plate and furniture. But this pleasantry, excellent
as pleasantry, hardly deserves serious refutation. No person who has
a right to give any opinion at all about politics can think that the
question, whether two of the greatest empires in the world should be
virtually united so as to form one irresistible mass, was a question
with which other states had nothing to do, a question about which
other states could not take counsel together without being guilty of
impertinence as gross as that of a busybody in private life who should
insist on being allowed to dictate the wills of other people. If the
whole Spanish monarchy should pass to the House of Bourbon, it was
highly probable that in a few years England would cease to be great and
free, and that Holland would be a mere province of France. Such a danger
England and Holland might lawfully have averted by war; and it would be
absurd to say that a danger which may be lawfully averted by war
cannot lawfully be averted by peaceable means. If nations are so deeply
interested in a question that they would be justified in resorting to
arms for the purpose of settling it, they must surely be sufficiently
interested in it to be justified in resorting to amicable arrangements
for the purpose of settling it. Yet, strange to say, a multitude of
writers who have warmly praised the English and Dutch governments for
waging a long and bloody war in order to prevent the question of the
Spanish succession from being settled in a manner prejudicial to them,
have severely blamed those governments for trying to attain the same end
without the shedding of a drop of blood, without the addition of a crown
to the taxation of any country in Christendom, and without a moment's
interruption of the trade of the world by land or by sea.
It has been said to have been unjust that three states should have
combined to divide a fourth state without its own consent; and, in
recent times, the partition of the Spanish monarchy which was meditated
in 1698 has been compared to the greatest political crime which stains
the history of modern Europe, the partition of Poland. But those who
hold such language cannot have well considered the nature of the Spanish
monarchy in the seventeenth century. That monarchy was not a body
pervaded by one principle of vitality and sensation. It was an
assemblage of distinct bodies, none of which had any strong sympathy
with the rest, and some of which had a positive antipathy for each
other. The partition planned at Loo was therefore the very opposite of
the partition of Poland. The partition of Poland was the partition of a
nation. It was such a partition as is effected by hacking a living man
limb from limb. The partition planned at Loo was the partition of an ill
governed empire which was not a nation. It was such a partition as
is effected by setting loose a drove of slaves who have been fastened
together with collars and handcuffs, and whose union has produced only
pain, inconvenience and mutual disgust. There is not the slightest
reason to believe that the Neapolitans would have preferred the Catholic
King to the Dauphin, or that the Lombards would have preferred the
Catholic King to the Archduke. How little the Guipuscoans would have
disliked separation from Spain and annexation to France we may judge
from the fact that, a few years later, the States of Guipuscoa actually
offered to transfer their allegiance to France on condition that their
peculiar franchises should be held sacred.
One wound the partition would undoubtedly have inflicted, a wound on the
Castilian pride. But surely the pride which a nation takes in exercising
over other nations a blighting and withering dominion, a dominion
without prudence or energy, without justice or mercy, is not a feeling
entitled to much respect. And even a Castilian who was not greatly
deficient in sagacity must have seen that an inheritance claimed by two
of the greatest potentates in Europe could hardly pass entire to one
claimant; that a partition was therefore all but inevitable; and
that the question was in truth merely between a partition effected by
friendly compromise and a partition effected by means of a long and
devastating war.
There seems, therefore, to be no ground at all for pronouncing the terms
of the Treaty of Loo unjust to the Emperor, to the Spanish monarchy
considered as a whole, or to any part of that monarchy. Whether those
terms were or were not too favourable to France is quite another
question. It has often been maintained that she would have gained more
by permanently annexing to herself Guipuscoa, Naples and Sicily than by
sending the Duke of Anjou or the Duke of Berry to reign at the Escurial.
On this point, however, if on any point, respect is due to the opinion
of William. That he thoroughly understood the politics of Europe is
as certain as that jealousy of the greatness of France was with him a
passion, a ruling passion, almost an infirmity. Before we blame him,
therefore, for making large concessions to the power which it was the
chief business of his life to keep within bounds, we shall do well to
consider whether those concessions may not, on close examination, be
found to be rather apparent than real. The truth is that they were so,
and were well known to be so both by William and by Lewis.
Naples and Sicily formed indeed a noble kingdom, fertile, populous,
blessed with a delicious climate, and excellently situated for trade.
Such a kingdom, had it been contiguous to Provence, would indeed have
been a most formidable addition to the French monarchy. But a glance at
the map ought to have been sufficient to undeceive those who imagined
that the great antagonist of the House of Bourbon could be so weak as to
lay the liberties of Europe at the feet of that house. A King of France
would, by acquiring territories in the South of Italy, have really bound
himself over to keep the peace; for, as soon as he was at war with his
neighbours, those territories were certain to be worse than useless to
him. They were hostages at the mercy of his enemies. It would be easy to
attack them. It would be hardly possible to defend them. A French army
sent to them by land would have to force its way through the passes of
the Alps, through Piedmont, through Tuscany, and through the Pontifical
States, in opposition probably to great German armies. A French fleet
would run great risk of being intercepted and destroyed by the squadrons
of England and Holland. Of all this Lewis was perfectly aware. He
repeatedly declared that he should consider the kingdom of the Two
Sicilies as a source, not of strength, but of weakness. He accepted it
at last with murmurs; he seems to have intended to make it over to one
of his younger grandsons; and he would beyond all doubt have gladly
given it in exchange for a thirtieth part of the same area in the
Netherlands. [15] But in the Netherlands England and Holland were
determined to allow him nothing. What he really obtained in Italy
was little more than a splendid provision for a cadet of his house.
Guipuscoa was then in truth the price in consideration of which France
consented that the Electoral Prince of Bavaria should be King of Spain
and the Indies. Guipuscoa, though a small, was doubtless a valuable
province, and was in a military point of view highly important. But
Guipuscoa was not in the Netherlands. Guipuscoa would not make Lewis a
more formidable neighbour to England or to the United Provinces. And,
if the Treaty should be broken off, if the vast Spanish empire should
be struggled for and torn in pieces by the rival races of Bourbon and
Habsburg, was it not possible, was it not probable, that France might
lay her iron grasp, not on Guipuscoa alone, but on Luxemburg and Namur,
on Hainault, Brabant and Antwerp, on Flanders East and West? Was it
certain that the united force of all her neighbours would be sufficient
to compel her to relinquish her prey? Was it not certain that the
contest would be long and terrible? And would not the English and
Dutch think themselves most fortunate if, after many bloody and costly
campaigns, the French King could be compelled to sign a treaty, the
same, word for word, with that which he was ready uncompelled to sign
now?
William, firmly relying on his own judgment, had not yet, in the whole
course of this momentous negotiation, asked the advice or employed the
agency of any English minister. But the treaty could not be formally
concluded without the instrumentality of one of the Secretaries of State
and of the Great Seal. Portland was directed to write to Vernon. The
King himself wrote to the Chancellor. Somers was authorised to consult
any of his colleagues whom he might think fit to be entrusted with
so high a secret; and he was requested to give his own opinion of the
proposed arrangement. If that opinion should be favourable, not a day
must be lost. The King of Spain might die at any moment, and could
hardly live till the winter. Full powers must be sent to Loo, sealed,
but with blanks left for the names of the plenipotentiaries. Strict
secresy must be observed; and care must be taken that the clerks whose
duty it was to draw up the necessary documents should not entertain any
suspicion of the importance of the work which they were performing.
The despatch from Loo found Somers at a distance from all his political
friends, and almost incapacitated by infirmities and by remedies from
attending to serious business, his delicate frame worn out by the
labours and vigils of many months, his head aching and giddy with the
first draughts from the chalybeate spring. He roused himself, however,
and promptly communicated by writing with Shrewsbury and Orford.
Montague and Vernon came down to Tunbridge Wells, and conferred fully
with him. The opinion of the leading Whig statesmen was communicated
to the King in a letter which was not many months later placed on the
records of Parliament. These statesmen entirely agreed with William
in wishing to see the question of the Spanish succession speedily and
peaceably settled. They apprehended that, if Charles should die leaving
that question unsettled, the immense power of the French King and
the geographical situation of his dominions would enable him to
take immediate possession of the most important parts of the great
inheritance. Whether he was likely to venture on so bold a course, and
whether, if he did venture on it, any continental government would have
the means and the spirit to withstand him, were questions as to which
the English ministers, with unfeigned deference, submitted their opinion
to that of their master, whose knowledge of the interests and tempers
of all the courts of Europe was unrivalled. But there was one important
point which must not be left out of consideration, and about which his
servants might perhaps be better informed than himself, the temper of
their own country. It was, the Chancellor wrote, their duty to tell His
Majesty that the recent elections had indicated the public feeling in a
manner which had not been expected, but which could not be mistaken. The
spirit which had borne the nation up through nine years of exertions and
sacrifices seemed to be dead. The people were sick of taxes; they hated
the thought of war. As it would, in such circumstances, be no easy
matter to form a coalition capable of resisting the pretensions of
France, it was most desirable that she should be induced to withdraw
those pretensions; and it was not to be expected that she would withdraw
them without securing for herself a large compensation. The principle of
the Treaty of Loo, therefore, the English Ministers cordially approved.
But whether the articles of that treaty were or were not too favourable
to the House of Bourbon, and whether the House of Bourbon was likely
faithfully to observe them, were questions about which Somers delicately
hinted that he and his colleagues felt some misgivings. They had their
fears that Lewis might be playing false. They had their fears also that,
possessed of Sicily, he would be master of the trade of the Levant; and
that, possessed of Guipuscoa, he would be able at any moment to push
an army into the heart of Castile. But they had been reassured by the
thought that their Sovereign thoroughly understood this department of
politics, that he had fully considered all these things, that he had
neglected no precaution, and that the concessions which he had made
to France were the smallest which could have averted the calamities
impending over Christendom. It was added that the service which His
Majesty had rendered to the House of Bavaria gave him a right to ask for
some return. Would it be too much to expect, from the gratitude of the
prince who was soon to be a great king, some relaxation of the rigorous
system which excluded the English trade from the Spanish colonies? Such
a relaxation would greatly endear His Majesty to his subjects.
With these suggestions the Chancellor sent off the powers which the King
wanted. They were drawn up by Vernon with his own hand, and sealed
in such a manner that no subordinate officer was let into the secret.
Blanks were left, as the King had directed, for the names of two
Commissioners. But Somers gently hinted that it would be proper to
fill those blanks with the names of persons who were English by
naturalisation, if not by birth, and who would therefore be responsible
to Parliament.
The King now had what he wanted from England. The peculiarity of the
Batavian polity threw some difficulties in his way; but every difficulty
gelded to his authority and to the dexterous management of Heinsius. And
in truth the treaty could not but be favourably regarded by the States
General; for it had been carefully framed with the especial object
of preventing France from obtaining any accession of territory, or
influence on the side of the Netherlands; and Dutchmen, who remembered
the terrible year when the camp of Lewis had been pitched between
Utrecht and Amsterdam, were delighted to find that he was not to add to
his dominions a single fortress in their neighbourhood, and were quite
willing to buy him off with whole provinces under the Pyrenees and
the Apennines. The sanction both of the federal and of the provincial
governments was given with ease and expedition; and in the evening of
the fourth of September 1698, the treaty was signed. As to the blanks in
the English powers, William had attended to his Chancellor's suggestion,
and had inserted the names of Sir Joseph Williamson, minister at the
Hague, a born Englishman, and of Portland, a naturalised Englishman. The
Grand Pensionary and seven other Commissioners signed on behalf of the
United Provinces. Tallard alone signed for France. He seems to have
been extravagantly elated by what seemed to be the happy issue of the
negotiation in which he had borne so great a part, and in his next
despatch to Lewis boasted of the new treaty as destined to be the most
famous that had been made during many centuries.
William too was well pleased; and he had reason to be so. Had the King
of Spain died, as all men expected, before the end of that year, it is
highly probable that France would have kept faith with England and the
United Provinces; and it is almost certain that, if France had kept
faith, the treaty would have been carried into effect without any
serious opposition in any quarter. The Emperor might have complained and
threatened; but he must have submitted; for what could he do? He had
no fleet; and it was therefore impossible for him even to attempt to
possess himself of Castile, of Arragon, of Sicily, of the Indies, in
opposition to the united navies of the three greatest maritime powers in
the world. In fact, the only part of the Spanish empire which he could
hope to seize and hold by force against the will of the confederates
of Loo was the Milanese; and the Milanese the confederates of Loo had
agreed to assign to his family. He would scarcely have been so mad as
to disturb the peace of the world when the only thing which he had any
chance of gaining by war was offered him without war. The Castilians
would doubtless have resented the dismemberment of the unwieldy body
of which they formed the head. But they would have perceived that by
resisting they were much more likely to lose the Indies than to preserve
Guipuscoa. As to Italy, they could no more make war there than in the
moon. Thus the crisis which had seemed likely to produce an European war
of ten years would have produced nothing worse than a few angry notes
and plaintive manifestoes.
Both the confederate Kings wished their compact to remain a secret while
their brother Charles lived; and it probably would have remained secret,
had it been confided only to the English and French Ministers. But
the institutions of the United Provinces were not well fitted for the
purpose of concealment. It had been necessary to trust so many deputies
and magistrates that rumours of what had been passing at Loo got abroad.
Quiros, the Spanish Ambassador at the Hague, followed the trail with
such skill and perseverance that he discovered, if not the whole truth,
yet enough to furnish materials for a despatch which produced much
irritation and alarm at Madrid. A council was summoned, and sate long in
deliberation. The grandees of the proudest of Courts could hardly fail
to perceive that their next sovereign, be he who he might, would find
it impossible to avoid sacrificing part of his defenceless and widely
scattered empire in order to preserve the rest; they could not bear to
think that a single fort, a single islet, in any of the four quarters of
the world was about to escape from the sullen domination of Castile. To
this sentiment all the passions and prejudices of the haughty race were
subordinate. "We are ready," such was the phrase then in their mouths,
"to go to any body, to go to the Dauphin, to go to the Devil, so that we
all go together." In the hope of averting the threatened dismemberment,
the Spanish ministers advised their master to adopt as his heir the
candidate whose pretensions it was understood that France, England and
Holland were inclined to support. The advice was taken; and it was soon
every where known that His Catholic Majesty had solemnly designated as
his successor his nephew Francis Joseph, Electoral Prince of Bavaria.
France protested against this arrangement, not, as far as can now be
judged, because she meant to violate the Treaty of Loo, but because it
would have been difficult for her, if she did not protest, to insist on
the full execution of that treaty. Had she silently acquiesced in the
nomination of the Electoral Prince, she would have appeared to admit
that the Dauphin's pretensions were unfounded; and, if she admitted the
Dauphin's pretensions to be unfounded, she could not, without flagrant
injustice, demand several provinces as the price in consideration
of which she would consent to waive those pretensions. Meanwhile the
confederates had secured the cooperation of a most important person, the
Elector of Bavaria, who was actually Governor of the Netherlands, and
was likely to be in a few months, at farthest, Regent of the whole
Spanish monarchy. He was perfectly sensible that the consent of France,
England and Holland to his son's elevation was worth purchasing at
almost any cost, and, with much alacrity, promised that, when the time
came, he would do all in his power to facilitate the execution of the
Treaty of Partition. He was indeed bound by the strongest ties to the
confederates of Loo. They had, by a secret article, added to the treaty,
agreed that, if the Electoral Prince should become King of Spain, and
then die without issue, his father should be his heir. The news that
young Francis Joseph had been declared heir to the throne of Spain was
welcome to all the potentates of Europe with the single exception of his
grandfather the Emperor. The vexation and indignation of Leopold were
extreme. But there could be no doubt that, graciously or ungraciously,
he would submit. It would have been madness in him to contend against
all Western Europe on land; and it was physically impossible for him to
wage war on the sea. William was therefore able to indulge, during some
weeks, the pleasing belief that he had by skill and firmness averted
from the civilised world a general war which had lately seemed to be
imminent, and that he had secured the great community of nations against
the undue predominance of one too powerful member.
But the pleasure and the pride with which he contemplated the success of
his foreign policy gave place to very different feelings as soon as he
again had to deal with our domestic factions. And, indeed, those who
most revere his memory must acknowledge that, in dealing with these
factions, he did not, at this time, show his wonted statesmanship. For
a wise man, he seems never to have been sufficiently aware how much
offence is given by discourtesy in small things. His ministers had
apprised him that the result of the elections had been unsatisfactory,
and that the temper of the new representatives of the people would
require much management. Unfortunately he did not lay this intimation
to heart. He had by proclamation fixed the opening of the Parliament for
the 29th of November. This was then considered as a very late day. For
the London season began together with Michaelmas Term; and, even during
the war, the King had scarcely ever failed to receive the compliments of
his faithful Lords and Commons on the fifth of November, the anniversary
both of his birth and of his memorable landing. The numerous members of
the House of Commons who were in town, having their time on their hands,
formed cabals, and heated themselves and each other by murmuring at his
partiality for the country of his birth. He had been off to Holland,
they said, at the earliest possible moment. He was now lingering in
Holland till the latest possible moment. This was not the worst.
The twenty-ninth of November came; but the King was not come. It was
necessary that the Lords Justices should prorogue the Parliament to the
sixth of December. The delay was imputed, and justly, to adverse winds.
But the malecontents asked, with some reason, whether His Majesty had
not known that there were often gales from the West in the German Ocean,
and whether, when he had made a solemn appointment with the Estates of
his Realm for a particular day, he ought not to have arranged things in
such a way that nothing short of a miracle could have prevented him from
keeping that appointment.
Thus the ill humour which a large proportion of the new legislators had
brought up from their country seats became more and more aced every day,
till they entered on their functions. One question was much agitated
during this unpleasant interval. Who was to be Speaker? The junto wished
to place Sir Thomas Littleton in the chair. He was one of their ablest,
most zealous and most steadfast friends; and had been, both in the
House of Commons and at the Board of Treasury, an invaluable second to
Montague. There was reason indeed to expect a strong opposition. That
Littleton was a Whig was a grave objection to him in the opinion of the
Tories. That he was a placeman, and that he was for a standing army,
were grave objections to him in the opinion of many who were not Tories.
But nobody else came forward. The health of the late Speaker Foley had
failed. Musgrave was talked of in coffeehouses; but the rumour that he
would be proposed soon died away. Seymour's name was in a few mouths;
but Seymour's day had gone by. He still possessed, indeed, those
advantages which had once made him the first of the country gentlemen
of England, illustrious descent, ample fortune, ready and weighty
eloquence, perfect familiarity with parliamentary business. But all
these things could not do so much to raise him as his moral character
did to drag him down. Haughtiness such as his, though it could never
have been liked, might, if it had been united with elevated sentiments
of virtue and honour, have been pardoned. But of all the forms of pride,
even the pride of upstart wealth not excepted, the most offensive is the
pride of ancestry when found in company with sordid and ignoble vices,
greediness, mendacity, knavery and impudence; and such was the pride of
Seymour. Many, even of those who were well pleased to see the ministers
galled by his keen and skilful rhetoric, remembered that he had sold
himself more than once, and suspected that he was impatient to sell
himself again. On the very eve of the opening of Parliament, a little
tract entitled "Considerations on the Choice of a Speaker" was widely
circulated, and seems to have produced a great sensation. The writer
cautioned the representatives of the people, at some length, against
Littleton; and then, in even stronger language, though more concisely,
against Seymour; but did not suggest any third person. The sixth of
December came, and found the Country party, as it called itself, still
unprovided with a candidate. The King, who had not been many hours in
London, took his seat in the House of Lords. The Commons were summoned
to the bar, and were directed to choose a Speaker. They returned to
their Chamber. Hartington proposed Littleton; and the proposition was
seconded by Spencer. No other person was put in nomination; but there
was a warm debate of two hours. Seymour, exasperated by finding that no
party was inclined to support his pretensions, spoke with extravagant
violence. He who could well remember the military despotism of Cromwell,
who had been an active politician in the days of the Cabal, and who
had seen his own beautiful county turned into a Golgotha by the Bloody
Circuit, declared that the liberties of the nation had never been in
greater danger than at that moment, and that their doom would be fixed
if a courtier should be called to the chair. The opposition insisted on
dividing. Hartington's motion was carried by two hundred and forty-two
votes to a hundred and thirty-five, Littleton himself, according to
the childish old usage which has descended to our times, voting in the
minority. Three days later, he was presented and approved.
The King then spoke from the throne. He declared his firm conviction
that the Houses were disposed to do whatever was necessary for the
safety, honour and happiness of the kingdom; and he asked them for
nothing more. When they came to consider the military and naval
establishments, they would remember that, unless England were secure
from attack, she could not continue to hold the high place which she
had won for herself among European powers; her trade would languish;
her credit would fail; and even her internal tranquillity would be in
danger. He also expressed a hope that some progress would be made in the
discharge of the debts contracted during the War. "I think," he said,
"an English Parliament can never make such a mistake as not to hold
sacred all Parliamentary engagements."
The speech appeared to be well received; and during a short time William
flattered himself that the great fault, as he considered it, of the
preceding session would be repaired, that the army would be augmented,
and that he should be able, at the important conjuncture which was
approaching, to speak to foreign powers in tones of authority, and
especially to keep France steady to her engagements. The Whigs of the
junto, better acquainted with the temper of the country and of the new
House of Commons, pronounced it impossible to carry a vote for a land
force of more than ten thousand men. Ten thousand men would probably be
obtained if His Majesty would authorise his servants to ask in his name
for that number, and to declare that with a smaller number he could
not answer for the public safety. William, firmly convinced that twenty
thousand would be too few, refused to make or empower others to make
a proposition which seemed to him absurd and disgraceful. Thus, at a
moment at which it was peculiarly desirable that all who bore a part in
the executive administration should act cordially together, there was
serious dissension between him and his ablest councillors. For that
dissension neither he nor they can be severely blamed. They were
differently situated, and necessarily saw the same objects from
different points of view. He, as was natural, considered the question
chiefly as an European question. They, as was natural, considered
it chiefly as an English question. They had found the antipathy to
a standing army insurmountably strong even in the late Parliament,
a Parliament disposed to place large confidence in them and in their
master. In the new Parliament that antipathy amounted almost to a mania.
That liberty, law, property, could never be secured while the Sovereign
had a large body of regular troops at his command in time of peace, and
that of all regular troops foreign troops were the most to be dreaded,
had, during the recent elections, been repeated in every town hall and
market place, and scrawled upon every dead wall. The reductions of the
preceding year, it was said, even if they had been honestly carved into
effect, would not have been sufficient; and they had not been honestly
carried into effect. On this subject the ministers pronounced the temper
of the Commons to be such that, if any person high in office were to
ask for what His Majesty thought necessary, there would assuredly be
a violent explosion; the majority would probably be provoked into
disbanding all that remained of the army; and the kingdom would be left
without a single soldier. William, however, could not be brought to
believe that the case was so hopeless. He listened too easily to some
secret adviser, Sunderland was probably the man, who accused Montague
and Somers of cowardice and insincerity. They had, it was whispered in
the royal ear, a majority, whenever they really wanted one. They were
bent upon placing their friend Littleton in the Speaker's chair;
and they had carried their point triumphantly. They would carry as
triumphantly a vote for a respectable military establishment if the
honour of their master and the safety of their country were as dear to
them as the petty interests of their own faction. It was to no purpose
that the King was told, what was nevertheless perfectly true, that not
one half of the members who had voted for Littleton, could, by any art
or eloquence, be induced to vote for an augmentation of the land force.
While he was urging his ministers to stand up manfully against the
popular prejudice, and while they were respectfully representing to him
that by so standing up they should only make that prejudice stronger and
more noxious, the day came which the Commons had fixed for taking
the royal speech into consideration. The House resolved itself into
a Committee. The great question was instantly raised; What provision
should be made for the defence of the realm? It was naturally expected
that the confidential advisers of the Crown would propose something. As
they remained silent, Harley took the lead which properly belonged to
them, and moved that the army should not exceed seven thousand men. Sir
Charles Sedley suggested ten thousand. Vernon, who was present, was of
opinion that this number would have been carved if it had been proposed
by one who was known to speak on behalf of the King. But few members
cared to support an amendment which was certain to be less pleasing to
their constituents, and did not appear to be more pleasing to the Court,
than the original motion. Harley's resolution passed the Committee. On
the morrow it was reported and approved. The House also resolved that
all the seven thousand men who were to be retained should be natural
born English subjects. Other votes were carried without a single
division either in the Committee or when the mace was on the table.
The King's indignation and vexation were extreme. He was angry with the
opposition, with the ministers, with all England. The nation seemed
to him to be under a judicial infatuation, blind to dangers which
his sagacity perceived to be real, near and formidable, and morbidly
apprehensive of dangers which his conscience told him were no dangers at
all. The perverse islanders were willing to trust every thing that was
most precious to them, their independence, their property, their laws,
their religion, to the moderation and good faith of France, to the
winds and the waves, to the steadiness and expertness of battalions of
ploughmen commanded by squires; and yet they were afraid to trust him
with the means of protecting them lest he should use those means for
the destruction of the liberties which he had saved from extreme peril,
which he had fenced with new securities, which he had defended with the
hazard of his life, and which from the day of his accession he had never
once violated. He was attached, and not without reason, to the Blue
Dutch Foot Guards. That brigade had served under him for many years, and
had been eminently distinguished by courage, discipline and fidelity. In
December 1688 that brigade had been the first in his army to enter
the English capital, and had been entrusted with the important duty of
occupying Whitehall and guarding the person of James. Eighteen months
later, that brigade had been the first to plunge into the waters of the
Boyne. Nor had the conduct of these veteran soldiers been less exemplary
in their quarters than in the field. The vote which required the King to
discard them merely because they were what he himself was seemed to him
a personal affront. All these vexations and scandals he imagined that
his ministers might have averted, if they had been more solicitous for
his honour and for the success of his great schemes of policy, and
less solicitous about their own popularity. They, on the other hand,
continued to assure him, and, as far as can now be judged, to assure him
with perfect truth, that it was altogether out of their power to effect
what he wished. Something they might perhaps be able to do. Many members
of the House of Commons had said in private that seven thousand men was
too small a number. If His Majesty would let it be understood that he
should consider those who should vote for ten thousand as having done
him good service, there might be hopes. But there could be no hope
if gentlemen found that by voting for ten thousand they should please
nobody, that they should be held up to the counties and towns which they
represented as turncoats and slaves for going so far to meet his wishes,
and that they should be at the same time frowned upon at Kensington for
not going farther. The King was not to be moved. He had been too great
to sink into littleness without a struggle. He had been the soul of
two great coalitions, the dread of France, the hope of all oppressed
nations. And was he to be degraded into a mere puppet of the Harleys
and the Hooves, a petty prince who could neither help nor hurt, a less
formidable enemy and less valuable ally than the Elector of Brandenburg
or the Duke of Savoy? His spirit, quite as arbitrary and as impatient
of control as that of any of his predecessors, Stuart, Tudor or
Plantagenet, swelled high against this ignominious bondage. It was well
known at Versailles that he was cruelly mortified and incensed; and,
during a short time, a strange hope was cherished there that, in the
heat of his resentment, he might be induced to imitate his uncles,
Charles and James, to conclude another treaty of Dover, and to sell
himself into vassalage for a subsidy which might make him independent of
his niggardly and mutinous Parliament. Such a subsidy, it was thought,
might be disguised under the name of a compensation for the little
principality of Orange, which Lewis had long been desirous to purchase
even at a fancy price. A despatch was drawn up containing a paragraph by
which Tallard was to be apprised of his master's views, and instructed
not to hazard any distinct proposition, but to try the effect of
cautious and delicate insinuations, and, if possible, to draw William on
to speak first. This paragraph was, on second thoughts, cancelled;
but that it should ever have been written must be considered a most
significant circumstance.
It may with confidence be affirmed that William would never have stooped
to be the pensioner of France; but it was with difficulty that he
was, at this conjuncture, dissuaded from throwing up the government of
England. When first he threw out hints about retiring to the Continent,
his ministers imagined that he was only trying to frighten them into
making a desperate effort to obtain for him an efficient army. But
they soon saw reason to believe that he was in earnest. That he was in
earnest, indeed, can hardly be doubted. For, in a confidential letter to
Heinsius, whom he could have no motive for deceiving, he intimated his
intention very clearly. "I foresee," he writes, "that I shall be driven
to take an extreme course, and that I shall see you again in Holland
sooner than I had imagined." [16] In fact he had resolved to go down to
the Lords, to send for the Commons, and to make his last speech from the
throne. That speech he actually prepared and had it translated. He meant
to tell his hearers that he had come to England to rescue their religion
and their liberties; that, for that end, he had been under the necessity
of waging a long and cruel war; that the war had, by the blessing of
God, ended in an honourable and advantageous peace; and that the nation
might now be tranquil and happy, if only those precautions were adopted
which he had on the first day of the session recommended as essential
to the public security. Since, however, the Estates of the Realm thought
fit to slight his advice, and to expose themselves to the imminent risk
of ruin, he would not be the witness of calamities which he had not
caused and which he could not avert. He must therefore request the
Houses to present to him a bill providing for the government of the
realm; he would pass that bill, and withdraw from a post in which he
could no longer be useful, but he should always take a deep interest in
the welfare of England; and, if what he foreboded should come to pass,
if in some day of danger she should again need his services, his life
should be hazarded as freely as ever in her defence.
When the King showed his speech to the Chancellor, that wise minister
forgot for a moment his habitual self-command. "This is extravagance,
Sir," he said: "this is madness. I implore your Majesty, for the sake of
your own honour, not to say to anybody else what you have said to
me." He argued the matter during two hours, and no doubt lucidly
and forcibly. William listened patiently; but his purpose remained
unchanged.
The alarm of the ministers seems to have been increased by finding that
the King's intention had been confided to Marlborough, the very last man
to whom such a secret would have been imparted unless William had really
made up his mind to abdicate in favour of the Princess of Denmark.
Somers had another audience, and again began to expostulate. But William
cut him short. "We shall not agree, my Lord; my mind is made up."
"Then, Sir," said Somers, "I have to request that I may be excused from
assisting as Chancellor at the fatal act which Your Majesty meditates.
It was from my King that I received this seal; and I beg that he will
take it from me while he is still my King."
In these circumstances the ministers, though with scarcely the faintest
hope of success, determined to try what they could do to meet the King's
wishes. A select Committee had been appointed by the House of Commons to
frame a bill for the disbanding of all the troops above seven thousand.
A motion was made by one of the Court party that this Committee should
be instructed to reconsider the number of men. Vernon acquitted himself
well in the debate. Montague spoke with even more than his wonted
ability and energy, but in vain. So far was he from being able to
rally round him such a majority as that which had supported him in the
preceding Parliament, that he could not count on the support even of the
placemen who sate at the same executive board with him. Thomas Pelham,
who had, only a few months before, been made a Lord of the Treasury,
tried to answer him. "I own," said Pelham, "that last year I thought a
large land force necessary; this year I think such a force unnecessary;
but I deny that I have been guilty of any inconsistency. Last year the
great question of the Spanish succession was unsettled, and there was
serious danger of a general war. That question has now been settled in
the best possible way; and we may look forward to many years of peace."
A Whig of still greater note and authority, the Marquess of Hartington,
separated himself on this occasion from the junto. The current was
irresistible. At last the voices of those who tried to speak for the
Instruction were drowned by clamour. When the question was put, there
was a great shout of No, and the minority submitted. To divide would
have been merely to have exposed their weakness.
By this time it became clear that the relations between the executive
government and the Parliament were again what they had been before the
year 1695. The history of our polity at this time is closely connected
with the history of one man. Hitherto Montague's career had been more
splendidly and uninterruptedly successful than that of any member of the
House of Commons, since the House of Commons had begun to exist. And now
fortune had turned. By the Tories he had long been hated as a Whig; and
the rapidity of his rise, the brilliancy of his fame, and the unvarying
good luck which seemed to attend him, had made many Whigs his enemies.
He was absurdly compared to the upstart favourites of a former age, Carr
and Villiers, men whom he resembled in nothing but in the speed with
which he had mounted from a humble to a lofty position. They had,
without rendering any service to the State, without showing any
capacity for the conduct of great affairs, been elevated to the highest
dignities, in spite of the murmurs of the whole nation, by the mere
partiality of the Sovereign. Montague owed every thing to his own merit
and to the public opinion of his merit. With his master he appears to
have had very little intercourse, and none that was not official. He
was in truth a living monument of what the Revolution had done for the
Country. The Revolution had found him a young student in a cell by the
Cam, poring on the diagrams which illustrated the newly discovered laws
of centripetal and centrifugal force, writing little copies of verses,
and indulging visions of parsonages with rich glebes, and of closes in
old cathedral towns had developed in him new talents; had held out to
him the hope of prizes of a very different sort from a rectory or a
prebend. His eloquence had gained for him the ear of the legislature.
His skill in fiscal and commercial affairs had won for him the
confidence of the City. During four years he had been the undisputed
leader of the majority of the House of Commons; and every one of those
years he had made memorable by great parliamentary victories, and by
great public services. It should seem that his success ought to have
been gratifying to the nation, and especially to that assembly of
which he was the chief ornament, of which indeed he might be called
the creature. The representatives of the people ought to have been
well pleased to find that their approbation could, in the new order
of things, do for the man whom they delighted to honour all that the
mightiest of the Tudors could do for Leicester, or the most arbitrary of
the Stuarts for Strafford. But, strange to say, the Commons soon began
to regard with an evil eve that greatness which was their own work. The
fault indeed was partly Montague's. With all his ability, he had not the
wisdom to avert, by suavity and moderation, that curse, the inseparable
concomitant of prosperity and glory, which the ancients personified
under the name of Nemesis. His head, strong for all the purposes of
debate and arithmetical calculation, was weak against the intoxicating
influence of success and fame. He became proud even to insolence. Old
companions, who, a very few years before, had punned and rhymed with him
in garrets, had dined with him at cheap ordinaries, had sate with him
in the pit, and had lent him some silver to pay his seamstress's bill,
hardly knew their friend Charles in the great man who could not forget
for one moment that he was First Lord of the Treasury, that he was
Chancellor of the Exchequer, that he had been a Regent of the kingdom,
that he had founded the Bank of England and the new East India Company,
that he had restored the currency, that he had invented the Exchequer
Bills, that he had planned the General Mortgage, and that he had been
pronounced, by a solemn vote of the Commons, to have deserved all
the favours which he had received from the Crown. It was said that
admiration of himself and contempt of others were indicated by all his
gestures and written in all the lines of his face. The very way in which
the little jackanapes, as the hostile pamphleteers loved to call him,
strutted through the lobby, making the most of his small figure, rising
on his toe, and perking up his chin, made him enemies. Rash and arrogant
sayings were imputed to him, and perhaps invented for him. He was
accused of boasting that there was nothing that he could not carry
through the House of Commons, that he could turn the majority round his
finger. A crowd of libellers assailed him with much more than political
hatred. Boundless rapacity and corruption were laid to his charge. He
was represented as selling all the places in the revenue department for
three years' purchase. The opprobrious nickname of Filcher was fastened
on him. His luxury, it was said, was not less inordinate than his
avarice. There was indeed an attempt made at this time to raise against
the leading Whig politicians and their allies, the great moneyed men of
the City, a cry much resembling the cry which, seventy or eighty years
later, was raised against the English Nabobs. Great wealth, suddenly
acquired, is not often enjoyed with moderation, dignity and good taste.
It is therefore not impossible that there may have been some small
foundation for the extravagant stories with which malecontent
pamphleteers amused the leisure of malecontent squires. In such stories
Montague played a conspicuous part. He contrived, it was said, to be at
once as rich as Croesus and as riotous as Mark Antony. His stud and his
cellar were beyond all price. His very lacqueys turned up their noses at
claret. He and his confederates were described as spending the immense
sums of which they had plundered the public in banquets of four courses,
such as Lucullus might have eaten in the Hall of Apollo. A supper for
twelve Whigs, enriched by jobs, grants, bribes, lucky purchases and
lucky sales of stock, was cheap at eighty pounds. At the end of every
course all the fine linen on the table was changed. Those who saw the
pyramids of choice wild fowl imagined that the entertainment had been
prepared for fifty epicures at the least. Only six birds' nests from the
Nicobar islands were to be had in London; and all the six, bought at
an enormous price, were smoking in soup on the board. These fables were
destitute alike of probability and of evidence. But Grub Street could
devise no fable injurious to Montague which was not certain to find
credence in more than half the manor houses and vicarages of England.
It may seem strange that a man who loved literature passionately, and
rewarded literary merit munificently, should have been more savagely
reviled both in prose and verse than almost any other politician in our
history. But there is really no cause for wonder. A powerful, liberal
and discerning protector of genius is very likely to be mentioned with
honour long after his death, but is very likely also to be most brutally
libelled during his life. In every age there will be twenty bad writers
for one good one; and every bad writer will think himself a good one. A
ruler who neglects all men of letters alike does not wound the self love
of any man of letters. But a ruler who shows favour to the few men of
letters who deserve it inflicts on the many the miseries of disappointed
hope, of affronted pride, of jealousy cruel as the grave. All the rage
of a multitude of authors, irritated at once by the sting of want and by
the sting of vanity, is directed against the unfortunate patron. It is
true that the thanks and eulogies of those whom he has befriended will
be remembered when the invectives of those whom he has neglected are
forgotten. But in his own time the obloquy will probably make as much
noise and find as much credit as the panegyric. The name of Maecenas
has been made immortal by Horace and Virgil, and is popularly used to
designate an accomplished statesman, who lives in close intimacy with
the greatest poets and wits of his time, and heaps benefits on them with
the most delicate generosity. But it may well be suspected that, if the
verses of Alpinus and Fannius, of Bavius and Maevius, had come down
to us, we might see Maecenas represented as the most niggardly and
tasteless of human beings, nay as a man who, on system, neglected and
persecuted all intellectual superiority. It is certain that Montague
was thus represented by contemporary scribblers. They told the world in
essays, in letters, in dialogues, in ballads, that he would do nothing
for anybody without being paid either in money or in some vile services;
that he not only never rewarded merit, but hated it whenever he saw it;
that he practised the meanest arts for the purpose of depressing it;
that those whom he protected and enriched were not men of ability and
virtue, but wretches distinguished only by their sycophancy and their
low debaucheries. And this was said of the man who made the fortune of
Joseph Addison, and of Isaac Newton.
Nothing had done more to diminish the influence of Montague in the House
of Commons than a step which he had taken a few weeks before the meeting
of the Parliament. It would seem that the result of the general election
had made him uneasy, and that he had looked anxiously round him for some
harbour in which he might take refuge from the storms which seemed to
be gathering. While his thoughts were thus employed, he learned that the
Auditorship of the Exchequer had suddenly become vacant. The Auditorship
was held for life. The duties were formal and easy. The gains were
uncertain; for they rose and fell with the public expenditure; but
they could hardly, in time of peace, and under the most economical
administration, be less than four thousand pounds a year, and were
likely, in time of war, to be more than double of that sum. Montague
marked this great office for his own. He could not indeed take it, while
he continued to be in charge of the public purse. For it would have been
indecent, and perhaps illegal, that he should audit his own accounts.
He therefore selected his brother Christopher, whom he had lately made a
Commissioner of the Excise, to keep the place for him. There was, as may
easily be supposed, no want of powerful and noble competitors for such
a prize. Leeds had, more than twenty years before, obtained from Charles
the Second a patent granting the reversion to Caermarthen. Godolphin,
it was said, pleaded a promise made by William. But Montague maintained,
and was, it seems, right in maintaining, that both the patent of Charles
and the promise of William had been given under a mistake, and that the
right of appointing the Auditor belonged, not to the Crown, but to the
Board of Treasury. He carried his point with characteristic audacity
and celerity. The news of the vacancy reached London on a Sunday. On the
Tuesday the new Auditor was sworn in. The ministers were amazed. Even
the Chancellor, with whom Montague was on terms of intimate friendship,
had not been consulted. Godolphin devoured his ill temper. Caermarthen
ordered out his wonderful yacht, and hastened to complain to the King,
who was then at Loo. But what had been done could not be undone.
This bold stroke placed Montague's fortune, in the lower sense of the
word, out of hazard, but increased the animosity of his enemies and
cooled the zeal of his adherents. In a letter written by one of his
colleagues, Secretary Vernon, on the day after the appointment, the
Auditorship is described as at once a safe and lucrative place. "But I
thought," Vernon proceeds, "Mr. Montague was too aspiring to stoop
to any thing below the height he was in, and that he least considered
profit." This feeling was no doubt shared by many of the friends of
the ministry. It was plain that Montague was preparing a retreat for
himself. This flinching of the captain, just on the eve of a perilous
campaign, naturally disheartened the whole army. It deserves to be
remarked that, more than eighty years later, another great parliamentary
leader was placed in a very similar situation. The younger William Pitt
held in 1784 the same offices which Montague had held in 1698. Pitt was
pressed in 1784 by political difficulties not less than those with which
Montague had contended in 1698. Pitt was also in 1784 a much poorer man
than Montague in 1698. Pitt, in 1784, like Montage in 1698, had at his
own absolute disposal a lucrative sinecure place in the Exchequer. Pitt
gave away the office which would have made him an opulent man, and gave
it away in such a manner as at once to reward unfortunate merit, and
to relieve the country from a burden. For this disinterestedness he was
repaid by the enthusiastic applause of his followers, by the enforced
respect of his opponents, and by the confidence which, through all the
vicissitudes of a chequered and at length disastrous career, the great
body of Englishmen reposed in his public spirit and in his personal
integrity. In the intellectual qualities of a statesman Montague was
probably not inferior to Pitt. But the magnanimity, the dauntless
courage, the contempt for riches and for baubles, to which, more than to
any intellectual quality, Pitt owed his long ascendency, were wanting to
Montague.
The faults of Montague were great; but his punishment was cruel. It was
indeed a punishment which must have been more bitter than the bitterness
of death to a man whose vanity was exquisitely sensitive, and who had
been spoiled by early and rapid success and by constant prosperity.
Before the new Parliament had been a month sitting it was plain that his
empire was at an end. He spoke with the old eloquence; but his speeches
no longer called forth the old response. Whatever he proposed was
maliciously scrutinised. The success of his budget of the preceding year
had surpassed all expectation. The two millions which he had undertaken
to find had been raised with a rapidity which seemed magical. Yet for
bringing the riches of the City, in an unprecedented flood, to
overflow the Exchequer he was reviled as if his scheme had failed more
ludicrously than the Tory Land Bank. Emboldened by his unpopularity,
the Old East India Company presented a petition praying that the General
Society Act, which his influence and eloquence had induced the late
Parliament to pass, might be extensively modified. Howe took the matter
up. It was moved that leave should be given to bring in a bill according
to the prayer of the petition; the motion was carried by a hundred and
seventy-five votes to a hundred and forty-eight; and the whole question
of the trade with the Eastern seas was reopened. The bill was brought
in, but was, with great difficulty and by a very small majority, thrown
out on the second reading. [17] On other financial questions Montague,
so lately the oracle of the Committee of Supply, was now heard with
malevolent distrust. If his enemies were unable to detect any flaw in
his reasonings and calculations, they could at least whisper that Mr.
Montague was very cunning, that it was not easy to track him, but that
it might be taken for granted that for whatever he did he had some
sinister motive, and that the safest course was to negative whatever he
proposed. Though that House of Commons was economical even to a vice,
the majority preferred paying high interest to paying low interest,
solely because the plan for raising money at low interest had been
framed by him. In a despatch from the Dutch embassy the States General
were informed that many of the votes of that session which had caused
astonishment out of doors were to be ascribed to nothing but to the
bitter envy which the ability and fame of Montague had excited. It was
not without a hard struggle and a sharp pang that the first Englishman
who has held that high position which has now been long called the
Leadership of the House of Commons submitted to be deposed. But he was
set upon with cowardly malignity by whole rows of small men none of
whom singly would have dared to look him in the face. A contemporary
pamphleteer compared him to an owl in the sunshine pursued and pecked
to death by flights of tiny birds. On one occasion he was irritated into
uttering an oath. Then there was a cry of Order; and he was threatened
with the Serjeant and the Tower. On another occasion he was moved even
to shedding tears of rage and vexation, tears which only moved the
mockery of his low minded and bad hearted foes.
If a minister were now to find himself thus situated in a House of
Commons which had just been elected, and from which it would therefore
be idle to appeal to the electors, he would instantly resign his office,
and his adversaries would take his place. The change would be most
advantageous to the public, even if we suppose his successor to be both
less virtuous and less able than himself. For it is much better for
the country to have a bad ministry than to have no ministry at all,
and there would be no ministry at all if the executive departments
were filled by men whom the representatives of the people took every
opportunity of thwarting and insulting. That an unprincipled man should
be followed by a majority of the House of Commons is no doubt an evil.
But, when this is the case, he will nowhere be so harmless as at the
head of affairs. As he already possesses the power to do boundless
mischief, it is desirable to give him a strong motive to abstain from
doing mischief; and such a motive he has from the moment that he
is entrusted with the administration. Office of itself does much to
equalise politicians. It by no means brings all characters to a level;
but it does bring high characters down and low characters up towards
a common standard. In power the most patriotic and most enlightened
statesman finds that he must disappoint the expectations of his
admirers; that, if he effects any good, he must effect it by compromise;
that he must relinquish many favourite schemes; that he must bear with
many abuses. On the other hand, power turns the very vices of the most
worthless adventurer, his selfish ambition, his sordid cupidity, his
vanity, his cowardice, into a sort of public spirit. The most greedy and
cruel wrecker that ever put up false lights to lure mariners to their
destruction will do his best to preserve a ship from going to pieces
on the rocks, if he is taken on board of her and made pilot; and so the
most profligate Chancellor of the Exchequer most wish that trade may
flourish, that the revenue may come in well, and that he may be able
to take taxes off instead of putting them on. The most profligate First
Lord of the Admiralty must wish to receive news of a victory like that
of the Nile rather than of a mutiny like that at the Nore. There is,
therefore, a limit to the evil which is to be apprehended from the worst
ministry that is likely ever to exist in England. But to the evil of
having no ministry, to the evil of having a House of Commons permanently
at war with the executive government, there is absolutely no limit. This
was signally proved in 1699 and 1700. Had the statesmen of the junto, as
soon as they had ascertained the temper of the new Parliament, acted as
statesmen similarly situated would now act, great calamities would have
been averted. The chiefs of the opposition must then have been called
upon to form a government. With the power of the late ministry the
responsibility of the late ministry would have been transferred to them;
and that responsibility would at once have sobered them. The orator
whose eloquence had been the delight of the Country party would have had
to exert his ingenuity on a new set of topics. There would have been
an end of his invectives against courtiers and placemen, of piteous
meanings about the intolerable weight of the land tax, of his boasts
that the militia of Kent and Sussex, without the help of a single
regular soldier, would turn the conquerors of Landen to the right about.
He would himself have been a courtier; he would himself have been a
placeman; he would have known that he should be held accountable for
all the misery which a national bankruptcy or a French invasion might
produce; and, instead of labouring to get up a clamour for the reduction
of imposts, and the disbanding of regiments, he would have employed all
his talents and influence for the purpose of obtaining from Parliament
the means of supporting public credit, and of putting the country in a
good posture of defence. Meanwhile the statesmen who were out might have
watched the new men, might have checked them when they were wrong, might
have come to their help when, by doing right, they had raised a mutiny
in their own absurd and perverse faction. In this way Montague and
Somers might, in opposition, have been really far more powerful than
they could be while they filled the highest posts in the executive
government and were outvoted every day in the House of Commons. Their
retirement would have mitigated envy; their abilities would have been
missed and regretted; their unpopularity would have passed to their
successors, who would have grievously disappointed vulgar expectation,
and would have been under the necessity of eating their own words in
every debate. The league between the Tories and the discontented Whigs
would have been dissolved; and it is probable that, in a session or
two, the public voice would have loudly demanded the recall of the best
Keeper of the Great Seal, and of the best First Lord of the Treasury,
the oldest man living could remember.
But these lessons, the fruits of the experience of five generations, had
never been taught to the politicians of the seventeenth century. Notions
imbibed before the Revolution still kept possession of the public mind.
Not even Somers, the foremost man of his age in civil wisdom, thought
it strange that one party should be in possession of the executive
administration while the other predominated in the legislature. Thus, at
the beginning of 1699, there ceased to be a ministry; and years elapsed
before the servants of the Crown and the representatives of the people
were again joined in an union as harmonious as that which had existed
from the general election of 1695 to the general election of 1698. The
anarchy lasted, with some short intervals of composedness, till the
general election of 1765. No portion of our parliamentary history is
less pleasing or more instructive. It will be seen that the House of
Commons became altogether ungovernable, abused its gigantic power with
unjust and insolent caprice, browbeat King and Lords, the Courts of
Common Law and the Constituent bodies, violated rights guaranteed by the
Great Charter, and at length made itself so odious that the people were
glad to take shelter, under the protection of the throne and of the
hereditary aristocracy, from the tyranny of the assembly which had been
chosen by themselves.
The evil which had brought on so much discredit on representative
institutions was of gradual though of rapid growth, and did not, in the
first session of the Parliament of 1698, take the most alarming form.
The lead of the House of Commons had, however, entirely passed away from
Montague, who was still the first minister of finance, to the chiefs
of the turbulent and discordant opposition. Among those chiefs the most
powerful was Harley, who, while almost constantly acting with the Tories
and High Churchmen, continued to use, on occasions cunningly selected,
the political and religious phraseology which he had learned in his
youth among the Roundheads. He thus, while high in the esteem of the
country gentlemen and even of his hereditary enemies, the country
parsons, retained a portion of the favour with which he and his
ancestors had long been regarded by Whigs and Nonconformists. He was
therefore peculiarly well qualified to act as mediator between the two
sections of the majority.
The bill for the disbanding of the army passed with little opposition
through the House till it reached the last stage. Then, at length, a
stand was made, but in vain. Vernon wrote the next day to Shrewsbury
that the ministers had had a division which they need not be ashamed of;
for that they had mustered a hundred and fifty-four against two hundred
and twenty-one. Such a division would not be considered as matter of
boast by a Secretary of State in our time.
The bill went up to the House of Lords, where it was regarded with no
great favour. But this was not one of those occasions on which the House
of Lords can act effectually as a check on the popular branch of the
legislature. No good would have been done by rejecting the bill for
disbanding the troops, unless the King could have been furnished with
the means of maintaining them; and with such means he could be furnished
only by the House of Commons. Somers, in a speech of which both the
eloquence and the wisdom were greatly admired, placed the question in
the true light. He set forth strongly the dangers to which the jealousy
and parsimony of the representatives of the people exposed the country.
But any thing, he said, was better than that the King and the Peers
should engage, without hope of success, in an acrimonious conflict with
the Commons. Tankerville spoke with his usual ability on the same side.
Nottingham and the other Tories remained silent; and the bill passed
without a division.
By this time the King's strong understanding had mastered, as it seldom
failed, after a struggle, to master, his rebellious temper. He had
made up his mind to fulfil his great mission to the end. It was with
no common pain that he admitted it to be necessary for him to give his
assent to the disbanding bill. But in this case it would have been worse
than useless to resort to his veto. For, if the bill had been rejected,
the army would have been dissolved, and he would have been left without
even the seven thousand men whom the Commons were willing to allow him.
He determined, therefore, to comply with the wish of his people, and
at the same time to give them a weighty and serious but friendly
admonition. Never had he succeeded better in suppressing the outward
signs of his emotions than on the day on which he carried this
determination into effect. The public mind was much excited. The crowds
in the parks and streets were immense. The Jacobites came in troops,
hoping to enjoy the pleasure of reading shame and rage on the face of
him whom they most hated and dreaded. The hope was disappointed. The
Prussian Minister, a discerning observer, free from the passions which
distracted English society, accompanied the royal procession from St.
James's Palace to Westminster Hall. He well knew how bitterly William
had been mortified, and was astonished to see him present himself to the
public gaze with a serene and cheerful aspect.
The speech delivered from the throne was much admired; and the
correspondent of the States General acknowledged that he despaired
of exhibiting in a French translation the graces of style which
distinguished the original. Indeed that weighty, simple and dignified
eloquence which becomes the lips of a sovereign was seldom wanting
in any composition of which the plan was furnished by William and the
language by Somers. The King informed the Lords and Commons that he had
come down to pass their bill as soon as it was ready for him. He could
not indeed but think that they had carried the reduction of the army
to a dangerous extent. He could not but feel that they had treated him
unkindly in requiring him to part with those guards who had come over
with him to deliver England, and who had since been near him on every
field of battle. But it was his fixed opinion that nothing could be so
pernicious to the State as that he should be regarded by his people with
distrust, distrust of which he had not expected to be the object after
what he had endeavoured, ventured, and acted, to restore and to secure
their liberties. He had now, he said, told the Houses plainly the
reason, the only reason, which had induced him to pass their bill; and
it was his duty to tell them plainly, in discharge of his high trust,
and in order that none might hold him accountable for the evils which he
had vainly endeavoured to avert, that, in his judgment, the nation was
left too much exposed.
When the Commons had returned to their chamber, and the King's speech
had been read from the chair, Howe attempted to raise a storm. A gross
insult had been offered to the House. The King ought to be asked who
had put such words into his mouth. But the spiteful agitator found no
support. The majority were so much pleased with the King for promptly
passing the bill that they were not disposed to quarrel with him
for frankly declaring that he disliked it. It was resolved without
a division that an address should be presented, thanking him for his
gracious speech and for his ready compliance with the wishes of his
people, and assuring him that his grateful Commons would never forget
the great things which he had done for the country, would never give him
cause to think them unkind or undutiful, and would, on all occasions,
stand by him against all enemies.
Just at this juncture tidings arrived which might well raise misgivings
in the minds of those who had voted for reducing the national means of
defence. The Electoral Prince of Bavaria was no more. The Gazette
which announced that the Disbanding Bill had received the royal assent
informed the public that he was dangerously ill at Brussels. The next
Gazette contained the news of his death. Only a few weeks had elapsed
since all who were anxious for the peace of the world had learned with
joy that he had been named heir to the Spanish throne. That the boy
just entering upon life with such hopes should die, while the wretched
Charles, long ago half dead, continued to creep about between his
bedroom and his chapel, was an event for which, notwithstanding the
proverbial uncertainty of life, the minds of men were altogether
unprepared. A peaceful solution of the great question now seemed
impossible. France and Austria were left confronting each other. Within
a month the whole Continent might be in arms. Pious men saw in this
stroke, so sudden and so terrible, the plain signs of the divine
displeasure. God had a controversy with the nations. Nine years of fire,
of slaughter and of famine had not been sufficient to reclaim a guilty
world; and a second and more severe chastisement was at hand. Others
muttered that the event which all good men lamented was to be ascribed
to unprincipled ambition. It would indeed have been strange if, in that
age, so important a death, happening at so critical a moment, had not
been imputed to poison. The father of the deceased Prince loudly accused
the Court of Vienna; and the imputation, though not supported by the
slightest evidence, was, during some time, believed by the vulgar.
The politicians at the Dutch embassy imagined that now at length the
parliament would listen to reason. It seemed that even the country
gentlemen must begin to contemplate the probability of an alarming
crisis. The merchants of the Royal Exchange, much better acquainted than
the country gentlemen with foreign lands, and much more accustomed than
the country gentlemen to take large views, were in great agitation.
Nobody could mistake the beat of that wonderful pulse which had recently
begun, and has during five generations continued, to indicate the
variations of the body politic. When Littleton was chosen speaker, the
stocks rose. When it was resolved that the army should be reduced to
seven thousand men, the stocks fell. When the death of the Electoral
Prince was known, they fell still lower. The subscriptions to a new
loan, which the Commons had, from mere spite to Montague, determined to
raise on conditions of which he disapproved, came in very slowly. The
signs of a reaction of feeling were discernible both in and out of
Parliament. Many men are alarmists by constitution. Trenchard and Howe
had frightened most men by writing and talking about the danger to which
liberty and property would be exposed if the government were allowed to
keep a large body of Janissaries in pay. The danger had ceased to exist;
and those people who must always be afraid of something, as they could
no longer be afraid of a standing army, began to be afraid of the French
King. There was a turn in the tide of public opinion; and no part of
statesmanship is more important than the art of taking the tide of
public opinion at the turn. On more than one occasion William showed
himself a master of that art. But, on the present occasion, a sentiment,
in itself amiable and respectable, led him to commit the greatest
mistake of his whole life. Had he at this conjuncture again earnestly
pressed on the Houses the importance of providing for the defence of the
kingdom, and asked of them an additional number of English troops, it is
not improbable that he might have carried his point; it is certain
that, if he had failed, there would have been nothing ignominious in his
failure. Unhappily, instead of raising a great public question, on which
he was in the right, on which he had a good chance of succeeding, and on
which he might have been defeated without any loss of dignity, he chose
to raise a personal question, on which he was in the wrong, on which,
right or wrong, he was sure to be beaten, and on which he could not
be beaten without being degraded. Instead of pressing for more English
regiments, he exerted all his influence to obtain for the Dutch guards
permission to remain in the island.
The first trial of strength was in the Upper House. A resolution was
moved there to the effect that the Lords would gladly concur in any plan
that could be suggested for retaining the services of the Dutch brigade.
The motion was carried by fifty-four votes to thirty-eight. But
a protest was entered, and was signed by all the minority. It is
remarkable that Devonshire was, and that Marlborough was not, one of the
Dissentients. Marlborough had formerly made himself conspicuous by the
keenness and pertinacity with which he had attacked the Dutch. But he
had now made his peace with the Court, and was in the receipt of a
large salary from the civil list. He was in the House on that day;
and therefore, if he voted, must have voted with the majority. The
Cavendishes had generally been strenuous supporters of the King and the
junto. But on the subject of the foreign troops Hartington in one House
and his father in the other were intractable.
This vote of the Lords caused much murmuring among the Commons. It was
said to be most unparliamentary to pass a bill one week, and the next
week to pass a resolution condemning that bill. It was true that the
bill had been passed before the death of the Electoral Prince was known
in London. But that unhappy event, though it might be a good reason for
increasing the English army, could be no reason for departing from
the principle that the English army should consist of Englishmen. A
gentleman who despised the vulgar clamour against professional soldiers,
who held the doctrine of Somers's Balancing Letter, and who was prepared
to vote for twenty or even thirty thousand men, might yet well ask why
any of those men should be foreigners. Were our countrymen naturally
inferior to men of other races in any of the qualities which, under
proper training, make excellent soldiers? That assuredly was not the
opinion of the Prince who had, at the head of Ormond's Life Guards,
driven the French household troops, till, then invincible, back over
the ruins of Neerwinden, and whose eagle eye and applauding voice had
followed Cutts's grenadiers up the glacis of Namur. Bitter spirited
malecontents muttered that, since there was no honourable service which
could not be as well performed by the natives of the realm as by alien
mercenaries, it might well be suspected that the King wanted his alien
mercenaries for some service not honourable. If it were necessary to
repel a French invasion or to put down an Irish insurrection, the Blues
and the Buffs would stand by him to the death. But, if his object were
to govern in defiance of the votes of his Parliament and of the cry
of his people, he might well apprehend that English swords and muskets
would, at the crisis, fail him, as they had failed his father in law,
and might well wish to surround himself with men who were not of our
blood, who had no reverence for our laws, and no sympathy with our
feelings. Such imputations could find credit with no body superior in
intelligence to those clownish squires who with difficulty managed to
spell out Dyer's Letter over their ale. Men of sense and temper admitted
that William had never shown any disposition to violate the solemn
compact which he had made with the nation, and that, even if he were
depraved enough to think of destroying the constitution by military
violence, he was not imbecile enough to imagine that the Dutch brigade,
or five such brigades, would suffice for his purpose. But such men,
while they fully acquitted him of the design attributed to him by
factious malignity, could not acquit him of a partiality which it was
natural that he should feel, but which it would have been wise in him
to hide, and with which it was impossible that his subjects should
sympathise. He ought to have known that nothing is more offensive to
free and proud nations than the sight of foreign uniforms and standards.
Though not much conversant with books, he must have been acquainted with
the chief events in the history of his own illustrious House; and he
could hardly have been ignorant that his great grandfather had commenced
a long and glorious struggle against despotism by exciting the States
General of Ghent to demand that all Spanish troops should be withdrawn
from the Netherlands. The final parting between the tyrant and the
future deliverer was not an event to be forgotten by any of the race
of Nassau. "It was the States, Sir," said the Prince of Orange. Philip
seized his wrist with a convulsive grasp, and exclaimed, "Not the
States, but you, you, you."
William, however, determined to try whether a request made by himself
in earnest and almost supplicating terms would induce his subjects to
indulge his national partiality at the expense of their own. None of
his ministers could flatter him with any hope of success. But on this
subject he was too much excited to hear reason. He sent down to the
Commons a message, not merely signed by himself according to the usual
form, but written throughout with his own hand. He informed them that
the necessary preparations had been made for sending away the guards who
came with him to England, and that they would immediately embark, unless
the House should, out of consideration for him, be disposed to retain
them, which he should take very kindly. When the message had been read,
a member proposed that a day might be fixed for the consideration of the
subject. But the chiefs of the majority would not consent to any
thing which might seem to indicate hesitation, and moved the previous
question. The ministers were in a false position. It was out of their
power to answer Harley when he sarcastically declared that he did not
suspect them of having advised His Majesty on this occasion. If, he
said, those gentlemen had thought it desirable that the Dutch brigade
should remain in the kingdom, they would have done so before. There had
been many opportunities of raising the question in a perfectly
regular manner during the progress of the Disbanding Bill. Of those
opportunities nobody had thought fit to avail himself; and it was now
too late to reopen the question. Most of the other members who spoke
against taking the message into consideration took the same line,
declined discussing points which might have been discussed when the
Disbanding Bill was before the House, and declared merely that they
could not consent to any thing so unparliamentary as the repealing of an
Act which had just been passed. But this way of dealing with the message
was far too mild and moderate to satisfy the implacable malice of Howe.
In his courtly days he had vehemently called on the King to use the
Dutch for the purpose of quelling the insubordination of the English
regiments. "None but the Dutch troops," he said, "are to be trusted." He
was now not ashamed to draw a parallel between those very Dutch troops
and the Popish Kernes whom James had brought over from Munster and
Connaught to enslave our island. The general feeling was such that
the previous question was carried without a division. A Committee was
immediately appointed to draw up an address explaining the reasons which
made it impossible for the House to comply with His Majesty's wish. At
the next sitting the Committee reported; and on the report there was
an animated debate. The friends of the government thought the proposed
address offensive. The most respectable members of the majority felt
that it would be ungraceful to aggravate by harsh language the pain
which must be caused by their conscientious opposition to the King's
wishes. Some strong expressions were therefore softened down; some
courtly phrases were inserted; but the House refused to omit one
sentence which almost reproachfully reminded the King that in his
memorable Declaration of 1688 he had promised to send back all the
foreign forces as soon as he had effected the deliverance of this
country. The division was, however, very close. There were one hundred
and fifty-seven votes for omitting this passage, and one hundred and
sixty-three for retaining it. [18]