Produced by Martin Adamson





THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND FROM THE ACCESSION OF JAMES THE SECOND

Volume V

(Chapters XXIII-XXV)

by Thomas Babington Macaulay




CONTENTS:


CHAPTER XXIII


Standing Armies
Sunderland
Lord Spencer
Controversy touching Standing Armies
Meeting of Parliament
The King's Speech well received; Debate on a Peace Establishment
Sunderland attacked
The Nation averse to a Standing Army
Mutiny Act; the Navy Acts concerning High Treason
Earl of Clancarty
Ways and Means; Rights of the Sovereign in reference to Crown Lands
Proceedings in Parliament on Grants of Crown Lands
Montague accused of Peculation
Bill of Pains and Penalties against Duncombe
Dissension between the houses
Commercial Questions
Irish Manufactures
East India Companies
Fire at Whitehall
Visit of the Czar
Portland's Embassy to France
The Spanish Succession
The Count of Tallard's Embassy
Newmarket Meeting: the insecure State of the Roads
Further Negotiations relating to the Spanish Succession
The King goes to Holland
Portland returns from his Embassy
William is reconciled to Marlborough





CHAPTER XXIV


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




CHAPTER XXV.


Trial of Spencer Cowper
Duels
Discontent of the Nation
Captain Kidd
Meeting of Parliament
Attacks on Burnet
Renewed Attack on Somers
Question of the Irish Forfeitures: Dispute between the Houses
Somers again attacked
Prorogation of Parliament
Death of James the Second
The Pretender recognised as King
Return of the King
General Election
Death of William




PREFACE TO THE FIFTH VOLUME.

I HAVE thought it right to publish that portion of the continuation of
the "History of England" which was fairly transcribed and revised by
Lord Macaulay. It is given to the world precisely as it was left: no
connecting link has been added; no reference verified; no authority
sought for or examined. It would indeed have been possible, with the
help I might have obtained from his friends, to have supplied much that
is wanting; but I preferred, and I believe the public will prefer, that
the last thoughts of the great mind passed away from among us should
be preserved sacred from any touch but his own. Besides the revised
manuscript, a few pages containing the first rough sketch of the last
two months of William's reign are all that is left. From this I have
with some difficulty deciphered the account of the death of William. No
attempt has been made to join it on to the preceding part, or to supply
the corrections which would have been given by the improving hand of the
author. But, imperfect as it must be, I believe it will be received with
pleasure and interest as a fit conclusion to the life of his great hero.

I will only add my grateful thanks for the kind advice and assistance
given me by his most dear and valued friends, Dean Milman and Mr. Ellis.




CHAPTER XXIII

 Standing Armies--Sunderland--Lord Spencer--Controversy touching Standing
 Armies--Meeting of Parliament--The King's Speech well received; Debate
 on a Peace Establishment--Sunderland attacked--The Nation averse to a
 Standing Army--Mutiny Act; the Navy Acts concerning High Treason--Earl
 of Clancarty--Ways and Means; Rights of the Sovereign in reference
 to Crown Lands--Proceedings in Parliament on Grants of Crown
 Lands--Montague accused of Peculation--Bill of Pains and Penalties
 against Duncombe--Dissension between the houses--Commercial
 Questions--Irish Manufactures--East India Companies--Fire at
 Whitehall--Visit of the Czar--Portland's Embassy to France--The Spanish
 Succession--The Count of Tallard's Embassy--Newmarket Meeting: the
 insecure State of the Roads--Further Negotiations relating to the
 Spanish Succession--The King goes to Holland--Portland returns from his
 Embassy--William is reconciled to Marlborough

THE rejoicings, by which London, on the second of December 1697,
celebrated the return of peace and prosperity, continued till long after
midnight. On the following morning the Parliament met; and one of the
most laborious sessions of that age commenced.

Among the questions which it was necessary that the Houses should
speedily decide, one stood forth preeminent in interest and importance.
Even in the first transports of joy with which the bearer of the treaty
of Ryswick had been welcomed to England, men had eagerly and anxiously
asked one another what was to be done with that army which had
been formed in Ireland and Belgium, which had learned, in many
hard campaigns, to obey and to conquer, and which now consisted of
eighty-seven thousand excellent soldiers. Was any part of this great
force to be retained in the service of the State? And, if any part, what
part? The last two kings had, without the consent of the legislature,
maintained military establishments in time of peace. But that they
had done this in violation of the fundamental laws of England was
acknowledged by all jurists, and had been expressly affirmed in the Bill
of Rights. It was therefore impossible for William, now that the country
was threatened by no foreign and no domestic enemy, to keep up even a
single battalion without the sanction of the Estates of the Realm; and
it might well be doubted whether such a sanction would be given.

It is not easy for us to see this question in the light in which it
appeared to our ancestors.

No man of sense has, in our days, or in the days of our fathers,
seriously maintained that our island could be safe without an army.
And, even if our island were perfectly secure from attack, an army would
still be indispensably necessary to us. The growth of the empire has
left us no choice. The regions which we have colonized or conquered
since the accession of the House of Hanover contain a population
exceeding twenty-fold that which the House of Stuart governed. There are
now more English soldiers on the other side of the tropic of Cancer in
time of peace than Cromwell had under his command in time of war. All
the troops of Charles II. would not have been sufficient to garrison the
posts which we now occupy in the Mediterranean Sea alone. The regiments
which defend the remote dependencies of the Crown cannot be duly
recruited and relieved, unless a force far larger than that which James
collected in the camp at Hounslow for the purpose of overawing his
capital be constantly kept up within the kingdom. The old national
antipathy to permanent military establishments, an antipathy which was
once reasonable and salutary, but which lasted some time after it
had become unreasonable and noxious, has gradually yielded to the
irresistible force of circumstances. We have made the discovery, that
an army may be so constituted as to be in the highest degree efficient
against an enemy, and yet obsequious to the civil magistrate. We have
long ceased to apprehend danger to law and to freedom from the license
of troops, and from the ambition of victorious generals. An alarmist who
should now talk such language, as was common five generations ago, who
should call for the entire disbanding of the land force; of the realm,
and who should gravely predict that the warriors of Inkerman and Delhi
would depose the Queen, dissolve the Parliament, and plunder the Bank,
would be regarded as fit only for a cell in Saint Luke's. But before the
Revolution our ancestors had known a standing army only as an instrument
of lawless power. Judging by their own experience, they thought it
impossible that such an army should exist without danger to the rights
both of the Crown and of the people. One class of politicians was never
weary of repeating that an Apostolic Church, a loyal gentry, an ancient
nobility, a sainted King, had been foully outraged by the Joyces and the
Prides; another class recounted the atrocities committed by the Lambs of
Kirke, and by the Beelzebubs and Lucifers of Dundee; and both classes,
agreeing in scarcely any thing else, were disposed to agree in aversion
to the red coats.

While such was the feeling of the nation, the King was, both as a
statesman and as a general, most unwilling to see that superb body
of troops which he had formed with infinite difficulty broken up and
dispersed. But, as to this matter, he could not absolutely rely on the
support of his ministers; nor could his ministers absolutely rely on the
support of that parliamentary majority whose attachment had enabled them
to confront enemies abroad and to crush traitors at home, to restore
a debased currency, and to fix public credit on deep and solid
foundations.

The difficulties of the King's situation are to be, in part at least,
attributed to an error which he had committed in the preceding spring.
The Gazette which announced that Sunderland been appointed Chamberlain
of the Royal Household, sworn of the Privy Council, and named one of the
Lords Justices who were to administer the government during the summer
had caused great uneasiness among plain men who remembered all the
windings and doublings of his long career. In truth, his countrymen
were unjust to him. For they thought him, not only an unprincipled and
faithless politician, which he was, but a deadly enemy of the liberties
of the nation, which he was not. What he wanted was simply to be safe,
rich and great. To these objects he had been constant through all the
vicissitudes of his life. For these objects he had passed from Church
to Church and from faction to faction, had joined the most turbulent
of oppositions without any zeal for freedom, and had served the most
arbitrary of monarchs without any zeal for monarchy; had voted for
the Exclusion Bill without being a Protestant, and had adored the Host
without being a Papist; had sold his country at once to both the great
parties which divided the Continent; had taken money from France, and
had sent intelligence to Holland. As far, however, as he could be said
to have any opinions, his opinions were Whiggish. Since his return from
exile, his influence had been generally exerted in favour of the Whig
party. It was by his counsel that the Great Seal had been entrusted
to Somers, that Nottingham had been sacrificed to Russell, and that
Montague had been preferred to Fox. It was by his dexterous management
that the Princess Anne had been detached from the opposition, and that
Godolphin had been removed from the head of the hoard of Treasury. The
party which Sunderland had done so much to serve now held a new pledge
for his fidelity. His only son, Charles Lord Spencer, was just entering
on public life. The precocious maturity of the young man's intellectual
and moral character had excited hopes which were not destined to
be realized. His knowledge of ancient literature, and his skill in
imitating the styles of the masters of Roman eloquence, were applauded
by veteran scholars. The sedateness of his deportment and the apparent
regularity of his life delighted austere moralists. He was known indeed
to have one expensive taste; but it was a taste of the most respectable
kind. He loved books, and was bent or forming the most magnificent
private library in England. While other heirs of noble houses were
inspecting patterns of steinkirks and sword knots, dangling after
actresses, or betting on fighting cocks, he was in pursuit of the
Mentz editions of Tully's Offices, of the Parmesan Statius, and of
the inestimable Virgin of Zarottus. [1] It was natural that high
expectations should be formed of the virtue and wisdom of a youth whose
very luxury and prodigality had a grave and erudite air, and that even
discerning men should be unable to detect the vices which were hidden
under that show of premature sobriety.

Spencer was a Whig, unhappily for the Whig party, which, before the
unhonoured and unlamented close of his life, was more than once brought
to the verge of ruin by his violent temper and his crooked politics. His
Whiggism differed widely from that of his father. It was not a languid,
speculative, preference of one theory of government to another, but a
fierce and dominant passion. Unfortunately, though an ardent, it was at
the same time a corrupt and degenerate, Whiggism; a Whiggism so narrow
and oligarchical as to be little, if at all, preferable to the worst
forms of Toryism. The young lord's imagination had been fascinated by
those swelling sentiments of liberty which abound in the Latin poets
and orators; and he, like those poets and orators, meant by liberty
something very different from the only liberty which is of importance to
the happiness of mankind. Like them, he could see no danger to liberty
except from kings. A commonwealth, oppressed and pillaged by such men
as Opimius and Verres, was free, because it had no king. A member of the
Grand Council of Venice, who passed his whole life under tutelage and
in fear, who could not travel where he chose, or visit whom he chose,
or invest his property as he chose, whose path was beset with spies,
who saw at the corners of the streets the mouth of bronze gaping for
anonymous accusations against him, and whom the Inquisitors of State
could, at any moment, and for any or no reason, arrest, torture, fling
into the Grand Canal, was free, because he had no king. To curtail,
for the benefit of a small privileged class, prerogatives which the
Sovereign possesses and ought to possess for the benefit of the whole
nation, was the object on which Spencer's heart was set. During many
years he was restrained by older and wiser men; and it was not till
those whom he had early been accustomed to respect had passed away, and
till he was himself at the head of affairs, that he openly attempted to
obtain for the hereditary nobility a precarious and invidious ascendency
in the State, at the expense both of the Commons and of the Throne.

In 1695, Spencer had taken his seat in the House of Commons as member
for Tiverton, and had, during two sessions, conducted himself as a
steady and zealous Whig.

The party to which he had attached himself might perhaps have reasonably
considered him as a hostage sufficient to ensure the good faith of his
father; for the Earl was approaching that time of life at which even
the most ambitious and rapacious men generally toil rather for their
children than for themselves. But the distrust which Sunderland inspired
was such as no guarantee could quiet. Many fancied that he was,--with
what object they never took the trouble to inquire,--employing the same
arts which had ruined James for the purpose of ruining William. Each
prince had had his weak side. One was too much a Papist, and the other
too much a soldier, for such a nation as this. The same intriguing
sycophant who had encouraged the Papist in one fatal error was now
encouraging the soldier in another. It might well be apprehended that,
under the influence of this evil counsellor, the nephew might alienate
as many hearts by trying to make England a military country as the uncle
had alienated by trying to make her a Roman Catholic country.

The parliamentary conflict on the great question of a standing army
was preceded by a literary conflict. In the autumn of 1697 began a
controversy of no common interest and importance. The press was now
free. An exciting and momentous political question could be fairly
discussed. Those who held uncourtly opinions could express those
opinions without resorting to illegal expedients and employing the
agency of desperate men. The consequence was that the dispute was
carried on, though with sufficient keenness, yet, on the whole, with a
decency which would have been thought extraordinary in the days of the
censorship.

On this occasion the Tories, though they felt strongly, wrote but
little. The paper war was almost entirely carried on between two
sections of the Whig party. The combatants on both sides were generally
anonymous. But it was well known that one of the foremost champions of
the malecontent Whigs was John Trenchard, son of the late Secretary of
State. Preeminent among the ministerial Whigs was one in whom admirable
vigour and quickness of intellect were united to a not less admirable
moderation and urbanity, one who looked on the history of past ages with
the eye of a practical statesman, and on the events which were passing
before him with the eye of a philosophical historian. It was not
necessary for him to name himself. He could be none but Somers.

The pamphleteers who recommended the immediate and entire disbanding of
the army had an easy task. If they were embarrassed, it was only by the
abundance of the matter from which they had to make their selection. On
their side were claptraps and historical commonplaces without number,
the authority of a crowd of illustrious names, all the prejudices, all
the traditions, of both the parties in the state. These writers laid
it down as a fundamental principle of political science that a standing
army and a free constitution could not exist together. What, they asked,
had destroyed the noble commonwealths of Greece? What had enslaved the
mighty Roman people? What had turned the Italian republics of the middle
ages into lordships and duchies? How was it that so many of the kingdoms
of modern Europe had been transformed from limited into absolute
monarchies? The States General of France, the Cortes of Castile, the
Grand Justiciary of Arragon, what had been fatal to them all? History
was ransacked for instances of adventurers who, by the help of mercenary
troops, had subjugated free nations or deposed legitimate princes;
and such instances were easily found. Much was said about Pisistratus,
Timophanes, Dionysius, Agathocles, Marius and Sylla, Julius Caesar and
Augustus Caesar, Carthage besieged by her own mercenaries, Rome put up
to auction by her own Praetorian cohorts, Sultan Osman butchered by his
own Janissaries, Lewis Sforza sold into captivity by his own Switzers.
But the favourite instance was taken from the recent history of our own
land. Thousands still living had seen the great usurper, who, strong in
the power of the sword, had triumphed over both royalty and freedom. The
Tories were reminded that his soldiers had guarded the scaffold before
the Banqueting House. The Whigs were reminded that those same soldiers
had taken the mace from the table of the House of Commons. From such
evils, it was said, no country could be secure which was cursed with
a standing army. And what were the advantages which could be set off
against such evils? Invasion was the bugbear with which the Court tried
to frighten the nation. But we were not children to be scared by nursery
tales. We were at peace; and, even in time of war, an enemy who should
attempt to invade us would probably be intercepted by our fleet, and
would assuredly, if he reached our shores, be repelled by our militia.
Some people indeed talked as if a militia could achieve nothing great.
But that base doctrine was refuted by all ancient and all modern
history. What was the Lacedaemonian phalanx in the best days of
Lacedaemon? What was, the Roman legion in the best days of Rome? What
were the armies which conquered at Cressy, at Poitiers, at Agincourt,
at Halidon, or at Flodden? What was that mighty array which Elizabeth
reviewed at Tilbury? In the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth
centuries Englishmen who did not live by the trade of war had made war
with success and glory. Were the English of the seventeenth century so
degenerate that they could not be trusted to play the men for their own
homesteads and parish churches?

For such reasons as these the disbanding of the forces was strongly
recommended. Parliament, it was said, might perhaps, from respect and
tenderness for the person of His Majesty, permit him to have guards
enough to escort his coach and to pace the rounds before his palace. But
this was the very utmost that it would be right to concede. The defence
of the realm ought to be confided to the sailors and the militia. Even
the Tower ought to have no garrison except the trainbands of the Tower
Hamlets.

It must be evident to every intelligent and dispassionate man that
these declaimers contradicted themselves. If an army composed of regular
troops really was far more efficient than an army composed of husbandmen
taken from the plough and burghers taken from the counter, how could the
country be safe with no defenders but husbandmen and burghers, when a
great prince, who was our nearest neighbour, who had a few months before
been our enemy, and who might, in a few months, be our enemy again, kept
up not less than a hundred and fifty thousand regular troops? If, on the
other hand, the spirit of the English people was such that they would,
with little or no training, encounter and defeat the most formidable
array of veterans from the continent, was it not absurd to apprehend
that such a people could be reduced to slavery by a few regiments of
their own countrymen? But our ancestors were generally so much blinded
by prejudice that this inconsistency passed unnoticed. They were secure
where they ought to have been wary, and timorous where they might
well have been secure. They were not shocked by hearing the same man
maintain, in the same breath, that, if twenty thousand professional
soldiers were kept up, the liberty and property of millions of
Englishmen would be at the mercy of the Crown, and yet that those
millions of Englishmen, fighting for liberty and property, would
speedily annihilate an invading army composed of fifty or sixty thousand
of the conquerors of Steinkirk and Landen. Whoever denied the former
proposition was called a tool of the Court. Whoever denied the latter
was accused of insulting and slandering the nation.

Somers was too wise to oppose himself directly to the strong current
of popular feeling. With rare dexterity he took the tone, not of an
advocate, but of a judge. The danger which seemed so terrible to many
honest friends of liberty he did not venture to pronounce altogether
visionary. But he reminded his countrymen that a choice between dangers
was sometimes all that was left to the wisest of mankind. No lawgiver
had ever been able to devise a perfect and immortal form of government.
Perils lay thick on the right and on the left; and to keep far from one
evil was to draw near to another. That which, considered merely with
reference to the internal polity of England, might be, to a certain
extent, objectionable, might be absolutely essential to her rank among
European Powers, and even to her independence. All that a statesman
could do in such a case was to weigh inconveniences against each other,
and carefully to observe which way the scale leaned. The evil of having
regular soldiers, and the evil of not having them, Somers set forth and
compared in a little treatise, which was once widely renowned as the
Balancing Letter, and which was admitted, even by the malecontents,
to be an able and plausible composition. He well knew that mere names
exercise a mighty influence on the public mind; that the most perfect
tribunal which a legislator could construct would be unpopular if
it were called the Star Chamber; that the most judicious tax which
a financier could devise would excite murmurs if it were called the
Shipmoney; and that the words Standing Army then had to English ears
a sound as unpleasing as either Shipmoney or Star Chamber. He declared
therefore that he abhorred the thought of a standing army. What he
recommended was, not a standing, but a temporary army, an army of which
Parliament would annually fix the number, an army for which Parliament
would annually frame a military code, an army which would cease to
exist as soon as either the Lords or the Commons should think that its
services were not needed. From such an army surely the danger to public
liberty could not by wise men be thought serious. On the other hand,
the danger to which the kingdom would be exposed if all the troops were
disbanded was such as might well disturb the firmest mind. Suppose a
war with the greatest power in Christendom to break out suddenly, and to
find us without one battalion of regular infantry, without one squadron
of regular cavalry; what disasters might we not reasonably apprehend?
It was idle to say that a descent could not take place without ample
notice, and that we should have time to raise and discipline a great
force. An absolute prince, whose orders, given in profound secresy, were
promptly obeyed at once by his captains on the Rhine and on the Scheld,
and by his admirals in the Bay of Biscay and in the Mediterranean, might
be ready to strike a blow long before we were prepared to parry it. We
might be appalled by learning that ships from widely remote parts, and
troops from widely remote garrisons, had assembled at a single point
within sight of our coast. To trust to our fleet was to trust to the
winds and the waves. The breeze which was favourable to the invader
might prevent our men of war from standing out to sea. Only nine years
ago this had actually happened. The Protestant wind, before which the
Dutch armament had run full sail down the Channel, had driven King
James's navy back into the Thames. It must then be acknowledged to be
not improbable that the enemy might land. And, if he landed, what would
he find? An open country; a rich country; provisions everywhere; not a
river but which could be forded; no natural fastnesses such as protect
the fertile plains of Italy; no artificial fastnesses such as, at every
step, impede the progress of a conqueror in the Netherlands. Every
thing must then be staked on the steadiness of the militia; and it was
pernicious flattery to represent the militia as equal to a conflict in
the field with veterans whose whole life had been a preparation for the
day of battle. The instances which it was the fashion to cite of the
great achievements of soldiers taken from the threshing floor and the
shopboard were fit only for a schoolboy's theme. Somers, who had studied
ancient literature like a man,--a rare thing in his time,--said that
those instances refuted the doctrine which they were meant to prove. He
disposed of much idle declamation about the Lacedaemonians by
saying, most concisely, correctly and happily, that the Lacedaemonian
commonwealth really was a standing army which threatened all the rest
of Greece. In fact, the Spartan had no calling except war. Of arts,
sciences and letters he was ignorant. The labour of the spade and of the
loom, and the petty gains of trade, he contemptuously abandoned to men
of a lower caste. His whole existence from childhood to old age was
one long military training. Meanwhile the Athenian, the Corinthian, the
Argive, the Theban, gave his chief attention to his oliveyard or his
vineyard, his warehouse or his workshop, and took up his shield and
spear only for short terms and at long intervals. The difference
therefore between a Lacedaemonian phalanx and any other phalanx was long
as great as the difference between a regiment of the French household
troops and a regiment of the London trainbands. Lacedaemon consequently
continued to be dominant in Greece till other states began to employ
regular troops. Then her supremacy was at an end. She was great while
she was a standing army among militias. She fell when she had to contend
with other standing armies. The lesson which is really to be learned
from her ascendency and from her decline is this, that the occasional
soldier is no match for the professional soldier. [2]

The same lesson Somers drew from the history of Rome; and every scholar
who really understands that history will admit that he was in the right.
The finest militia that ever existed was probably that of Italy in the
third century before Christ. It might have been thought that seven
or eight hundred thousand fighting men, who assuredly wanted neither
natural courage nor public spirit, would have been able to protect their
own hearths and altars against an invader. An invader came, bringing
with him an army small and exhausted by a march over the snows of the
Alps, but familiar with battles and sieges. At the head of this army
he traversed the peninsula to and fro, gained a succession of victories
against immense numerical odds, slaughtered the hardy youth of Latium
like sheep, by tens of thousands, encamped under the walls of Rome,
continued during sixteen years to maintain himself in a hostile country,
and was never dislodged till he had by a cruel discipline gradually
taught his adversaries how to resist him.

It was idle to repeat the names of great battles won, in the middle
ages, by men who did not make war their chief calling; those battles
proved only that one militia might beat another, and not that a militia
could beat a regular army. As idle was it to declaim about the camp
at Tilbury. We had indeed reason to be proud of the spirit which all
classes of Englishmen, gentlemen and yeomen, peasants and burgesses,
had so signally displayed in the great crisis of 1588. But we had also
reason to be thankful that, with all their spirit, they were not brought
face to face with the Spanish battalions. Somers related an anecdote,
well worthy to be remembered, which had been preserved by tradition
in the noble house of De Vere. One of the most illustrious men of that
house, a captain who had acquired much experience and much fame in the
Netherlands, had, in the crisis of peril, been summoned back to England
by Elizabeth, and rode with her through the endless ranks of shouting
pikemen. She asked him what he thought of the army. "It is," he said, "a
brave army." There was something in his tone or manner which showed
that he meant more than his words expressed. The Queen insisted on his
speaking out. "Madam," he said, "Your Grace's army is brave indeed. I
have not in the world the name of a coward, and yet I am the greatest
coward here. All these fine fellows are praying that the enemy may land,
and that there may be a battle; and I, who know that enemy well, cannot
think of such a battle without dismay." De Vere was doubtless in the
right. The Duke of Parma, indeed, would not have subjected our country;
but it is by no means improbable that, if he had effected a landing,
the island would have been the theatre of a war greatly resembling that
which Hannibal waged in Italy, and that the invaders would not have been
driven out till many cities had been sacked, till many counties had been
wasted, and till multitudes of our stout-hearted rustics and artisans
had perished in the carnage of days not less terrible than those of
Thrasymene and Cannae.

While the pamphlets of Trenchard and Somers were in every hand, the
Parliament met.

The words with which the King opened the session brought the great
question to a speedy issue. "The circumstances," he said, "of affairs
abroad are such, that I think myself obliged to tell you my opinion,
that, for the present, England cannot be safe without a land force;
and I hope we shall not give those that mean us ill the opportunity of
effecting that under the notion of a peace which they could not bring to
pass by war."

The speech was well received; for that Parliament was thoroughly well
affected to the Government. The members had, like the rest of the
community, been put into high good humour by the return of peace and by
the revival of trade. They were indeed still under the influence of
the feelings of the preceding day; and they had still in their ears
the thanksgiving sermons and thanksgiving anthems; all the bonfires had
hardly burned out; and the rows of lamps and candles had hardly been
taken down. Many, therefore, who did not assent to all that the King had
said, joined in a loud hum of approbation when he concluded. [3] As
soon as the Commons had retired to their own chamber, they resolved to
present an address assuring His Majesty that they would stand by him
in peace as firmly as they had stood by him in war. Seymour, who had,
during the autumn, been going from shire to shire, for the purpose of
inflaming the country gentlemen against the ministry, ventured to make
some uncourtly remarks; but he gave so much offence that he was hissed
down, and did not venture to demand a division. [4]

The friends of the Government were greatly elated by the proceedings
of this day. During the following week hopes were entertained that the
Parliament might be induced to vote a peace establishment of thirty
thousand men. But these hopes were delusive. The hum with which
William's speech had been received, and the hiss which had drowned the
voice of Seymour, had been misunderstood. The Commons were indeed warmly
attached to the King's person and government, and quick to resent any
disrespectful mention of his name. But the members who were disposed
to let him have even half as many troops as he thought necessary were
a minority. On the tenth of December his speech was considered in a
Committee of the whole House; and Harley came forward as the chief of
the opposition. He did not, like some hot headed men, among both
the Whigs and the Tories, contend that there ought to be no regular
soldiers. But he maintained that it was unnecessary to keep up, after
the peace of Ryswick, a larger force than had been kept up after the
peace of Nimeguen. He moved, therefore, that the military establishment
should be reduced to what it had been in the year 1680. The Ministers
found that, on this occasion, neither their honest nor their dishonest
supporters could be trusted. For, in the minds of the most respectable
men, the prejudice against standing armies was of too long growth and
too deep root to be at once removed; and those means by which the Court
might, at another time, have secured the help of venal politicians
were, at that moment, of less avail than usual. The Triennial Act was
beginning to produce its effects. A general election was at hand. Every
member who had constituents was desirous to please them; and it was
certain that no member would please his constituents by voting for a
standing army; and the resolution moved by Harvey was strongly supported
by Howe, was carried, was reported to the House on the following day,
and, after a debate in which several orators made a great display of
their knowledge of ancient and modern history, was confirmed by one
hundred and eighty-five votes to one hundred and forty-eight. [5]

In this debate the fear and hatred with which many of the best friends
of the Government regarded Sunderland were unequivocally manifested. "It
is easy," such was the language of several members, "it is easy to
guess by whom that unhappy sentence was inserted in the speech from the
Throne. No person well acquainted with the disastrous and disgraceful
history of the last two reigns can doubt who the minister is, who is now
whispering evil counsel in the ear of a third master." The Chamberlain,
thus fiercely attacked, was very feebly defended. There was indeed in
the House of Commons a small knot of his creatures; and they were men
not destitute of a certain kind of ability; but their moral character
was as bad as his. One of them was the late Secretary of the Treasury,
Guy, who had been turned out of his place for corruption. Another was
the late Speaker, Trevor, who had, from the chair, put the question
whether he was or was not a rogue, and had been forced to pronounce
that the Ayes had it. A third was Charles Duncombe, long the greatest
goldsmith of Lombard Street, and now one of the greatest landowners of
the North Riding of Yorkshire. Possessed of a private fortune equal to
that of any duke, he had not thought it beneath him to accept the place
of Cashier of the Excise, and had perfectly understood how to make
that place lucrative; but he had recently been ejected from office by
Montague, who thought, with good reason, that he was not a man to be
trusted. Such advocates as Trevor, Guy and Duncombe could do little for
Sunderland in debate. The statesmen of the junto would do nothing for
him. They had undoubtedly owed much to him. His influence, cooperating
with their own great abilities and with the force of circumstances, had
induced the King to commit the direction of the internal administration
of the realm to a Whig Cabinet. But the distrust which the old traitor
and apostate inspired was not to be overcome. The ministers could not be
sure that he was not, while smiling on them, whispering in confidential
tones to them, pouring out, as it might seem, all his heart to them,
really calumniating them in the closet or suggesting to the opposition
some ingenious mode of attacking them. They had very recently been
thwarted by him. They were bent on making Wharton a Secretary of State,
and had therefore looked forward with impatience to the retirement of
Trumball, who was indeed hardly equal to the duties of his great place.
To their surprise and mortification they learned, on the eve of the
meeting of Parliament, that Trumball had suddenly resigned, and Vernon,
the Under Secretary, had been summoned to Kensington, and had returned
thence with the seals. Vernon was a zealous Whig, and not personally
unacceptable to the chiefs of his party. But the Lord Chancellor, the
First Lord of the Treasury, and the First Lord of the Admiralty, might
not unnaturally think it strange that a post of the highest importance
should have been filled up in opposition to their known wishes, and with
a haste and a secresy which plainly showed that the King did not wish to
be annoyed by their remonstrances. The Lord Chamberlain pretended that
he had done all in his power to serve Wharton. But the Whig chiefs were
not men to be duped by the professions of so notorious a liar. Montague
bitterly described him as a fireship, dangerous at best, but on the
whole most dangerous as a consort, and least dangerous when showing
hostile colours. Smith, who was the most efficient of Montague's
lieutenants, both in the Treasury and in the Parliament, cordially
sympathised with his leader. Sunderland was therefore left undefended.
His enemies became bolder and more vehement every day. Sir Thomas Dyke,
member for Grinstead, and Lord Norris, son of the Earl of Abingdon,
talked of moving an address requesting the King to banish for ever from
the Court and the Council that evil adviser who had misled His Majesty's
royal uncles, had betrayed the liberties of the people, and had abjured
the Protestant religion.

Sunderland had been uneasy from the first moment at which his name
had been mentioned in the House of Commons. He was now in an agony
of terror. The whole enigma of his life, an enigma of which many
unsatisfactory and some absurd explanations have been propounded, is at
once solved if we consider him as a man insatiably greedy of wealth and
power, and yet nervously apprehensive of danger. He rushed with ravenous
eagerness at every bait which was offered to his cupidity. But any
ominous shadow, any threatening murmur, sufficed to stop him in his full
career, and to make him change his course or bury himself in a hiding
place. He ought to have thought himself fortunate indeed, when, after
all the crimes which he had committed, he found himself again enjoying
his picture gallery and his woods at Althorpe, sitting in the House of
Lords, admitted to the royal closet, pensioned from the Privy Purse,
consulted about the most important affairs of state. But his ambition
and avarice would not suffer him to rest till he held a high and
lucrative office, till he was a regent of the kingdom. The consequence
was, as might have been expected, a violent clamour; and that clamour he
had not the spirit to face.

His friends assured him that the threatened address would not be
carried. Perhaps a hundred and sixty members might vote for it; but
hardly more. "A hundred and sixty!" he cried: "No minister can stand
against a hundred and sixty. I am sure that I will not try." It must be
remembered that a hundred and sixty votes in a House of five hundred and
thirteen members would correspond to more than two hundred votes in the
present House of Commons; a very formidable minority on the unfavourable
side of a question deeply affecting the personal character of a public
man. William, unwilling to part with a servant whom he knew to be
unprincipled, but whom he did not consider as more unprincipled than
many other English politicians, and in whom he had found much of a very
useful sort of knowledge, and of a very useful sort of ability, tried to
induce the ministry to come to the rescue. It was particularly
important to soothe Wharton, who had been exasperated by his recent
disappointment, and had probably exasperated the other members of the
junto. He was sent for to the palace. The King himself intreated him
to be reconciled to the Lord Chamberlain, and to prevail on the Whig
leaders in the Lower House to oppose any motion which Dyke or Norris
might make. Wharton answered in a manner which made it clear that
from him no help was to be expected. Sunderland's terrors now became
insupportable. He had requested some of his friends to come to his house
that he might consult them; they came at the appointed hour, but found
that he had gone to Kensington, and had left word that he should soon
be back. When he joined them, they observed that he had not the gold key
which is the badge of the Lord Chamberlain, and asked where it was. "At
Kensington," answered Sunderland. They found that he had tendered his
resignation, and that it had been, after a long struggle, accepted.
They blamed his haste, and told him that, since he had summoned them to
advise him on that day, he might at least have waited till the morrow.
"To morrow," he exclaimed, "would have ruined me. To night has saved
me."

Meanwhile, both the disciples of Somers and the disciples of Trenchard
were grumbling at Harley's resolution. The disciples of Somers
maintained that, if it was right to have an army at all, it must be
right to have an efficient army. The disciples of Trenchard complained
that a great principle had been shamefully given up. On the vital
issue, Standing Army or no Standing Army, the Commons had pronounced an
erroneous, a fatal decision. Whether that army should consist of five
regiments or of fifteen was hardly worth debating. The great dyke which
kept out arbitrary power had been broken. It was idle to say that the
breach was narrow; for it would soon be widened by the flood which would
rush in. The war of pamphlets raged more fiercely than ever. At the same
time alarming symptoms began to appear among the men of the sword. They
saw themselves every day described in print as the scum of society,
as mortal enemies of the liberties of their country. Was it
reasonable,--such was the language of some scribblers,--that an honest
gentleman should pay a heavy land tax, in order to support in idleness
and luxury a set of fellows who requited him by seducing his dairy maids
and shooting his partridges? Nor was it only in Grub Street tracts that
such reflections were to be found. It was known all over the town that
uncivil things had been said of the military profession in the House of
Commons, and that Jack Howe, in particular, had, on this subject,
given the rein to his wit and to his ill nature. Some rough and daring
veterans, marked with the scars of Steinkirk and singed with the smoke
of Namur, threatened vengeance for these insults. The writers and
speakers who had taken the greatest liberties went in constant fear
of being accosted by fierce-looking captains, and required to make an
immediate choice between fighting and being caned. One gentleman, who
had made himself conspicuous by the severity of his language, went about
with pistols in his pockets. Howe, whose courage was not proportionate
to his malignity and petulance, was so much frightened, that he retired
into the country. The King, well aware that a single blow given, at
that critical conjuncture, by a soldier to a member of Parliament might
produce disastrous consequences, ordered the officers of the army to
their quarters, and, by the vigorous exertion of his authority and
influence, succeeded in preventing all outrage. [6]

All this time the feeling in favour of a regular force seemed to be
growing in the House of Commons. The resignation of Sunderland had
put many honest gentlemen in good humour. The Whig leaders exerted
themselves to rally their followers, held meetings at the "Rose," and
represented strongly the dangers to which the country would be exposed,
if defended only by a militia. The opposition asserted that neither
bribes nor promises were spared. The ministers at length flattered
themselves that Harley's resolution might be rescinded. On the eighth of
January they again tried their strength, and were again defeated, though
by a smaller majority than before. A hundred and sixty-four members
divided with them. A hundred and eighty-eight were for adhering to the
vote of the eleventh of December. It was remarked that on this occasion
the naval men, with Rooke at their head, voted against the Government.
[7]

It was necessary to yield. All that remained was to put on the words
of the resolution of the eleventh of December the most favourable sense
that they could be made to bear. They did indeed admit of very different
interpretations. The force which was actually in England in 1680 hardly
amounted to five thousand men. But the garrison of Tangier and the
regiments in the pay of the Batavian federation, which, as they were
available for the defence of England against a foreign or domestic
enemy, might be said to be in some sort part of the English army,
amounted to at least five thousand more. The construction which the
ministers put on the resolution of the eleventh of December was, that
the army was to consist of ten thousand men; and in this construction
the House acquiesced. It was not held to be necessary that the
Parliament should, as in our time, fix the amount of the land force. The
Commons thought that they sufficiently limited the number of soldiers by
limiting the sum which was to be expended in maintaining soldiers. What
that sum should be was a question which raised much debate. Harley was
unwilling to give more than three hundred thousand pounds. Montague
struggled for four hundred thousand. The general sense of the House was
that Harley offered too little, and that Montague demanded too much. At
last, on the fourteenth of January, a vote was taken for three hundred
and fifty thousand pounds. Four days later the House resolved to
grant half-pay to the disbanded officers till they should be otherwise
provided for. The half-pay was meant to be a retainer as well as a
reward. The effect of this important vote therefore was that, whenever
a new war should break out, the nation would be able to command the
services of many gentlemen of great military experience. The ministry
afterwards succeeded in obtaining, much against the will of a portion of
the opposition, a separate vote for three thousand marines.

A Mutiny Act, which had been passed in 1697, expired in the spring of
1698. As yet no such Act had been passed except in time of war; and the
temper of the Parliament and of the nation was such that the ministers
did not venture to ask, in time of peace, for a renewal of powers
unknown to the constitution. For the present, therefore, the soldier was
again, as in the times which preceded the Revolution, subject to exactly
the same law which governed the citizen.

It was only in matters relating to the army that the government found
the Commons unmanageable. Liberal provision was made for the navy. The
number of seamen was fixed at ten thousand, a great force, according to
the notions of that age, for a time of peace. The funds assigned some
years before for the support of the civil list had fallen short of the
estimate. It was resolved that a new arrangement should be made, and
that a certain income should be settled on the King. The amount was
fixed, by an unanimous vote, at seven hundred thousand pounds; and the
Commons declared that, by making this ample provision for his comfort
and dignity, they meant to express their sense of the great things which
he had done for the country. It is probable, however, that so large a
sum would not have been given without debates and divisions, had it not
been understood that he meant to take on himself the charge of the Duke
of Gloucester's establishment, and that he would in all probability have
to pay fifty thousand pounds a year to Mary of Modena. The Tories
were unwilling to disoblige the Princess of Denmark; and the Jacobites
abstained from offering any opposition to a grant in the benefit of
which they hoped that the banished family would participate.

It was not merely by pecuniary liberality that the Parliament testified
attachment to the Sovereign. A bill was rapidly passed which withheld
the benefit of the Habeas Corpus Act, during twelve months more, from
Bernardi and some other conspirators who had been concerned in the
Assassination Plot, but whose guilt, though demonstrated to the
conviction of every reasonable man, could not be proved by two
witnesses. At the same time new securities were provided against a new
danger which threatened the government. The peace had put an end to the
apprehension that the throne of William might be subverted by foreign
arms, but had, at the same time, facilitated domestic treason. It was no
longer necessary for an agent from Saint Germains to cross the sea in
a fishing boat, under the constant dread of being intercepted by a
cruiser. It was no longer necessary for him to land on a desolate beach,
to lodge in a thatched hovel, to dress himself like a carter, or to
travel up to town on foot. He came openly by the Calais packet, walked
into the best inn at Dover, and ordered posthorses for London. Meanwhile
young Englishmen of quality and fortune were hastening in crowds to
Paris. They would naturally wish to see him who had once been their
king; and this curiosity, though in itself innocent, might have evil
consequences. Artful tempters would doubtless be on the watch for every
such traveller; and many such travellers might be well pleased to be
courteously accosted, in a foreign land, by Englishmen of honourable
name, distinguished appearance, and insinuating address. It was not to
be expected that a lad fresh from the university would be able to refute
all the sophisms and calumnies which might be breathed in his ear
by dexterous and experienced seducers. Nor would it be strange if he
should, in no long time, accept an invitation to a private audience
at Saint Germains, should be charmed by the graces of Mary of Modena,
should find something engaging in the childish innocence of the Prince
of Wales, should kiss the hand of James, and should return home an
ardent Jacobite. An Act was therefore passed forbidding English subjects
to hold any intercourse orally, or by writing, or by message, with the
exiled family. A day was fixed after which no English subject, who had,
during the late war, gone into France without the royal permission or
borne arms against his country was to be permitted to reside in this
kingdom, except under a special license from the King. Whoever infringed
these rules incurred the penalties of high treason.

The dismay was at first great among the malecontents. For English and
Irish Jacobites, who had served under the standards of Lewis or hung
about the Court of Saint Germains, had, since the peace, come over in
multitudes to England. It was computed that thousands were within the
scope of the new Act. But the severity of that Act was mitigated by a
beneficent administration. Some fierce and stubborn non-jurors who would
not debase themselves by asking for any indulgence, and some conspicuous
enemies of the government who had asked for indulgence in vain, were
under the necessity of taking refuge on the Continent. But the great
majority of those offenders who promised to live peaceably under
William's rule obtained his permission to remain in their native land.

In the case of one great offender there were some circumstances which
attracted general interest, and which might furnish a good subject to
a novelist or a dramatist. Near fourteen years before this time,
Sunderland, then Secretary of State to Charles the Second, had married
his daughter Lady Elizabeth Spencer to Donough Macarthy, Earl of
Clancarty, the lord of an immense domain in Munster. Both the bridegroom
and the bride were mere children, the bridegroom only fifteen, the bride
only eleven. After the ceremony they were separated; and many years
full of strange vicissitudes elapsed before they again met. The boy soon
visited his estates in Ireland. He had been bred a member of the Church
of England; but his opinions and his practice were loose. He found
himself among kinsmen who were zealous Roman Catholics. A Roman
Catholic king was on the throne. To turn Roman Catholic was the best
recommendation to favour both at Whitehall and at Dublin Castle.
Clancarty speedily changed his religion, and from a dissolute Protestant
became a dissolute Papist. After the Revolution he followed the fortunes
of James; sate in the Celtic Parliament which met at the King's Inns;
commanded a regiment in the Celtic army; was forced to surrender himself
to Marlborough at Cork; was sent to England, and was imprisoned in the
Tower. The Clancarty estates, which were supposed to yield a rent of not
much less than ten thousand a year, were confiscated. They were charged
with an annuity to the Earl's brother, and with another annuity to his
wife; but the greater part was bestowed by the King on Lord Woodstock,
the eldest son of Portland; During some time, the prisoner's life was
not safe. For the popular voice accused him of outrages for which the
utmost license of civil war would not furnish a plea. It is said that
he was threatened with an appeal of murder by the widow of a Protestant
clergyman who had been put to death during the troubles. After passing
three years in confinement, Clancarty made his escape to the Continent,
was graciously received at St. Germains, and was entrusted with the
command of a corps of Irish refugees. When the treaty of Ryswick had
put an end to the hope that the banished dynasty would be restored by
foreign arms, he flattered himself that he might be able to make his
peace with the English Government. But he was grievously disappointed.
The interest of his wife's family was undoubtedly more than sufficient
to obtain a pardon for him. But on that interest he could not reckon.
The selfish, base, covetous, father-in-law was not at all desirous
to have a highborn beggar and the posterity of a highborn beggar to
maintain. The ruling passion of the brother-in-law was a stern and
acrimonious party spirit. He could not bear to think that he was so
nearly connected with an enemy of the Revolution and of the Bill of
Rights, and would with pleasure have seen the odious tie severed even
by the hand of the executioner. There was one, however, from whom the
ruined, expatriated, proscribed young nobleman might hope to find a kind
reception. He stole across the Channel in disguise, presented himself at
Sunderland's door, and requested to see Lady Clancarty. He was charged,
he said, with a message to her from her mother, who was then lying on a
sick bed at Windsor. By this fiction he obtained admission, made himself
known to his wife, whose thoughts had probably been constantly fixed on
him during many years, and prevailed on her to give him the most tender
proofs of an affection sanctioned by the laws both of God and of man.
The secret was soon discovered and betrayed by a waiting woman. Spencer
learned that very night that his sister had admitted her husband to her
apartment. The fanatical young Whig, burning with animosity which he
mistook for virtue, and eager to emulate the Corinthian who assassinated
his brother, and the Roman who passed sentence of death on his son, flew
to Vernon's office, gave information that the Irish rebel, who had once
already escaped from custody, was in hiding hard by, and procured a
warrant and a guard of soldiers. Clancarty was found in the arms of his
wife, and dragged to the Tower. She followed him and implored permission
to partake his cell. These events produced a great stir throughout the
society of London. Sunderland professed everywhere that he heartily
approved of his son's conduct; but the public had made up its mind about
Sunderland's veracity, and paid very little attention to his professions
on this or on any other subject. In general, honourable men of both
parties, whatever might be their opinion of Clancarty, felt great
compassion for his mother who was dying of a broken heart, and his poor
young wife who was begging piteously to be admitted within the Traitor's
Gate. Devonshire and Bedford joined with Ormond to ask for mercy. The
aid of a still more powerful intercessor was called in. Lady Russell
was esteemed by the King as a valuable friend; she was venerated by
the nation generally as a saint, the widow of a martyr; and, when she
deigned to solicit favours, it was scarcely possible that she should
solicit in vain. She naturally felt a strong sympathy for the unhappy
couple, who were parted by the walls of that gloomy old fortress in
which she had herself exchanged the last sad endearments with one whose
image was never absent from her. She took Lady Clancarty with her to the
palace, obtained access to William, and put a petition into his hand.
Clancarty was pardoned on condition that he should leave the kingdom and
never return to it. A pension was granted to him, small when compared
with the magnificent inheritance which he had forfeited, but quite
sufficient to enable him to live like a gentleman on the Continent. He
retired, accompanied by his Elizabeth, to Altona.

All this time the ways and means for the year were under consideration.
The Parliament was able to grant some relief to the country. The land
tax was reduced from four shillings in the pound to three. But nine
expensive campaigns had left a heavy arrear behind them; and it was
plain that the public burdens must, even in the time of peace, be such
as, before the Revolution, would have been thought more than sufficient
to support a vigorous war. A country gentleman was in no very good
humour, when he compared the sums which were now exacted from him with
those which he had been in the habit of paying under the last two kings;
his discontent became stronger when he compared his own situation
with that of courtiers, and above all of Dutch courtiers, who had been
enriched by grants of Crown property; and both interest and envy made
him willing to listen to politicians who assured him that, if those
grants were resumed, he might be relieved from another shilling.

The arguments against such a resumption were not likely to be heard with
favour by a popular assembly composed of taxpayers, but to statesmen and
legislators will seem unanswerable.

There can be no doubt that the Sovereign was, by the old polity of the
realm, competent to give or let the domains of the Crown in such manner
as seemed good to him. No statute defined the length of the term which
he might grant, or the amount of the rent which he must reserve. He
might part with the fee simple of a forest extending over a hundred
square miles in consideration of a tribute of a brace of hawks to be
delivered annually to his falconer, or of a napkin of fine linen to be
laid on the royal table at the coronation banquet. In fact, there had
been hardly a reign since the Conquest, in which great estates had not
been bestowed by our princes on favoured subjects. Anciently, indeed,
what had been lavishly given was not seldom violently taken away.
Several laws for the resumption of Crown lands were passed by the
Parliaments of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Of those laws the
last was that which, in the year 1485, immediately after the battle of
Bosworth, annulled the donations of the kings of the House of York. More
than two hundred years had since elapsed without any Resumption Act.
An estate derived from the royal liberality had long been universally
thought as secure as an estate which had descended from father to son
since the compilation of Domesday Book. No title was considered as more
perfect than that of the Russells to Woburn, given by Henry the Eighth
to the first Earl of Bedford, or than that of the Cecils to Hatfield,
purchased from the Crown for less than a third of the real value by
the first Earl of Salisbury. The Long Parliament did not, even in that
celebrated instrument of nineteen articles, which was framed expressly
for the purpose of making the King a mere Doge, propose to restrain him
from dealing according to his pleasure with his parks and his castles,
his fisheries and his mines. After the Restoration, under the government
of an easy prince, who had indeed little disposition to give, but who
could not bear to refuse, many noble private fortunes were carved out of
the property of the Crown. Some of the persons who were thus enriched,
Albemarle, for example, Sandwich and Clarendon, might be thought to have
fairly earned their master's favour by their services. Others had
merely amused his leisure or pandered to his vices. His mistresses were
munificently rewarded. Estates sufficient to support the highest rank in
the peerage were distributed among his illegitimate children. That these
grants, however prodigal, were strictly legal, was tacitly admitted by
the Estates of the Realm, when, in 1689, they recounted and condemned
the unconstitutional acts of the kings of the House of Stuart. Neither
in the Declaration of Right nor in the Bill of Rights is there a word on
the subject. William, therefore, thought himself at liberty to give
away his hereditary domains as freely as his predecessors had given away
theirs. There was much murmuring at the profusion with which he rewarded
his Dutch favourites; and we have seen that, on one occasion in the year
1696, the House of Commons interfered for the purpose of restraining
his liberality. An address was presented requesting him not to grant to
Portland an extensive territory in North Wales. But it is to be observed
that, though in this address a strong opinion was expressed that the
grant would be mischievous, the Commons did not deny, and must therefore
be considered as having admitted, that it would be perfectly legal. The
King, however, yielded; and Portland was forced to content himself with
ten or twelve manors scattered over various counties from Cumberland to
Sussex.

It seems, therefore, clear that our princes were, by the law of the
land, competent to do what they would with their hereditary estates.
It is perfectly true that the law was defective, and that the profusion
with which mansions, abbeys, chaces, warrens, beds of ore, whole
streets, whole market towns, had been bestowed on courtiers was greatly
to be lamented. Nothing could have been more proper than to pass a
prospective statute tying up in strict entail the little which still
remained of the Crown property. But to annul by a retrospective statute
patents, which in Westminster Hall were held to be legally valid, would
have been simply robbery. Such robbery must necessarily have made all
property insecure; and a statesman must be short-sighted indeed who
imagines that what makes property insecure can really make society
prosperous.

But it is vain to expect that men who are inflamed by anger, who are
suffering distress, and who fancy that it is in their power to obtain
immediate relief from their distresses at the expense of those who have
excited their anger, will reason as calmly as the historian who, biassed
neither by interest nor passion, reviews the events of a past age.
The public burdens were heavy. To whatever extent the grants of royal
domains were revoked, those burdens would be lightened. Some of the
recent grants had undoubtedly been profuse. Some of the living grantees
were unpopular. A cry was raised which soon became formidably loud. All
the Tories, all the malecontent Whigs, and multitudes who, without
being either Tories or malecontent Whigs, disliked taxes and disliked
Dutchmen, called for a resumption of all the Crown property which King
William had, as it was phrased, been deceived into giving away.

On the seventh of February 1698, this subject, destined to irritate
the public mind at intervals during many years, was brought under the
consideration of the House of Commons. The opposition asked leave to
bring in a bill vacating all grants of Crown property which had been
made since the Revolution. The ministers were in a great strait; the
public feeling was strong; a general election was approaching; it was
dangerous and it would probably be vain to encounter the prevailing
sentiment directly. But the shock which could not be resisted might be
eluded. The ministry accordingly professed to find no fault with the
proposed bill, except that it did not go far enough, and moved for leave
to bring in two more bills, one for annulling the grants of James the
Second, the other for annulling the grants of Charles the Second. The
Tories were caught in their own snare. For most of the grants of Charles
and James had been made to Tories; and a resumption of those grants
would have reduced some of the chiefs of the Tory party to poverty. Yet
it was impossible to draw a distinction between the grants of William
and those of his two predecessors. Nobody could pretend that the law
had been altered since his accession. If, therefore, the grants of the
Stuarts were legal, so were his; if his grants were illegal, so were
the grants of his uncles. And, if both his grants and the grants of his
uncles were illegal, it was absurd to say that the mere lapse of time
made a difference. For not only was it part of the alphabet of the law
that there was no prescription against the Crown, but the thirty-eight
years which had elapsed since the Restoration would not have sufficed
to bar a writ of right brought by a private demandant against a wrongful
tenant. Nor could it be pretended that William had bestowed his favours
less judiciously than Charles and James. Those who were least friendly
to the Dutch would hardly venture to say that Portland, Zulestein and
Ginkell was less deserving of the royal bounty than the Duchess of
Cleveland and the Duchess of Portsmouth, than the progeny of Nell Gwynn,
than the apostate Arlington or the butcher Jeffreys. The opposition,
therefore, sullenly assented to what the ministry proposed. From that
moment the scheme was doomed. Everybody affected to be for it; and
everybody was really against it. The three bills were brought in
together, read a second time together, ordered to be committed together,
and were then, first mutilated, and at length quietly dropped.

In the history of the financial legislation of this session, there were
some episodes which deserve to be related. Those members, a numerous
body, who envied and dreaded Montague readily became the unconscious
tools of the cunning malice of Sunderland, whom Montague had refused
to defend in Parliament, and who, though detested by the opposition,
contrived to exercise some influence over that party through the
instrumentality of Charles Duncombe. Duncombe indeed had his own reasons
for hating Montague, who had turned him out of the place of Cashier of
the Excise. A serious charge was brought against the Board of Treasury,
and especially against its chief. He was the inventor of Exchequer
Bills; and they were popularly called Montague's notes. He had induced
the Parliament to enact that those bills, even when at a discount in the
market, should be received at par by the collectors of the revenue.
This enactment, if honestly carried into effect, would have been
unobjectionable. But it was strongly rumoured that there had been
foul play, peculation, even forgery. Duncombe threw the most serious
imputations on the Board of Treasury, and pretended that he had been put
out of his office only because he was too shrewd to be deceived, and too
honest to join in deceiving the public. Tories and malecontent Whigs,
elated by the hope that Montague might be convicted of malversation,
eagerly called for inquiry. An inquiry was instituted; but the
result not only disappointed but utterly confounded the accusers. The
persecuted minister obtained both a complete acquittal, and a signal
revenge. Circumstances were discovered which seemed to indicate that
Duncombe himself was not blameless. The clue was followed; he was
severely cross-examined; he lost his head; made one unguarded admission
after another, and was at length compelled to confess, on the floor of
the House, that he had been guilty of an infamous fraud, which, but for
his own confession, it would have been scarcely possible to bring home
to him. He had been ordered by the Commissioners of the Excise to pay
ten thousand pounds into the Exchequer for the public service. He had in
his hands, as cashier, more than double that sum in good milled silver.
With some of this money he bought Exchequer Bills which were then at
a considerable discount; he paid those bills in; and he pocketed the
discount, which amounted to about four hundred pounds. Nor was this
all. In order to make it appear that the depreciated paper, which he had
fraudulently substituted for silver, had been received by him in payment
of taxes, he had employed a knavish Jew to forge endorsements of names,
some real and some imaginary. This scandalous story, wrung out of his
own lips, was heard by the opposition with consternation and shame,
by the ministers and their friends with vindictive exultation. It was
resolved, without any division, that he should be sent to the Tower,
that he should be kept close prisoner there, that he should be expelled
from the House. Whether any further punishment could be inflicted on him
was a perplexing question. The English law touching forgery became, at a
later period, barbarously severe; but, in 1698, it was absurdly lax. The
prisoner's offence was certainly not a felony; and lawyers apprehended
that there would be much difficulty in convicting him even of a
misdemeanour. But a recent precedent was fresh in the minds of all men.
The weapon which had reached Fenwick might reach Duncombe. A bill of
pains and penalties was brought in, and carried through the earlier
stages with less opposition than might have been expected. Some Noes
might perhaps be uttered; but no members ventured to say that the Noes
had it. The Tories were mad with shame and mortification, at finding
that their rash attempt to ruin an enemy had produced no effect except
the ruin of a friend. In their rage, they eagerly caught at a new hope
of revenge, a hope destined to end, as their former hope had ended, in
discomfiture and disgrace. They learned, from the agents of Sunderland,
as many people suspected, but certainly from informants who were well
acquainted with the offices about Whitehall, that some securities
forfeited to the Crown in Ireland had been bestowed by the King
ostensibly on one Thomas Railton, but really on the Chancellor of the
Exchequer. The value of these securities was about ten thousand pounds.
On the sixteenth of February this transaction was brought without
any notice under the consideration of the House of Commons by Colonel
Granville, a Tory member, nearly related to the Earl of Bath. Montague
was taken completely by surprise, but manfully avowed the whole truth,
and defended what he had done. The orators of the opposition declaimed
against him with great animation and asperity. "This gentleman,"
they said, "has at once violated three distinct duties. He is a privy
councillor, and, as such, is bound to advise the Crown with a view, not
to his own selfish interests, but to the general good. He is the first
minister of finance, and is, as such, bound to be a thrifty manager of
the royal treasure. He is a member of this House, and is, as such, bound
to see that the burdens borne by his constituents are not made heavier
by rapacity and prodigality. To all these trusts he has been unfaithful.
The advice of the privy councillor to his master is, 'Give me money.'
The first Lord of the Treasury signs a warrant for giving himself money
out of the Treasury. The member for Westminster puts into his pocket
money which his constituents must be taxed to replace." The surprise
was complete; the onset was formidable; but the Whig majority, after
a moment of dismay and wavering, rallied firmly round their leader.
Several speakers declared that they highly approved of the prudent
liberality with which His Majesty had requited the services of a most
able, diligent and trusty counsellor. It was miserable economy indeed to
grudge a reward of a few thousands to one who had made the State richer
by millions. Would that all the largesses of former kings had been as
well bestowed! How those largesses had been bestowed none knew better
than some of the austere patriots who harangued so loudly against the
avidity of Montague. If there is, it was said, a House in England
which has been gorged with undeserved riches by the prodigality of weak
sovereigns, it is the House of Bath. Does it lie in the mouth of a son
of that house to blame the judicious munificence of a wise and good
King? Before the Granvilles complain that distinguished merit has been
rewarded with ten thousand pounds, let them refund some part of the
hundreds of thousands which they have pocketed without any merit at all.

The rule was, and still is, that a member against whom a charge is made
must be heard in his own defence, and must then leave the House. The
Opposition insisted that Montague should retire. His friends maintained
that this case did not fall within the rule. Distinctions were drawn;
precedents were cited; and at length the question was put, that Mr.
Montague do withdraw. The Ayes were only ninety-seven; the Noes two
hundred and nine. This decisive result astonished both parties. The
Tories lost heart and hope. The joy of the Whigs was boundless. It
was instantly moved that the Honourable Charles Montague, Esquire,
Chancellor of the Exchequer, for his good services to this Government
does deserve His Majesty's favour. The Opposition, completely cowed, did
not venture to demand another division. Montague scornfully thanked
them for the inestimable service which they had done him. But for
their malice he never should have had the honour and happiness of
being solemnly pronounced by the Commons of England a benefactor of his
country. As to the grant which had been the subject of debate, he was
perfectly ready to give it up, if his accusers would engage to follow
his example.

Even after this defeat the Tories returned to the charge. They pretended
that the frauds which had been committed with respect to the Exchequer
Bills had been facilitated by the mismanagement of the Board of
Treasury, and moved a resolution which implied a censure on that Board,
and especially on its chief. This resolution was rejected by a hundred
and seventy votes to eighty-eight. It was remarked that Spencer, as if
anxious to show that he had taken no part in the machinations of which
his father was justly or unjustly suspected, spoke in this debate with
great warmth against Duncombe and for Montague.

A few days later, the bill of pains and penalties against Duncombe
passed the Commons. It provided that two thirds of his enormous
property, real and personal, should be confiscated and applied to the
public service. Till the third reading there was no serious opposition.
Then the Tories mustered their strength. They were defeated by a hundred
and thirty-eight votes to a hundred and three; and the bill was carried
up to the Lords by the Marquess of Hartington, a young nobleman whom the
great body of Whigs respected as one of their hereditary chiefs, as the
heir of Devonshire, and as the son in law of Russell.

That Duncombe had been guilty of shameful dishonesty was acknowledged
by all men of sense and honour in the party to which he belonged. He had
therefore little right to expect indulgence from the party which he had
unfairly and malignantly assailed. Yet it is not creditable to the Whigs
that they should have been so much disgusted by his frauds, or so much
irritated by his attacks, as to have been bent on punishing him in a
manner inconsistent with all the principles which governments ought to
hold most sacred.

Those who concurred in the proceeding against Duncombe tried to
vindicate their conduct by citing as an example the proceeding
against Fenwick. So dangerous is it to violate, on any pretence, those
principles which the experience of ages has proved to be the safeguards
of all that is most precious to a community. Twelve months had hardly
elapsed since the legislature had, in very peculiar circumstances, and
for very plausible reasons, taken upon itself to try and to punish a
great criminal whom it was impossible to reach in the ordinary course
of justice; and already the breach then made in the fences which protect
the dearest rights of Englishmen was widening fast. What had last year
been defended only as a rare exception seemed now to be regarded as the
ordinary rule. Nay, the bill of pains and penalties which now had
an easy passage through the House of Commons was infinitely more
objectionable than the bill which had been so obstinately resisted at
every stage in the preceding session.

The writ of attainder against Fenwick was not, as the vulgar imagined
and still imagine, objectionable because it was retrospective. It
is always to be remembered that retrospective legislation is bad in
principle only when it affects the substantive law. Statutes creating
new crimes or increasing the punishment of old crimes ought in no case
to be retrospective. But statutes which merely alter the procedure, if
they are in themselves good statutes, ought to be retrospective. To take
examples from the legislation of our own time, the Act passed in 1845,
for punishing the malicious destruction of works of art with whipping,
was most properly made prospective only. Whatever indignation the
authors of that Act might feel against the ruffian who had broken the
Barberini Vase, they knew that they could not, without the most serious
detriment to the commonwealth, pass a law for scourging him. On the
other hand the Act which allowed the affirmation of a Quaker to be
received in criminal cases allowed, and most justly and reasonably, such
affirmation to be received in the case of a past as well as of a future
misdemeanour or felony. If we try the Act which attainted Fenwick by
these rules we shall find that almost all the numerous writers who
have condemned it have condemned it on wrong grounds. It made no
retrospective change in the substantive law. The crime was not new.
It was high treason as defined by the Statute of Edward the Third. The
punishment was not new. It was the punishment which had been inflicted
on traitors of ten generations. All that was new was the procedure;
and, if the new procedure had been intrinsically better than the old
procedure, the new procedure might with perfect propriety have been
employed. But the procedure employed in Fenwick's case was the worst
possible, and would have been the worst possible if it had been
established from time immemorial. However clearly political crime may
have been defined by ancient laws, a man accused of it ought not to be
tried by a crowd of five hundred and thirteen eager politicians, of whom
he can challenge none even with cause, who have no judge to guide them,
who are allowed to come in and go out as they choose, who hear as much
or as little as they choose of the accusation and of the defence, who
are exposed, during the investigation, to every kind of corrupting
influence, who are inflamed by all the passions which animated debates
naturally excite, who cheer one orator and cough down another, who are
roused from sleep to cry Aye or No, or who are hurried half drunk
from their suppers to divide. For this reason, and for no other, the
attainder of Fenwick is to be condemned. It was unjust and of evil
example, not because it was a retrospective Act, but because it was an
act essentially judicial, performed by a body destitute of all judicial
qualities.

The bill for punishing Duncombe was open to all the objections which can
be urged against the bill for punishing Fenwick, and to other objections
of even greater weight. In both cases the judicial functions were
usurped by a body unfit to exercise such functions. But the bill
against Duncombe really was, what the bill against Fenwick was not,
objectionable as a retrospective bill. It altered the substantive
criminal law. It visited an offence with a penalty of which the
offender, at the time when he offended, had no notice.

It may be thought a strange proposition that the bill against Duncombe
was a worse bill than the bill against Fenwick, because the bill against
Fenwick struck at life, and the bill against Duncombe struck only at
property. Yet this apparent paradox is a sober truth. Life is indeed
more precious than property. But the power of arbitrarily taking away
the lives of men is infinitely less likely to be abused than the power
of arbitrarily taking away their property. Even the lawless classes of
society generally shrink from blood. They commit thousands of offences
against property to one murder; and most of the few murders which they
do commit are committed for the purpose of facilitating or concealing
some offence against property. The unwillingness of juries to find a
fellow creature guilty of a capital felony even on the clearest evidence
is notorious; and it may well be suspected that they frequently violate
their oaths in favour of life. In civil suits, on the other hand, they
too often forget that their duty is merely to give the plaintiff a
compensation for evil suffered; and, if the conduct of the defendant has
moved their indignation and his fortune is known to be large, they turn
themselves into a criminal tribunal, and, under the name of damages,
impose a large fine. As housebreakers are more likely to take plate and
jewellery than to cut throats; as juries are far more likely to err on
the side of pecuniary severity in assessing damages than to send to the
gibbet any man who has not richly deserved it; so a legislature,
which should be so unwise as to take on itself the functions properly
belonging to the Courts of Law, would be far more likely to pass Acts of
Confiscation than Acts of Attainder. We naturally feel pity even for a
bad man whose head is about to fall. But, when a bad man is compelled to
disgorge his ill-gotten gains, we naturally feel a vindictive pleasure,
in which there is much danger that we may be tempted to indulge too
largely.

The hearts of many stout Whigs doubtless bled at the thought of what
Fenwick must have suffered, the agonizing struggle, in a mind not of
the firmest temper, between the fear of shame and the fear of death,
the parting from a tender wife, and all the gloomy solemnity of the
last morning. But whose heart was to bleed at the thought that
Charles Duncombe, who was born to carry parcels and to sweep down a
counting-house, was to be punished for his knavery by having his income
reduced to eight thousand a year, more than most earls then possessed?

His judges were not likely to feel compassion for him; and they all had
strong selfish reasons to vote against him. They were all in fact bribed
by the very bill by which he would be punished.

His property was supposed to amount to considerably more than four
hundred thousand pounds. Two thirds of that property were equivalent to
about sevenpence in the pound on the rental of the kingdom as assessed
to the land tax. If, therefore, two thirds of that property could have
been brought into the Exchequer, the land tax for 1699, a burden most
painfully felt by the class which had the chief power in England, might
have been reduced from three shillings to two and fivepence. Every
squire of a thousand a year in the House of Commons would have had
thirty pounds more to spend; and that sum might well have made to him
the whole difference between being at ease and being pinched during
twelve months. If the bill had passed, if the gentry and yeomanry of
the kingdom had found that it was possible for them to obtain a welcome
remission of taxation by imposing on a Shylock or an Overreach, by a
retrospective law, a fine not heavier than his misconduct might, in a
moral view, seem to have deserved, it is impossible to believe that they
would not soon have recurred to so simple and agreeable a resource. In
every age it is easy to find rich men who have done bad things for which
the law has provided no punishment or an inadequate punishment. The
estates of such men would soon have been considered as a fund applicable
to the public service. As often as it was necessary to vote an
extraordinary supply to the Crown, the Committee of Ways and Means would
have looked about for some unpopular capitalist to plunder. Appetite
would have grown with indulgence. Accusations would have been eagerly
welcomed. Rumours and suspicions would have been received as proofs. The
wealth of the great goldsmiths of the Royal Exchange would have become
as insecure as that of a Jew under the Plantagenets, as that of a
Christian under a Turkish Pasha. Rich men would have tried to invest
their acquisitions in some form in which they could lie closely hidden
and could be speedily removed. In no long time it would have been found
that of all financial resources the least productive is robbery, and
that the public had really paid far more dearly for Duncombe's hundreds
of thousands than if it had borrowed them at fifty per cent.

These considerations had more weight with the Lords than with the
Commons. Indeed one of the principal uses of the Upper House is to
defend the vested rights of property in cases in which those rights are
unpopular, and are attacked on grounds which to shortsighted politicians
seem valid. An assembly composed of men almost all of whom have
inherited opulence, and who are not under the necessity of paying court
to constituent bodies, will not easily be hurried by passion or seduced
by sophistry into robbery. As soon as the bill for punishing Duncombe
had been read at the table of the Peers, it became clear that there
would be a sharp contest. Three great Tory noblemen, Rochester,
Nottingham and Leeds, headed the opposition; and they were joined by
some who did not ordinarily act with them. At an early stage of the
proceedings a new and perplexing question was raised. How did it appear
that the facts set forth in the preamble were true, that Duncombe had
committed the frauds for which it was proposed to punish him in so
extraordinary a manner? In the House of Commons, he had been taken
by surprise; he had made admissions of which he had not foreseen the
consequences; and he had then been so much disconcerted by the severe
manner in which he had been interrogated that he had at length avowed
everything. But he had now had time to prepare himself; he had been
furnished with advice by counsel; and, when he was placed at the bar of
the Peers, he refused to criminate himself and defied his persecutors
to prove him guilty. He was sent back to the Tower. The Lords acquainted
the Commons with the difficulty which had arisen. A conference was
held in the Painted Chamber; and there Hartington, who appeared for the
Commons, declared that he was authorized, by those who had sent him, to
assure the Lords that Duncombe had, in his place in Parliament, owned
the misdeeds which he now challenged his accusers to bring home to him.
The Lords, however, rightly thought that it would be a strange and a
dangerous thing to receive a declaration of the House of Commons in its
collective character as conclusive evidence of the fact that a man
had committed a crime. The House of Commons was under none of those
restraints which were thought necessary in ordinary cases to protect
innocent defendants against false witnesses. The House of Commons
could not be sworn, could not be cross-examined, could not be indicted,
imprisoned, pilloried, mutilated, for perjury. Indeed the testimony of
the House of Commons in its collective character was of less value than
the uncontradicted testimony of a single member. For it was only
the testimony of the majority of the House. There might be a large
respectable minority whose recollections might materially differ from
the recollections of the majority. This indeed was actually the case.
For there had been a dispute among those who had heard Duncombe's
confession as to the precise extent of what he had confessed; and
there had been a division; and the statement which the Upper House was
expected to receive as decisive on the point of fact had been at last
carried only by ninety votes to sixty-eight. It should seem therefore
that, whatever moral conviction the Lords might feel of Duncombe's
guilt, they were bound, as righteous judges, to absolve him.

After much animated debate, they divided; and the bill was lost by
forty-eight votes to forty-seven. It was proposed by some of the
minority that proxies should be called; but this scandalous proposition
was strenuously resisted; and the House, to its great honour, resolved
that on questions which were substantially judicial, though they might
be in form legislative, no peer who was absent should be allowed to have
a voice.

Many of the Whig Lords protested. Among them were Orford and Wharton.
It is to be lamented that Burnet, and the excellent Hough, who was now
Bishop of Oxford, should have been impelled by party spirit to record
their dissent from a decision which all sensible and candid men will now
pronounce to have been just and salutary. Somers was present; but his
name is not attached to the protest which was subscribed by his brethren
of the junto. We may therefore not unreasonably infer that, on this as
on many other occasions, that wise and virtuous statesman disapproved of
the violence of his friends.

In rejecting the bill, the Lords had only exercised their indisputable
right. But they immediately proceeded to take a step of which the
legality was not equally clear. Rochester moved that Duncombe should be
set at liberty. The motion was carried; a warrant for the discharge of
the prisoner was sent to the Tower, and was obeyed without hesitation
by Lord Lucas, who was Lieutenant of that fortress. As soon as this was
known, the anger of the Commons broke forth with violence. It was by
their order that the upstart Duncombe had been put in ward. He was their
prisoner; and it was monstrous insolence in the Peers to release him.
The Peers defended what they had done by arguments which must be allowed
to have been ingenious, if not satisfactory. It was quite true that
Duncombe had originally been committed to the Tower by the Commons. But,
it was said, the Commons, by sending a penal bill against him to the
Lords, did, by necessary implication, send him also to the Lords. For
it was plainly impossible for the Lords to pass the bill without hearing
what he had to say against it. The Commons had felt this, and had not
complained when he had, without their consent, been brought from his
place of confinement, and set at the bar of the Peers. From that moment
he was the prisoner of the Peers. He had been taken back from the bar
to the Tower, not by virtue of the Speaker's warrant, of which the force
was spent, but by virtue of their order which had remanded him. They,
therefore, might with perfect propriety discharge him.

Whatever a jurist might have thought of these arguments, they had no
effect on the Commons. Indeed, violent as the spirit of party was in
those times, it was less violent than the spirit of caste. Whenever a
dispute arose between the two Houses, many members of both forgot that
they were Whigs or Tories, and remembered only that they were Patricians
or Plebeians. On this occasion nobody was louder in asserting the
privileges of the representatives of the people in opposition to the
encroachments of the nobility than Harley. Duncombe was again arrested
by the Serjeant at Arms, and remained in confinement till the end of the
session. Some eager men were for addressing the King to turn Lucas out
of office. This was not done; but during several days the ill humour
of the Lower House showed itself by a studied discourtesy. One of
the members was wanted as a witness in a matter which the Lords were
investigating. They sent two judges with a message requesting the
permission of the Commons to examine him. At any other time the judges
would have been called in immediately, and the permission would have
been granted as of course. But on this occasion the judges were kept
waiting some hours at the door; and such difficulties were made about
the permission that the Peers desisted from urging a request which
seemed likely to be ungraciously refused.

The attention of the Parliament was, during the remainder of the
session, chiefly occupied by commercial questions. Some of those
questions required so much investigation, and gave occasion to so much
dispute, that the prorogation did not take place till the fifth of July.
There was consequently some illness and much discontent among both Lords
and Commons. For, in that age, the London season usually ended soon
after the first notes of the cuckoo had been heard, and before the poles
had been decked for the dances and mummeries which welcomed the genial
May day of the ancient calendar. Since the year of the Revolution, a
year which was an exception to all ordinary rules, the members of the
two Houses had never been detained from their woods and haycocks even so
late as the beginning of June.

The Commons had, soon after they met, appointed a Committee to enquire
into the state of trade, and had referred to this Committee several
petitions from merchants and manufacturers who complained that they were
in danger of being undersold, and who asked for additional protection.

A highly curious report on the importation of silks and the exportation
of wool was soon presented to the House. It was in that age believed by
all but a very few speculative men that the sound commercial policy was
to keep out of the country the delicate and brilliantly tinted textures
of southern looms, and to keep in the country the raw material on which
most of our own looms were employed. It was now fully proved that,
during eight years of war, the textures which it was thought desirable
to keep out had been constantly coming in, and the material which it
was thought desirable to keep in had been constantly going out. This
interchange, an interchange, as it was imagined, pernicious to England,
had been chiefly managed by an association of Huguenot refugees,
residing in London. Whole fleets of boats with illicit cargoes had
been passing and repassing between Kent and Picardy. The loading and
unloading had taken place sometimes in Romney Marsh, sometimes on the
beach under the cliffs between Dover and Folkstone. All the inhabitants
of the south eastern coast were in the plot. It was a common saying
among them that, if a gallows were set up every quarter of a mile along
the coast, the trade would still go on briskly. It had been discovered,
some years before, that the vessels and the hiding places which were
necessary to the business of the smuggler had frequently afforded
accommodation to the traitor. The report contained fresh evidence upon
this point. It was proved that one of the contrabandists had provided
the vessel in which the ruffian O'Brien had carried Scum Goodman over to
France.

The inference which ought to have been drawn from these facts was that
the prohibitory system was absurd. That system had not destroyed the
trade which was so much dreaded, but had merely called into existence a
desperate race of men who, accustomed to earn their daily bread by the
breach of an unreasonable law, soon came to regard the most reasonable
laws with contempt, and, having begun by eluding the custom house
officers, ended by conspiring against the throne. And, if, in time of
war, when the whole Channel was dotted with our cruisers, it had been
found impossible to prevent the regular exchange of the fleeces of
Cotswold for the alamodes of Lyons, what chance was there that any
machinery which could be employed in time of peace would be more
efficacious? The politicians of the seventeenth century, however, were
of opinion that sharp laws sharply administered could not fail to save
Englishmen from the intolerable grievance of selling dear what could
be best produced by themselves, and of buying cheap what could be best
produced by others. The penalty for importing French silks was made
more severe. An Act was passed which gave to a joint stock company an
absolute monopoly of lustrings for a term of fourteen years. The fruit
of these wise counsels was such as might have been foreseen. French
silks were still imported; and, long before the term of fourteen years
had expired, the funds of the Lustring Company had been spent, its
offices had been shut up, and its very name had been forgotten at
Jonathan's and Garraway's.

Not content with prospective legislation, the Commons unanimously
determined to treat the offences which the Committee had brought to
light as high crimes against the State, and to employ against a few
cunning mercers in Nicholas Lane and the Old Jewry all the gorgeous and
cumbrous machinery which ought to be reserved for the delinquencies of
great Ministers and Judges. It was resolved, without a division, that
several Frenchmen and one Englishman who had been deeply concerned
in the contraband trade should be impeached. Managers were appointed;
articles were drawn up; preparations were made for fitting up
Westminster Hall with benches and scarlet hangings; and at one time
it was thought that the trials would last till the partridge shooting
began. But the defendants, having little hope of acquittal, and not
wishing that the Peers should come to the business of fixing the
punishment in the temper which was likely to be the effect of an
August passed in London, very wisely declined to give their lordships
unnecessary trouble, and pleaded guilty. The sentences were consequently
lenient. The French offenders were merely fined; and their fines
probably did not amount to a fifth part of the sums which they had
realised by unlawful traffic. The Englishman who had been active in
managing the escape of Goodman was both fined and imprisoned.

The progress of the woollen manufactures of Ireland excited even more
alarm and indignation than the contraband trade with France. The
French question indeed had been simply commercial. The Irish question,
originally commercial, became political. It was not merely the
prosperity of the clothiers of Wiltshire and of the West Riding that was
at stake; but the dignity of the Crown, the authority of the Parliament,
and the unity of the empire. Already might be discerned among the
Englishry, who were now, by the help and under the protection of the
mother country, the lords of the conquered island, some signs of a
spirit, feeble indeed, as yet, and such as might easily be put down by a
few resolute words, but destined to revive at long intervals, and to be
stronger and more formidable at every revival.

The person who on this occasion came forward as the champion of the
colonists, the forerunner of Swift and of Grattan, was William Molyneux.
He would have rejected the name of Irishman as indignantly as a citizen
of Marseilles or Cyrene, proud of his pure Greek blood, and fully
qualified to send a chariot to the Olympic race course, would have
rejected the name of Gaul or Libyan. He was, in the phrase of that
time, an English gentleman of family and fortune born in Ireland. He had
studied at the Temple, had travelled on the Continent, had become
well known to the most eminent scholars and philosophers of Oxford and
Cambridge, had been elected a member of the Royal Society of London, and
had been one of the founders of the Royal Society of Dublin. In the days
of Popish ascendancy he had taken refuge among his friends here; he
had returned to his home when the ascendancy of his own caste had been
reestablished; and he had been chosen to represent the University of
Dublin in the House of Commons. He had made great efforts to promote the
manufactures of the kingdom in which he resided; and he had found those
efforts impeded by an Act of the English Parliament which laid severe
restrictions on the exportation of woollen goods from Ireland. In
principle this Act was altogether indefensible. Practically it was
altogether unimportant. Prohibitions were not needed to prevent the
Ireland of the seventeenth century from being a great manufacturing
country; nor could the most liberal bounties have made her so. The
jealousy of commerce, however, is as fanciful and unreasonable as the
jealousy of love. The clothiers of Wilts and Yorkshire were weak enough
to imagine that they should be ruined by the competition of a half
barbarous island, an island where there was far less capital than in
England, where there was far less security for life and property than
in England, and where there was far less industry and energy among the
labouring classes than in England. Molyneux, on the other hand, had
the sanguine temperament of a projector. He imagined that, but for
the tyrannical interference of strangers, a Ghent would spring up
in Connemara, and a Bruges in the Bog of Allen. And what right had
strangers to interfere? Not content with showing that the law of which
he complained was absurd and unjust, he undertook to prove that it was
null and void. Early in the year 1698 he published and dedicated to the
King a treatise in which it was asserted in plain terms that the English
Parliament had no authority over Ireland.

Whoever considers without passion or prejudice the great constitutional
question which was thus for the first time raised will probably be
of opinion that Molyneux was in error. The right of the Parliament of
England to legislate for Ireland rested on the broad general principle
that the paramount authority of the mother country extends over all
colonies planted by her sons in all parts of the world. This principle
was the subject of much discussion at the time of the American troubles,
and was then maintained, without any reservation, not only by the
English Ministers, but by Burke and all the adherents of Rockingham,
and was admitted, with one single reservation, even by the Americans
themselves. Down to the moment of separation the Congress fully
acknowledged the competency of the King, Lords and Commons to make laws,
of any kind but one, for Massachusetts and Virginia. The only power
which such men as Washington and Franklin denied to the Imperial
legislature was the power of taxing. Within living memory, Acts which
have made great political and social revolutions in our Colonies have
been passed in this country; nor has the validity of those Acts ever
been questioned; and conspicuous among them were the law of 1807 which
abolished the slave trade, and the law of 1833 which abolished slavery.

The doctrine that the parent state has supreme power over the colonies
is not only borne out by authority and by precedent, but will appear,
when examined, to be in entire accordance with justice and with policy.
During the feeble infancy of colonies independence would be pernicious,
or rather fatal, to them. Undoubtedly, as they grow stronger and
stronger, it will be wise in the home government to be more and more
indulgent. No sensible parent deals with a son of twenty in the same way
as with a son of ten. Nor will any government not infatuated treat such
a province as Canada or Victoria in the way in which it might be proper
to treat a little band of emigrants who have just begun to build their
huts on a barbarous shore, and to whom the protection of the flag of
a great nation is indispensably necessary. Nevertheless, there cannot
really be more than one supreme power in a society. If, therefore, a
time comes at which the mother country finds it expedient altogether to
abdicate her paramount authority over a colony, one of two courses
ought to be taken. There ought to be complete incorporation, if
such incorporation be possible. If not, there ought to be complete
separation. Very few propositions in polities can be so perfectly
demonstrated as this, that parliamentary government cannot be carried on
by two really equal and independent parliaments in one empire.

And, if we admit the general rule to be that the English parliament is
competent to legislate for colonies planted by English subjects, what
reason was there for considering the case of the colony in Ireland as an
exception? For it is to be observed that the whole question was between
the mother country and the colony. The aboriginal inhabitants, more than
five sixths of the population, had no more interest in the matter than
the swine or the poultry; or, if they had an interest, it was for
their interest that the caste which domineered over them should not be
emancipated from all external control. They were no more represented in
the parliament which sate at Dublin than in the parliament which sate at
Westminster. They had less to dread from legislation at Westminster than
from legislation at Dublin. They were, indeed, likely to obtain but a
very scanty measure of justice from the English Tories, a more scanty
measure still from the English Whigs; but the most acrimonious English
Whig did not feel towards them that intense antipathy, compounded of
hatred, fear and scorn, with which they were regarded by the Cromwellian
who dwelt among them. [8] For the Irishry Molyneux, though boasting that
he was the champion of liberty, though professing to have learned his
political principles from Locke's writings, and though confidently
expecting Locke's applause, asked nothing but a more cruel and more
hopeless slavery. What he claimed was that, as respected the colony to
which he belonged, England should forego rights which she has exercised
and is still exercising over every other colony that she has ever
planted. And what reason could be given for making such a distinction?
No colony had owed so much to England. No colony stood in such need of
the support of England. Twice, within the memory of men then living, the
natives had attempted to throw off the alien yoke; twice the intruders
had been in imminent danger of extirpation; twice England had come to
the rescue, and had put down the Celtic population under the feet of
her own progeny. Millions of English money had been expended in the
struggle. English blood had flowed at the Boyne and at Athlone, at
Aghrim and at Limerick. The graves of thousands of English soldiers
had been dug in the pestilential morass of Dundalk. It was owing to the
exertions and sacrifices of the English people that, from the basaltic
pillars of Ulster to the lakes of Kerry, the Saxon settlers were
trampling on the children of the soil. The colony in Ireland was
therefore emphatically a dependency; a dependency, not merely by the
common law of the realm, but by the nature of things. It was absurd to
claim independence for a community which could not cease to be dependent
without ceasing to exist.

Molyneux soon found that he had ventured on a perilous undertaking. A
member of the English House of Commons complained in his place that
a book which attacked the most precious privileges of the supreme
legislature was in circulation. The volume was produced; some passages
were read; and a Committee was appointed to consider the whole subject.
The Committee soon reported that the obnoxious pamphlet was only one
of several symptoms which indicated a spirit such as ought to be
suppressed. The Crown of Ireland had been most improperly described in
public instruments as an imperial Crown. The Irish Lords and Commons had
presumed, not only to reenact an English Act passed expressly for
the purpose of binding them, but to reenact it with alterations. The
alterations were indeed small; but the alteration even of a letter was
tantamount to a declaration of independence. Several addresses were
voted without a division. The King was entreated to discourage all
encroachments of subordinate powers on the supreme authority of the
English legislature, to bring to justice the pamphleteer who had dared
to question that authority, to enforce the Acts which had been passed
for the protection of the woollen manufactures of England, and to direct
the industry and capital of Ireland into the channel of the linen trade,
a trade which might grow and flourish in Leinster and Ulster without
exciting the smallest jealousy at Norwich or at Halifax.

The King promised to do what the Commons asked; but in truth there was
little to be done. The Irish, conscious of their impotence, submitted
without a murmur. The Irish woollen manufacture languished and
disappeared, as it would, in all probability, have languished and
disappeared if it had been left to itself. Had Molyneux lived a few
months longer he would probably have been impeached. But the close of
the session was approaching; and before the Houses met again a timely
death had snatched him from their vengeance; and the momentous question
which had been first stirred by him slept a deep sleep till it was
revived in a more formidable shape, after the lapse of twenty-six years,
by the fourth letter of The Drapier.

Of the commercial questions which prolonged this session far into the
summer the most important respected India. Four years had elapsed since
the House of Commons had decided that all Englishmen had an equal right
to traffic in the Asiatic Seas, unless prohibited by Parliament; and in
that decision the King had thought it prudent to acquiesce. Any merchant
of London or Bristol might now fit out a ship for Bengal or for China,
without the least apprehension of being molested by the Admiralty or
sued in the Courts of Westminster. No wise man, however, was disposed
to stake a large sum on such a venture. For the vote which protected him
from annoyance here left him exposed to serious risks on the other
side of the Cape of Good Hope. The Old Company, though its exclusive
privileges were no more, and though its dividends had greatly
diminished, was still in existence, and still retained its castles and
warehouses, its fleet of fine merchantmen, and its able and zealous
factors, thoroughly qualified by a long experience to transact business
both in the palaces and in the bazaars of the East, and accustomed
to look for direction to the India House alone. The private trader
therefore still ran great risk of being treated as a smuggler, if not as
a pirate. He might indeed, if he was wronged, apply for redress to the
tribunals of his country. But years must elapse before his cause could
be heard; his witnesses must be conveyed over fifteen thousand miles
of sea; and in the meantime he was a ruined man. The experiment of free
trade with India had therefore been tried under every disadvantage, or,
to speak more correctly, had not been tried at all. The general opinion
had always been that some restriction was necessary; and that opinion
had been confirmed by all that had happened since the old restrictions
had been removed. The doors of the House of Commons were again besieged
by the two great contending factions of the City. The Old Company
offered, in return for a monopoly secured by law, a loan of seven
hundred thousand pounds; and the whole body of Tories was for accepting
the offer. But those indefatigable agitators who had, ever since the
Revolution, been striving to obtain a share in the trade of the Eastern
seas exerted themselves at this conjuncture more strenuously than ever,
and found a powerful patron in Montague.

That dexterous and eloquent statesman had two objects in view. One was
to obtain for the State, as the price of the monopoly, a sum much larger
than the Old Company was able to give. The other was to promote the
interest of his own party. Nowhere was the conflict between Whigs and
Tories sharper than in the City of London; and the influence of the City
of London was felt to the remotest corner of the realm. To elevate the
Whig section of that mighty commercial aristocracy which congregated
under the arches of the Royal Exchange, and to depress the Tory section,
had long been one of Montague's favourite schemes. He had already formed
one citadel in the heart of that great emporium; and he now thought that
it might be in his power to erect and garrison a second stronghold in a
position scarcely less commanding. It had often been said, in times of
civil war, that whoever was master of the Tower and of Tilbury Fort was
master of London. The fastnesses by means of which Montague proposed
to keep the capital obedient in times of peace and of constitutional
government were of a different kind. The Bank was one of his fortresses;
and he trusted that a new India House would be the other.

The task which he had undertaken was not an easy one. For, while his
opponents were united, his adherents were divided. Most of those who
were for a New Company thought that the New Company ought, like the Old
Company, to trade on a joint stock. But there were some who held that
our commerce with India would be best carried on by means of what is
called a regulated Company. There was a Turkey Company, the members of
which contributed to a general fund, and had in return the exclusive
privilege of trafficking with the Levant; but those members trafficked,
each on his own account; they forestalled each other; they undersold
each other; one became rich; another became bankrupt. The Corporation
meanwhile watched over the common interest of all the members, furnished
the Crown with the means of maintaining an embassy at Constantinople,
and placed at several important ports consuls and vice-consuls, whose
business was to keep the Pacha and the Cadi in good humour, and to
arbitrate in disputes among Englishmen. Why might not the same system be
found to answer in regions lying still further to the east? Why should
not every member of the New Company be at liberty to export European
commodities to the countries beyond the Cape, and to bring back shawls,
saltpetre and bohea to England, while the Company, in its collective
capacity, might treat with Asiatic potentates, or exact reparation
from them, and might be entrusted with powers for the administration of
justice and for the government of forts and factories?

Montague tried to please all those whose support was necessary to him;
and this he could effect only by bringing forward a plan so intricate
that it cannot without some pains be understood. He wanted two millions
to extricate the State from its financial embarrassments. That sum he
proposed to raise by a loan at eight per cent. The lenders might be
either individuals or corporations. But they were all, individuals and
corporations, to be united in a new corporation, which was to be called
the General Society. Every member of the General Society, whether
individual or corporation, might trade separately with India to an
extent not exceeding the amount which such member had advanced to the
government. But all the members or any of them might, if they so thought
fit, give up the privilege of trading separately, and unite themselves
under a royal Charter for the purpose of trading in common. Thus the
General Society was, by its original constitution, a regulated company;
but it was provided that either the whole Society or any part of it
might become a joint stock company.

The opposition to the scheme was vehement and pertinacious. The Old
Company presented petition after petition. The Tories, with Seymour at
their head, appealed both to the good faith and to the compassion of
Parliament. Much was said about the sanctity of the existing Charter,
and much about the tenderness due to the numerous families which had,
in reliance on that Charter, invested their substance in India stock. On
the other side there was no want of plausible topics or of skill to use
them. Was it not strange that those who talked so much about the Charter
should have altogether overlooked the very clause of the Charter on
which the whole question turned? That clause expressly reserved to
the government power of revocation, after three years' notice, if the
Charter should not appear to be beneficial to the public. The Charter
had not been found beneficial to the public; the three years' notice
should be given; and in the year 1701 the revocation would take effect.
What could be fairer? If anybody was so weak as to imagine that the
privileges of the Old Company were perpetual, when the very instrument
which created those privileges expressly declared them to be terminable,
what right had he to blame the Parliament, which was bound to do the
best for the State, for not saving him, at the expense of the State,
from the natural punishment of his own folly? It was evident that
nothing was proposed inconsistent with strict justice. And what right
had the Old Company to more than strict justice? These petitioners
who implored the legislature to deal indulgently with them in their
adversity, how had they used their boundless prosperity? Had not the
India House recently been the very den of corruption, the tainted spot
from which the plague had spread to the Court and the Council, to the
House of Commons and the House of Lords? Were the disclosures of 1695
forgotten, the eighty thousand pounds of secret service money disbursed
in one year, the enormous bribes direct and indirect, Seymour's
saltpetre contracts, Leeds's bags of golds? By the malpractices which
the inquiry in the Exchequer Chamber then brought to light, the Charter
had been forfeited; and it would have been well if the forfeiture had
been immediately enforced. "Had not time then pressed," said Montague,
"had it not been necessary that the session should close, it is probable
that the petitioners, who now cry out that they cannot get justice,
would have got more justice than they desired. If they had been called
to account for great and real wrong in 1695, we should not have had them
here complaining of imaginary wrong in 1698."

The fight was protracted by the obstinacy and dexterity of the Old
Company and its friends from the first week of May to the last week in
June. It seems that many even of Montague's followers doubted whether
the promised two millions would be forthcoming. His enemies confidently
predicted that the General Society would be as complete a failure as the
Land Bank had been in the year before the last, and that he would in the
autumn find himself in charge of an empty exchequer. His activity and
eloquence, however, prevailed. On the twenty-sixth of June, after many
laborious sittings, the question was put that this Bill do pass, and was
carried by one hundred and fifteen votes to seventy-eight. In the upper
House, the conflict was short and sharp. Some peers declared that, in
their opinion, the subscription to the proposed loan, far from amounting
to the two millions which the Chancellor of the Exchequer expected,
would fall far short of one million. Others, with much reason,
complained that a law of such grave importance should have been sent up
to them in such a shape that they must either take the whole or throw
out the whole. The privilege of the Commons with respect to money bills
had of late been grossly abused. The Bank had been created by one money
bill; this General Society was to be created by another money bill. Such
a bill the Lords could not amend; they might indeed reject it; but to
reject it was to shake the foundations of public credit and to leave
the kingdom defenceless. Thus one branch of the legislature was
systematically put under duress by the other, and seemed likely to
be reduced to utter insignificance. It was better that the government
should be once pinched for money than that the House of Peers should
cease to be part of the Constitution. So strong was this feeling that
the Bill was carried only by sixty-five to forty-eight. It received
the royal sanction on the fifth of July. The King then spoke from the
throne. This was the first occasion on which a King of England
had spoken to a Parliament of which the existence was about to be
terminated, not by his own act, but by the act of the law. He could
not, he said, take leave of the Lords and Gentlemen before him without
publicly acknowledging the great things which they had done for his
dignity and for the welfare of the nation. He recounted the chief
services which they had, during three eventful sessions, rendered to
the country. "These things will," he said, "give a lasting reputation to
this Parliament, and will be a subject of emulation to Parliaments which
shall come after." The Houses were then prorogued.

During the week which followed there was some anxiety as to the result
of the subscription for the stock of the General Society. If that
subscription failed, there would be a deficit; public credit would be
shaken; and Montague would be regarded as a pretender who had owed his
reputation to a mere run of good luck, and who had tempted chance
once too often. But the event was such as even his sanguine spirit had
scarcely ventured to anticipate. At one in the afternoon of the 14th
of July the books were opened at the Hall of the Company of Mercers in
Cheapside. An immense crowd was already collected in the street. As
soon as the doors were flung wide, wealthy citizens, with their money
in their hands, pressed in, pushing and elbowing each other. The guineas
were paid down faster than the clerks could count them. Before night six
hundred thousand pounds had been subscribed. The next day the throng was
as great. More than one capitalist put down his name for thirty thousand
pounds. To the astonishment of those ill boding politicians who were
constantly repeating that the war, the debt, the taxes, the grants to
Dutch courtiers, had ruined the kingdom, the sum, which it had been
doubted whether England would be able to raise in many weeks, was
subscribed by London in a few hours. The applications from the
provincial towns and rural districts came too late. The merchants of
Bristol had intended to take three hundred thousand pounds of the stock,
but had waited to learn how the subscription went on before they gave
their final orders; and, by the time that the mail had gone down to
Bristol and returned, there was no more stock to be had.

This was the moment at which the fortunes of Montague reached the
meridian. The decline was close at hand. His ability and his constant
success were everywhere talked of with admiration and envy. That man, it
was commonly said, has never wanted, and never will want, an expedient.

During the long and busy session which had just closed, some interesting
and important events had taken place which may properly be mentioned
here. One of those events was the destruction of the most celebrated
palace in which the sovereigns of England have ever dwelt. On the
evening of the 4th of January, a woman,--the patriotic journalists
and pamphleteers of that time did not fail to note that she was a
Dutchwoman,--who was employed as a laundress at Whitehall, lighted a
charcoal fire in her room and placed some linen round it. The linen
caught fire and burned furiously. The tapestry, the bedding, the
wainscots were soon in a blaze. The unhappy woman who had done the
mischief perished. Soon the flames burst out of the windows. All
Westminster, all the Strand, all the river were in commotion. Before
midnight the King's apartments, the Queen's apartments, the Wardrobe,
the Treasury, the office of the Privy Council, the office of the
Secretary of State, had been destroyed. The two chapels perished
together; that ancient chapel where Wolsey had heard mass in the midst
of gorgeous copes, golden candlesticks, and jewelled crosses, and that
modern edifice which had been erected for the devotions of James and
had been embellished by the pencil of Verrio and the chisel of Gibbons.
Meanwhile a great extent of building had been blown up; and it was hoped
that by this expedient a stop had been put to the conflagration. But
early in the morning a new fire broke out of the heaps of combustible
matter which the gunpowder had scattered to right and left. The guard
room was consumed. No trace was left of that celebrated gallery which
had witnessed so many balls and pageants, in which so many maids of
honour had listened too easily to the vows and flatteries of gallants,
and in which so many bags of gold had changed masters at the hazard
table. During some time men despaired of the Banqueting House. The
flames broke in on the south of that beautiful hall, and were with great
difficulty extinguished by the exertions of the guards, to whom Cutts,
mindful of his honourable nickname of the Salamander, set as good an
example on this night of terror as he had set in the breach of Namur.
Many lives were lost, and many grievous wounds were inflicted by the
falling masses of stone and timber, before the fire was effectually
subdued. When day broke, the heaps of smoking ruins spread from Scotland
Yard to the Bowling Green, where the mansion of the Duke of Buccleuch
now stands. The Banqueting House was safe; but the graceful columns and
festoons designed by Inigo were so much defaced and blackened that their
form could hardly be discerned. There had been time to move the most
valuable effects which were moveable. Unfortunately some of Holbein's
finest pictures were painted on the walls, and are consequently known to
us only by copies and engravings. The books of the Treasury and of the
Privy Council were rescued, and are still preserved. The Ministers
whose offices had been burned down were provided with new offices in the
neighbourhood. Henry the Eighth had built, close to St. James's Park,
two appendages to the Palace of Whitehall, a cockpit and a tennis court.
The Treasury now occupies the site of the cockpit, the Privy Council
Office the site of the tennis court.

Notwithstanding the many associations which make the name of Whitehall
still interesting to an Englishman, the old building was little
regretted. It was spacious indeed and commodious, but mean and
inelegant. The people of the capital had been annoyed by the scoffing
way in which foreigners spoke of the principal residence of our
sovereigns, and often said that it was a pity that the great fire had
not spared the old portico of St. Paul's and the stately arcades of
Gresham's Bourse, and taken in exchange that ugly old labyrinth of dingy
brick and plastered timber. It might now be hoped that we should have
a Louvre. Before the ashes of the old palace were cold, plans for a new
palace were circulated and discussed. But William, who could not draw
his breath in the air of Westminster, was little disposed to expend
a million on a house which it would have been impossible for him
to inhabit. Many blamed him for not restoring the dwelling of his
predecessors; and a few Jacobites, whom evil temper and repeated
disappointments had driven almost mad, accused him of having burned it
down. It was not till long after his death that Tory writers ceased to
call for the rebuilding of Whitehall, and to complain that the King of
England had no better town house than St. James's, while the delightful
spot where the Tudors and the Stuarts had held their councils and their
revels was covered with the mansions of his jobbing courtiers. [9]

In the same week in which Whitehall perished, the Londoners were
supplied with a new topic of conversation by a royal visit, which, of
all royal visits, was the least pompous and ceremonious and yet the most
interesting and important. On the 10th of January a vessel from Holland
anchored off Greenwich and was welcomed with great respect. Peter the
First, Czar of Muscovy, was on board. He took boat with a few attendants
and was rowed up the Thames to Norfolk Street, where a house overlooking
the river had been prepared for his reception.

His journey is an epoch in the history, not only of his own country, but
of our's, and of the world. To the polished nations of Western Europe,
the empire which he governed had till then been what Bokhara or Siam is
to us. That empire indeed, though less extensive than at present, was
the most extensive that had ever obeyed a single chief. The dominions of
Alexander and of Trajan were small when compared with the immense
area of the Scythian desert. But in the estimation of statesmen that
boundless expanse of larch forest and morass, where the snow lay deep
during eight months of every year, and where a wretched peasantry could
with difficulty defend their hovels against troops of famished wolves,
was of less account than the two or three square miles into which were
crowded the counting houses, the warehouses, and the innumerable masts
of Amsterdam. On the Baltic Russia had not then a single port. Her
maritime trade with the other rations of Christendom was entirely
carried on at Archangel, a place which had been created and was
supported by adventurers from our island. In the days of the Tudors, a
ship from England, seeking a north east passage to the land of silk and
spice, had discovered the White Sea. The barbarians who dwelt on the
shores of that dreary gulf had never before seen such a portent as a
vessel of a hundred and sixty tons burden. They fled in terror; and,
when they were pursued and overtaken, prostrated themselves before the
chief of the strangers and kissed his feet. He succeeded in opening a
friendly communication with them; and from that time there had been a
regular commercial intercourse between our country and the subjects
of the Czar. A Russia Company was incorporated in London. An English
factory was built at Archangel. That factory was indeed, even in the
latter part of the seventeenth century, a rude and mean building. The
walls consisted of trees laid one upon another; and the roof was of
birch bark. This shelter, however, was sufficient in the long summer day
of the Arctic regions. Regularly at that season several English ships
cast anchor in the bay. A fair was held on the beach. Traders came from
a distance of many hundreds of miles to the only mart where they could
exchange hemp and tar, hides and tallow, wax and honey, the fur of the
sable and the wolverine, and the roe of the sturgeon of the Volga, for
Manchester stuffs, Sheffield knives, Birmingham buttons, sugar from
Jamaica and pepper from Malabar. The commerce in these articles was
open. But there was a secret traffic which was not less active or less
lucrative, though the Russian laws had made it punishable, and though
the Russian divines pronounced it damnable. In general the mandates of
princes and the lessons of priests were received by the Muscovite with
profound reverence. But the authority of his princes and of his priests
united could not keep him from tobacco. Pipes he could not obtain; but
a cow's horn perforated served his turn. From every Archangel fair rolls
of the best Virginia speedily found their way to Novgorod and Tobolsk.

The commercial intercourse between England and Russia made some
diplomatic intercourse necessary. The diplomatic intercourse however
was only occasional. The Czar had no permanent minister here. We had no
permanent minister at Moscow; and even at Archangel we had no consul.
Three or four times in a century extraordinary embassies were sent from
Whitehall to the Kremlin and from the Kremlin to Whitehall.

The English embassies had historians whose narratives may still be
read with interest. Those historians described vividly, and sometimes
bitterly, the savage ignorance and the squalid poverty of the barbarous
country in which they had sojourned. In that country, they said, there
was neither literature nor science, neither school nor college. It was
not till more than a hundred years after the invention of printing that
a single printing press had been introduced into the Russian empire; and
that printing press had speedily perished in a fire which was supposed
to have been kindled by the priests. Even in the seventeenth century
the library of a prelate of the first dignity consisted of a few
manuscripts. Those manuscripts too were in long rolls; for the art of
bookbinding was unknown. The best educated men could barely read and
write. It was much if the secretary to whom was entrusted the direction
of negotiations with foreign powers had a sufficient smattering of Dog
Latin to make himself understood. The arithmetic was the arithmetic of
the dark ages. The denary notation was unknown. Even in the Imperial
Treasury the computations were made by the help of balls strung on
wires. Round the person of the Sovereign there was a blaze of gold and
jewels; but even in his most splendid palaces were to be found the filth
and misery of an Irish cabin. So late as the year 1663 the gentlemen of
the retinue of the Earl of Carlisle were, in the city of Moscow, thrust
into a single bedroom, and were told that, if they did not remain
together, they would be in danger of being devoured by rats.

Such was the report which the English legations made of what they had
seen and suffered in Russia; and their evidence was confirmed by the
appearance which the Russian legations made in England. The strangers
spoke no civilised language. Their garb, their gestures, their
salutations, had a wild and barbarous character. The ambassador and the
grandees who accompanied him were so gorgeous that all London crowded to
stare at them, and so filthy that nobody dared to touch them. They came
to the court balls dropping pearls and vermin. It was said that one
envoy cudgelled the lords of his train whenever they soiled or lost
any part of their finery, and that another had with difficulty been
prevented from putting his son to death for the crime of shaving and
dressing after the French fashion.

Our ancestors therefore were not a little surprised to learn that a
young barbarian, who had, at seventeen years of age, become the autocrat
of the immense region stretching from the confines of Sweden to those
of China, and whose education had been inferior to that of an English
farmer or shopman, had planned gigantic improvements, had learned enough
of some languages of Western Europe to enable him to communicate with
civilised men, had begun to surround himself with able adventurers from
various parts of the world, had sent many of his young subjects to
study languages, arts and sciences in foreign cities, and finally had
determined to travel as a private man, and to discover, by personal
observation, the secret of the immense prosperity and power enjoyed by
some communities whose whole territory was far less than the hundredth
part of his dominions.

It might have been expected that France would have been the first object
of his curiosity. For the grace and dignity of the French King, the
splendour of the French Court, the discipline of the French armies, and
the genius and learning of the French writers, were then renowned all
over the world. But the Czar's mind had early taken a strange ply which
it retained to the last. His empire was of all empires the least capable
of being made a great naval power. The Swedish provinces lay between his
States and the Baltic. The Bosporus and the Dardanelles lay between
his States and the Mediterranean. He had access to the ocean only in
a latitude in which navigation is, during a great part of every
year, perilous and difficult. On the ocean he had only a single port,
Archangel; and the whole shipping of Archangel was foreign. There did
not exist a Russian vessel larger than a fishing-boat. Yet, from some
cause which cannot now be traced, he had a taste for maritime pursuits
which amounted to a passion, indeed almost to a monomania. His
imagination was full of sails, yardarms, and rudders. That large mind,
equal to the highest duties of the general and the statesman, contracted
itself to the most minute details of naval architecture and naval
discipline. The chief ambition of the great conqueror and legislator was
to be a good boatswain and a good ship's carpenter. Holland and England
therefore had for him an attraction which was wanting to the galleries
and terraces of Versailles. He repaired to Amsterdam, took a lodging in
the dockyard, assumed the garb of a pilot, put down his name on the list
of workmen, wielded with his own hand the caulking iron and the mallet,
fixed the pumps, and twisted the ropes. Ambassadors who came to pay
their respects to him were forced, much against their will, to clamber
up the rigging of a man of war, and found him enthroned on the cross
trees.

Such was the prince whom the populace of London now crowded to behold.
His stately form, his intellectual forehead, his piercing black eyes,
his Tartar nose and mouth, his gracious smile, his frown black with all
the stormy rage and hate of a barbarian tyrant, and above all a strange
nervous convulsion which sometimes transformed his countenance during a
few moments, into an object on which it was impossible to look without
terror, the immense quantities of meat which he devoured, the pints
of brandy which he swallowed, and which, it was said, he had carefully
distilled with his own hands, the fool who jabbered at his feet, the
monkey which grinned at the back of his chair, were, during some weeks,
popular topics of conversation. He meanwhile shunned the public gaze
with a haughty shyness which inflamed curiosity. He went to a play; but,
as soon as he perceived that pit, boxes and galleries were staring,
not at the stage, but at him, he retired to a back bench where he was
screened from observation by his attendants. He was desirous to see a
sitting of the House of Lords; but, as he was determined not to be seen,
he was forced to climb up to the leads, and to peep through a small
window. He heard with great interest the royal assent given to a bill
for raising fifteen hundred thousand pounds by land tax, and learned
with amazement that this sum, though larger by one half than the whole
revenue which he could wring from the population of the immense empire
of which he was absolute master, was but a small part of what
the Commons of England voluntarily granted every year to their
constitutional King.

William judiciously humoured the whims of his illustrious guest, and
stole to Norfolk Street so quietly that nobody in the neighbourhood
recognised His Majesty in the thin gentleman who got out of the modest
looking coach at the Czar's lodgings. The Czar returned the visit with
the same precautions, and was admitted into Kensington House by a
back door. It was afterwards known that he took no notice of the fine
pictures with which the palace was adorned. But over the chimney of
the royal sitting room was a plate which, by an ingenious machinery,
indicated the direction of the wind; and with this plate he was in
raptures.

He soon became weary of his residence. He found that he was too far from
the objects of his curiosity, and too near to the crowds to which he was
himself an object of curiosity. He accordingly removed to Deptford, and
was there lodged in the house of John Evelyn, a house which had long
been a favourite resort of men of letters, men of taste and men of
science. Here Peter gave himself up to his favourite pursuits. He
navigated a yacht every day up and down the river. His apartment was
crowded with models of three deckers and two deckers, frigates, sloops
and fireships. The only Englishman of rank in whose society he seemed to
take much pleasure was the eccentric Caermarthen, whose passion for the
sea bore some resemblance to his own, and who was very competent to
give an opinion about every part of a ship from the stem to the stern.
Caermarthen, indeed, became so great a favourite that he prevailed on
the Czar to consent to the admission of a limited quantity of tobacco
into Russia. There was reason to apprehend that the Russian clergy
would cry out against any relaxation of the ancient rule, and would
strenuously maintain that the practice of smoking was condemned by that
text which declares that man is defiled, not by those things which enter
in at the mouth, but by those which proceed out of it. This apprehension
was expressed by a deputation of merchants who were admitted to an
audience of the Czar; but they were reassured by the air with which he
told them that he knew how to keep priests in order.

He was indeed so free from any bigoted attachment to the religion in
which he had been brought up that both Papists and Protestants hoped
at different times to make him a proselyte. Burnet, commissioned by his
brethren, and impelled, no doubt, by his own restless curiosity and
love of meddling, repaired to Deptford and was honoured with several
audiences. The Czar could not be persuaded to exhibit himself at Saint
Paul's; but he was induced to visit Lambeth palace. There he saw the
ceremony of ordination performed, and expressed warm approbation of
the Anglican ritual. Nothing in England astonished him so much as the
Archiepiscopal library. It was the first good collection of books that
he had seen; and he declared that he had never imagined that there were
so many printed volumes in the world.

The impression which he made on Burnet was not favourable. The good
bishop could not understand that a mind which seemed to be chiefly
occupied with questions about the best place for a capstan and the best
way of rigging a jury mast might be capable, not merely of ruling an
empire, but of creating a nation. He complained that he had gone to see
a great prince, and had found only an industrious shipwright. Nor does
Evelyn seem to have formed a much more favourable opinion of his august
tenant. It was, indeed, not in the character of tenant that the Czar
was likely to gain the good word of civilised men. With all the high
qualities which were peculiar to himself, he had all the filthy habits
which were then common among his countrymen. To the end of his life,
while disciplining armies, founding schools, framing codes, organising
tribunals, building cities in deserts, joining distant seas by
artificial rivers, he lived in his palace like a hog in a sty; and, when
he was entertained by other sovereigns, never failed to leave on their
tapestried walls and velvet state beds unequivocal proof that a savage
had been there. Evelyn's house was left in such a state that the
Treasury quieted his complaints with a considerable sum of money.

Towards the close of March the Czar visited Portsmouth, saw a sham
seafight at Spithead, watched every movement of the contending fleets
with intense interest, and expressed in warm terms his gratitude to the
hospitable government which had provided so delightful a spectacle for
his amusement and instruction. After passing more than three months in
England, he departed in high good humour. [10]

His visit, his singular character, and what was rumoured of his great
designs, excited much curiosity here, but nothing more than curiosity.
England had as yet nothing to hope or to fear from his vast empire. All
her serious apprehensions were directed towards a different quarter.
None could say how soon France, so lately an enemy, might be an enemy
again.

The new diplomatic relations between the two great western powers were
widely different from those which had existed before the war. During the
eighteen years which had elapsed between the signing of the Treaty
of Dover and the Revolution, all the envoys who had been sent from
Whitehall to Versailles had been mere sycophants of the great King.
In England the French ambassador had been the object of a degrading
worship. The chiefs of both the great parties had been his pensioners
and his tools. The ministers of the Crown had paid him open homage. The
leaders of the opposition had stolen into his house by the back door.
Kings had stooped to implore his good offices, had persecuted him
for money with the importunity of street beggars; and, when they
had succeeded in obtaining from him a box of doubloons or a bill of
exchange, had embraced him with tears of gratitude and joy. But those
days were past. England would never again send a Preston or a Skelton to
bow down before the majesty of France. France would never again send
a Barillon to dictate to the cabinet of England. Henceforth the
intercourse between the two states would be on terms of perfect
equality.

William thought it necessary that the minister who was to represent him
at the French Court should be a man of the first consideration, and one
on whom entire reliance could be reposed. Portland was chosen for this
important and delicate mission; and the choice was eminently judicious.
He had, in the negotiations of the preceding year, shown more ability
than was to be found in the whole crowd of formalists who had been
exchanging notes and drawing up protocols at Ryswick. Things which had
been kept secret from the plenipotentiaries who had signed the treaty
were well known to him. The clue of the whole foreign policy of England
and Holland was in his possession. His fidelity and diligence were
beyond all praise. These were strong recommendations. Yet it seemed
strange to many that William should have been willing to part, for a
considerable time, from a companion with whom he had during a quarter of
a century lived on terms of entire confidence and affection. The truth
was that the confidence was still what it had long been, but that the
affection, though it was not yet extinct, though it had not even cooled,
had become a cause of uneasiness to both parties. Till very recently,
the little knot of personal friends who had followed William from his
native land to his place of splendid banishment had been firmly united.
The aversion which the English nation felt for them had given him much
pain; but he had not been annoyed by any quarrel among themselves.
Zulestein and Auverquerque had, without a murmur, yielded to Portland
the first place in the royal favour; nor had Portland grudged to
Zulestein and Auverquerque very solid and very signal proofs of their
master's kindness. But a younger rival had lately obtained an influence
which created much jealousy. Among the Dutch gentlemen who had sailed
with the Prince of Orange from Helvoetsluys to Torbay was one named
Arnold Van Keppel. Keppel had a sweet and obliging temper, winning
manners, and a quick, though not a profound, understanding. Courage,
loyalty and secresy were common between him and Portland. In other
points they differed widely. Portland was naturally the very opposite
of a flatterer, and, having been the intimate friend of the Prince of
Orange at a time when the interval between the House of Orange and the
House of Bentinck was not so wide as it afterwards became, had acquired
a habit of plain speaking which he could not unlearn when the comrade
of his youth had become the sovereign of three kingdoms. He was a most
trusty, but not a very respectful, subject. There was nothing which he
was not ready to do or suffer for William. But in his intercourse with
William he was blunt and sometimes surly. Keppel, on the other hand, had
a great desire to please, and looked up with unfeigned admiration to
a master whom he had been accustomed, ever since he could remember,
to consider as the first of living men. Arts, therefore, which were
neglected by the elder courtier were assiduously practised by the
younger. So early as the spring of 1691 shrewd observers were struck
by the manner in which Keppel watched every turn of the King's eye, and
anticipated the King's unuttered wishes. Gradually the new servant rose
into favour. He was at length made Earl of Albemarle and Master of the
Robes. But his elevation, though it furnished the Jacobites with a fresh
topic for calumny and ribaldry, was not so offensive to the nation as
the elevation of Portland had been. Portland's manners were thought
dry and haughty; but envy was disarmed by the blandness of Albemarle's
temper and by the affability of his deportment.

Portland, though strictly honest, was covetous; Albemarle was generous.
Portland had been naturalised here only in name and form; but Albemarle
affected to have forgotten his own country, and to have become an
Englishman in feelings and manners. The palace was soon disturbed by
quarrels in which Portland seems to have been always the aggressor, and
in which he found little support either among the English or among
his own countrymen. William, indeed, was not the man to discard an old
friend for a new one. He steadily gave, on all occasions, the preference
to the companion of his youthful days. Portland had the first place
in the bed-chamber. He held high command in the army. On all great
occasions he was trusted and consulted. He was far more powerful in
Scotland than the Lord High Commissioner, and far deeper in the secret
of foreign affairs than the Secretary of State. He wore the Garter,
which sovereign princes coveted. Lands and money had been bestowed on
him so liberally that he was one of the richest subjects in Europe.
Albemarle had as yet not even a regiment; he had not been sworn of the
Council; and the wealth which he owed to the royal bounty was a pittance
when compared with the domains and the hoards of Portland. Yet Portland
thought himself aggrieved. He could not bear to see any other person
near him, though below him, in the royal favour. In his fits of
resentful sullenness, he hinted an intention of retiring from the Court.
William omitted nothing that a brother could have done to soothe and
conciliate a brother. Letters are still extant in which he, with the
utmost solemnity, calls God to witness that his affection for Bentinck
still is what it was in their early days. At length a compromise was
made. Portland, disgusted with Kensington, was not sorry to go to France
as ambassador; and William with deep emotion consented to a separation
longer than had ever taken place during an intimacy of twenty-five
years. A day or two after the new plenipotentiary had set out on his
mission, he received a touching letter from his master. "The loss
of your society," the King wrote, "has affected me more than you can
imagine. I should be very glad if I could believe that you felt as much
pain at quitting me as I felt at seeing you depart; for then I might
hope that you had ceased to doubt the truth of what I so solemnly
declared to you on my oath. Assure yourself that I never was more
sincere. My feeling towards you is one which nothing but death can
alter." It should seem that the answer returned to these affectionate
assurances was not perfectly gracious; for, when the King next wrote, he
gently complained of an expression which had wounded him severely.

But, though Portland was an unreasonable and querulous friend, he was
a most faithful and zealous minister. His despatches show how
indefatigably he toiled for the interests, and how punctiliously he
guarded the dignity, of the prince by whom he imagined that he had been
unjustly and unkindly treated.

The embassy was the most magnificent that England had ever sent to any
foreign court. Twelve men of honourable birth and ample fortune, some of
whom afterwards filled high offices in the State, attended the mission
at their own charge. Each of them had his own carriage, his own horses,
and his own train of servants. Two less wealthy persons, who, in
different ways, attained great note in literature, were of the company.
Rapin, whose history of England might have been found, a century ago,
in every library, was the preceptor of the ambassador's eldest son,
Lord Woodstock. Prior was Secretary of Legation. His quick parts,
his industry, his politeness, and his perfect knowledge of the French
language, marked him out as eminently fitted for diplomatic employment.
He had, however, found much difficulty in overcoming an odd prejudice
which his chief had conceived against him. Portland, with good natural
abilities and great expertness in business, was no scholar. He had
probably never read an English book; but he had a general notion,
unhappily but too well founded, that the wits and poets who congregated
at Will's were a most profane and licentious set; and, being himself a
man of orthodox opinions and regular life, he was not disposed to give
his confidence to one whom he supposed to be a ribald scoffer. Prior,
with much address, and perhaps with the help of a little hypocrisy,
completely removed this unfavourable impression. He talked on serious
subjects seriously, quoted the New Testament appositely, vindicated
Hammond from the charge of popery, and, by way of a decisive blow, gave
the definition of a true Church from the nineteenth Article. Portland
stared at him. "I am glad, Mr. Prior, to find you so good a Christian. I
was afraid that you were an atheist." "An atheist, my good lord!" cried
Prior. "What could lead your Lordship to entertain such a suspicion?"
"Why," said Portland, "I knew that you were a poet; and I took it for
granted that you did not believe in God." "My lord," said the wit, "you
do us poets the greatest injustice. Of all people we are the farthest
from atheism. For the atheists do not even worship the true God, whom
the rest of mankind acknowledge; and we are always invoking and hymning
false gods whom everybody else has renounced." This jest will be
perfectly intelligible to all who remember the eternally recurring
allusions to Venus and Minerva, Mars, Cupid and Apollo, which were meant
to be the ornaments, and are the blemishers, of Prior's compositions.
But Portland was much puzzled. However, he declared himself satisfied;
and the young diplomatist withdrew, laughing to think with how little
learning a man might shine in courts, lead armies, negotiate treaties,
obtain a coronet and a garter, and leave a fortune of half a million.

The citizens of Paris and the courtiers of Versailles, though more
accustomed than the Londoners to magnificent pageantry, allowed that no
minister from any foreign state had ever made so superb an appearance
as Portland. His horses, his liveries, his plate, were unrivalled. His
state carriage, drawn by eight fine Neapolitan greys decorated with
orange ribands, was specially admired. On the day of his public entry
the streets, the balconies, and the windows were crowded with spectators
along a line of three miles. As he passed over the bridge on which the
statue of Henry IV. stands, he was much amused by hearing one of the
crowd exclaim: "Was it not this gentleman's master that we burned on
this very bridge eight years ago?" The Ambassador's hotel was constantly
thronged from morning to night by visitors in plumes and embroidery.
Several tables were sumptuously spread every day under his roof; and
every English traveller of decent station and character was welcome
to dine there. The board at which the master of the house presided in
person, and at which he entertained his most distinguished guests,
was said to be more luxurious than that of any prince of the House of
Bourbon. For there the most exquisite cookery of France was set off by a
certain neatness and comfort which then, as now, peculiarly belonged to
England. During the banquet the room was filled with people of fashion,
who went to see the grandees eat and drink. The expense of all this
splendour and hospitality was enormous, and was exaggerated by report.
The cost to the English government really was fifty thousand pounds in
five months. It is probable that the opulent gentlemen who accompanied
the mission as volunteers laid out nearly as much more from their
private resources.

The malecontents at the coffeehouses of London murmured at this
profusion, and accused William of ostentation. But, as this fault was
never, on any other occasion, imputed to him even by his detractors,
we may not unreasonably attribute to policy what to superficial
or malicious observers seemed to be vanity. He probably thought it
important, at the commencement of a new era in the relations between the
two great kingdoms of the West, to hold high the dignity of the Crown
which he wore. He well knew, indeed, that the greatness of a prince
does not depend on piles of silver bowls and chargers, trains of gilded
coaches, and multitudes of running footmen in brocade, and led horses in
velvet housings. But he knew also that the subjects of Lewis had, during
the long reign of their magnificent sovereign, been accustomed to see
power constantly associated with pomp, and would hardly believe that the
substance existed unless they were dazzled by the trappings.

If the object of William was to strike the imagination of the French
people, he completely succeeded. The stately and gorgeous appearance
which the English embassy made on public occasions was, during some
time, the general topic of conversation at Paris. Portland enjoyed a
popularity which contrasts strangely with the extreme unpopularity which
he had incurred in England. The contrast will perhaps seem less strange
when we consider what immense sums he had accumulated at the expense of
the English, and what immense sums he was laying out for the benefit
of the French. It must also be remembered that he could not confer or
correspond with Englishmen in their own language, and that the French
tongue was at least as familiar to him, as that of his native Holland.
He, therefore, who here was called greedy, niggardly, dull, brutal, whom
one English nobleman had described as a block of wood, and another as
just capable of carrying a message right, was in the brilliant circles
of France considered as a model of grace, of dignity and of munificence,
as a dexterous negotiator and a finished gentleman. He was the better
liked because he was a Dutchman. For, though fortune had favoured
William, though considerations of policy had induced the Court of
Versailles to acknowledge him, he was still, in the estimation of
that Court, an usurper; and his English councillors and captains were
perjured traitors who richly deserved axes and halters, and might,
perhaps, get what they deserved. But Bentinck was not to be confounded
with Leeds and Marlborough, Orford and Godolphin. He had broken no oath,
had violated no law. He owed no allegiance to the House of Stuart; and
the fidelity and zeal with which he had discharged his duties to his
own country and his own master entitled him to respect. The noble and
powerful vied with each other in paying honour to the stranger.

The Ambassador was splendidly entertained by the Duke of Orleans at St.
Cloud, and by the Dauphin at Meudon. A Marshal of France was charged to
do the honours of Marli; and Lewis graciously expressed his concern that
the frosts of an ungenial spring prevented the fountains and flower beds
from appearing to advantage. On one occasion Portland was distinguished,
not only by being selected to hold the waxlight in the royal bedroom,
but by being invited to go within the balustrade which surrounded the
couch, a magic circle which the most illustrious foreigners had hitherto
found impassable. The Secretary shared largely in the attentions which
were paid to his chief. The Prince of Conde took pleasure in talking
with him on literary subjects. The courtesy of the aged Bossuet, the
glory of the Church of Rome, was long gratefully remembered by the
young heretic. Boileau had the good sense and good feeling to exchange a
friendly greeting with the aspiring novice who had administered to him a
discipline as severe as he had administered to Quinault. The great King
himself warmly praised Prior's manners and conversation, a circumstance
which will be thought remarkable when it is remembered that His
Majesty was an excellent model and an excellent judge of gentlemanlike
deportment, and that Prior had passed his boyhood in drawing corks at
a tavern, and his early manhood in the seclusion of a college. The
Secretary did not however carry his politeness so far as to refrain from
asserting, on proper occasions, the dignity of his country and of his
master. He looked coldly on the twenty-one celebrated pictures in which
Le Brun had represented on the coifing of the gallery of Versailles
the exploits of Lewis. When he was sneeringly asked whether Kensington
Palace could boast of such decorations, he answered, with spirit and
propriety: "No, Sir. The memorials of the great things which my master
has done are to be seen in many places; but not in his own house."

Great as was the success of the embassy, there was one drawback. James
was still at Saint Germains; and round the mock King were gathered
a mock Court and Council, a Great Seal and a Privy Seal, a crowd of
garters and collars, white staves and gold keys. Against the pleasure
which the marked attentions of the French princes and grandees gave to
Portland, was to be set off the vexation which he felt when Middleton
crossed his path with the busy look of a real Secretary of State. But it
was with emotions far deeper that the Ambassador saw on the terraces and
in the antechambers of Versailles men who had been deeply implicated
in plots against the life of his master. He expressed his indignation
loudly and vehemently. "I hope," he said, "that there is no design in
this; that these wretches are not purposely thrust in my way. When
they come near me all my blood runs back in my veins." His words were
reported to Lewis. Lewis employed Boufflers to smooth matters; and
Boufflers took occasion to say something on the subject as if from
himself. Portland easily divined that in talking with Boufflers he
was really talking with Lewis, and eagerly seized the opportunity of
representing the expediency, the absolute necessity, of removing James
to a greater distance from England. "It was not contemplated, Marshal,"
he said, "when we arranged the terms of peace in Brabant, that a palace
in the suburbs of Paris was to continue to be an asylum for outlaws and
murderers." "Nay, my Lord," said Boufflers, uneasy doubtless on his own
account, "you will not; I am sure, assert that I gave you any pledge
that King James would be required to leave France. You are too
honourable a man, you are too much my friend, to say any such thing."
"It is true," answered Portland, "that I did not insist on a positive
promise from you; but remember what passed. I proposed that King James
should retire to Rome or Modena. Then you suggested Avignon; and I
assented. Certainly my regard for you makes me very unwilling to do
anything that would give you pain. But my master's interests are dearer
to me than all the friends that I have in the world put together. I must
tell His Most Christian Majesty all that passed between us; and I hope
that, when I tell him, you will be present, and that you will be able to
bear witness that I have not put a single word of mine into your mouth."

When Boufflers had argued and expostulated in vain, Villeroy was sent
on the same errand, but had no better success. A few days later Portland
had a long private audience of Lewis. Lewis declared that he was
determined to keep his word, to preserve the peace of Europe, to abstain
from everything which could give just cause of offence to England, but
that, as a man of honour, as a man of humanity, he could not refuse
shelter to an unfortunate King, his own first cousin. Portland replied
that nobody questioned His Majesty's good faith; but that while Saint
Germains was occupied by its present inmates it would be beyond even
His Majesty's power to prevent eternal plotting between them and the
malecontents on the other side of the Straits of Dover, and that, while
such plotting went on, the peace must necessarily be insecure. The
question was really not one of humanity. It was not asked, it was not
wished, that James should be left destitute. Nay, the English government
was willing to allow him an income larger than that which he derived
from the munificence of France. Fifty thousand pounds a year, to which
in strictness of law he had no right, awaited his acceptance, if he
would only move to a greater distance from the country which, while
he was near it, could never be at rest. If, in such circumstances, he
refused to move, this was the strongest reason for believing that he
could not safely be suffered to stay. The fact that he thought the
difference between residing at Saint Germains and residing at Avignon
worth more than fifty thousand a year sufficiently proved that he had
not relinquished the hope of being restored to his throne by means of a
rebellion or of something worse. Lewis answered that on that point his
resolution was unalterable. He never would compel his guest and kinsman
to depart. "There is another matter," said Portland, "about which I have
felt it my duty to make representations. I mean the countenance given
to the assassins." "I know nothing about assassins," said Lewis. "Of
course," answered the Ambassador, "your Majesty knows nothing about such
men. At least your Majesty does not know them for what they are. But
I can point them out, and can furnish ample proofs of their guilt." He
then named Berwick. For the English Government, which had been willing
to make large allowances for Berwick's peculiar position as long as he
confined himself to acts of open and manly hostility, conceived that
he had forfeited all claim to indulgence by becoming privy to the
Assassination Plot. This man, Portland said, constantly haunted
Versailles. Barclay, whose guilt was of a still deeper dye,--Barclay,
the chief contriver of the murderous ambuscade of Turnham Green,--had
found in France, not only an asylum, but an honourable military
position. The monk who was sometimes called Harrison and sometimes went
by the alias of Johnson, but who, whether Harrison or Johnson, had
been one of the earliest and one of the most bloodthirsty of Barclays
accomplices, was now comfortably settled as prior of a religious house
in France. Lewis denied or evaded all these charges. "I never," he said,
"heard of your Harrison. As to Barclay, he certainly once had a company;
but it has been disbanded; and what has become of him I do not know. It
is true that Berwick was in London towards the close of 1695; but he was
there only for the purpose of ascertaining whether a descent on England
was practicable; and I am confident that he was no party to any cruel
and dishonourable design." In truth Lewis had a strong personal
motive for defending Berwick. The guilt of Berwick as respected the
Assassination Plot does not appear to have extended beyond connivance;
and to the extent of connivance Lewis himself was guilty.

Thus the audience terminated. All that was left to Portland was to
announce that the exiles must make their choice between Saint Germains
and fifty thousand a year; that the protocol of Ryswick bound the
English government to pay to Mary of Modena only what the law gave her;
that the law gave her nothing; that consequently the English government
was bound to nothing; and that, while she, her husband and her child
remained where they were, she should have nothing. It was hoped that
this announcement would produce a considerable effect even in James's
household; and indeed some of his hungry courtiers and priests seem
to have thought the chance of a restoration so small that it would be
absurd to refuse a splendid income, though coupled with a condition
which might make that small chance somewhat smaller. But it is certain
that, if there was murmuring among the Jacobites, it was disregarded by
James. He was fully resolved not to move, and was only confirmed in
his resolution by learning that he was regarded by the usurper as a
dangerous neighbour. Lewis paid so much regard to Portland's complaints
as to intimate to Middleton a request, equivalent to a command, that
the Lords and gentlemen who formed the retinue of the banished King of
England would not come to Versailles on days on which the representative
of the actual King was expected there. But at other places there was
constant risk of an encounter which might have produced several duels,
if not an European war. James indeed, far from shunning such encounters,
seems to have taken a perverse pleasure in thwarting his benefactor's
wish to keep the peace, and in placing the Ambassador in embarrassing
situations. One day his Excellency, while drawing on his boots for a run
with the Dauphin's celebrated wolf pack, was informed that King James
meant to be of the party, and was forced to stay at home. Another day,
when his Excellency had set his heart on having some sport with the
royal staghounds, he was informed by the Grand Huntsman that King James
might probably come to the rendezvous without any notice. Melfort was
particularly active in laying traps for the young noblemen and gentlemen
of the Legation. The Prince of Wales was more than once placed in such a
situation that they could scarcely avoid passing close to him. Were they
to salute him? Were they to stand erect and covered while every body
else saluted him? No Englishman zealous for the Bill of Rights and
the Protestant religion would willingly do any thing which could
be construed into an act of homage to a Popish pretender. Yet no
goodnatured and generous man, however firm in his Whig principles,
would willingly offer any thing which could look like an affront to an
innocent and a most unfortunate child.

Meanwhile other matters of grave importance claimed Portland's
attention. There was one matter in particular about which the French
ministers anxiously expected him to say something, but about which he
observed strict silence. How to interpret that silence they scarcely
knew. They were certain only that it could not be the effect of
unconcern. They were well assured that the subject which he so carefully
avoided was never, during two waking hours together, out of his
thoughts or out of the thoughts of his master. Nay, there was not in all
Christendom a single politician, from the greatest ministers of state
down to the silliest newsmongers of coffeehouses, who really felt
that indifference which the prudent Ambassador of England affected. A
momentous event, which had during many years been constantly becoming
more and more probable, was now certain and near. Charles the Second of
Spain, the last descendant in the male line of the Emperor Charles the
Fifth, would soon die without posterity. Who would then be the heir to
his many kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, lordships, acquired in different
ways, held by different titles and subject to different laws? That was a
question about which jurists differed, and which it was not likely that
jurists would, even if they were unanimous, be suffered to decide. Among
the claimants were the mightiest sovereigns of the continent; there was
little chance that they would submit to any arbitration but that of the
sword; and it could not be hoped that, if they appealed to the sword,
other potentates who had no pretension to any part of the disputed
inheritance would long remain neutral. For there was in Western Europe
no government which did not feel that its own prosperity, dignity and
security might depend on the event of the contest.

It is true that the empire, which had, in the preceding century,
threatened both France and England with subjugation, had of late been
of hardly so much account as the Duchy of Savoy or the Electorate of
Brandenburg. But it by no means followed that the fate of that empire
was matter of indifference to the rest of the world. The paralytic
helplessness and drowsiness of the body once so formidable could not
be imputed to any deficiency of the natural elements of power. The
dominions of the Catholic King were in extent and in population superior
to those of Lewis and of William united. Spain alone, without a single
dependency, ought to have been a kingdom of the first rank; and Spain
was but the nucleus of the Spanish monarchy. The outlying provinces
of that monarchy in Europe would have sufficed to make three highly
respectable states of the second order. One such state might have
been formed in the Netherlands. It would have been a wide expanse of
cornfield, orchard and meadow, intersected by navigable rivers and
canals. At short intervals, in that thickly peopled and carefully tilled
region, rose stately old towns, encircled by strong fortifications,
embellished by fine cathedrals and senate-houses, and renowned either
as seats of learning or as seats of mechanical industry. A second
flourishing principality might have been created between the Alps and
the Po, out of that well watered garden of olives and mulberry trees
which spreads many miles on every side of the great white temple of
Milan. Yet neither the Netherlands nor the Milanese could, in physical
advantages, vie with the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a land which
nature had taken pleasure in enriching and adorning, a land which would
have been paradise, if tyranny and superstition had not, during many
ages, lavished all their noxious influences on the bay of Campania, the
plain of Enna, and the sunny banks of Galesus.

In America the Spanish territories spread from the Equator northward
and southward through all the signs of the Zodiac far into the temperate
zone. Thence came gold and silver to be coined in all the mints, and
curiously wrought in all the jewellers' shops, of Europe and Asia.
Thence came the finest tobacco, the finest chocolate, the finest indigo,
the finest cochineal, the hides of innumerable wild oxen, quinquina,
coffee, sugar. Either the viceroyalty of Mexico or the viceroyalty of
Peru would, as an independent state with ports open to all the world,
have been an important member of the great community of nations.

And yet the aggregate, made up of so many parts, each of which
separately might have been powerful and highly considered, was impotent
to a degree which moved at once pity and laughter. Already one most
remarkable experiment had been tried on this strange empire. A small
fragment, hardly a three hundredth part of the whole in extent, hardly
a thirtieth part of the whole in population, had been detached from the
rest, had from that moment begun to display a new energy and to enjoy
a new prosperity, and was now, after the lapse of a hundred and twenty
years, far more feared and reverenced than the huge mass of which it had
once been an obscure corner. What a contrast between the Holland which
Alva had oppressed and plundered, and the Holland from which William
had sailed to deliver England! And who, with such an example before him,
would venture to foretell what changes might be at hand, if the most
languid and torpid of monarchies should be dissolved, and if every one
of the members which had composed it should enter on an independent
existence?

To such a dissolution that monarchy was peculiarly liable. The King, and
the King alone, held it together. The populations which acknowledged him
as their chief either knew nothing of each other, or regarded each other
with positive aversion. The Biscayan was in no sense the countryman of
the Valencian, nor the Lombard of the Biscayan, nor the Fleeting of
the Lombard, nor the Sicilian of the Fleeting. The Arragonese had never
ceased to pine for their lost independence. Within the memory of many
persons still living the Catalans had risen in rebellion, had entreated
Lewis the Thirteenth of France to become their ruler with the old title
of Count of Barcelona, and had actually sworn fealty to him. Before the
Catalans had been quieted, the Neapolitans had taken arms, had abjured
their foreign master, had proclaimed their city a republic, and had
elected a Loge. In the New World the small caste of born Spaniards which
had the exclusive enjoyment of power and dignity was hated by Creoles
and Indians, Mestizos and Quadroons. The Mexicans especially had turned
their eyes on a chief who bore the name and had inherited the blood
of the unhappy Montezuma. Thus it seemed that the empire against which
Elizabeth and Henry the Fourth had been scarcely able to contend would
not improbably fall to pieces of itself, and that the first violent
shock from without would scatter the ill-cemented parts of the huge
fabric in all directions.

But, though such a dissolution had no terrors for the Catalonian or
the Fleming, for the Lombard or the Calabrian, for the Mexican or the
Peruvian, the thought of it was torture and madness to the Castilian.
Castile enjoyed the supremacy in that great assemblage of races and
languages. Castile sent out governors to Brussels, Milan, Naples,
Mexico, Lima. To Castile came the annual galleons laden with the
treasures of America. In Castile was ostentatiously displayed and
lavishly spent great fortunes made in remote provinces by oppression
and corruption. In Castile were the King and his Court. There stood
the stately Escurial, once the centre of the politics of the world, the
place to which distant potentates looked, some with hope and gratitude,
some with dread and hatred, but none without anxiety and awe. The glory
of the house had indeed departed. It was long since couriers bearing
orders big with the fate of kings and commonwealths had ridden forth
from those gloomy portals. Military renown, maritime ascendency, the
policy once reputed so profound, the wealth once deemed inexhaustible,
had passed away. An undisciplined army, a rotting fleet, an incapable
council, an empty treasury, were all that remained of that which had
been so great. Yet the proudest of nations could not bear to part even
with the name and the shadow of a supremacy which was no more. All, from
the grandee of the first class to the peasant, looked forward with dread
to the day when God should be pleased to take their king to himself.
Some of them might have a predilection for Germany; but such
predilections were subordinate to a stronger feeling. The paramount
object was the integrity of the empire of which Castile was the head;
and the prince who should appear to be most likely to preserve that
integrity unviolated would have the best right to the allegiance of
every true Castilian.

No man of sense, however, out of Castile, when he considered the nature
of the inheritance and the situation of the claimants, could doubt
that a partition was inevitable. Among those claimants three stood
preeminent, the Dauphin, the Emperor Leopold, and the Electoral Prince
of Bavaria.

If the question had been simply one of pedigree, the right of the
Dauphin would have been incontestable. Lewis the Fourteeenth had married
the Infanta Maria Theresa, eldest daughter of Philip the Fourth and
sister of Charles the Second. Her eldest son, the Dauphin, would
therefore, in the regular course of things, have been her brother's
successor. But she had, at the time of her marriage, renounced, for
herself and her posterity, all pretensions to the Spanish crown.

To that renunciation her husband had assented. It had been made an
article of the Treaty of the Pyrenees. The Pope had been requested to
give his apostolical sanction to an arrangement so important to the
peace of Europe; and Lewis had sworn, by every thing that could bind a
gentleman, a king, and a Christian, by his honour, by his royal word, by
the canon of the Mass, by the Holy Gospels, by the Cross of Christ, that
he would hold the renunciation sacred. [11]

The claim of the Emperor was derived from his mother Mary Anne, daughter
of Philip the Third, and aunt of Charles the Second, and could not
therefore, if nearness of blood alone were to be regarded, come into
competition with the claim of the Dauphin. But the claim of the Emperor
was barred by no renunciation. The rival pretensions of the great Houses
of Bourbon and Habsburg furnished all Europe with an inexhaustible
subject of discussion. Plausible topics were not wanting to the
supporters of either cause. The partisans of the House of Austria dwelt
on the sacredness of treaties; the partisans of France on the sacredness
of birthright. How, it was asked on one side, can a Christian king have
the effrontery, the impiety, to insist on a claim which he has with such
solemnity renounced in the face of heaven and earth? How, it was asked
on the other side, can the fundamental laws of a monarchy be annulled by
any authority but that of the supreme legislature? The only body which
was competent to take away from the children of Maria Theresa their
hereditary rights was the Comes. The Comes had not ratified her
renunciation. That renunciation was therefore a nullity; and no
swearing, no signing, no sealing, could turn that nullity into a
reality.

Which of these two mighty competitors had the better case may perhaps
be doubted. What could not be doubted was that neither would obtain the
prize without a struggle which would shake the world. Nor can we
justly blame either for refusing to give way to the other. For, on this
occasion, the chief motive which actuated them was, not greediness, but
the fear of degradation and ruin. Lewis, in resolving to put every thing
to hazard rather than suffer the power of the House of Austria to be
doubled; Leopold, in determining to put every thing to hazard rather
than suffer the power of the House of Bourbon to be doubled; merely
obeyed the law of self preservation. There was therefore one way, and
one alone, by which the great woe which seemed to be coming on Europe
could be averted. Was it possible that the dispute might be compromised?
Might not the two great rivals be induced to make to a third party
concessions such as neither could reasonably be expected to make to the
other?

The third party, to whom all who were anxious for the peace of
Christendom looked as their best hope, was a child of tender age,
Joseph, son of the Elector of Bavaria. His mother, the Electress Mary
Antoinette, was the only child of the Emperor Leopold by his first wife
Margaret, a younger sister of the Queen of Lewis the Fourteenth. Prince
Joseph was, therefore, nearer in blood to the Spanish throne than his
grandfather the Emperor, or than the sons whom the Emperor had by
his second wife. The Infanta Margaret had indeed, at the time of her
marriage, renounced her rights to the kingdom of her forefathers. But
the renunciation wanted many formalities which had been observed in
her sister's case, and might be considered as cancelled by the will
of Philip the Fourth, which had declared that, failing his issue male,
Margaret and her posterity would be entitled to inherit his Crown. The
partisans of France held that the Bavarian claim was better than the
Austrian claim; the partisans of Austria held that the Bavarian claim
was better than the French claim. But that which really constituted
the strength of the Bavarian claim was the weakness of the Bavarian
government. The Electoral Prince was the only candidate whose success
would alarm nobody; would not make it necessary for any power to raise
another regiment, to man another frigate, to have in store another
barrel of gunpowder. He was therefore the favourite candidate of prudent
and peaceable men in every country.

Thus all Europe was divided into the French, the Austrian, and the
Bavarian factions. The contests of these factions were daily renewed
in every place where men congregated, from Stockholm to Malta, and from
Lisbon to Smyrna. But the fiercest and most obstinate conflict was that
which raged in the palace of the Catholic King. Much depended on him.
For, though it was not pretended that he was competent to alter by his
sole authority the law which regulated the descent of the Crown, yet, in
a case in which the law was doubtful, it was probable that his subjects
might be disposed to accept the construction which he might put upon it,
and to support the claimant whom he might, either by a solemn adoption
or by will, designate as the rightful heir. It was also in the power of
the reigning sovereign to entrust all the most important offices in his
kingdom, the government of all the provinces subject to him in the Old
and in the New World, and the keys of all his fortresses and arsenals,
to persons zealous for the family which he was inclined to favour. It
was difficult to say to what extent the fate of whole nations might be
affected by the conduct of the officers who, at the time of his decease,
might command the garrisons of Barcelona, of Mons, and of Namur.

The prince on whom so much depended was the most miserable of human
beings. In old times he would have been exposed as soon as he came into
the world; and to expose him would have been a kindness. From his birth
a blight was on his body and on his mind. With difficulty his almost
imperceptible spark of life had been screened and fanned into a dim and
flickering flame. His childhood, except when he could be rocked and sung
into sickly sleep, was one long piteous wail. Until he was ten years
old his days were passed on the laps of women; and he has never once
suffered to stand on his ricketty legs. None of those tawny little
urchins, clad in rags stolen from scarecrows, whom Murillo loved to
paint begging or rolling in the sand, owed less to education than this
despotic ruler of thirty millions of subjects, The most important events
in the history of his own kingdom, the very names of provinces and
cities which were among his most valuable possessions, were unknown
to him. It may well be doubted whether he was aware that Sicily was an
island, that Christopher Columbus had discovered America, or that the
English were not Mahometans. In his youth, however, though too imbecile
for study or for business, he was not incapable of being amused. He
shot, hawked and hunted. He enjoyed with the delight of a true Spaniard
two delightful spectacles, a horse with its bowels gored out, and a
Jew writhing in the fire. The time came when the mightiest of instincts
ordinarily wakens from its repose. It was hoped that the young King
would not prove invincible to female attractions, and that he would
leave a Prince of Asturias to succeed him. A consort was found for
him in the royal family of France; and her beauty and grace gave him a
languid pleasure. He liked to adorn her with jewels, to see her dance,
and to tell her what sport he had had with his dogs and his falcons. But
it was soon whispered that she was a wife only in name. She died;
and her place was supplied by a German princess nearly allied to the
Imperial House. But the second marriage, like the first, proved
barren; and, long before the King had passed the prime of life, all
the politicians of Europe had begun to take it for granted in all their
calculations that he would be the last descendant, in the male line,
of Charles the Fifth. Meanwhile a sullen and abject melancholy took
possession of his soul. The diversions which had been the serious
employment of his youth became distasteful to him. He ceased to find
pleasure in his nets and boar spears, in the fandango and the bullfight.
Sometimes he shut himself up in an inner chamber from the eyes of his
courtiers. Sometimes he loitered alone, from sunrise to sunset, in the
dreary and rugged wilderness which surrounds the Escurial. The hours
which he did not waste in listless indolence were divided between
childish sports and childish devotions. He delighted in rare animals,
and still more in dwarfs. When neither strange beasts nor little men
could dispel the black thoughts which gathered in his mind, he repeated
Aves and Credos; he walked in processions; sometimes he starved himself;
sometimes he whipped himself. At length a complication of maladies
completed the ruin of all his faculties. His stomach failed; nor was
this strange; for in him the malformation of the jaw, characteristic of
his family, was so serious that he could not masticate his food; and
he was in the habit of swallowing ollas and sweetmeats in the state in
which they were set before him. While suffering from indigestion he
was attacked by ague. Every third day his convulsive tremblings, his
dejection, his fits of wandering, seemed to indicate the approach of
dissolution. His misery was increased by the knowledge that every body
was calculating how long he had to live, and wondering what would become
of his kingdoms when he should be dead. The stately dignitaries of
his household, the physicians who ministered to his diseased body, the
divines whose business was to soothe his not less diseased mind, the
very wife who should have been intent on those gentle offices by which
female tenderness can alleviate even the misery of hopeless decay, were
all thinking of the new world which was to commence with his death,
and would have been perfectly willing to see him in the hands of the
embalmer if they could have been certain that his successor would be
the prince whose interest they espoused. As yet the party of the Emperor
seemed to predominate. Charles had a faint sort of preference for the
House of Austria, which was his own house, and a faint sort of antipathy
to the House of Bourbon, with which he had been quarrelling, he did not
well know why, ever since he could remember. His Queen, whom he did not
love, but of whom he stood greatly in awe, was devoted to the interests
of her kinsman the Emperor; and with her was closely leagued the Count
of Melgar, Hereditary Admiral of Castile and Prime Minister.

Such was the state of the question of the Spanish succession at the time
when Portland had his first public audience at Versailles. The French
ministers were certain that he must be constantly thinking about that
question, and were therefore perplexed by his evident determination to
say nothing about it. They watched his lips in the hope that he would
at least let fall some unguarded word indicating the hopes or fears
entertained by the English and Dutch Governments. But Portland was not
a man out of whom much was to be got in that way. Nature and habit
cooperating had made him the best keeper of secrets in Europe. Lewis
therefore directed Pomponne and Torcy, two ministers of eminent ability,
who had, under himself, the chief direction of foreign affairs, to
introduce the subject which the discreet confidant of William seemed
studiously to avoid. Pomponne and Torcy accordingly repaired to
the English embassy; and there opened one of the most remarkable
negotiations recorded in the annals of European diplomacy.

The two French statesmen professed in their master's name the most
earnest desire, not only that the peace might remain unbroken, but
that there might be a close union between the Courts of Versailles and
Kensington. One event only seemed likely to raise new troubles. If the
Catholic King should die before it had been settled who should succeed
to his immense dominions, there was but too much reason to fear that the
nations, which were just beginning to breathe after an exhausting and
devastating struggle of nine years, would be again in arms. His Most
Christian Majesty was therefore desirous to employ the short interval
which might remain, in concerting with the King of England the means of
preserving the tranquillity of the world.

Portland made a courteous but guarded answer. He could not, he said,
presume to say exactly what William's sentiments were; but this he
knew, that it was not solely or chiefly by the sentiments of the King
of England that the policy of England on a great occasion would
be regulated. The islanders must and would have their government
administered according to certain maxims which they held sacred; and of
those maxims they held none more sacred than this, that every increase
of the power of France ought to be viewed with extreme jealousy.

Pomponne and Torcy answered that their master was most desirous to
avoid every thing which could excite the jealousy of which Portland had
spoken. But was it of France alone that a nation so enlightened as the
English must be jealous? Was it forgotten that the House of Austria had
once aspired to universal dominion? And would it be wise in the princes
and commonwealths of Europe to lend their aid for the purpose of
reconstructing the gigantic monarchy which, in the sixteenth century,
had seemed likely to overwhelm them all?

Portland answered that, on this subject, he must be understood to
express only the opinions of a private man. He had however now lived,
during some years, among the English, and believed himself to be pretty
well acquainted with their temper. They would not, he thought, be much
alarmed by any augmentation of power which the Emperor might obtain.
The sea was their element. Traffic by sea was the great source of their
wealth; ascendency on the sea the great object of their ambition. Of the
Emperor they had no fear. Extensive as was the area which he governed,
he had not a frigate on the water; and they cared nothing for his
Pandours and Croatians. But France had a great navy. The balance of
maritime power was what would be anxiously watched in London; and the
balance of maritime power would not be affected by an union between
Spain and Austria, but would be most seriously deranged by an union
between Spain and France.

Pomponne and Torcy declared that every thing should be done to quiet the
apprehensions which Portland had described. It was not contemplated, it
was not wished, that France and Spain should be united. The Dauphin
and his eldest son the Duke of Burgundy would waive their rights. The
younger brothers of the Duke of Burgundy, Philip Duke of Anjou and
Charles Duke of Berry, were not named; but Portland perfectly understood
what was meant. There would, he said, be scarcely less alarm in England
if the Spanish dominions devolved on a grandson of His Most Christian
Majesty than if they were annexed to the French crown. The laudable
affection of the young princes for their country and their family,
and their profound respect for the great monarch from whom they were
descended, would inevitably determine their policy. The two kingdoms
would be one; the two navies would be one; and all other states would
be reduced to vassalage. England would rather see the Spanish monarchy
added to the Emperor's dominions than governed by one of the younger
French princes, who would, though nominally independent, be really
a viceroy of France. But in truth there was no risk that the Spanish
monarchy would be added to the Emperor's dominions. He and his eldest
son the Archduke Joseph would, no doubt, be as ready to waive their
rights as the Dauphin and the Duke of Burgundy could be; and thus
the Austrian claim to the disputed heritage would pass to the younger
Archduke Charles. A long discussion followed. At length Portland plainly
avowed, always merely as his own private opinion, what was the opinion
of every intelligent man who wished to preserve the peace of the world.
"France is afraid," he said, "of every thing which can increase the
power of the Emperor. All Europe is afraid of every thing which can
increase the power of France. Why not put an end to all these uneasy
feelings at once, by agreeing to place the Electoral Prince of Bavaria
on the throne of Spain?" To this suggestion no decisive answer was
returned. The conference ended; and a courier started for England with
a despatch informing William of what had passed, and soliciting further
instructions.

William, who was, as he had always been, his own Secretary for Foreign
Affairs, did not think it necessary to discuss the contents of this
despatch with any of his English ministers. The only person whom he
consulted was Heinsius. Portland received a kind letter warmly approving
all that he had said in the conference, and directing him to declare
that the English government sincerely wished to avert the calamities
which were but too likely to follow the death of the King of Spain,
and would therefore be prepared to take into serious consideration
any definite plan which His Most Christian Majesty might think fit to
suggest. "I will own to you," William wrote to his friend, "that I am so
unwilling to be again at war during the short time which I still have
to live, that I will omit nothing that I can honestly and with a safe
conscience do for the purpose of maintaining peace."

William's message was delivered by Portland to Lewis at a private
audience. In a few days Pomponne and Torcy were authorised to propose a
plan. They fully admitted that all neighbouring states were entitled
to demand the strongest security against the union of the French and
Spanish crowns. Such security should be given. The Spanish government
might be requested to choose between the Duke of Anjou and the Duke of
Berry. The youth who was selected would, at the utmost, be only fifteen
years old, and could not be supposed to have any very deeply rooted
national prejudices. He should be sent to Madrid without French
attendants, should be educated by Spaniards, should become a Spaniard.
It was absurd to imagine that such a prince would be a mere viceroy of
France. Apprehensions had been sometimes hinted that a Bourbon, seated
on the throne of Spain, might cede his dominions in the Netherlands to
the head of his family. It was undoubtedly important to England, and all
important to Holland, that those provinces should not become a part of
the French monarchy. All danger might be averted by making them over to
the Elector of Bavaria, who was now governing them as representative of
the Catholic King. The Dauphin would be perfectly willing to renounce
them for himself and for all his descendants. As to what concerned
trade, England and Holland had only to say what they desired, and every
thing in reason should be done to give them satisfaction.

As this plan was, in the main, the same which had been suggested by the
French ministers in the former conference, Portland did little more
than repeat what he had then said. As to the new scheme respecting the
Netherlands, he shrewdly propounded a dilemma which silenced Pomponne
and Torcy.

If renunciations were of any value, the Dauphin and his posterity were
excluded from the Spanish succession; and, if renunciations were of
no value, it was idle to offer England and Holland a renunciation as a
guarantee against a great danger.

The French Ministers withdrew to make their report to their master,
and soon returned to say that their proposals had been merely first
thoughts, that it was now the turn of King William to suggest something,
and that whatever he might suggest should receive the fullest and
fairest consideration.

And now the scene of the negotiation was shifted from Versailles
to Kensington. The Count of Tallard had just set out for England as
Ambassador. He was a fine gentleman; he was a brave soldier; and he was
as yet reputed a skilful general. In all the arts and graces which were
priced as qualifications for diplomatic missions of the highest class,
he had, among the brilliant aristocracy to which he belonged, no
superior and only one equal, the Marquess of Harcourt, who was entrusted
with the care of the interests of the House of Bourbon at Madrid.

Tallard carried with him instructions carefully framed in the French
Foreign Office. He was reminded that his situation would be widely
different from that of his predecessors who had resided in England
before the Revolution. Even his predecessors, however, had considered
it as their duty to study the temper, not only of the Court, but of the
nation. It would now be more than ever necessary to watch the movements
of the public mind. A man of note was not to be slighted merely because
he was out of place. Such a man, with a great name in the country and a
strong following in Parliament, might exercise as much influence on the
politics of England, and consequently of Europe, as any minister. The
Ambassador must therefore try to be on good terms with those who were
out as well as with those who were in. To this rule, however, there was
one exception which he must constantly bear in mind. With nonjurors and
persons suspected of plotting against the existing government he must
not appear to have any connection. They must not be admitted into his
house. The English people evidently wished to be at rest, and had
given the best proof of their pacific disposition by insisting on
the reduction of the army. The sure way to stir up jealousies and
animosities which were just sinking to sleep would be to make the French
embassy the head quarters of the Jacobite party. It would be wise in
Tallard to say and to charge his agents to say, on all fit occasions,
and particularly in societies where members of Parliament might be
present, that the Most Christian King had never been an enemy of the
liberties of England. His Majesty had indeed hoped that it might be
in his power to restore his cousin, but not without the assent of
the nation. In the original draft of the instructions was a curious
paragraph which, on second thoughts, it was determined to omit. The
Ambassador was directed to take proper opportunities of cautioning the
English against a standing army, as the only thing which could really
be fatal to their laws and liberties. This passage was suppressed, no
doubt, because it occurred to Pomponne and Torcy that, with whatever
approbation the English might listen to such language when uttered by a
demagogue of their own race, they might be very differently affected by
hearing it from a French diplomatist, and might think that there could
not be a better reason for arming, than that Lewis and his emissaries
earnestly wished them to disarm.

Tallard was instructed to gain, if possible, some members of the House
of Commons. Every thing, he was told, was now subjected to the
scrutiny of that assembly; accounts of the public income, of the public
expenditure, of the army, of the navy, were regularly laid on the table;
and it would not be difficult to find persons who would supply the
French legation with copious information on all these subjects.

The question of the Spanish succession was to be mentioned to William at
a private audience. Tallard was fully informed of all that had passed in
the conferences which the French ministers had held with Portland; and
was furnished with all the arguments that the ingenuity of publicists
could devise in favour of the claim of the Dauphin.

The French embassy made as magnificent an appearance m England as the
English embassy had made in France. The mansion of the Duke of Ormond,
one of the finest houses in Saint James's Square, was taken for Tallard.
On the day of the public entry, all the streets from Tower Hill to Pall
Mall were crowded with gazers who admired the painting and gilding of
his Excellency's carriages, the surpassing beauty of his horses, and
the multitude of his running footmen, dressed in gorgeous liveries
of scarlet and gold lace. The Ambassador was graciously received at
Kensington, and was invited to accompany William to Newmarket, where
the largest and most splendid Spring Meeting ever known was about to
assemble. The attraction must be supposed to have been great; for the
risks of the journey were not trifling. The peace had, all over Europe,
and nowhere more than in England, turned crowds of old soldiers into
marauders. [12] Several aristocratical equipages had been attacked even
in Hyde Park. Every newspaper contained stories of travellers stripped,
bound and flung into ditches. One day the Bristol mail was robbed;
another day the Dover coach; then the Norwich waggon. On Hounslow Heath
a company of horsemen, with masks on their faces, waited for the great
people who had been to pay their court to the King at Windsor. Lord
Ossulston escaped with the loss of two horses. The Duke of Saint Albans,
with the help of his servants, beat off the assailants. His brother the
Duke of Northumberland, less strongly guarded, fell into their hands.
They succeeded in stopping thirty or forty coaches, and rode off with
a great booty in guineas, watches and jewellery. Nowhere, however, does
the peal seem to have been so great as on the Newmarket road. There
indeed robbery was organised on a scale unparalleled in the kingdom
since the days of Robin Hood and Little John. A fraternity of
plunderers, thirty in number according to the lowest estimate, squatted,
near Waltham Cross, under the shades of Epping Forest, and built
themselves huts, from which they sallied forth with sword and pistol
to bid passengers stand. The King and Tallard were doubtless too
well attended to be in jeopardy. But, soon after they had passed the
dangerous spot, there was a fight on the highway attended with loss of
life. A warrant of the Lord Chief justice broke up the Maroon village
for a short time, but the dispersed thieves soon mustered again, and had
the impudence to bid defiance to the government in a cartel signed, it
was said, with their real names. The civil power was unable to deal with
this frightful evil. It was necessary that, during some time, cavalry
should patrol every evening on the roads near the boundary between
Middlesex and Essex.

The state of those roads, however, though contemporaries described it as
dangerous beyond all example, did not deter men of rank and fashion
from making the joyous pilgrimages to Newmarket. Half the Dukes in the
kingdom were there. Most of the chief ministers of state swelled the
crowd; nor was the opposition unrepresented. Montague stole two or three
days from the Treasury, and Orford from the Admiralty. Godolphin was
there, looking after his horses and his bets, and probably went away a
richer man than he came. But racing was only one of the many amusements
of that festive season. On fine mornings there was hunting. For those
who preferred hawking choice falcons had been brought from Holland.
On rainy days the cockpit was encircled by stars and blue ribands. On
Sundays William went to church in state, and the most eminent divines of
the neighbouring University of Cambridge preached before him. He omitted
no opportunity of showing marked civility to Tallard. The Ambassador
informed his Court that his place at table was next to the royal arm
chair, and that his health had been most graciously drunk by the King.

All this time, both at Kensington and Newmarket, the Spanish question
was the subject of constant and earnest discussion. To trace all the
windings of the negotiation would be tedious. The general course which
it took may easily be described. The object of William was to place the
Electoral Prince of Bavaria on the Spanish throne. To obtain the consent
of Lewis to such an arrangement seemed all but impossible; but William
manoeuvred with rare skill. Though he frankly acknowledged that he
preferred the Electoral Prince to any other candidate, he professed.
himself desirous to meet, as far as he honourably or safely could, the
wishes of the French King. There were conditions on which England and
Holland might perhaps consent, though not without reluctance, that a
son of the Dauphin should reign at Madrid, and should be master of the
treasures of the New World. Those conditions were that the Milanese and
the Two Sicilies should belong to the Archduke Charles, that the Elector
of Bavaria should have the Spanish Netherlands, that Lewis should give
up some fortified towns in Artois for the purpose of strengthening the
barrier which protected the United Provinces, and that some important
places both in the Mediterranean sea and in the Gulf of Mexico should
be made over to the English and Dutch for the security of trade. Minorca
and Havanna were mentioned as what might satisfy England.

Against these terms Lewis exclaimed loudly. Nobody, he said, who knew
with how sensitive a jealousy the Spaniards watched every encroachment
on their colonial empire would believe that they would ever consent to
give up any part of that empire either to England or to Holland. The
demand which was made upon himself was altogether inadmissible. A
barrier was not less necessary to France than to Holland; and he never
would break the iron chain of frontier fastnesses which was the defence
of his own kingdom, even in order to purchase another kingdom for his
grandson. On that subject he begged that he might hear no more. The
proposition was one which he would not discuss, one to which he would
not listen.

As William, however, resolutely maintained that the terms which he had
offered, hard as they might seem, were the only terms on which England
and Holland could suffer a Bourbon to reign at Madrid, Lewis began
seriously to consider, whether it might not be on the whole for his
interest and that of his family rather to sell the Spanish crown dear
than to buy it dear. He therefore now offered to withdraw his opposition
to the Bavarian claim, provided a portion of the disputed inheritance
were assigned to him in consideration of his disinterestedness and
moderation. William was perfectly willing and even eager to treat
on this basis. The first demands of Lewis were, as might have been
expected, exorbitantly high. He asked for the kingdom of Navarre,
which would have made him little less than master of the whole Iberian
peninsula, and for the duchy of Luxemburg, which would have made him
more dangerous than ever to the United Provinces. On both points he
encountered a steady resistance. The impression which, throughout these
transactions, the firmness and good faith of William made on Tallard
is remarkable. At first the dexterous and keen witted Frenchman was
all suspicion. He imagined that there was an evasion in every phrase, a
hidden snare in every offer. But after a time he began to discover that
he had to do with a man far too wise to be false. "The King of England,"
he wrote, and it is impossible to doubt that he wrote what he thought,
"acts with good faith in every thing. His way of dealing is upright and
sincere." [13] "The King of England," he wrote a few days later, "has
hitherto acted with great sincerity; and I venture to say that, if he
once enters into a treaty, he will steadily adhere to it." But in the
same letter the Ambassador thought it necessary to hint to his
master that the diplomatic chicanery which might be useful in other
negotiations would be all thrown away here. "I must venture to observe
to Your Majesty that the King of England is very sharpsighted, that his
judgment is sound, and that, if we try to spin the negotiation out, he
will very soon perceive that we are trifling with him." [14]

During some time projects and counterprojects continued to pass and
repass between Kensington and Versailles. Something was conceded on both
sides; and when the session of Parliament ended there seemed to be fair
hopes of a settlement. And now the scene of the negotiation was again
changed. Having been shifted from France to England, it was shifted from
England to Holland. As soon as William had prorogued the Houses, he
was impatient to be again in his native land. He felt all the glee of a
schoolboy who is leaving harsh masters and quarrelsome comrades to pass
the Christmas holidays at a happy home. That stern and composed face
which had been the same in the pursuit at the Boyne and in the rout at
Landen, and of which the keenest politicians had in vain tried to read
the secrets, now wore an expression but too intelligible. The English
were not a little provoked by seeing their King so happy. Hitherto his
annual visits to the Continent had been not only pardoned but approved.
It was necessary that he should be at the head of his army. If he had
left his people, it had been in order to put his life in jeopardy for
their independence, their liberty, and their religion. But they had
hoped that, when peace had been restored, when no call of duty required
him to cross the sea, he would generally, during the summer and autumn,
reside in his fair palaces and parks on the banks of the Thames, or
travel from country seat to country seat, and from cathedral town to
cathedral town, making himself acquainted with every shire of his realm,
and giving his hand to be kissed by multitudes of squires, clergymen and
aldermen who were not likely ever to see him unless he came among them.
It now appeared that he was sick of the noble residences which had
descended to him from ancient princes; that he was sick even of those
mansions which the liberality of Parliament had enabled him to build and
embellish according to his own taste; that he was sick of Windsor, of
Richmond, and of Hampton; that he promised himself no enjoyment from a
progress through those flourishing and populous counties which he
had never seen, Yorkshire and Norfolk, Cheshire, Shropshire and
Worcestershire. While he was forced to be with us, he was weary of us,
pining for his home, counting the hours to the prorogation. As soon as
the passing of the last bill of supply had set him at liberty, he turned
his back on his English subjects; he hastened to his seat in Guelders,
where, during some months, he might be free from the annoyance of seeing
English faces and hearing English words; and he would with difficulty
tear himself away from his favourite spot when it became absolutely
necessary that he should again ask for English money.

Thus his subjects murmured; but, in spite of their murmurs, he set
off in high spirits. It had been arranged that Tallard should speedily
follow him, and that the discussion in which they had been engaged at
Kensington should be resumed at Loo.

Heinsius, whose cooperation was indispensable, would be there. Portland
too would lend his assistance. He had just returned. He had always
considered his mission as an extraordinary mission, of which the object
was to put the relations between the two great Western powers on a
proper footing after a long series of years during which England had
been sometimes the enemy, but never the equal friend, of France. His
task had been well performed; and he now came back, leaving behind
him the reputation of an excellent minister, firm yet cautious as to
substance, dignified yet conciliating in manner. His last audience at
Versailles was unusually long; and no third person was present. Nothing
could be more gracious than the language and demeanour of Lewis.
He condescended to trace a route for the embassy, and insisted that
Portland should make a circuit for the purpose of inspecting some of
the superb fortresses of the French Netherlands. At every one of those
fortresses the governors and engineers had orders to pay every attention
to the distinguished stranger. Salutes were everywhere fired to welcome
him. A guard of honour was everywhere in attendance on him. He stopped
during three days at Chantilly, and was entertained there by the Prince
of Condé with all that taste and magnificence for which Chantilly had
long been renowned. There were boar hunts in the morning and concerts in
the evening. Every gentleman of the legation had a gamekeeper specially
assigned to him. The guests, who, in their own island were accustomed
to give extravagant vails at every country house which they visited,
learned, with admiration, that His Highness's servants were strictly
forbidden to receive presents. At his luxurious table, by a refinement
of politeness, choice cider from the orchards round the Malvern Hills
made its appearance in company with the Champagne and the Burgundy.

Portland was welcomed by his master with all the kindness of old times.
But that kindness availed nothing. For Albemarle was still in the royal
household, and appeared to have been, during the last few months, making
progress in the royal favour. Portland was angry, and the more angry
because he could not but perceive that his enemies enjoyed his anger,
and that even his friends generally thought it unreasonable; nor did he
take any pains to conceal his vexation. But he was the very opposite
of the vulgar crowd of courtiers who fawn on a master while they betray
him. He neither disguised his ill humour, nor suffered it to interfere
with the discharge of his duties. He gave his prince sullen looks, short
answers, and faithful and strenuous services. His first wish, he said,
was to retire altogether from public life. But he was sensible that,
having borne a chief part in the negotiation on which the fate of Europe
depended, he might be of use at Loo; and, with devoted loyalty, though
with a sore heart and a gloomy brow, he prepared to attend William
thither.

Before the King departed he delegated his power to nine Lords Justices.
The public was well pleased to find that Sunderland was not among them.
Two new names appeared in the list. That of Montague could excite no
surprise. But that of Marlborough awakened many recollections and gave
occasion to many speculations. He had once enjoyed a large measure of
royal favour. He had then been dismissed, disgraced, imprisoned. The
Princess Anne, for refusing to discard his wife, had been turned out of
the palace, and deprived of the honours which had often been enjoyed
by persons less near to the throne. Ministers who were supposed to have
great influence in the closet had vainly tried to overcome the dislike
with which their master regarded the Churchills. It was not till he had
been some time reconciled to his sister in law that he ceased to regard
her two favourite servants as his enemies. So late as the year 1696
he had been heard to say, "If I had been a private gentleman, my Lord
Marlborough and I must have measured swords." All these things were now,
it seemed, forgotten. The Duke of Gloucester's household had just been
arranged. As he was not yet nine years old, and the civil list was
burdened with a heavy debt, fifteen thousand pounds was thought for
the present a sufficient provision. The child's literary education
was directed by Burnet, with the title of Preceptor. Marlborough was
appointed Governor; and the London Gazette announced his appointment,
not with official dryness, but in the fervid language of panegyric.
He was at the same time again sworn a member of the Privy Council from
which he had been expelled with ignominy; and he was honoured a few days
later with a still higher mark of the King's confidence, a seat at the
board of Regency.

Some persons imagined that they saw in this strange reconciliation
a sign that the influence of Portland was on the wane and that the
influence of Albemarle was growing. For Marlborough had been many years
at feud with Portland, and had even--a rare event indeed--been so much
irritated as to speak of Portland in coarse and ungentlemanlike
terms. With Albemarle, on the other hand, Marlborough had studiously
ingratiated himself by all the arts which a mind singularly observant
and sagacious could learn from a long experience in courts; and it is
possible that Albemarle may have removed some difficulties. It is hardly
necessary, however, to resort to that supposition for the purpose of
explaining why so wise a man as William forced himself, after some delay
caused by very just and natural resentment, to act wisely. His opinion
of Marlborough's character was probably unaltered. But he could not help
perceiving that Marlborough's situation was widely different from what
it had been a few years before. That very ambition, that very avarice,
which had, in former times, impelled him to betray two masters, were now
sufficient securities for his fidelity to the order of things which had
been established by the Bill of Rights. If that order of things could be
maintained inviolate, he could scarcely fail to be, in a few years, the
greatest and wealthiest subject in Europe. His military and political
talents might therefore now be used without any apprehension that they
would be turned against the government which used them. It is to be
remembered too that he derived his importance less from his military
and political talents, great as they were, than from the dominion which,
through the instrumentality of his wife, he exercised over the mind of
the Princess. While he was on good terms with the Court it was certain
that she would lend no countenance to any cabal which might attack
either the title or the prerogatives of her brother in law. Confident
that from this quarter, a quarter once the darkest and most stormy in
the whole political horizon, nothing but sunshine and calm was now to
be expected, William set out cheerfully on his expedition to his native
country.




CHAPTER XXIV

 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]

The address was presented by the whole House. William's answer was as
good as it was possible for him, in the unfortunate position in which he
had placed himself, to return. It showed that he was deeply hurt; but it
was temperate and dignified. Those who saw him in private knew that his
feelings had been cruelly lacerated. His body sympathised with his mind.
His sleep was broken. His headaches tormented him more than ever. From
those whom he had been in the habit of considering as his friends, and
who had failed him in the recent struggle, he did not attempt to conceal
his displeasure. The lucrative see of Worcester was vacant; and some
powerful Whigs of the cider country wished to obtain it for John
Hall, Bishop of Bristol. One of the Foleys, a family zealous for the
Revolution, but hostile to standing armies, spoke to the King on the
subject. "I will pay as much respect to your wishes," said William, "as
you and yours have paid to mine." Lloyd of St. Asaph was translated to
Worcester.

The Dutch Guards immediately began to march to the coast. After all the
clamour which had been raised against them, the populace witnessed
their departure rather with sorrow than with triumph. They had been long
domiciled here; they had been honest and inoffensive; and many of them
were accompanied by English wives and by young children who talked no
language but English. As they traversed the capital, not a single shout
of exultation was raised; and they were almost everywhere greeted with
kindness. One rude spectator, indeed, was heard to remark that Hans made
a much better figure, now that he had been living ten years on the fat
of the land, than when he first came. "A pretty figure you would have
made," said a Dutch soldier, "if we had not come." And the retort was
generally applauded. It would not, however, be reasonable to infer from
the signs of public sympathy and good will with which the foreigners
were dismissed that the nation wished them to remain. It was probably
because they were going that they were regarded with favour by many who
would never have seen them relieve guard at St. James's without black
looks and muttered curses.

Side by side with the discussion about the land force had been
proceeding a discussion, scarcely less animated, about the naval
administration. The chief minister of marine was a man whom it had once
been useless and even perilous to attack in the Commons. It was to no
purpose that, in 1693, grave charges, resting on grave evidence, had
been brought against the Russell who had conquered at La Hogue. The name
of Russell acted as a spell on all who loved English freedom. The name
of La Hogue acted as a spell on all who were proud of the glory of
the English arms. The accusations, unexamined and unrefuted, were
contemptuously flung aside; and the thanks of the House were voted
to the accused commander without one dissentient voice. But times had
changed. The Admiral still had zealous partisans; but the fame of his
exploits had lost their gloss; people in general were quick to discern
his faults; and his faults were but too discernible. That he had carried
on a traitorous correspondence with Saint Germains had not been proved,
and had been pronounced by the representatives of the people to be
a foul calumny. Yet the imputation had left a stain on his name. His
arrogant, insolent and quarrelsome temper made him an object of hatred.
His vast and growing wealth made him an object of envy. What his
official merits and demerits really were it is not easy to discover
through the mist made up of factious abuse and factious panegyric. One
set of writers described him as the most ravenous of all the plunderers
of the poor overtaxed nation. Another set asserted that under him the
ships were better built and rigged, the crews were better disciplined
and better tempered, the biscuit was better, the beer was better, the
slops were better, than under any of his predecessors; and yet that the
charge to the public was less than it had been when the vessels were
unseaworthy, when the sailors were riotous, when the food was alive with
vermin, when the drink tasted like tanpickle, and when the clothes
and hammocks were rotten. It may, however, be observed that these two
representations are not inconsistent with each other; and there is
strong reason to believe that both are, to a great extent, true. Orford
was covetous and unprincipled; but he had great professional skill and
knowledge, great industry, and a strong will. He was therefore an useful
servant of the state when the interests of the state were not opposed to
his own; and this was more than could be said of some who had preceded
him. He was, for example, an incomparably better administrator than
Torrington. For Torrington's weakness and negligence caused ten times as
much mischief as his rapacity. But, when Orford had nothing to gain
by doing what was wrong, he did what was right, and did it ably and
diligently. Whatever Torrington did not embezzle he wasted. Orford may
have embezzled as much as Torrington; but he wasted nothing.

Early in the session, the House of Commons resolved itself into a
Committee on the state of the Navy. This Committee sate at intervals
during more than three months. Orford's administration underwent a
close scrutiny, and very narrowly escaped a severe censure. A resolution
condemning the manner in which his accounts had been kept was lost by
only one vote. There were a hundred and forty against him, and a hundred
and forty-one for him. When the report was presented to the House,
another attempt was made to put a stigma upon him. It was moved that the
King should be requested to place the direction of maritime affairs
in other hands. There were a hundred and sixty Ayes to a hundred and
sixty-four Noes. With this victory, a victory hardly to be distinguished
from a defeat, his friends were forced to be content. An address setting
forth some of the abuses in the naval department, and beseeching King
William to correct them, was voted without a division. In one of those
abuses Orford was deeply interested. He was First Lord of the Admiralty;
and he had held, ever since the Revolution, the lucrative place of
Treasurer of the Navy. It was evidently improper that two offices, one
of which was meant to be a check on the other, should be united in the
same person; and this the Commons represented to the King.

Questions relating to the military and naval Establishments occupied
the attention of the Commons so much during the session that, until the
prorogation was at hand, little was said about the resumption of the
Crown grants. But, just before the Land Tax Bill was sent up to the
Lords, a clause was added to it by which seven Commissioners were
empowered to take account of the property forfeited in Ireland during
the late troubles. The selection of those Commissioners the House
reserved to itself. Every member was directed to bring a list containing
the names of seven persons who were not members; and the seven names
which appeared in the greatest number of lists were inserted in the
bill. The result of the ballot was unfavourable to the government. Four
of the seven on whom the choice fell were connected with the opposition;
and one of them, Trenchard, was the most conspicuous of the pamphleteers
who had been during many months employed in raising a cry against the
army.

The Land Tax Bill, with this clause tacked to it, was carried to the
Upper House. The Peers complained, and not without reason, of this mode
of proceeding. It may, they said, be very proper that Commissioners
should be appointed by Act of Parliament to take account of the
forfeited property in Ireland. But they should be appointed by a
separate Act. Then we should be able to make amendments, to ask for
conferences, to give and receive explanations. The Land Tax Bill we
cannot amend. We may indeed reject it; but we cannot reject it without
shaking public credit, without leaving the kingdom defenceless, without
raising a mutiny in the navy. The Lords yielded, but not without a
protest which was signed by some strong Whigs and some strong Tories.
The King was even more displeased than the Peers. "This Commission," he
said, in one of his private letters, "will give plenty of trouble next
winter." It did indeed give more trouble than he at all anticipated, and
brought the nation nearer than it has ever since been to the verge of
another revolution.

And now the supplies had been voted. The spring was brightening and
blooming into summer. The lords and squires were sick of London; and
the King was sick of England. On the fourth day of May he prorogued the
Houses with a speech very different from the speeches with which he had
been in the habit of dismissing the preceding Parliament. He uttered not
one word of thanks or praise. He expressed a hope that, when they should
meet again, they would make effectual provision for the public safety.
"I wish," these were his concluding words, "no mischief may happen in
the mean time." The gentlemen who thronged the bar withdrew in wrath,
and, as they could not take immediate vengeance, laid up his reproaches
in their hearts against the beginning of the next session.

The Houses had broken up; but there was still much to be done before the
King could set out for Loo. He did not yet perceive that the true way
to escape from his difficulties was to form an entirely new ministry
possessing the confidence of the majority which had, in the late
session, been found so unmanageable. But some partial changes he could
not help making. The recent votes of the Commons forced him seriously
to consider the state of the Board of Admiralty. It was impossible that
Orford could continue to preside at that Board and be at the same time
Treasurer of the Navy. He was offered his option. His own wish was to
keep the Treasurership, which was both the more lucrative and the more
secure of his two places. But it was so strongly represented to him that
he would disgrace himself by giving up great power for the sake of gains
which, rich and childless as he was, ought to have been beneath his
consideration, that he determined to remain at the Admiralty. He seems
to have thought that the sacrifice which he had made entitled him to
govern despotically the department at which he had been persuaded to
remain. But he soon found that the King was determined to keep in his
own hands the power of appointing and removing the junior Lords. One of
these Lords, especially, the First Commissioner hated, and was bent on
ejecting, Sir George Rooke, who was Member of Parliament for Portsmouth.
Rooke was a brave and skilful officer, and had, therefore, though a Tory
in politics, been suffered to keep his place during the ascendency of
the Whig junto. Orford now complained to the King that Rooke had been
in correspondence with the factious opposition which had given so
much trouble, and had lent the weight of his professional and official
authority to the accusations which had been brought against the naval
administration. The King spoke to Rooke, who declared that Orford had
been misinformed. "I have a great respect for my Lord; and on proper
occasions I have not failed to express it in public. There have
certainly been abuses at the Admiralty which I am unable to defend. When
those abuses have been the subject of debate in the House of Commons, I
have sate silent. But, whenever any personal attack has been made on
my Lord, I have done him the best service that I could." William was
satisfied, and thought that Orford should have been satisfied too.
But that haughty and perverse nature could be content with nothing but
absolute dominion. He tendered his resignation, and could not be induced
to retract it. He said that he could be of no use. It would be easy to
supply his place; and his successors should have his best wishes. He
then retired to the country, where, as was reported and may easily be
believed, he vented his ill humour in furious invectives against the
King. The Treasurership of the Navy was given to the Speaker Littleton.
The Earl of Bridgewater, a nobleman of very fair character and of some
experience in business, became First Lord of the Admiralty.

Other changes were made at the same time. There had during some time
been really no Lord President of the Council. Leeds, indeed, was still
called Lord President, and, as such, took precedence of dukes of older
creation; but he had not performed any of the duties of his office since
the prosecution instituted against him by the Commons in 1695 had been
suddenly stopped by an event which made the evidence of his guilt at
once legally defective and morally complete. It seems strange that a
statesman of eminent ability, who had been twice Prime Minister, should
have wished to hold, by so ignominious a tenure, a place which can have
had no attraction for him but the salary. To that salary, however, Leeds
had clung, year after year; and he now relinquished it with a very bad
grace. He was succeeded by Pembroke; and the Privy Seal which Pembroke
laid down was put into the hands of a peer of recent creation, Viscount
Lonsdale. Lonsdale had been distinguished in the House of Commons as Sir
John Lowther, and had held high office, but had quitted public life in
weariness and disgust, and had passed several years in retirement at his
hereditary seat in Cumberland. He had planted forests round his house,
and had employed Verrio to decorate the interior with gorgeous
frescoes which represented the gods at their banquet of ambrosia. Very
reluctantly, and only in compliance with the earnest and almost angry
importunity of the King, Lonsdale consented to leave his magnificent
retreat, and again to encounter the vexations of public life.

Trumball resigned the Secretaryship of State; and the Seals which he
had held were given to Jersey, who was succeeded at Paris by the Earl of
Manchester.

It is to be remarked that the new Privy Seal and the new Secretary of
State were moderate Tories. The King had probably hoped that, by calling
them to his councils, he should conciliate the opposition. But the
device proved unsuccessful; and soon it appeared that the old practice
of filling the chief offices of state with men taken from various
parties, and hostile to one another, or, at least, unconnected with one
another, was altogether unsuited to the new state of affairs; and that,
since the Commons had become possessed of supreme power, the only way to
prevent them from abusing that power with boundless folly and violence
was to intrust the government to a ministry which enjoyed their
confidence.

While William was making these changes in the great offices of state, a
change in which he took a still deeper interest was taking place in his
own household. He had laboured in vain during many months to keep
the peace between Portland and Albemarle. Albemarle, indeed, was
all courtesy, good humour, and submission; but Portland would not
be conciliated. Even to foreign ministers he railed at his rival and
complained of his master. The whole Court was divided between the
competitors, but divided very unequally. The majority took the side
of Albemarle, whose manners were popular and whose power was evidently
growing. Portland's few adherents were persons who, like him, had
already made their fortunes, and who did not therefore think it worth
their while to transfer their homage to a new patron. One of these
persons tried to enlist Prior in Portland's faction, but with very
little success. "Excuse me," said the poet, "if I follow your example
and my Lord's. My Lord is a model to us all; and you have imitated him
to good purpose. He retires with half a million. You have large grants,
a lucrative employment in Holland, a fine house. I have nothing of the
kind. A court is like those fashionable churches into which we have
looked at Paris. Those who have received the benediction are instantly
away to the Opera House or the wood of Boulogne. Those who have not
received the benediction are pressing and elbowing each other to get
near the altar. You and my Lord have got your blessing, and are quite
right to take yourselves off with it. I have not been blest, and must
fight my way up as well as I can." Prior's wit was his own. But his
worldly wisdom was common to him with multitudes; and the crowd of
those who wanted to be lords of the bedchamber, rangers of parks, and
lieutenants of counties, neglected Portland and tried to ingratiate
themselves with Albemarle.

By one person, however, Portland was still assiduously courted; and that
person was the King. Nothing was omitted which could soothe an irritated
mind. Sometimes William argued, expostulated and implored during two
hours together. But he found the comrade of his youth an altered man,
unreasonable, obstinate and disrespectful even before the public eye.
The Prussian minister, an observant and impartial witness, declared that
his hair had more than once stood on end to see the rude discourtesy
with which the servant repelled the gracious advances of the master.
Over and over William invited his old friend to take the long accustomed
seat in his royal coach, that seat which Prince George himself had never
been permitted to invade; and the invitation was over and over declined
in a way which would have been thought uncivil even between equals.
A sovereign could not, without a culpable sacrifice of his personal
dignity, persist longer in such a contest. Portland was permitted to
withdraw from the palace. To Heinsius, as to a common friend, William
announced this separation in a letter which shows how deeply his
feelings had been wounded. "I cannot tell you what I have suffered. I
have done on my side every thing that I could do to satisfy him; but it
was decreed that a blind jealousy should make him regardless of every
thing that ought to have been dear to him." To Portland himself the King
wrote in language still more touching. "I hope that you will oblige me
in one thing. Keep your key of office. I shall not consider you as bound
to any attendance. But I beg you to let me see you as often as possible.
That will be a great mitigation of the distress which you have caused
me. For, after all that has passed, I cannot help loving you tenderly."

Thus Portland retired to enjoy at his ease immense estates scattered
over half the shires of England, and a hoard of ready money, such, it
was said, as no other private man in Europe possessed. His fortune still
continued to grow. For, though, after the fashion of his countrymen,
he laid out large sums on the interior decoration of his houses, on his
gardens, and on his aviaries, his other expenses were regulated with
strict frugality. His repose was, however, during some years not
uninterrupted. He had been trusted with such grave secrets, and
employed in such high missions, that his assistance was still frequently
necessary to the government; and that assistance was given, not, as
formerly, with the ardour of a devoted friend, but with the exactness
of a conscientious servant. He still continued to receive letters from
William; letters no longer indeed overflowing with kindness, but always
indicative of perfect confidence and esteem.

The chief subject of those letters was the question which had been for a
time settled in the previous autumn at Loo, and which had been reopened
in the spring by the death of the Electoral Prince of Bavaria.

As soon as that event was known at Paris, Lewis directed Tallard to
sound William as to a new treaty. The first thought which occurred to
William was that it might be possible to put the Elector of Bavaria in
his son's place. But this suggestion was coldly received at Versailles,
and not without reason. If, indeed, the young Francis Joseph had lived
to succeed Charles, and had then died a minor without issue, the
case would have been very different. Then the Elector would have been
actually administering the government of the Spanish monarchy, and,
supported by France, England and the United Provinces, might without
much difficulty have continued to rule as King the empire which he had
begun to rule as Regent. He would have had also, not indeed a right, but
something which to the vulgar would have looked like a right, to be his
son's heir. Now he was altogether unconnected with Spain. No more
reason could be given for selecting him to be the Catholic King than for
selecting the Margrave of Baden or the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Something
was said about Victor Amadeus of Savoy, and something about the King of
Portugal; but to both there were insurmountable objections. It seemed,
therefore, that the only choice was between a French Prince and an
Austrian Prince; and William learned, with agreeable surprise, that
Lewis might possibly be induced to suffer the younger Archduke to be
King of Spain and the Indies. It was intimated at the same time that the
House of Bourbon would expect, in return for so great a concession to
the rival House of Habsburg, greater advantages than had been thought
sufficient when the Dauphin consented to waive his claims in favour of
a candidate whose elevation could cause no jealousies. What Lewis
demanded, in addition to the portion formerly assigned to France, was
the Milanese. With the Milanese he proposed to buy Lorraine from
its Duke. To the Duke of Lorraine this arrangement would have been
beneficial, and to the people of Lorraine more beneficial still. They
were, and had long been, in a singularly unhappy situation. Lewis
domineered over them as if they had been his subjects, and troubled
himself as little about their happiness as if they had been his enemies.
Since he exercised as absolute a power over them as over the Normans and
Burgundians, it was desirable that he should have as great an interest
in their welfare as in the welfare of the Normans and Burgundians.

On the basis proposed by France William was willing to negotiate; and,
when, in June 1699, he left Kensington to pass the summer at Loo, the
terms of the treaty known as the Second Treaty of Partition were very
nearly adjusted. The great object now was to obtain the consent of the
Emperor. That consent, it should seem, ought to have been readily and
even eagerly given. Had it been given, it might perhaps have saved
Christendom from a war of eleven years. But the policy of Austria was,
at that time, strangely dilatory and irresolute. It was in vain that
William and Heinsius represented the importance of every hour. "The
Emperor's ministers go on dawdling," so the King wrote to Heinsius, "not
because there is any difficulty about the matter, not because they mean
to reject the terms, but solely because they are people who can make up
their minds to nothing." While the negotiation at Vienna was thus drawn
out into endless length, evil tidings came from Madrid.

Spain and her King had long been sunk so low that it seemed impossible
for him to sink lower. Yet the political maladies of the monarchy and
the physical maladies of the monarch went on growing, and exhibited
every day some new and frightful symptom. Since the death of the
Bavarian Prince, the Court had been divided between the Austrian
faction, of which the Queen and the leading ministers Oropesa and Melgar
were the chiefs, and the French faction, of which the most important
member was Cardinal Portocarrero, Archbishop of Toledo. At length an
event which, as far as can now be judged, was not the effect of a deeply
meditated plan, and was altogether unconnected with the disputes about
the succession, gave the advantage to the adherents of France. The
government, having committed the great error of undertaking to supply
Madrid with food, committed the still greater error of neglecting to
perform what it had undertaken. The price of bread doubled. Complaints
were made to the magistrates, and were heard with the indolent apathy
characteristic of the Spanish administration from the highest to the
lowest grade. Then the populace rose, attacked the house of Oropesa,
poured by thousands into the great court of the palace, and insisted on
seeing the King. The Queen appeared in a balcony, and told the rioters
that His Majesty was asleep. Then the multitude set up a roar of fury.
"It is false; we do not believe you. We will see him." "He has slept too
long," said one threatening voice; "and it is high time that he should
wake." The Queen retired weeping; and the wretched being on whose
dominions the sun never set tottered to the window, bowed as he
had never bowed before, muttered some gracious promises, waved a
handkerchief in the air, bowed again, and withdrew. Oropesa, afraid of
being torn to pieces, retired to his country seat. Melgar made some
show of resistance, garrisoned his house, and menaced the rabble with
a shower of grenades, but was soon forced to go after Oropesa; and the
supreme power passed to Portocarrero.

Portocarrero was one of a race of men of whom we, happily for us,
have seen very little, but whose influence has been the curse of Roman
Catholic countries. He was, like Sixtus the Fourth and Alexander the
Sixth, a politician made out of an impious priest. Such politicians are
generally worse than the worst of the laity, more merciless than any
ruffian that can be found in camps, more dishonest than any pettifogger
who haunts the tribunals. The sanctity of their profession has an
unsanctifying influence on them. The lessons of the nursery, the habits
of boyhood and of early youth, leave in the minds of the great majority
of avowed infidels some traces of religion, which, in seasons of
mourning and of sickness, become plainly discernible. But it is scarcely
possible that any such trace should remain in the mind of the hypocrite
who, during many years, is constantly going through what he considers
as the mummery of preaching, saying mass, baptizing, shriving. When an
ecclesiastic of this sort mixes in the contests of men of the world, he
is indeed much to be dreaded as an enemy, but still more to be dreaded
as an ally. From the pulpit where he daily employs his eloquence to
embellish what he regards as fables, from the altar whence he daily
looks down with secret scorn on the prostrate dupes who believe that he
can turn a drop of wine into blood, from the confessional where he daily
studies with cold and scientific attention the morbid anatomy of guilty
consciences, he brings to courts some talents which may move the envy
of the more cunning and unscrupulous of lay courtiers; a rare skill in
reading characters and in managing tempers, a rare art of dissimulation,
a rare dexterity in insinuating what it is not safe to affirm or to
propose in explicit terms. There are two feelings which often prevent
an unprincipled layman from becoming utterly depraved and despicable,
domestic feeling, and chivalrous feeling. His heart may be softened by
the endearments of a family. His pride may revolt from the thought of
doing what does not become a gentleman. But neither with the domestic
feeling nor with the chivalrous feeling has the wicked priest any
sympathy. His gown excludes him from the closest and most tender of
human relations, and at the same time dispenses him from the observation
of the fashionable code of honour.

Such a priest was Portocarrero; and he seems to have been a consummate
master of his craft. To the name of statesman he had no pretensions. The
lofty part of his predecessor Ximenes was out of the range, not more of
his intellectual, than his moral capacity. To reanimate a paralysed
and torpid monarchy, to introduce order and economy into a bankrupt
treasury, to restore the discipline of an army which had become a mob,
to refit a navy which was perishing from mere rottenness, these were
achievements beyond the power, beyond even the ambition, of that ignoble
nature. But there was one task for which the new minister was admirably
qualified, that of establishing, by means of superstitious terror, an
absolute dominion over a feeble mind; and the feeblest of all minds was
that of his unhappy sovereign. Even before the riot which had made the
cardinal supreme in the state, he had succeeded in introducing into the
palace a new confessor selected by himself. In a very short time the
King's malady took a new form. That he was too weak to lift his food
to his misshapen mouth, that, at thirty-seven, he had the bald head and
wrinkled face of a man of seventy, that his complexion was turning from
yellow to green, that he frequently fell down in fits and remained long
insensible, these were no longer the worst symptoms of his malady.
He had always been afraid of ghosts and demons; and it had long been
necessary that three friars should watch every night by his restless bed
as a guard against hobgoblins. But now he was firmly convinced that he
was bewitched, that he was possessed, that there was a devil within him,
that there were devils all around him. He was exorcised according to the
forms of his Church; but this ceremony, instead of quieting him, scared
him out of almost all the little reason that nature had given him. In
his misery and despair he was induced to resort to irregular modes of
relief. His confessor brought to court impostors who pretended that they
could interrogate the powers of darkness. The Devil was called up, sworn
and examined. This strange deponent made oath, as in the presence of
God, that His Catholic Majesty was under a spell, which had been laid on
him many years before, for the purpose of preventing the continuation of
the royal line. A drug had been compounded out of the brains and kidneys
of a human corpse, and had been administered in a cup of chocolate.
This potion had dried up all the sources of life; and the best remedy
to which the patient could now resort would be to swallow a bowl of
consecrated oil every morning before breakfast. Unhappily, the authors
of this story fell into contradictions which they could excuse only by
throwing the blame on Satan, who, they said, was an unwilling witness,
and a liar from the beginning. In the midst of their conjuring, the
Inquisition came down upon them. It must be admitted that, if the Holy
Office had reserved all its terrors for such cases, it would not now
have been remembered as the most hateful judicature that was ever known
among civilised men. The subaltern impostors were thrown into dungeons.
But the chief criminal continued to be master of the King and of
the kingdom. Meanwhile, in the distempered mind of Charles one mania
succeeded another. A longing to pry into those mysteries of the grave
from which human beings avert their thoughts had long been hereditary
in his house. Juana, from whom the mental constitution of her posterity
seems to have derived a morbid taint, had sate, year after year, by the
bed on which lay the ghastly remains of her husband, apparelled in the
rich embroidery and jewels which he had been wont to wear while living.
Her son Charles found an eccentric pleasure in celebrating his own
obsequies, in putting on his shroud, placing himself in the coffin,
covering himself with the pall; and lying as one dead till the requiem
had been sung, and the mourners had departed leaving him alone in the
tomb. Philip the Second found a similar pleasure in gazing on the huge
chest of bronze in which his remains were to be laid, and especially on
the skull which, encircled with the crown of Spain, grinned at him from
the cover. Philip the Fourth, too, hankered after burials and burial
places, gratified his curiosity by gazing on the remains of his great
grandfather, the Emperor, and sometimes stretched himself out at full
length like a corpse in the niche which he had selected for himself
in the royal cemetery. To that cemetery his son was now attracted by
a strange fascination. Europe could show no more magnificent place of
sepulture. A staircase encrusted with jasper led down from the stately
church of the Escurial into an octagon situated just beneath the high
altar. The vault, impervious to the sun, was rich with gold and precious
marbles, which reflected the blaze from a huge chandelier of silver.
On the right and on the left reposed, each in a massy sarcophagus,
the departed kings and queens of Spain. Into this mausoleum the King
descended with a long train of courtiers, and ordered the coffins to be
unclosed. His mother had been embalmed with such consummate skill that
she appeared as she had appeared on her death bed. The body of his
grandfather too seemed entire, but crumbled into dust at the first
touch. From Charles neither the remains of his mother nor those of his
grandfather could draw any sign of sensibility. But, when the gentle and
graceful Louisa of Orleans, the miserable man's first wife, she who
had lighted up his dark existence with one short and pale gleam of
happiness, presented herself, after the lapse of ten years, to his eyes,
his sullen apathy gave way. "She is in heaven," he cried; "and I shall
soon be there with her;" and, with all the speed of which his limbs were
capable, he tottered back to the upper air.

Such was the state of the Court of Spain when, in the autumn of 1699, it
became known that, since the death of the Electoral Prince of Bavaria,
the governments of France, of England and of the United Provinces, were
busily engaged in framing a second Treaty of Partition. That Castilians
would be indignant at learning that any foreign potentate meditated the
dismemberment of that empire of which Castile was the head might have
been foreseen. But it was less easy to foresee that William would be
the chief and indeed almost the only object of their indignation. If the
meditated partition really was unjustifiable, there could be no doubt
that Lewis was far more to blame than William. For it was by Lewis, and
not by William, that the partition had been originally suggested; and it
was Lewis, and not William, who was to gain an accession of territory
by the partition. Nobody could doubt that William would most gladly
have acceded to any arrangement by which the Spanish monarchy, could be
preserved entire without danger to the liberties of Europe, and that he
had agreed to the division of that monarchy solely for the purpose of
contenting Lewis. Nevertheless the Spanish ministers carefully avoided
whatever could give offence to Lewis, and indemnified themselves by
offering a gross indignity to William. The truth is that their pride
had, as extravagant pride often has, a close affinity with meanness.
They knew that it was unsafe to insult Lewis; and they believed that
they might with perfect safety insult William. Lewis was absolute master
of his large kingdom. He had at no great distance armies and fleets
which one word from him would put in motion. If he were provoked,
the white flag might in a few days be again flying on the walls of
Barcelona. His immense power was contemplated by the Castilians with
hope as well as with fear. He and he alone, they imagined, could avert
that dismemberment of which they could not bear to think. Perhaps
he might yet be induced to violate the engagements into which he had
entered with England and Holland, if one of his grandsons were named
successor to the Spanish throne. He, therefore, must be respected and
courted. But William could at that moment do little to hurt or to help.
He could hardly be said to have an army. He could take no step which
would require an outlay of money without the sanction of the House of
Commons; and it seemed to be the chief study of the House of Commons to
cross him and to humble him. The history of the late session was known
to the Spaniards principally by inaccurate reports brought by Irish
friars. And, had those reports been accurate, the real nature of a
Parliamentary struggle between the Court party and the Country party
could have been but very imperfectly understood by the magnates of
a realm in which there had not, during several generations, been any
constitutional opposition to the royal pleasure. At one time it was
generally believed at Madrid, not by the mere rabble, but by Grandees
who had the envied privilege of going in coaches and four through the
streets of the capital, that William had been deposed, that he had
retired to Holland, that the Parliament had resolved that there should
be no more kings, that a commonwealth had been proclaimed, and that a
Doge was about to be appointed and, though this rumour turned out to be
false, it was but too true that the English government was, just at
that conjuncture, in no condition to resent slights. Accordingly, the
Marquess of Canales, who represented the Catholic King at Westminster,
received instructions to remonstrate in strong language, and was not
afraid to go beyond those instructions. He delivered to the Secretary
of State a note abusive and impertinent beyond all example and all
endurance. His master, he wrote, had learnt with amazement that King
William, Holland and other powers,--for the ambassador, prudent even in
his blustering, did not choose to name the King of France,--were engaged
in framing a treaty, not only for settling the succession to the Spanish
crown, but for the detestable purpose of dividing the Spanish monarchy.
The whole scheme was vehemently condemned as contrary to the law of
nature and to the law of God. The ambassador appealed from the King of
England to the Parliament, to the nobility, and to the whole nation, and
concluded by giving notice that he should lay the whole case before the
two Houses when next they met.

The style of this paper shows how strong an impression had been made on
foreign nations by the unfortunate events of the late session. The King,
it was plain, was no longer considered as the head of the government. He
was charged with having committed a wrong; but he was not asked to make
reparation. He was treated as a subordinate officer who had been
guilty of an offence against public law, and was threatened with the
displeasure of the Commons, who, as the real rulers of the state, were
bound to keep their servants in order. The Lords justices read this
outrageous note with indignation, and sent it with all speed to Loo.
Thence they received, with equal speed, directions to send Canales
out of the country. Our ambassador was at the same time recalled from
Madrid; and all diplomatic intercourse between England and Spain was
suspended.

It is probable that Canales would have expressed himself in a less
unbecoming manner, had there not already existed a most unfortunate
quarrel between Spain and William, a quarrel in which William was
perfectly blameless, but in which the unanimous feeling of the English
Parliament and of the English nation was on the side of Spain.

It is necessary to go back some years for the purpose of tracing the
origin and progress of this quarrel. Few portions of our history are
more interesting or instructive; but few have been more obscured and
distorted by passion and prejudice. The story is an exciting one; and it
has generally been told by writers whose judgment had been perverted by
strong national partiality. Their invectives and lamentations have still
to be temperately examined; and it may well be doubted whether, even
now, after the lapse of more than a century and a half, feelings hardly
compatible with temperate examination will not be stirred up in many
minds by the name of Darien. In truth that name is associated with
calamities so cruel that the recollection of them may not unnaturally
disturb the equipoise even of a fair and sedate mind.

The man who brought these calamities on his country was not a mere
visionary or a mere swindler. He was that William Paterson whose name is
honourably associated with the auspicious commencement of a new era in
English commerce and in English finance. His plan of a national bank,
having been examined and approved by the most eminent statesmen who sate
in the Parliament house at Westminster and by the most eminent merchants
who walked the Exchange of London, had been carried into execution with
signal success. He thought, and perhaps thought with reason, that his
services had been ill requited. He was, indeed, one of the original
Directors of the great corporation which owed its existence to him; but
he was not reelected. It may easily be believed that his colleagues,
citizens of ample fortune and of long experience in the practical part
of trade, aldermen, wardens of companies, heads of firms well known in
every Burse throughout the civilised world, were not well pleased to
see among them in Grocers' Hall a foreign adventurer whose whole capital
consisted in an inventive brain and a persuasive tongue. Some of them
were probably weak enough to dislike him for being a Scot; some were
probably mean enough to be jealous of his parts and knowledge; and even
persons who were not unfavourably disposed to him might have discovered,
before they had known him long, that, with all his cleverness, he was
deficient in common sense; that his mind was full of schemes which,
at the first glance, had a specious aspect, but which, on closer
examination, appeared to be impracticable or pernicious; and that the
benefit which the public had derived from one happy project formed by
him would be very dearly purchased if it were taken for granted that
all his other projects must be equally happy. Disgusted by what he
considered as the ingratitude of the English, he repaired to the
Continent, in the hope that he might be able to interest the traders of
the Hanse Towns and the princes of the German Empire in his plans. From
the Continent he returned unsuccessful to London; and then at length the
thought that he might be more justly appreciated by his countrymen than
by strangers seems to have risen in his mind. Just at this time he
fell in with Fletcher of Saltoun, who happened to be in England. These
eccentric men soon became intimate. Each of them had his monomania; and
the two monomaniac suited each other perfectly. Fletcher's whole soul
was possessed by a sore, jealous, punctilious patriotism. His heart was
ulcerated by the thought of the poverty, the feebleness, the political
insignificance of Scotland, and of the indignities which she had
suffered at the hand of her powerful and opulent neighbour. When he
talked of her wrongs his dark meagre face took its sternest expression;
his habitual frown grew blacker, and his eyes flashed more than their
wonted fire. Paterson, on the other hand, firmly believed himself to
have discovered the means of making any state which would follow his
counsel great and prosperous in a time which, when compared with the
life of an individual, could hardly be called long, and which, in the
life of a nation, was but as a moment. There is not the least reason
to believe that he was dishonest. Indeed he would have found more
difficulty in deceiving others had he not begun by deceiving himself.
His faith to his own schemes was strong even to martyrdom; and the
eloquence with which he illustrated and defended them had all the charm
of sincerity and of enthusiasm. Very seldom has any blunder committed
by fools, or any villany devised by impostors, brought on any society
miseries so great as the dreams of these two friends, both of them men
of integrity and both of them men of parts, were destined to bring on
Scotland.

In 1695 the pair went down together to their native country. The
Parliament of that country was then about to meet under the presidency
of Tweeddale, an old acquaintance and country neighbour of Fletcher.
On Tweeddale the first attack was made. He was a shrewd, cautious, old
politician. Yet it should seem that he was not able to hold out against
the skill and energy of the assailants. Perhaps, however, he was
not altogether a dupe. The public mind was at that moment violently
agitated. Men of all parties were clamouring for an inquiry into the
slaughter of Glencoe. There was reason to fear that the session which
was about to commence would be stormy. In such circumstances the Lord
High Commissioner might think that it would be prudent to appease the
anger of the Estates by offering an almost irresistible bait to their
cupidity. If such was the policy of Tweeddale, it was, for the
moment, eminently successful. The Parliament, which met burning with
indignation, was soothed into good humour. The blood of the murdered
Macdonalds continued to cry for vengeance in vain. The schemes of
Paterson, brought forward under the patronage of the ministers of the
Crown, were sanctioned by the unanimous voice of the Legislature.

The great projector was the idol of the whole nation. Men spoke to
him with more profound respect than to the Lord High Commissioner. His
antechamber was crowded with solicitors desirous to catch some drops of
that golden shower of which he was supposed to be the dispenser. To be
seen walking with him in the High Street, to be honoured by him with a
private interview of a quarter of an hour, were enviable distinctions.
He, after the fashion of all the false prophets who have deluded
themselves and others, drew new faith in his own lie from the credulity
of his disciples. His countenance, his voice, his gestures, indicated
boundless self-importance. When he appeared in public he looked,--such
is the language of one who probably had often seen him,--like Atlas
conscious that a world was on his shoulders. But the airs which he gave
himself only heightened the respect and admiration which he inspired.
His demeanour was regarded as a model. Scotch men who wished to be
thought wise looked as like Paterson as they could.

His plan, though as yet disclosed to the public only by glimpses,
was applauded by all classes, factions and sects, lords, merchants,
advocates, divines, Whigs and Jacobites, Cameronians and Episcopalians.
In truth, of all the ten thousand bubbles of which history has preserved
the memory, none was ever more skilfully puffed into existence; none
ever soared higher, or glittered more brilliantly; and none ever burst
with a more lamentable explosion. There was, however, a certain mixture
of truth in the magnificent day dream which produced such fatal effects.

Scotland was, indeed, not blessed with a mild climate or a fertile soil.
But the richest spots that had ever existed on the face of the earth had
been spots quite as little favoured by nature. It was on a bare rock,
surrounded by deep sea, that the streets of Tyre were piled up to a
dizzy height. On that sterile crag were woven the robes of Persian
satraps and Sicilian tyrants; there were fashioned silver bowls and
chargers for the banquets of kings; and there Pomeranian amber was set
in Lydian gold to adorn the necks of queens. In the warehouses were
collected the fine linen of Egypt and the odorous gums of Arabia; the
ivory of India, and the tin of Britain. In the port lay fleets of great
ships which had weathered the storms of the Euxine and the Atlantic.
Powerful and wealthy colonies in distant parts of the world looked up
with filial reverence to the little island; and despots, who trampled
on the laws and outraged the feelings of all the nations between the
Hydaspes and the Aegean, condescended to court the population of that
busy hive. At a later period, on a dreary bank formed by the soil which
the Alpine streams swept down to the Adriatic, rose the palaces of
Venice. Within a space which would not have been thought large enough
for one of the parks of a rude northern baron were collected riches
far exceeding those of a northern kingdom. In almost every one of the
prorate dwellings which fringed the Great Canal were to be seen plate,
mirrors, jewellery, tapestry, paintings, carving, such as might move
the envy of the master of Holyrood. In the arsenal were munitions of war
sufficient to maintain a contest against the whole power of the Ottoman
Empire. And, before the grandeur of Venice had declined, another
commonwealth, still less favoured, if possible, by nature, had
rapidly risen to a power and opulence which the whole civilised world
contemplated with envy and admiration. On a desolate marsh overhung by
fogs and exhaling diseases, a marsh where there was neither wood nor
stone, neither firm earth nor drinkable water, a marsh from which the
ocean on one side and the Rhine on the other were with difficulty kept
out by art, was to be found the most prosperous community in Europe.
The wealth which was collected within five miles of the Stadthouse of
Amsterdam would purchase the fee simple of Scotland. And why should
this be? Was there any reason to believe that nature had bestowed on the
Phoenician, on the Venetian, or on the Hollander, a larger measure of
activity, of ingenuity, of forethought, of self command, than on the
citizen of Edinburgh or Glasgow? The truth was that, in all those
qualities which conduce to success in life, and especially in commercial
life, the Scot had never been surpassed; perhaps he had never been
equalled. All that was necessary was that his energy should take a
proper direction, and a proper direction Paterson undertook to give.

His esoteric project was the original project of Christopher Columbus,
extended and modified. Columbus had hoped to establish a communication
between our quarter of the world and India across the great western
ocean. But he was stopped by an unexpected obstacle. The American
continent, stretching far north and far south into cold and inhospitable
regions, presented what seemed an insurmountable barrier to his
progress; and, in the same year in which he first set foot on that
continent, Gama reached Malabar by doubling the Cape of Good Hope. The
consequence was that during two hundred years the trade of Europe with
the remoter parts of Asia had been carried on by rounding the immense
peninsula of Africa. Paterson now revived the project of Columbus, and
persuaded himself and others that it was possible to carry that project
into effect in such a manner as to make his country the greatest
emporium that had ever existed on our globe.

For this purpose it was necessary to occupy in America some spot which
might be a resting place between Scotland and India. It was true that
almost every habitable part of America had already been seized by some
European power. Paterson, however, imagined that one province, the most
important of all, had been overlooked by the short-sighted cupidity of
vulgar politicians and vulgar traders. The isthmus which joined the
two great continents of the New World remained, according to him,
unappropriated. Great Spanish viceroyalties, he said, lay on the east
and on the west; but the mountains and forests of Darien were abandoned
to rude tribes which followed their own usages and obeyed their own
princes. He had been in that part of the world, in what character was
not quite clear. Some said that he had gone thither to convert the
Indians, and some that he had gone thither to rob the Spaniards. But,
missionary or pirate, he had visited Darien, and had brought away none
but delightful recollections. The havens, he averred, were capacious
and secure; the sea swarmed with turtle; the country was so mountainous
that, within nine degrees of the equator, the climate was temperate;
and yet the inequalities of the ground offered no impediment to the
conveyance of goods. Nothing would be easier than to construct roads
along which a string of mules or a wheeled carriage might in the course
of a single day pass from sea to sea. The soil was, to the depth of
several feet, a rich black mould, on which a profusion of valuable herbs
and fruits grew spontaneously, and on which all the choicest productions
of tropical regions might easily be raised by human industry and art;
and yet the exuberant fertility of the earth had not tainted the purity
of the air. Considered merely as a place of residence, the isthmus was
a paradise. A colony placed there could not fail to prosper, even if it
had no wealth except what was derived from agriculture. But agriculture
was a secondary object in the colonization of Darien. Let but that
precious neck of land be occupied by an intelligent, an enterprising,
a thrifty race; and, in a few years, the whole trade between India and
Europe must be drawn to that point. The tedious and perilous passage
round Africa would soon be abandoned. The merchant would no longer
expose his cargoes to the mountainous billows and capricious gales
of the Antarctic seas. The greater part of the voyage from Europe to
Darien, and the whole voyage from Darien to the richest kingdoms of
Asia, would be a rapid yet easy gliding before the trade winds over blue
and sparkling waters. The voyage back across the Pacific would, in the
latitude of Japan, be almost equally speedy and pleasant. Time, labour,
money, would be saved. The returns would come in more quickly. Fewer
hands would be required to navigate the ships. The loss of a vessel
would be a rare event. The trade would increase fast. In a short time
it would double; and it would all pass through Darien. Whoever possessed
that door of the sea, that key of the universe,--such were the bold
figures which Paterson loved to employ,--would give law to both
hemispheres; and would, by peaceful arts, without shedding one drop of
blood, establish an empire as splendid as that of Cyrus or Alexander. Of
the kingdoms of Europe, Scotland was, as yet, the poorest and the least
considered. If she would but occupy Darien, if she would but become one
great free port, one great warehouse for the wealth which the soil of
Darien might produce, and for the still greater wealth which would be
poured into Darien from Canton and Siam, from Ceylon and the Moluccas,
from the mouths of the Ganges and the Gulf of Cambay, she would at once
take her place in the first rank among nations. No rival would be able
to contend with her either in the West Indian or in the East Indian
trade. The beggarly country, as it had been insolently called by the
inhabitants of warmer and more fruitful regions, would be the great mart
for the choicest luxuries, sugar, rum, coffee, chocolate, tobacco, the
tea and porcelain of China, the muslin of Dacca, the shawls of Cashmere,
the diamonds of Golconda, the pearls of Karrack, the delicious birds'
nests of Nicobar, cinnamon and pepper, ivory and sandal wood. From
Scotland would come all the finest jewels and brocade worn by duchesses
at the balls of St. James's and Versailles. From Scotland would come
all the saltpetre which would furnish the means of war to the fleets and
armies of contending potentates. And on all the vast riches which would
be constantly passing through the little kingdom a toll would be paid
which would remain behind. There would be a prosperity such as might
seem fabulous, a prosperity of which every Scotchman, from the peer to
the cadie, would partake. Soon, all along the now desolate shores of the
Forth and Clyde, villas and pleasure grounds would be as thick as along
the edges of the Dutch canals. Edinburgh would vie with London and
Paris; and the baillie of Glasgow or Dundee would have as stately and
well furnished a mansion, and as fine a gallery of pictures, as any
burgomaster of Amsterdam.

This magnificent plan was at first but partially disclosed to the
public. A colony was to be planted; a vast trade was to be opened
between both the Indies and Scotland; but the name of Darien was as yet
pronounced only in whispers by Paterson and by his most confidential
friends. He had however shown enough to excite boundless hopes and
desires. How well he succeeded in inspiring others with his own feelings
is sufficiently proved by the memorable Act to which the Lord High
Commissioner gave the Royal sanction on the 26th of June 1695. By this
Act some persons who were named, and such other persons as should join
with them, were formed into a corporation, which was to be named the
Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies. The amount of the
capital to be employed was not fixed by law; but it was provided that
one half of the stock at least must be held by Scotchmen resident
in Scotland, and that no stock which had been originally held by a
Scotchman resident in Scotland should ever be transferred to any but
a Scotchman resident in Scotland. An entire monopoly of the trade with
Asia, Africa and America, for a term of thirty-one years, was granted
to the Company. All goods imported by the Company were during twenty-one
years to be duty free, with the exception of foreign sugar and tobacco.
Sugar and tobacco grown on the Company's own plantations were exempted
from all taxation. Every member and every servant of the Company was to
be privileged against impressment and arrest. If any of these privileged
persons was impressed or arrested, the Company was authorised to release
him, and to demand the assistance both of the civil and of the military
power. The Company was authorised to take possession of unoccupied
territories in any part of Asia, Africa or America, and there to plant
colonies, to build towns and forts, to impose taxes, and to provide
magazines, arms and ammunition, to raise troops, to wage war, to
conclude treaties; and the King was made to promise that, if any foreign
state should injure the Company, he would interpose, and would, at the
public charge, obtain reparation. Lastly it was provided that, in order
to give greater security and solemnity to this most exorbitant grant,
the whole substance of the Act should be set forth in Letters Patent to
which the Chancellor was directed to put the Great Seal without delay.

The letters were drawn; the Great Seal was affixed; the subscription
books were opened; the shares were fixed at a hundred pounds sterling
each; and from the Pentland Firth to the Solway Firth every man who had
a hundred pounds was impatient to put down his name. About two hundred
and twenty thousand pounds were actually paid up. This may not, at first
sight, appear a large sum to those who remember the bubbles of 1825 and
of 1845, and would assuredly not have sufficed to defray the charge of
three months of war with Spain. Yet the effort was marvellous when
it may be affirmed with confidence that the Scotch people voluntarily
contributed for the colonisation of Darien a larger proportion of
their substance than any other people ever, in the same space of time,
voluntarily contributed to any commercial undertaking. A great part of
Scotland was then as poor and rude as Iceland now is. There were five or
six shires which did not altogether contain so many guineas and crowns
as were tossed about every day by the shovels of a single goldsmith
in Lombard Street. Even the nobles had very little ready money. They
generally took a large part of their rents in kind, and were thus able,
on their own domains, to live plentifully and hospitably. But there were
many esquires in Kent and Somersetshire who received from their tenants
a greater quantity of gold and silver than a Duke of Cordon or a
Marquess of Atholl drew from extensive provinces. The pecuniary
remuneration of the clergy was such as would have moved the pity of the
most needy curate who thought it a privilege to drink his ale and smoke
his pipe in the kitchen of an English manor house. Even in the fertile
Merse there were parishes of which the minister received only from
four to eight pounds sterling in cash. The official income of the Lord
President of the Court of Session was only five hundred a year; that
of the Lord Justice Clerk only four hundred a year. The land tax of
the whole kingdom was fixed some years later by the Treaty of Union at
little more than half the land tax of the single county of Norfolk. Four
hundred thousand pounds probably bore as great a ratio to the wealth of
Scotland then as forty millions would bear now.

The list of the members of the Darien Company deserves to be examined.
The number of shareholders was about fourteen hundred. The largest
quantity of stock registered in one name was three thousand pounds. The
heads of three noble houses took three thousand pounds each, the Duke
of Hamilton, the Duke of Queensbury and Lord Belhaven, a man of ability,
spirit and patriotism, who had entered into the design with enthusiasm
not inferior to that of Fletcher. Argyle held fifteen hundred pounds.
John Dalrymple, but too well known as the Master of Stair, had just
succeeded to his father's title and estate, and was now Viscount Stair.
He put down his name for a thousand pounds. The number of Scotch peers
who subscribed was between thirty and forty. The City of Edinburgh, in
its corporate capacity, took three thousand pounds, the City of Glasgow
three thousand, the City of Perth two thousand. But the great majority
of the subscribers contributed only one hundred or two hundred pounds
each. A very few divines who were settled in the capital or in other
large towns were able to purchase shares. It is melancholy to see in the
roll the name of more than one professional man whose paternal anxiety
led him to lay out probably all his hardly earned savings in purchasing
a hundred pound share for each of his children. If, indeed, Paterson's
predictions had been verified, such a share would, according to the
notions of that age and country, have been a handsome portion for the
daughter of a writer or a surgeon.

That the Scotch are a people eminently intelligent, wary, resolute and
self possessed, is obvious to the most superficial observation. That
they are a people peculiarly liable to dangerous fits of passion and
delusions of the imagination is less generally acknowledged, but is
not less true. The whole kingdom seemed to have gone mad. Paterson had
acquired an influence resembling rather that of the founder of a new
religion, that of a Mahomet, that of a Joseph Smith, than that of a
commercial projector. Blind faith in a religion, fanatical zeal for a
religion, are too common to astonish us. But such faith and zeal seem
strangely out of place in the transactions of the money market. It is
true that we are judging after the event. But before the event materials
sufficient for the forming of a sound judgment were within the reach of
all who cared to use them. It seems incredible that men of sense, who
had only a vague and general notion of Paterson's scheme, should
have staked every thing on the success of that scheme. It seems more
incredible still that men to whom the details of that scheme had been
confided should not have looked into any of the common books of history
or geography in which an account of Darien might have been found, and
should not have asked themselves the simple question, whether Spain
was likely to endure a Scotch colony in the midst of her Transatlantic
dominions. It was notorious that she claimed the sovereignty of the
isthmus on specious, nay, on solid, grounds. A Spaniard had been the
first discoverer of the coast of Darien. A Spaniard had built a town
and established a government on that coast. A Spaniard had, with great
labour and peril, crossed the mountainous neck of land, had seen rolling
beneath him the vast Pacific, never before revealed to European eyes,
had descended, sword in hand, into the waves up to his girdle, and had
there solemnly taken possession of sea and shore in the name of the
Crown of Castile. It was true that the region which Paterson described
as a paradise had been found by the first Castilian settlers to be a
land of misery and death. The poisonous air, exhaled from rank jungle
and stagnant water, had compelled them to remove to the neighbouring
haven of Panama; and the Red Indians had been contemptuously permitted
to live after their own fashion on the pestilential soil. But that soil
was still considered, and might well be considered, by Spain as her own.
In many countries there were tracts of morass, of mountain, of forest,
in which governments did not think it worth while to be at the expense
of maintaining order, and in which rude tribes enjoyed by connivance
a kind of independence. It was not necessary for the members of the
Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies to look very far
for an example. In some highland districts, not more than a hundred
miles from Edinburgh, dwelt clans which had always regarded the
authority of King, Parliament, Privy Council and Court of Session, quite
as little as the aboriginal population of Darien regarded the authority
of the Spanish Viceroys and Audiences. Yet it would surely have been
thought an outrageous violation of public law in the King of Spain to
take possession of Appin and Lochaber. And would it be a less outrageous
violation of public law in the Scots to seize on a province in the very
centre of his possessions, on the plea that this province was in the
same state in which Appin and Lochaber had been during centuries?

So grossly unjust was Paterson's scheme; and yet it was less unjust
than impolitic. Torpid as Spain had become, there was still one point on
which she was exquisitely sensitive. The slightest encroachment of any
other European power even on the outskirts of her American dominions
sufficed to disturb her repose and to brace her paralysed nerves. To
imagine that she would tamely suffer adventurers from one of the most
insignificant kingdoms of the Old World to form a settlement in the
midst of her empire, within a day's sail of Portobello on one side and
of Carthagena on the other, was ludicrously absurd. She would have been
just as likely to let them take possession of the Escurial. It was,
therefore, evident that, before the new Company could even begin its
commercial operations, there must be a war with Spain and a complete
triumph over Spain. What means had the Company of waging such a war,
and what chance of achieving such a triumph? The ordinary revenue of
Scotland in time of peace was between sixty and seventy thousand a year.
The extraordinary supplies granted to the Crown during the war with
France had amounted perhaps to as much more. Spain, it is true, was
no longer the Spain of Pavia and Lepanto. But, even in her decay,
she possessed in Europe resources which exceeded thirty fold those
of Scotland; and in America, where the struggle must take place, the
disproportion was still greater. The Spanish fleets and arsenals were
doubtless in wretched condition. But there were Spanish fleets; there
were Spanish arsenals. The galleons, which sailed every year from
Seville to the neighbourhood of Darien and from the neighbourhood of
Darien back to Seville, were in tolerable condition, and formed, by
themselves, a considerable armament. Scotland had not a single ship
of the line, nor a single dockyard where such a ship could be built.
A marine sufficient to overpower that of Spain must be, not merely
equipped and manned, but created. An armed force sufficient to defend
the isthmus against the whole power of the viceroyalties of Mexico and
Peru must be sent over five thousand miles of ocean. What was the
charge of such an expedition likely to be? Oliver had, in the preceding
generation, wrested a West Indian island from Spain; but, in order to do
this, Oliver, a man who thoroughly understood the administration of war,
who wasted nothing, and who was excellently served, had been forced to
spend, in a single year, on his navy alone, twenty times the ordinary
revenue of Scotland; and, since his days, war had been constantly
becoming more and more costly.

It was plain that Scotland could not alone support the charge of a
contest with the enemy whom Paterson was bent on provoking. And what
assistance was she likely to have from abroad? Undoubtedly the vast
colonial empire and the narrow colonial policy of Spain were regarded
with an evil eye by more than one great maritime power. But there was
no great maritime power which would not far rather have seen the isthmus
between the Atlantic and the Pacific in the hands of Spain than in the
hands of the Darien Company. Lewis could not but dread whatever tended
to aggrandise a state governed by William. To Holland the East India
trade was as the apple of her eye. She had been the chief gainer by the
discoveries of Gama; and it might be expected that she would do all
that could be done by craft, and, if need were, by violence, rather
than suffer any rival to be to her what she had been to Venice. England
remained; and Paterson was sanguine enough to flatter himself that
England might be induced to lend her powerful aid to the Company. He and
Lord Belhaven repaired to London, opened an office in Clement's Lane,
formed a Board of Directors auxiliary to the Central Board at Edinburgh,
and invited the capitalists of the Royal Exchange to subscribe for the
stock which had not been reserved for Scotchmen resident in Scotland.
A few moneyed men were allured by the bait; but the clamour of the City
was loud and menacing; and from the City a feeling of indignation spread
fast through the country. In this feeling there was undoubtedly a large
mixture of evil. National antipathy operated on some minds, religious
antipathy on others. But it is impossible to deny that the anger which
Paterson's schemes excited throughout the south of the island was, in
the main, just and reasonable. Though it was not yet generally known in
what precise spot his colony was to be planted, there could be little
doubt that he intended to occupy some part of America; and there could
be as little doubt that such occupation would be resisted. There would
be a maritime war; and such a war Scotland had no means of carrying on.
The state of her finances was such that she must be quite unable to fit
out even a single squadron of moderate size. Before the conflict had
lasted three months, she would have neither money nor credit left.
These things were obvious to every coffeehouse politician; and it was
impossible to believe that they had escaped the notice of men so able
and well informed as some who sate in the Privy Council and Parliament
at Edinburgh. In one way only could the conduct of these schemers be
explained. They meant to make a dupe and a tool of the Southron. The two
British kingdoms were so closely connected, physically and politically,
that it was scarcely possible for one of them to be at peace with a
power with which the other was at war. If the Scotch drew King William
into a quarrel, England must, from regard to her own dignity which
was bound up with his, support him in it. She was to be tricked into a
bloody and expensive contest in the event of which she had no interest;
nay, into a contest in which victory would be a greater calamity to her
than defeat. She was to lavish her wealth and the lives of her seamen,
in order that a set of cunning foreigners might enjoy a monopoly by
which she would be the chief sufferer. She was to conquer and defend
provinces for this Scotch Corporation; and her reward was to be that
her merchants were to be undersold, her customers decoyed away, her
exchequer beggared. There would be an end to the disputes between
the old East India Company and the new East India Company; for both
Companies would be ruined alike. The two great springs of revenue would
be dried up together. What would be the receipt of the Customs, what
of the Excise, when vast magazines of sugar, rum, tobacco, coffee,
chocolate, tea, spices, silks, muslins, all duty free, should be formed
along the estuaries of the Forth and of the Clyde, and along the border
from the mouth of the Esk to the mouth of the Tweed? What army, what
fleet, would be sufficient to protect the interests of the government
and of the fair trader when the whole kingdom of Scotland should be
turned into one great smuggling establishment? Paterson's plan was
simply this, that England should first spend millions in defence of
the trade of his Company, and should then be plundered of twice as many
millions by means of that very trade.

The cry of the city and of the nation was soon echoed by the
legislature. When the Parliament met for the first time after the
general election of 1695, Rochester called the attention of the Lords
to the constitution and designs of the Company. Several witnesses were
summoned to the bar, and gave evidence which produced a powerful effect
on the House. "If these Scots are to have their way," said one peer, "I
shall go and settle in Scotland, and not stay here to be made a beggar."
The Lords resolved to represent strongly to the King the injustice of
requiring England to exert her power in support of an enterprise which,
if successful, must be fatal to her commerce and to her finances. A
representation was drawn up and communicated to the Commons. The Commons
eagerly concurred, and complimented the Peers on the promptitude with
which their Lordships had, on this occasion, stood forth to protect the
public interests. The two Houses went up together to Kensington with
the address. William had been under the walls of Namur when the Act
for incorporating the Company had been touched with his sceptre at
Edinburgh, and had known nothing about that Act till his attention had
been called to it by the clamour of his English subjects. He now said,
in plain terms, that he had been ill served in Scotland, but that he
would try to find a remedy for the evil which bad been brought to his
notice. The Lord High Commissioner Tweeddale and Secretary Johnstone
were immediately dismissed. But the Act which had been passed by their
management still continued to be law in Scotland, nor was it in their
master's power to undo what they had done.

The Commons were not content with addressing the throne. They instituted
an inquiry into the proceedings of the Scotch Company in London.
Belhaven made his escape to his own country, and was there beyond the
reach of the Serjeant-at-Arms. But Paterson and some of his confederates
were severely examined. It soon appeared that the Board which was
sitting in Clement's Lane had done things which were certainly imprudent
and perhaps illegal. The Act of Incorporation empowered the detectors to
take and to administer to their servants an oath of fidelity. But that
Act was on the south of the Tweed a nullity. Nevertheless the directors
had, in the heart of the City of London, taken and administered this
oath, and had thus, by implication, asserted that the powers conferred
on them by the legislature of Scotland accompanied them to England. It
was resolved that they had been guilty of a high crime and misdemeanour,
and that they should be impeached. A committee was appointed to frame
articles of impeachment; but the task proved a difficult one; and the
prosecution was suffered to drop, not however till the few English
capitalists who had at first been friendly to Paterson's project had
been terrified into renouncing all connection with him.

Now, surely, if not before, Paterson ought to have seen that his project
could end in nothing but shame to himself and ruin to his worshippers.
From the first it had been clear that England alone could protect his
Company against the enmity of Spain; and it was now clear that Spain
would be a less formidable enemy than England. It was impossible that
his plan could excite greater indignation in the Council of the Indies
at Madrid, or in the House of Trade at Seville, than it had excited in
London. Unhappily he was given over to a strong delusion, and the blind
multitude eagerly followed their blind leader. Indeed his dupes were
maddened by that which should have sobered them. The proceedings of the
Parliament which sate at Westminster, proceedings just and reasonable
in substance, but in manner doubtless harsh and insolent, had roused
the angry passions of a nation, feeble indeed in numbers and in material
resources, but eminently high spirited. The proverbial pride of the
Scotch was too much for their proverbial shrewdness. The votes of
the English Lords and Commons were treated with marked contempt. The
populace of Edinburgh burned Rochester in effigy. Money was poured
faster than ever into the treasury of the Company. A stately house, in
Milne Square, then the most modern and fashionable part of Edinburgh,
was purchased and fitted up at once as an office and a warehouse. Ships
adapted both for war and for trade were required; but the means of
building such ships did not exist in Scotland; and no firm in the south
of the island was disposed to enter into a contract which might not
improbably be considered by the House of Commons as an impeachable
offence. It was necessary to have recourse to the dockyards of Amsterdam
and Hamburg. At an expense of fifty thousand pounds a few vessels were
procured, the largest of which would hardly have ranked as sixtieth in
the English navy; and with this force, a force not sufficient to keep
the pirates of Sallee in check, the Company threw down the gauntlet to
all the maritime powers in the world.

It was not till the summer of 1698 that all was ready for the expedition
which was to change the face of the globe. The number of seamen and
colonists who embarked at Leith was twelve hundred. Of the colonists
many were younger sons of honourable families, or officers who had been
disbanded since the peace. It was impossible to find room for all who
were desirous of emigrating. It is said that some persons who had vainly
applied for a passage hid themselves in dark corners about the ships,
and, when discovered, refused to depart, clung to the rigging, and
were at last taken on shore by main force. This infatuation is the more
extraordinary because few of the adventurers knew to what place they
were going. All that was quite certain was that a colony was to be
planted somewhere, and to be named Caledonia. The general opinion was
that the fleet would steer for some part of the coast of America. But
this opinion was not universal. At the Dutch Embassy in Saint James's
Square there was an uneasy suspicion that the new Caledonia would be
founded among those Eastern spice islands with which Amsterdam had long
carried on a lucrative commerce.

The supreme direction of the expedition was entrusted to a Council of
Seven. Two Presbyterian chaplains and a preceptor were on board. A cargo
had been laid in which was afterwards the subject of much mirth to the
enemies of the Company, slippers innumerable, four thousand periwigs of
all kinds from plain bobs to those magnificent structures which, in that
age, towered high above the foreheads and descended to the elbows of
men of fashion, bales of Scotch woollen stuffs which nobody within the
tropics could wear, and many hundreds of English bibles which neither
Spaniard nor Indian could read. Paterson, flushed with pride and hope,
not only accompanied the expedition, but took with him his wife, a
comely dame, whose heart he had won in London, where she had presided
over one of the great coffeehouses in the neighbourhood of the Royal
Exchange. At length on the twenty-fifth of July the ships, followed by
many tearful eyes, and commended to heaven in many vain prayers, sailed
out of the estuary of the Forth.

The voyage was much longer than a voyage to the Antipodes now is; and
the adventurers suffered much. The rations were scanty; there were
bitter complaints both of the bread and of the meat; and, when the
little fleet, after passing round the Orkneys and Ireland, touched at
Madeira, those gentlemen who had fine clothes among their baggage were
glad to exchange embroidered coats and laced waistcoats for provisions
and wine. From Madeira the adventurers ran across the Atlantic, landed
on an uninhabited islet lying between Porto Rico and St. Thomas, took
possession of this desolate spot in the name of the Company, set up a
tent, and hoisted the white cross of St. Andrew. Soon, however, they
were warned off by an officer who was sent from St. Thomas to inform
them that they were trespassing on the territory of the King of Denmark.
They proceeded on their voyage, having obtained the services of an old
buccaneer who knew the coast of Central America well. Under his pilotage
they anchored on the first of November close to the Isthmus of Darien.
One of the greatest princes of the country soon came on board. The
courtiers who attended him, ten or twelve in number, were stark naked;
but he was distinguished by a red coat, a pair of cotton drawers, and
an old hat. He had a Spanish name, spoke Spanish, and affected the grave
deportment of a Spanish don. The Scotch propitiated Andreas, as he was
called, by a present of a new hat blazing with gold lace, and assured
him that, if he would trade with them, they would treat him better than
the Castilians had done.

A few hours later the chiefs of the expedition went on shore, took
formal possession of the country, and named it Caledonia. They were
pleased with the aspect of a small peninsula about three miles in length
and a quarter of a mile in breadth, and determined to fix here the city
of New Edinburgh, destined, as they hoped, to be the great emporium
of both Indies. The peninsula terminated in a low promontory of about
thirty acres, which might easily be turned into an island by digging a
trench. The trench was dug; and on the ground thus separated from
the main land a fort was constructed; fifty guns were placed on the
ramparts; and within the enclosures houses were speedily built and
thatched with palm leaves.

Negotiations were opened with the chieftains, as they were called, who
governed the neighbouring tribes. Among these savage rulers were found
as insatiable a cupidity, as watchful a jealousy, and as punctilious a
pride, as among the potentates whose disputes had seemed likely to make
the Congress of Ryswick eternal. One prince hated the Spaniards because
a fine rifle had been taken away from him by the Governor of Portobello
on the plea that such a weapon was too good for a red man. Another loved
the Spaniards because they had given him a stick tipped with silver. On
the whole, the new comers succeeded in making friends of the aboriginal
race. One mighty monarch, the Lewis the Great of the isthmus, who wore
with pride a cap of white reeds lined with red silk and adorned with an
ostrich feather, seemed well inclined to the strangers, received them
hospitably in a palace built of canes and covered with palmetto royal,
and regaled them with calabashes of a sort of ale brewed from Indian
corn and potatoes. Another chief set his mark to a treaty of peace and
alliance with the colony. A third consented to become a vassal of the
Company, received with great delight a commission embellished with
gold thread and flowered riband, and swallowed to the health of his new
masters not a few bumpers of their own brandy.

Meanwhile the internal government of the colony was organised according
to a plan devised by the directors at Edinburgh. The settlers were
divided into bands of fifty or sixty; each band chose a representative;
and thus was formed an assembly which took the magnificent name of
Parliament. This Parliament speedily framed a curious code. The first
article provided that the precepts, instructions, examples, commands and
prohibitions expressed and contained in the Holy Scriptures should have
the full force and effect of laws in New Caledonia, an enactment which
proves that those who drew it up either did not know what the Holy
Scriptures contained or did not know what a law meant. There is another
provision which shows not less clearly how far these legislators were
from understanding the first principles of legislation. "Benefits
received and good services done shall always be generously and
thankfully compensated, whether a prior bargain hath been made or not;
and, if it shall happen to be otherwise, and the Benefactor obliged
justly to complain of the ingratitude, the Ungrateful shall in such case
be obliged to give threefold satisfaction at the least." An article much
more creditable to the little Parliament, and much needed in a community
which was likely to be constantly at war, prohibits, on pain of death,
the violation of female captives.

By this time all the Antilles and all the shores of the Gulf of Mexico
were in a ferment. The new colony was the object of universal hatred.
The Spaniards began to fit out armaments. The chiefs of the French
dependencies in the West Indies eagerly offered assistance to
the Spaniards. The governors of the English settlements put forth
proclamations interdicting all communication with this nest of
buccaneers. Just at this time, the Dolphin, a vessel of fourteen guns,
which was the property of the Scotch Company, was driven on shore by
stress of weather under the walls of Carthagena. The ship and cargo were
confiscated, the crew imprisoned and put in irons. Some of the sailors
were treated as slaves, and compelled to sweep the streets and to work
on the fortifications. Others, and among them the captain, were sent
to Seville to be tried for piracy. Soon an envoy with a flag of truce
arrived at Carthagena, and, in the name of the Council of Caledonia,
demanded the release of the prisoners. He delivered to the authorities a
letter threatening them with the vengeance of the King of Great Britain,
and a copy of the Act of Parliament by which the Company had been
created. The Castilian governor, who probably knew that William, as
Sovereign of England, would not, and, as Sovereign of Scotland, could
not, protect the squatters who had occupied Darien, flung away both
letter and Act of Parliament with a gesture of contempt, called for a
guard, and was with difficulty dissuaded from throwing the messenger
into a dungeon. The Council of Caledonia, in great indignation, issued
letters of mark and reprisal against Spanish vessels. What every man of
common sense must have foreseen had taken place. The Scottish flag had
been but a few months planted on the walls of New Edinburgh; and already
a war, which Scotland, without the help of England, was utterly unable
to sustain, had begun.

By this time it was known in Europe that the mysterious voyage of the
adventurers from the Forth had ended at Darien. The ambassador of the
Catholic King repaired to Kensington, and complained bitterly to William
of this outrageous violation of the law of nations. Preparations were
made in the Spanish ports for an expedition against the intruders; and
in no Spanish port were there more fervent wishes for the success of
that expedition than in the cities of London and Bristol. In Scotland,
on the other hand, the exultation was boundless. In the parish churches
all over the kingdom the ministers gave public thanks to God for having
vouchsafed thus far to protect and bless the infant colony. At some
places a day was set apart for religious exercises on this account. In
every borough bells were rung; bonfires were lighted; and candles were
placed in the windows at night. During some months all the reports which
arrived from the other side of the Atlantic were such as to excite hope
and joy in the north of the island, and alarm and envy in the south. The
colonists, it was asserted, had found rich gold mines, mines in which
the precious metal was far more abundant and in a far purer state than
on the coast of Guinea. Provisions were plentiful. The rainy season had
not proved unhealthy. The settlement was well fortified. Sixty guns were
mounted on the ramparts. An immense crop of Indian corn was expected.
The aboriginal tribes were friendly. Emigrants from various quarters
were coming in. The population of Caledonia had already increased from
twelve hundred to ten thousand. The riches of the country,--these are
the words of a newspaper of that time,--were great beyond imagination.
The mania in Scotland rose to the highest point. Munitions of war and
implements of agriculture were provided in large quantities. Multitudes
were impatient to emigrate to the land of promise.

In August 1699 four ships, with thirteen hundred men on board, were
despatched by the Company to Caledonia. The spiritual care of these
emigrants was entrusted to divines of the Church of Scotland. One of
these was that Alexander Shields whose Hind Let Loose proves that in
his zeal for the Covenant he had forgotten the Gospel. To another, John
Borland, we owe the best account of the voyage which is now extant. The
General Assembly had charged the chaplains to divide the colonists into
congregations, to appoint ruling elders, to constitute a presbytery,
and to labour for the propagation of divine truth among the Pagan
inhabitants of Darien. The second expedition sailed as the first had
sailed, amidst the acclamations and blessings of all Scotland. During
the earlier part of September the whole nation was dreaming a delightful
dream of prosperity and glory; and triumphing, somewhat maliciously,
in the vexation of the English. But, before the close of that month, it
began to be rumoured about Lombard Street and Cheapside that letters had
arrived from Jamaica with strange news. The colony from which so much
had been hoped and dreaded was no more. It had disappeared from the face
of the earth. The report spread to Edinburgh, but was received there
with scornful incredulity. It was an impudent lie devised by some
Englishmen who could not bear to see that, in spite of the votes of the
English Parliament, in spite of the proclamations of the governors of
the English colonies, Caledonia was waxing great and opulent. Nay, the
inventor of the fable was named. It was declared to be quite certain
that Secretary Vernon was the man. On the fourth of October was put
forth a vehement contradiction of the story.

On the fifth the whole truth was known. Letters were received from New
York announcing that a few miserable men, the remains of the colony
which was to have been the garden, the warehouse, the mart, of the whole
world, their bones peeping through their skin, and hunger and fever
written in their faces, had arrived in the Hudson.

The grief, the dismay and the rage of those who had a few hours before
fancied themselves masters of all the wealth of both Indies may easily
be imagined. The Directors, in their fury, lost all self command, and,
in their official letters, railed at the betrayers of Scotland, the
white-livered deserters. The truth is that those who used these hard
words were far more deserving of blame than the wretches whom they had
sent to destruction, and whom they now reviled for not staying to be
utterly destroyed. Nothing had happened but what might easily have
been foreseen. The Company had, in childish reliance on the word of an
enthusiastic projector, and in defiance of facts known to every educated
man in Europe, taken it for granted that emigrants born and bred within
ten degrees of the Arctic Circle would enjoy excellent health within
ten degrees of the Equator. Nay, statesmen and scholars had been deluded
into the belief that a country which, as they might have read in books
so common as those of Hakluyt and Purchas, was noted even among tropical
countries for its insalubrity, and had been abandoned by the Spaniards
solely on account of its insalubrity, was a Montpelier. Nor had any of
Paterson's dupes considered how colonists from Fife or Lothian, who had
never in their lives known what it was to feel the heat of a distressing
midsummer day, could endure the labour of breaking clods and carrying
burdens under the fierce blaze of a vertical sun. It ought to have been
remembered that such colonists would have to do for themselves what
English, French, Dutch, and Spanish colonists employed Negroes or
Indians to do for them. It was seldom indeed that a white freeman in
Barbadoes or Martinique, in Guiana or at Panama, was employed in severe
bodily labour. But the Scotch who settled at Darien must at first be
without slaves, and must therefore dig the trench round their town,
build their houses, cultivate their fields, hew wood, and draw water,
with their own hands. Such toil in such an atmosphere was too much for
them. The provisions which they had brought out had been of no good
quality, and had not been improved by lapse of time or by change of
climate. The yams and plantains did not suit stomachs accustomed to good
oatmeal. The flesh of wild animals and the green fat of the turtle, a
luxury then unknown in Europe, went but a small way; and supplies were
not to be expected from any foreign settlement. During the cool months,
however, which immediately followed the occupation of the isthmus there
were few deaths. But, before the equinox, disease began to make fearful
havoc in the little community. The mortality gradually rose to ten or
twelve a day. Both the clergymen who had accompanied the expedition
died. Paterson buried his wife in that soil which, as he had assured
his too credulous countrymen, exhaled health and vigour. He was himself
stretched on his pallet by an intermittent fever. Still he would not
admit that the climate of his promised land was bad. There could not be
a purer air. This was merely the seasoning which people who passed from
one country to another must expect. In November all would be well again.
But the rate at which the emigrants died was such that none of them
seemed likely to live till November. Those who were not laid on their
beds were yellow, lean, feeble, hardly able to move the sick and to
bury the dead, and quite unable to repel the expected attack of the
Spaniards. The cry of the whole community was that death was all around
them, and that they must, while they still had strength to weigh an
anchor or spread a sail, fly to some less fatal region. The men and
provisions were equally distributed among three ships, the Caledonia,
the Unicorn, and the Saint Andrew. Paterson, though still too ill to sit
in the Council, begged hard that he might be left behind with twenty or
thirty companions to keep up a show of possession, and to await the
next arrivals from Scotland. So small a number of people, he said,
might easily subsist by catching fish and turtles. But his offer was
disregarded; he was carried, utterly helpless, on board of the Saint
Andrew; and the vessel stood out to sea.

The voyage was horrible. Scarcely any Guinea slave ship has ever had
such a middle passage. Of two hundred and fifty persons who were on
board of the Saint Andrew, one hundred and fifty fed the sharks of the
Atlantic before Sandy Hook was in sight. The Unicorn lost almost all
its officers, and about a hundred and forty men. The Caledonia, the
healthiest ship of the three, threw overboard a hundred corpses. The
squalid survivors, as if they were not sufficiently miserable, raged
fiercely against one another. Charges of incapacity, cruelty, brutal
insolence, were hurled backward and forward. The rigid Presbyterians
attributed the calamities of the colony to the wickedness of Jacobites,
Prelatists, Sabbath-breakers, Atheists, who hated in others that image
of God which was wanting in themselves. The accused malignants, on the
other hand, complained bitterly of the impertinence of meddling fanatics
and hypocrites. Paterson was cruelly reviled, and was unable to
defend himself. He had been completely prostrated by bodily and
mental suffering. He looked like a skeleton. His heart was broken. His
inventive faculties and his plausible eloquence were no more; and he
seemed to have sunk into second childhood.

Meanwhile the second expedition had been on the seas. It reached Darien
about four months after the first settlers had fled. The new comers had
fully expected to find a flourishing young town, secure fortifications,
cultivated fields, and a cordial welcome. They found a wilderness. The
castle of New Edinburgh was in ruins. The huts had been burned. The site
marked out for the proud capital which was to have been the Tyre, the
Venice, the Amsterdam of the eighteenth century was overgrown with
jungle, and inhabited only by the sloth and the baboon. The hearts of
the adventurers sank within them. For their fleet had been fitted out,
not to plant a colony, but to recruit a colony already planted and
supposed to be prospering. They were therefore worse provided with
every necessary of life than their predecessors had been. Some feeble
attempts, however, were made to restore what had perished. A new fort
was constructed on the old ground; and within the ramparts was built a
hamlet, consisting of eighty or ninety cabins, generally of twelve feet
by ten. But the work went on languidly. The alacrity which is the effect
of hope, the strength which is the effect of union, were alike wanting
to the little community. From the councillors down to the humblest
settlers all was despondency and discontent. The stock of provisions was
scanty. The stewards embezzled great part of it. The rations were small;
and soon there was a cry that they were unfairly distributed. Factions
were formed. Plots were laid. One ringleader of the malecontents was
hanged. The Scotch were generally, as they still are, a religious
people; and it might therefore have been expected that the influence of
the divines to whom the spiritual charge of the colony had been confided
would have been employed with advantage for the preserving of order and
the calming of evil passions. Unfortunately those divines seem to have
been at war with almost all the rest of the society. They described
their companions as the most profligate of mankind, and declared that it
was impossible to constitute a presbytery according to the directions
of the General Assembly; for that persons fit to be ruling elders of
a Christian Church were not to be found among the twelve or thirteen
hundred emigrants. Where the blame lay it is now impossible to decide.
All that can with confidence be said is that either the clergymen must
have been most unreasonably and most uncharitably austere, or the laymen
must have been most unfavourable specimens of the nation and class to
which they belonged.

It may be added that the provision by the General Assembly for the
spiritual wants of the colony was as defective as the provision made for
temporal wants by the directors of the Company. Nearly one third of the
emigrants who sailed with the second expedition were Highlanders, who
did not understand a word of English; and not one of the four chaplains
could speak a word of Gaelic. It was only through interpreters that a
pastor could communicate with a large portion of the Christian flock
of which he had charge. Even by the help of interpreters he could not
impart religious instruction to those heathen tribes which the Church
of Scotland had solemnly recommended to his care. In fact, the colonists
left behind them no mark that baptized men had set foot on Darien,
except a few Anglo-Saxon curses, which, having been uttered more
frequently and with greater energy than any other words in our language,
had caught the ear and been retained in the memory of the native
population of the isthmus.

The months which immediately followed the arrival of the new comers were
the coolest and most salubrious of the year. But, even in those months,
the pestilential influence of a tropical sun, shining on swamps rank
with impenetrable thickets of black mangroves, began to be felt. The
mortality was great; and it was but too clear that, before the summer
was far advanced, the second colony would, like the first, have to
choose between death and flight. But the agony of the inevitable
dissolution was shortened by violence. A fleet of eleven vessels under
the flag of Castile anchored off New Edinburgh. At the same time an
irregular army of Spaniards, Creoles, negroes, mulattoes and Indians
marched across the isthmus from Panama; and the fort was blockaded at
once by sea and land.

A drummer soon came with a message from the besiegers, but a message
which was utterly unintelligible to the besieged. Even after all that we
have seen of the perverse imbecility of the directors of the Company, it
must be thought strange that they should have sent a colony to a remote
part of the world, where it was certain that there must be constant
intercourse, peaceable or hostile, with Spaniards, and yet should not
have taken care that there should be in the whole colony a single person
who knew a little Spanish.

With some difficulty a negotiation was carried on in such French and
such Latin as the two parties could furnish. Before the end of March
a treaty was signed by which the Scotch bound themselves to evacuate
Darien in fourteen days; and on the eleventh of April they departed, a
much less numerous body than when they arrived. In little more than four
months, although the healthiest months of the year, three hundred men
out of thirteen hundred had been swept away by disease. Of the survivors
very few lived to see their native country again. Two of the ships
perished at sea. Many of the adventurers, who had left their homes
flushed with hopes of speedy opulence, were glad to hire themselves out
to the planters of Jamaica, and laid their bones in that land of exile.
Shields died there, worn out and heart broken. Borland was the only
minister who came back. In his curious and interesting narrative, he
expresses his feelings, after the fashion of the school in which he
had been bred, by grotesque allusions to the Old Testament, and by a
profusion of Hebrew words. On his first arrival, he tells us, he found
New Edinburgh a Ziklag. He had subsequently been compelled to dwell in
the tents of Kedar. Once, indeed, during his sojourn, he had fallen
in with a Beer-lahai-roi, and had set up his Ebenezer; but in general
Darien was to him a Magor Missabib, a Kibroth-hattaavah. The sad story
is introduced with the words in which a great man of old, delivered
over to the malice of the Evil Power, was informed of the death of his
children and of the ruin of his fortunes: "I alone am escaped to tell
thee."




CHAPTER XXV.

 Trial of Spencer Cowper--Duels--Discontent of the Nation--Captain
 Kidd--Meeting of Parliament--Attacks on Burnet--Renewed Attack
 on Somers--Question of the Irish Forfeitures: Dispute between the
 Houses--Somers again attacked--Prorogation of Parliament--Death of
 James the Second--The Pretender recognised as King--Return of the
 King--General Election--Death of William

THE passions which had agitated the Parliament during the late session
continued to ferment in the minds of men during the recess, and, having
no longer a vent in the senate, broke forth in every part of the empire,
destroyed the peace of towns, brought into peril the honour and the
lives of innocent men, and impelled magistrates to leave the bench
of justice and attack one another sword in hand. Private calamities,
private brawls, which had nothing to do with the disputes between court
and country, were turned by the political animosities of that unhappy
summer into grave political events.

One mournful tale, which called forth the strongest feelings of the
contending factions, is still remembered as a curious part of the
history of our jurisprudence, and especially of the history of our
medical jurisprudence. No Whig member of the lower House, with the
single exception of Montague, filled a larger space in the public eye
than William Cowper. In the art of conciliating an audience, Cowper was
preeminent. His graceful and engaging eloquence cast a spell on juries;
and the Commons, even in those stormy moments when no other defender of
the administration could obtain a hearing, would always listen to him.
He represented Hertford, a borough in which his family had considerable
influence; but there was a strong Tory minority among the electors, and
he had not won his seat without a hard fight, which had left behind it
many bitter recollections. His younger brother Spencer, a man of parts
and learning, was fast rising into practice as a barrister on the Home
Circuit.

At Hertford resided an opulent Quaker family named Stout. A pretty young
woman of this family had lately sunk into a melancholy of a kind not
very unusual in girls of strong sensibility and lively imagination who
are subject to the restraints of austere religious societies. Her dress,
her looks, her gestures, indicated the disturbance of her mind. She
sometimes hinted her dislike of the sect to which she belonged. She
complained that a canting waterman who was one of the brotherhood had
held forth against her at a meeting. She threatened to go beyond sea,
to throw herself out of window, to drown herself. To two or three of
her associates she owned that she was in love; and on one occasion she
plainly said that the man whom she loved was one whom she never could
marry. In fact, the object of her fondness was Spencer Cowper, who was
already married. She at length wrote to him in language which she never
would have used if her intellect had not been disordered. He, like an
honest man, took no advantage of her unhappy state of mind, and did his
best to avoid her. His prudence mortified her to such a degree that
on one occasion she went into fits. It was necessary, however, that he
should see her, when he came to Hertford at the spring assizes of
1699. For he had been entrusted with some money which was due to her
on mortgage. He called on her for this purpose late one evening, and
delivered a bag of gold to her. She pressed him to be the guest of her
family; but he excused himself and retired. The next morning she was
found dead among the stakes of a mill dam on the stream called
the Priory River. That she had destroyed herself there could be no
reasonable doubt. The coroner's inquest found that she had drowned
herself while in a state of mental derangement. But her family was
unwilling to admit that she had shortened her own life, and looked about
for somebody who might be accused of murdering her. The last person
who could be proved to have been in her company was Spencer Cowper. It
chanced that two attorneys and a scrivener, who had come down from town
to the Hertford assizes, had been overheard, on that unhappy night,
talking over their wine about the charms and flirtations of the handsome
Quaker girl, in the light way in which such subjects are sometimes
discussed even at the circuit tables and mess tables of our more refined
generation. Some wild words, susceptible of a double meaning, were used
about the way in which she had jilted one lover, and the way in which
another lover would punish her for her coquetry. On no better grounds
than these her relations imagined that Spencer Cowper had, with the
assistance of these three retainers of the law, strangled her, and
thrown her corpse into the water. There was absolutely no evidence of
the crime. There was no evidence that any one of the accused had any
motive to commit such a crime; there was no evidence that Spencer Cowper
had any connection with the persons who were said to be his accomplices.
One of those persons, indeed, he had never seen. But no story is
too absurd to be imposed on minds blinded by religious and political
fanaticism. The Quakers and the Tories joined to raise a formidable
clamour. The Quakers had, in those days, no scruples about capital
punishments. They would, indeed, as Spencer Cowper said bitterly, but
too truly, rather send four innocent men to the gallows than let it be
believed that one who had their light within her had committed suicide.
The Tories exulted in the prospect of winning two seats from the Whigs.
The whole kingdom was divided between Stouts and Cowpers. At the summer
assizes Hertford was crowded with anxious faces from London and from
parts of England more distant than London. The prosecution was conducted
with a malignity and unfairness which to us seem almost incredible; and,
unfortunately, the dullest and most ignorant judge of the twelve was
on the bench. Cowper defended himself and those who were said to be his
accomplices with admirable ability and self possession. His brother,
much more distressed than himself, sate near him through the long agony
of that day. The case against the prisoners rested chiefly on the vulgar
error that a human body, found, as this poor girl's body had been found,
floating in water, must have been thrown into the water while still
alive. To prove this doctrine the counsel for the Crown called medical
practitioners, of whom nothing is now known except that some of them
had been active against the Whigs at Hertford elections. To confirm
the evidence of these gentlemen two or three sailors were put into the
witness box. On the other side appeared an array of men of science whose
names are still remembered. Among them was William Cowper, not a kinsman
of the defendant, but the most celebrated anatomist that England had
then produced. He was, indeed, the founder of a dynasty illustrious in
the history of science; for he was the teacher of William Cheselden,
and William Cheselden was the teacher of John Hunter. On the same side
appeared Samuel Garth, who, among the physicians of the capital, had no
rival except Radcliffe, and Hans Sloane, the founder of the magnificent
museum which is one of the glories of our country. The attempt of the
prosecutors to make the superstitions of the forecastle evidence for
the purpose of taking away the lives of men was treated by these
philosophers with just disdain. The stupid judge asked Garth what he
could say in answer to the testimony of the seamen. "My Lord," replied
Garth, "I say that they are mistaken. I will find seamen in abundance to
swear that they have known whistling raise the wind."

The jury found the prisoners Not guilty; and the report carried back to
London by persons who had been present at the trial was that everybody
applauded the verdict, and that even the Stouts seemed to be convinced
of their error. It is certain, however, that the malevolence of the
defeated party soon revived in all its energy. The lives of the four
men who had just been absolved were again attacked by means of the most
absurd and odious proceeding known to our old law, the appeal of
murder. This attack too failed. Every artifice of chicane was at
length exhausted; and nothing was left to the disappointed sect and the
disappointed faction except to calumniate those whom it had been found
impossible to murder. In a succession of libels Spencer Cowper was held
up to the execration of the public. But the public did him justice. He
rose to high eminence in his profession; he at length took his seat,
with general applause, on the judicial bench, and there distinguished
himself by the humanity which he never failed to show to unhappy men
who stood, as he had once stood, at the bar. Many who seldom trouble
themselves about pedigrees may be interested by learning that he was
the grandfather of that excellent man and excellent poet William Cowper,
whose writings have long been peculiarly loved and prized by the members
of the religious community which, under a strong delusion, sought to
slay his innocent progenitor. [19]

Though Spencer Cowper had escaped with life and honour, the Tories had
carried their point. They had secured against the next election the
support of the Quakers of Hertford; and the consequence was that
the borough was lost to the family and to the party which had lately
predominated there.

In the very week in which the great trial took place at Hertford, a
feud arising out of the late election for Buckinghamshire very nearly
produced fatal effects. Wharton, the chief of the Buckinghamshire Whigs,
had with difficulty succeeded in bringing in his brother as one of
the knights of the shire. Graham Viscount Cheyney, of the kingdom of
Scotland, had been returned at the head of the poll by the Tories. The
two noblemen met at the quarter sessions. In England Cheyney was before
the Union merely an Esquire. Wharton was undoubtedly entitled to take
place of him, and had repeatedly taken place of him without any dispute.
But angry passions now ran so high that a decent pretext for indulging
them was hardly thought necessary. Cheyney fastened a quarrel on
Wharton. They drew. Wharton, whose cool good humoured courage and skill
in fence were the envy of all the swordsmen of that age, closed with his
quarrelsome neighbour, disarmed him, and gave him his life.

A more tragical duel had just taken place at Westminster. Conway
Seymour, the eldest son of Sir Edward Seymour, had lately come of age.
He was in possession of an independent fortune of seven thousand pounds
a year, which he lavished in costly fopperies. The town had nicknamed
him Beau Seymour. He was displaying his curls and his embroidery in
Saint James's Park on a midsummer evening, after indulging too freely in
wine, when a young officer of the Blues named Kirke, who was as tipsy as
himself, passed near him. "There goes Beau Seymour," said Kirke. Seymour
flew into a rage. Angry words were exchanged between the foolish boys.
They immediately went beyond the precincts of the Court, drew, and
exchanged some pushes. Seymour was wounded in the neck. The wound
was not very serious; but, when his cure was only half completed, he
revelled in fruit, ice and Burgundy till he threw himself into a violent
fever. Though a coxcomb and a voluptuary, he seems to have had some
fine qualities. On the last day of his life he saw Kirke. Kirke implored
forgiveness; and the dying man declared that he forgave as he hoped to
be forgiven. There can be no doubt that a person who kills another in a
duel is, according to law, guilty of murder. But the law had never been
strictly enforced against gentlemen in such cases; and in this case
there was no peculiar atrocity, no deep seated malice, no suspicion of
foul play. Sir Edward, however, vehemently declared that he would
have life for life. Much indulgence is due to the resentment of an
affectionate father maddened by the loss of a son. But there is but
too much reason to believe that the implacability of Seymour was the
implacability, not of an affectionate father, but of a factious and
malignant agitator. He tried to make what is, in the jargon of our time,
called political capital out of the desolation of his house and the
blood of his first born. A brawl between two dissolute youths, a brawl
distinguished by nothing but its unhappy result from the hundred brawls
which took place every month in theatres and taverns, he magnified into
an attack on the liberties of the nation, an attempt to introduce a
military tyranny. The question was whether a soldier was to be permitted
to insult English gentlemen, and, if they murmured, to cut their
throats? It was moved in the Court of King's Bench that Kirke should
either be brought to immediate trial or admitted to bail. Shower, as
counsel for Seymour, opposed the motion. But Seymour was not content to
leave the case in Shower's hands. In defiance of all decency, he went to
Westminster Hall, demanded a hearing, and pronounced a harangue against
standing armies. "Here," he said, "is a man who lives on money taken out
of our pockets. The plea set up for taxing us in order to support him
is that his sword protects us, and enables us to live in peace and
security. And is he to be suffered to use that sword to destroy us?"
Kirke was tried and found guilty of manslaughter. In his case, as in the
case of Spencer Cowper, an attempt was made to obtain a writ of appeal.
The attempt failed; and Seymour was disappointed of his revenge; but he
was not left without consolation. If he had lost a son, he had found,
what he seems to have prized quite as much, a fertile theme for
invective.

The King, on his return from the Continent, found his subjects in
no bland humour. All Scotland, exasperated by the fate of the first
expedition to Darien, and anxiously waiting for news of the second,
called loudly for a Parliament. Several of the Scottish peers carried to
Kensington an address which was subscribed by thirty-six of their body,
and which earnestly pressed William to convoke the Estates at Edinburgh,
and to redress the wrongs which had been done to the colony of New
Caledonia. A petition to the same effect was widely circulated among
the commonalty of his Northern kingdom, and received, if report could
be trusted, not less than thirty thousand signatures. Discontent was far
from being as violent in England as in Scotland. Yet in England there
was discontent enough to make even a resolute prince uneasy. The time
drew near at which the Houses must reassemble; and how were the Commons
to be managed? Montague, enraged, mortified, and intimidated by the
baiting of the last session, was fully determined not again to appear
in the character of chief minister of finance. The secure and luxurious
retreat which he had, some months ago, prepared for himself was awaiting
him. He took the Auditorship, and resigned his other places. Smith
became Chancellor of the Exchequer. A new commission of Treasury issued;
and the first name was that of Tankerville. He had entered on his
career, more than twenty years before, with the fairest hopes, young,
noble, nobly allied, of distinguished abilities, of graceful manners.
There was no more brilliant man of fashion in the theatre and in the
ring. There was no more popular tribune in Guildhall. Such was the
commencement of a life so miserable that all the indignation excited by
great faults is overpowered by pity. A guilty passion, amounting to a
madness, left on the moral character of the unhappy man a stain at which
even libertines looked grave. He tried to make the errors of his private
life forgotten by splendid and perilous services to a public cause; and,
having endured in that cause penury and exile, the gloom of a dungeon,
the prospect of a scaffold, the ruin of a noble estate, he was so
unfortunate as to be regarded by the party for which he had sacrificed
every thing as a coward, if not a traitor. Yet, even against such
accumulated disasters and disgraces, his vigorous and aspiring mind
bore up. His parts and eloquence gained for him the ear of the House
of Lords; and at length, though not till his constitution was so broken
that he was fitter for flannel and cushions than for a laborious office
at Whitehall, he was put at the head of one of the most important
departments of the administration. It might have been expected that this
appointment would call forth clamours from widely different quarters;
that the Tories would be offended by the elevation of a rebel; that
the Whigs would set up a cry against the captain to whose treachery
or faintheartedness they had been in the habit of imputing the rout of
Sedgemoor; and that the whole of that great body of Englishmen which
cannot be said to be steadily Whig or Tory, but which is zealous for
decency and the domestic virtues, would see with indignation a
signal mark of royal favour bestowed on one who had been convicted of
debauching a noble damsel, the sister of his own wife. But so capricious
is public feeling that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to find,
in any of the letters, essays, dialogues, and poems which bear the date
of 1699 or of 1700, a single allusion to the vices or misfortunes of the
new First Lord of the Treasury. It is probable that his infirm health
and his isolated position were his protection. The chiefs of the
opposition did not fear him enough to hate him. The Whig junto was still
their terror and their abhorrence. They continued to assail Montague and
Orford, though with somewhat less ferocity than while Montague had the
direction of the finances, and Orford of the marine. But the utmost
spite of all the leading malecontents were concentrated on one object,
the great magistrate who still held the highest civil post in the realm,
and who was evidently determined to hold it in defiance of them. It was
not so easy to get rid of him as it had been to drive his colleagues
from office. His abilities the most intolerant Tories were forced
grudgingly to acknowledge. His integrity might be questioned in nameless
libels and in coffeehouse tattle, but was certain to come forth bright
and pure from the most severe Parliamentary investigation. Nor was he
guilty of those faults of temper and of manner to which, more than
to any grave delinquency, the unpopularity of his associates is to be
ascribed. He had as little of the insolence and perverseness of Orford
as of the petulance and vaingloriousness of Montague. One of the most
severe trials to which the head and heart of man can be put is great and
rapid elevation. To that trial both Montague and Somers were put. It was
too much for Montague. But Somers was found equal to it. He was the son
of a country attorney. At thirty-seven he had been sitting in a stuff
gown on a back bench in the Court of King's Bench. At forty-two he
was the first lay dignitary of the realm, and took precedence of the
Archbishop of York, and of the Duke of Norfolk. He had risen from a
lower point than Montague, had risen as fast as Montague, had risen as
high as Montague, and yet had not excited envy such as dogged Montague
through a long career. Garreteers, who were never weary of calling the
cousin of the Earls of Manchester and Sandwich an upstart, could not,
without an unwonted sense of shame, apply those words to the Chancellor,
who, without one drop of patrician blood in his veins, had taken his
place at the head of the patrician order with the quiet dignity of a man
ennobled by nature. His serenity, his modesty, his selfcommand, proof
even against the most sudden surprises of passion, his selfrespect,
which forced the proudest grandees of the kingdom to respect him, his
urbanity, which won the hearts of the youngest lawyers of the Chancery
Bar, gained for him many private friends and admirers among the most
respectable members of the opposition. But such men as Howe and Seymour
hated him implacably; they hated his commanding genius much; they hated
the mild majesty of his virtue still more. They sought occasion against
him everywhere; and they at length flattered themselves that they had
found it.

Some years before, while the war was still raging, there had been loud
complaints in the city that even privateers of St. Malo's and Dunkirk
caused less molestation to trade than another class of marauders. The
English navy was fully employed in the Channel, in the Atlantic, and in
the Mediterranean. The Indian Ocean, meanwhile, swarmed with pirates of
whose rapacity and cruelty frightful stories were told. Many of these
men, it was said, came from our North American colonies, and carried
back to those colonies the spoils gained by crime. Adventurers who
durst not show themselves in the Thames found a ready market for their
illgotten spices and stuffs at New York. Even the Puritans of New
England, who in sanctimonious austerity surpassed even their brethren of
Scotland, were accused of conniving at the wickedness which enabled them
to enjoy abundantly and cheaply the produce of Indian looms and Chinese
tea plantations.

In 1695 Richard Coote, Earl of Bellamont, an Irish peer who sate in
the English House of Commons, was appointed Governor of New York
and Massachusets. He was a man of eminently fair character, upright,
courageous and independent. Though a decided Whig, he had distinguished
himself by bringing before the Parliament at Westminster some tyrannical
acts done by Whigs at Dublin, and particularly the execution, if it is
not rather to be called the murder, of Gafney. Before Bellamont sailed
for America, William spoke strongly to him about the freebooting which
was the disgrace of the colonies. "I send you, my Lord, to New York," he
said, "because an honest and intrepid man is wanted to put these abuses
down, and because I believe you to be such a man." Bellamont exerted
himself to justify the high opinion which the King had formed of him. It
was soon known at New York that the Governor who had just arrived from
England was bent on the suppression of piracy; and some colonists in
whom he placed great confidence suggested to him what they may perhaps
have thought the best mode of attaining that object. There was then in
the settlement a veteran mariner named William Kidd. He had passed most
of his life on the waves, had distinguished himself by his seamanship,
had had opportunities of showing his valour in action with the French,
and had retired on a competence. No man knew the Eastern seas better. He
was perfectly acquainted with all the haunts of the pirates who prowled
between the Cape of Good Hope and the Straits of Malacca; and he would
undertake, if he were entrusted with a single ship of thirty or forty
guns, to clear the Indian Ocean of the whole race. The brigantines of
the rovers were numerous, no doubt; but none of them was large; one
man of war, which in the royal navy would hardly rank as a fourth rate,
would easily deal with them all in succession; and the lawful spoils of
the enemies of mankind would much more than defray the charges of the
expedition. Bellamont was charmed with this plan, and recommended it to
the King. The King referred it to the Admiralty. The Admiralty raised
difficulties, such as are perpetually raised by public boards when any
deviation, whether for the better or for the worse, from the established
course of proceeding is proposed. It then occurred to Bellamont that his
favourite scheme might be carried into effect without any cost to the
state. A few public spirited men might easily fit out a privateer which
would soon make the Arabian Gulph and the Bay of Bengal secure highways
for trade. He wrote to his friends in England imploring, remonstrating,
complaining of their lamentable want of public spirit. Six thousand
pounds would be enough. That sum would be repaid, and repaid with large
interest, from the sale of prizes; and an inestimable benefit would
be conferred on the kingdom and on the world. His urgency succeeded.
Shrewsbury and Romney contributed. Orford, though, as first Lord of the
Admiralty, he had been unwilling to send Kidd to the Indian ocean with a
king's ship, consented to subscribe a thousand pounds. Somers subscribed
another thousand. A ship called the Adventure Galley was equipped in the
port of London; and Kidd took the command. He carried with him, besides
the ordinary letters of marque, a commission under the Great Seal
empowering him to seize pirates, and to take them to some place where
they might be dealt with according to law. Whatever right the King
might have to the goods found in the possession of these malefactors he
granted, by letters patent, to the persons who had been at the expense
of fitting out the expedition, reserving to himself only one tenth part
of the gains of the adventure, which was to be paid into the treasury.
With the claim of merchants to have back the property of which they had
been robbed His Majesty of course did not interfere. He granted away,
and could grant away, no rights but his own.

The press for sailors to man the royal navy was at that time so hot that
Kidd could not obtain his full complement of hands in the Thames. He
crossed the Atlantic, visited New York, and there found volunteers in
abundance. At length, in February 1697, he sailed from the Hudson with a
crew of more than a hundred and fifty men, and in July reached the coast
of Madagascar.

It is possible that Kidd may at first have meant to act in accordance
with his instructions. But, on the subject of piracy, he held the
notions which were then common in the North American colonies; and most
of his crew were of the same mind. He found himself in a sea which was
constantly traversed by rich and defenceless merchant ships; and he had
to determine whether he would plunder those ships or protect them. The
gain which might be made by plundering them was immense, and might be
snatched without the dangers of a battle or the delays of a trial. The
rewards of protecting the lawful trade were likely to be comparatively
small. Such as they were, they would be got only by first fighting with
desperate ruffians who would rather be killed than taken, and by
then instituting a proceeding and obtaining a judgment in a Court of
Admiralty. The risk of being called to a severe reckoning might not
unnaturally seem small to one who had seen many old buccaneers living
in comfort and credit at New York and Boston. Kidd soon threw off the
character of a privateer, and became a pirate. He established friendly
communications, and exchanged arms and ammunition, with the most
notorious of those rovers whom his commission authorised him to destroy,
and made war on those peaceful traders whom he was sent to defend. He
began by robbing Mussulmans, and speedily proceeded from Mussulmans to
Armenians, and from Armenians to Portuguese. The Adventure Galley took
such quantities of cotton and silk, sugar and coffee, cinnamon and
pepper, that the very foremast men received from a hundred to two
hundred pounds each, and that the captain's share of the spoil would
have enabled him to live at home as an opulent gentleman. With the
rapacity Kidd had the cruelty of his odious calling. He burned houses;
he massacred peasantry. His prisoners were tied up and beaten with naked
cutlasses in order to extort information about their concealed hoards.
One of his crew, whom he had called a dog, was provoked into exclaiming,
in an agony of remorse, "Yes, I am a dog; but it is you that have made
me so." Kidd, in a fury, struck the man dead.

News then travelled very slowly from the eastern seas to England. But,
in August 1698, it was known in London that the Adventure Galley from
which so much had been hoped was the terror of the merchants of Surat,
and of the villagers of the coast of Malabar. It was thought probable
that Kidd would carry his booty to some colony. Orders were therefore
sent from Whitehall to the governors of the transmarine possessions
of the Crown, directing them to be on the watch for him. He meanwhile,
having burned his ship and dismissed most of his men, who easily found
berths in the sloops of other pirates, returned to New York with the
means, as he flattered himself, of making his peace and of living
in splendour. He had fabricated a long romance to which Bellamont,
naturally unwilling to believe that he had been duped and had been the
means of duping others, was at first disposed to listen with favour. But
the truth soon came out. The governor did his duty firmly; and Kidd was
placed in close confinement till orders arrived from the Admiralty that
he should be sent to England.

To an intelligent and candid judge of human actions it will not appear
that any of the persons at whose expense the Adventure Galley was fitted
out deserved serious blame. The worst that could be imputed even to
Bellamont, who had drawn in all the rest, was that he had been led into
a fault by his ardent zeal for the public service, and by the generosity
of a nature as little prone to suspect as to devise villanies. His
friends in England might surely be pardoned for giving credit to his
recommendation. It is highly probable that the motive which induced some
of them to aid his design was genuine public spirit. But, if we suppose
them to have had a view to gain, it was to legitimate gain. Their
conduct was the very opposite of corrupt. Not only had they taken no
money. They had disbursed money largely, and had disbursed it with the
certainty that they should never be reimbursed unless the outlay proved
beneficial to the public. That they meant well they proved by staking
thousands on the success of their plan; and, if they erred in judgment,
the loss of those thousands was surely a sufficient punishment for such
an error. On this subject there would probably have been no difference
of opinion had not Somers been one of the contributors. About the other
patrons of Kidd the chiefs of the opposition cared little. Bellamont was
far removed from the political scene. Romney could not, and Shrewsbury
would not, play a first part. Orford had resigned his employments. But
Somers still held the Great Seal, still presided in the House of Lords,
still had constant access to the closet. The retreat of his friends had
left him the sole and undisputed head of that party which had, in
the late Parliament, been a majority, and which was, in the present
Parliament, outnumbered indeed, disorganised and disheartened, but still
numerous and respectable. His placid courage rose higher and higher
to meet the dangers which threatened him. He provided for himself
no refuge. He made no move towards flight; and, without uttering one
boastful word, gave his enemies to understand, by the mild firmness of
his demeanour, that he dared them to do their worst.

In their eagerness to displace and destroy him they overreached
themselves. Had they been content to accuse him of lending his
countenance, with a rashness unbecoming his high place, to an
illconcerted scheme, that large part of mankind which judges of a plan
simply by the event would probably have thought the accusation well
founded. But the malice which they bore to him was not to be so
satisfied. They affected to believe that he had from the first been
aware of Kidd's character and designs. The Great Seal had been employed
to sanction a piratical expedition. The head of the law had laid down
a thousand pounds in the hope of receiving tens of thousands when his
accomplices should return, laden with the spoils of ruined merchants. It
was fortunate for the Chancellor that the calumnies of which he was the
object were too atrocious to be mischievous.

And now the time had come at which the hoarded illhumour of six months
was at liberty to explode. On the sixteenth of November the Houses
met. The King, in his speech, assured them in gracious and affectionate
language that he was determined to do his best to merit their love by
constant care to preserve their liberty and their religion, by a pure
administration of justice, by countenancing virtue, by discouraging
vice, by shrinking from no difficulty or danger when the welfare of the
nation was at stake. "These," he said, "are my resolutions; and I am
persuaded that you are come together with purposes on your part suitable
to these on mine. Since then our aims are only for the general good,
let us act with confidence in one another, which will not fail, by
God's blessing, to make me a happy king, and you a great and flourishing
people."

It might have been thought that no words less likely to give offence had
ever been uttered from the English throne. But even in those words the
malevolence of faction sought and found matter for a quarrel. The gentle
exhortation, "Let us act with confidence in one another," must mean
that such confidence did not now exist, that the King distrusted the
Parliament, or that the Parliament had shown an unwarrantable distrust
of the King. Such an exhortation was nothing less than a reproach;
and such a reproach was a bad return for the gold and the blood which
England had lavished in order to make and to keep him a great
sovereign. There was a sharp debate, in which Seymour took part. With
characteristic indelicacy and want of feeling he harangued the Commons
as he had harangued the Court of King's Bench, about his son's death,
and about the necessity of curbing the insolence of military men. There
were loud complaints that the events of the preceding session had been
misrepresented to the public, that emissaries of the Court, in every
part of the kingdom, declaimed against the absurd jealousies or still
more absurd parsimony which had refused to His Majesty the means of
keeping up such an army as might secure the country against invasion.
Even justices of the peace, it was said, even deputy-lieutenants, had
used King James and King Lewis as bugbears, for the purpose of stirring
up the people against honest and thrifty representatives. Angry
resolutions were passed, declaring it to be the opinion of the House
that the best way to establish entire confidence between the King and
the Estates of the Realm would be to put a brand on those evil advisers
who had dared to breathe in the royal ear calumnies against a faithful
Parliament. An address founded on these resolutions was voted; many
thought that a violent rupture was inevitable. But William returned an
answer so prudent and gentle that malice itself could not prolong the
dispute. By this time, indeed, a new dispute had begun. The address
had scarcely been moved when the House called for copies of the papers
relating to Kidd's expedition. Somers, conscious of innocence, knew that
it was wise as well as right to be perfectly ingenuous, and resolved
that there should be no concealment. His friends stood manfully by him,
and his enemies struck at him with such blind fury that their blows
injured only themselves. Howe raved like a maniac. "What is to become of
the country, plundered by land, plundered by sea? Our rulers have laid
hold on our lands, our woods, our mines, our money. And all this is not
enough. We cannot send a cargo to the farthest ends of the earth, but
they must send a gang of thieves after it." Harley and Seymour tried
to carry a vote of censure without giving the House time to read the
papers. But the general feeling was strongly for a short delay. At
length, on the sixth of December, the subject was considered in a
committee of the whole House. Shower undertook to prove that the letters
patent to which Somers had put the Great Seal were illegal. Cowper
replied to him with immense applause, and seems to have completely
refuted him. Some of the Tory orators had employed what was then a
favourite claptrap. Very great men, no doubt, were concerned in this
business. But were the Commons of England to stand in awe of great men?
Would not they have the spirit to censure corruption and oppression
in the highest places? Cowper answered finely that assuredly the House
ought not to be deterred from the discharge of any duty by the fear of
great men, but that fear was not the only base and evil passion of which
great men were the objects, and that the flatterer who courted their
favour was not a worse citizen than the envious calumniator who took
pleasure in bringing whatever was eminent down to his own level. At
length, after a debate which lasted from midday till nine at night, and
in which all the leading members took part, the committee divided on
the question that the letters patent were dishonourable to the King,
inconsistent with the law of nations, contrary to the statutes of the
realm, and destructive of property and trade. The Chancellor's enemies
had felt confident of victory, and had made the resolution so strong in
order that it might be impossible for him to retain the Great Seal. They
soon found that it would have been wise to propose a gentler censure.
Great numbers of their adherents, convinced by Cowper's arguments,
or unwilling to put a cruel stigma on a man of whose genius and
accomplishments the nation was proud, stole away before the door was
closed. To the general astonishment there were only one hundred and
thirty-three Ayes to one hundred and eighty-nine Noes. That the City of
London did not consider Somers as the destroyer, and his enemies as the
protectors, of trade, was proved on the following morning by the most
unequivocal of signs. As soon as the news of his triumph reached the
Royal Exchange, the price of stocks went up.

Some weeks elapsed before the Tories ventured again to attack him. In
the meantime they amused themselves by trying to worry another person
whom they hated even more bitterly. When, in a financial debate,
the arrangements of the household of the Duke of Gloucester were
incidentally mentioned, one or two members took the opportunity of
throwing reflections on Burnet. Burnet's very name sufficed to raise
among the High Churchmen a storm of mingled merriment and anger. The
Speaker in vain reminded the orators that they were wandering from the
question. The majority was determined to have some fun with the Right
Reverend Whig, and encouraged them to proceed. Nothing appears to have
been said on the other side. The chiefs of the opposition inferred from
the laughing and cheering of the Bishop's enemies, and from the silence
of his friends, that there would be no difficulty in driving from Court,
with contumely, the prelate whom of all prelates they most detested, as
the personification of the latitudinarian spirit, a Jack Presbyter in
lawn sleeves. They, therefore, after the lapse of a few hours, moved
quite unexpectedly an address requesting the King to remove the Bishop
of Salisbury from the place of preceptor to the young heir apparent.
But it soon appeared that many who could not help smiling at Burnet's
weaknesses did justice to his abilities and virtues. The debate was hot.
The unlucky Pastoral Letter was of course not forgotten. It was asked
whether a man who had proclaimed that England was a conquered country, a
man whose servile pages the English Commons had ordered to be burned
by the hangman, could be a fit instructor for an English Prince. Some
reviled the Bishop for being a Socinian, which he was not, and some
for being a Scotchman, which he was. His defenders fought his battle
gallantly. "Grant," they said, "that it is possible to find, amidst an
immense mass of eloquent and learned matter published in defence of the
Protestant religion and of the English Constitution, a paragraph which,
though well intended, was not well considered, is that error of an
unguarded minute to outweigh the services of more than twenty years? If
one House of Commons, by a very small majority, censured a little tract
of which his Lordship was the author, let it be remembered that another
House of Commons unanimously voted thanks to him for a work of very
different magnitude and importance, the History of the Reformation. And,
as to what is said about his birthplace, is there not already ill humour
enough in Scotland? Has not the failure of that unhappy expedition to
Darien raised a sufficiently bitter feeling against us throughout that
kingdom? Every wise and honest man is desirous to soothe the angry
passions of our neighbours. And shall we, just at this moment,
exasperate those passions by proclaiming that to be born on the north
of the Tweed is a disqualification for all honourable trust?" The
ministerial members would gladly have permitted the motion to be
withdrawn. But the opposition, elated with hope, insisted on dividing,
and were confounded by finding that, with all the advantage of a
surprise, they were only one hundred and thirty-three to one hundred and
seventy-three. Their defeat would probably have been less complete, had
not all those members who were especially attached to the Princess of
Denmark voted in the majority or absented themselves. Marlborough used
all his influence against the motion; and he had strong reasons for
doing so. He was by no means well pleased to see the Commons engaged in
discussing the characters and past lives of the persons who were placed
about the Duke of Gloucester. If the High Churchmen, by reviving old
stories, succeeded in carrying a vote against the Preceptor, it was
by no means unlikely that some malicious Whig might retaliate on
the Governor. The Governor must have been conscious that he was not
invulnerable; nor could he absolutely rely on the support of the
whole body of Tories; for it was believed that their favourite leader,
Rochester, thought himself the fittest person to superintend the
education of his grand nephew.

From Burnet the opposition went back to Somers. Some Crown property
near Reigate had been granted to Somers by the King. In this transaction
there was nothing that deserved blame. The Great Seal ought always to
be held by a lawyer of the highest distinction; nor can such a lawyer
discharge his duties in a perfectly efficient manner unless, with the
Great Seal, he accepts a peerage. But he may not have accumulated a
fortune such as will alone suffice to support a peerage; his peerage
is permanent; and his tenure of the Great Seal is precarious. In a few
weeks he may be dismissed from office, and may find that he has lost a
lucrative profession, that he has got nothing but a costly dignity, that
he has been transformed from a prosperous barrister into a mendicant
lord. Such a risk no wise man will run. If, therefore, the state is to
be well served in the highest civil post, it is absolutely necessary
that a provision should be made for retired Chancellors. The Sovereign
is now empowered by Act of Parliament to make such a provision out of
the public revenue. In old times such a provision was ordinarily made
out of the hereditary domain of the Crown. What had been bestowed on
Somers appears to have amounted, after all deductions, to a net income
of about sixteen hundred a year, a sum which will hardly shock us who
have seen at one time five retired Chancellors enjoying pensions of five
thousand a year each. For the crime, however, of accepting this grant
the leaders of the opposition hoped that they should be able to punish
Somers with disgrace and ruin. One difficulty stood in the way. All that
he had received was but a pittance when compared with the wealth with
which some of his persecutors had been loaded by the last two kings of
the House of Stuart. It was not easy to pass any censure on him which
should not imply a still more severe censure on two generations of
Granvilles, on two generations of Hydes, and on two generations of
Finches. At last some ingenious Tory thought of a device by which it
might be possible to strike the enemy without wounding friends.
The grants of Charles and James had been made in time of peace; and
William's grant to Somers had been made in time of war. Malice eagerly
caught at this childish distinction. It was moved that any minister
who had been concerned in passing a grant for his own benefit while the
nation was under the heavy taxes of the late war had violated his trust;
as if the expenditure which is necessary to secure to the country a good
administration of justice ought to be suspended by war; or as if it were
not criminal in a government to squander the resources of the state in
time of peace. The motion was made by James Brydges, eldest son of the
Lord Chandos, the James Brydges who afterwards became Duke of Chandos,
who raised a gigantic fortune out of war taxes, to squander it in
comfortless and tasteless ostentation, and who is still remembered
as the Timon of Pope's keen and brilliant satire. It was remarked as
extraordinary that Brydges brought forward and defended his motion
merely as the assertion of an abstract truth, and avoided all mention
of the Chancellor. It seemed still more extraordinary that Howe, whose
whole eloquence consisted in cutting personalities, named nobody on this
occasion, and contented himself with declaiming in general terms against
corruption and profusion. It was plain that the enemies of Somers were
at once urged forward by hatred and kept back by fear. They knew
that they could not carry a resolution directly condemning him. They,
therefore, cunningly brought forward a mere speculative proposition
which many members might be willing to affirm without scrutinising it
severely. But, as soon as the major premise had been admitted, the minor
would be without difficulty established; and it would be impossible to
avoid coming to the conclusion that Somers had violated his trust. Such
tactics, however, have very seldom succeeded in English parliaments;
for a little good sense and a little straightforwardness are quite
sufficient to confound them. A sturdy Whig member, Sir Rowland Gwyn,
disconcerted the whole scheme of operations. "Why this reserve?" he
said, "Everybody knows your meaning. Everybody sees that you have not
the courage to name the great man whom you are trying to destroy." "That
is false," cried Brydges; and a stormy altercation followed. It soon
appeared that innocence would again triumph. The two parties seemed to
have exchanged characters for one day. The friends of the government,
who in the Parliament were generally humble and timorous, took a high
tone, and spoke as it becomes men to speak who are defending persecuted
genius and virtue. The malecontents, generally so insolent and
turbulent, seemed to be completely cowed. They abased themselves so
low as to protest, what no human being could believe, that they had no
intention of attacking the Chancellor, and had framed their resolution
without any view to him. Howe, from whose lips scarcely any thing ever
dropped but gall and poison, went so far as to say: "My Lord Somers is
a man of eminent merit, of merit so eminent that, if he had made a slip,
we might well overlook it." At a late hour the question was put; and the
motion was rejected by a majority of fifty in a house of four hundred
and nineteen members. It was long since there had been so large an
attendance at a division.

The ignominious failure of the attacks on Somers and Burnet seemed to
prove that the assembly was coming round to a better temper. But the
temper of a House of Commons left without the guidance of a ministry
is never to be trusted. "Nobody can tell today," said an experienced
politician of that time, "what the majority may take it into their heads
to do tomorrow." Already a storm was gathering in which the Constitution
itself was in danger of perishing, and from which none of the three
branches of the legislature escaped without serious damage.

The question of the Irish forfeitures had been raised; and about
that question the minds of men, both within and without the walls of
Parliament, were in a strangely excitable state. Candid and intelligent
men, whatever veneration they may feel for the memory of William,
must find it impossible to deny that, in his eagerness to enrich and
aggrandise his personal friends, he too often forgot what was due to
his own reputation and to the public interest. It is true that in giving
away the old domains of the Crown he did only what he had a right to
do, and what all his predecessors had done; nor could the most factious
opposition insist on resuming his grants of those domains without
resuming at the same time the grants of his uncles. But between those
domains and the estates recently forfeited in Ireland there was a
distinction, which would not indeed have been recognised by the
judges, but which to a popular assembly might well seem to be of grave
importance. In the year 1690 a Bill had been brought in for applying the
Irish forfeitures to the public service. That Bill passed the Commons,
and would probably, with large amendments, have passed the Lords, had
not the King, who was under the necessity of attending the Congress at
the Hague, put an end to the session. In bidding the Houses farewell
on that occasion, he assured them that he should not dispose of the
property about which they had been deliberating, till they should have
had another opportunity of settling that matter. He had, as he thought,
strictly kept his word; for he had not disposed of this property till
the Houses had repeatedly met and separated without presenting to him
any bill on the subject. They had had the opportunity which he had
assured them that they should have. They had had more than one such
opportunity. The pledge which he had given had therefore been amply
redeemed; and he did not conceive that he was bound to abstain longer
from exercising his undoubted prerogative. But, though it could hardly
be denied that he had literally fulfilled his promise, the general
opinion was that such a promise ought to have been more than literally
fulfilled. If his Parliament, overwhelmed with business which could not
be postponed without danger to his throne and to his person, had been
forced to defer, year after year, the consideration of so large and
complex a question as that of the Irish forfeitures, it ill became
him to take advantage of such a laches with the eagerness of a shrewd
attorney. Many persons, therefore, who were sincerely attached to his
government, and who on principle disapproved of resumptions, thought the
case of these forfeitures an exception to the general rule.

The Commons had at the close of the last session tacked to the Land Tax
Bill a clause impowering seven Commissioners, who were designated by
name, to take account of the Irish forfeitures; and the Lords and the
King, afraid of losing the Land Tax Bill, had reluctantly consented to
this clause. During the recess, the commissioners had visited Ireland.
They had since returned to England. Their report was soon laid before
both Houses. By the Tories, and by their allies the republicans, it was
eagerly hailed. It had, indeed, been framed for the express purpose
of flattering and of inflaming them. Three of the commissioners had
strongly objected to some passages as indecorous, and even calumnious;
but the other four had overruled every objection. Of the four the chief
was Trenchard. He was by calling a pamphleteer, and seems not to have
been aware that the sharpness of style and of temper which may be
tolerated in a pamphlet is inexcusable in a state paper. He was certain
that he should be protected and rewarded by the party to which he owed
his appointment, and was delighted to have it in his power to publish,
with perfect security and with a semblance of official authority, bitter
reflections on King and ministry, Dutch favourites, French refugees, and
Irish Papists. The consequence was that only four names were subscribed
to the report. The three dissentients presented a separate memorial. As
to the main facts, however, there was little or no dispute. It appeared
that more than a million of Irish acres, or about seventeen
hundred thousand English acres, an area equal to that of Middlesex,
Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdonshire
together, had been forfeited during the late troubles. But of the
value of this large territory very different estimates were formed.
The commissioners acknowledged that they could obtain no certain
information. In the absence of such information they conjectured the
annual rent to be about two hundred thousand pounds, and the fee simple
to be worth thirteen years' purchase, that is to say, about two millions
six hundred thousand pounds. They seem not to have been aware that much
of the land had been let very low on perpetual leases, and that much was
burdened with mortgages. A contemporary writer, who was evidently well
acquainted with Ireland, asserted that the authors of the report had
valued the forfeited property in Carlow at six times the real market
price, and that the two million six hundred thousand pounds, of which
they talked, would be found to shrink to about half a million, which, as
the exchanges then stood between Dublin and London, would have dwindled
to four hundred thousand pounds by the time that it reached the English
Exchequer. It was subsequently proved, beyond all dispute, that this
estimate was very much nearer the truth than that which had been formed
by Trenchard and Trenchard's colleagues.

Of the seventeen hundred thousand acres which had been forfeited, above
a fourth part had been restored to the ancient proprietors in conformity
with the civil articles of the treaty of Limerick. About one seventh
of the remaining three fourths had been given back to unhappy families,
which, though they could not plead the letter of the treaty, had been
thought fit objects of clemency. The rest had been bestowed, partly on
persons whose seances merited all and more than all that they obtained,
but chiefly on the King's personal friends. Romney had obtained a
considerable share of the royal bounty. But of all the grants the
largest was to Woodstock, the eldest son of Portland; the next was to
Albemarle. An admirer of William cannot relate without pain that he
divided between these two foreigners an extent of country larger than
Hertfordshire.

This fact, simply reported, would have sufficed to excite a strong
feeling of indignation in a House of Commons less irritable and
querulous than that which then sate at Westminster. But Trenchard and
his confederates were not content with simply reporting the fact. They
employed all their skill to inflame the passions of the majority. They
at once applied goads to its anger and held out baits to its cupidity.

They censured that part of William's conduct which deserved high
praise even more severely than that part of his conduct for which it is
impossible to set up any defence. They told the Parliament that the old
proprietors of the soil had been treated with pernicious indulgence;
that the capitulation of Limerick had been construed in a manner far
too favourable to the conquered race; and that the King had suffered his
compassion to lead him into the error of showing indulgence to many who
could not pretend that they were within the terms of the capitulation.
Even now, after the lapse of eight years, it might be possible, by
instituting a severe inquisition, and by giving proper encouragement to
informers, to prove that many Papists, who were still permitted to enjoy
their estates, had taken the side of James during the civil war. There
would thus be a new and plentiful harvest of confiscations. The four
bitterly complained that their task had been made more difficult by
the hostility of persons who held office in Ireland, and by the secret
influence of great men who were interested in concealing the truth.
These grave charges were made in general terms. No name was mentioned;
no fact was specified; no evidence was tendered.

Had the report stopped here, those who drew it up might justly have
been blamed for the unfair and ill natured manner in which they had
discharged their functions; but they could not have been accused of
usurping functions which did not belong to them for the purpose of
insulting the Sovereign and exasperating the nation. But these men
well knew in what way and for what purpose they might safely venture to
exceed their commission. The Act of Parliament from which they derived
their powers authorised them to report on estates forfeited during the
late troubles. It contained not a word which could be construed into an
authority to report on the old hereditary domain of the Crown. With that
domain they had as little to do as with the seignorage levied on tin
in the Duchy of Cornwall, or with the church patronage of the Duchy of
Lancaster. But they had discovered that a part of that domain had been
alienated by a grant which they could not deny themselves the pleasure
of publishing to the world. It was indeed an unfortunate grant, a grant
which could not be brought to light without much mischief and much
scandal. It was long since William had ceased to be the lover of
Elisabeth Villiers, long since he had asked her counsel or listened to
her fascinating conversation except in the presence of other persons.
She had been some years married to George Hamilton, a soldier who had
distinguished himself by his courage in Ireland and Flanders, and who
probably held the courtier like doctrine that a lady is not dishonoured
by having been the paramour of a king. William was well pleased with the
marriage, bestowed on the wife a portion of the old Crown property in
Ireland, and created the husband a peer of Scotland by the title of
Earl of Orkney. Assuredly William would not have raised his character by
abandoning to poverty a woman whom he had loved, though with a criminal
love. He was undoubtedly bound, as a man of humanity and honour, to
provide liberally for her; but he should have provided for her rather
by saving from his civil list than by alienating his hereditary revenue.
The four malecontent commissioners rejoiced with spiteful joy over this
discovery. It was in vain that the other three represented that the
grant to Lady Orkney was one with which they had nothing to do, and
that, if they went out of their way to hold it up to obloquy, they might
be justly said to fly in the King's face. "To fly in the King's face!"
said one of the majority; "our business is to fly in the King's face. We
were sent here to fly in the King's face." With this patriotic object a
paragraph about Lady Orkney's grant was added to the report, a paragraph
too in which the value of that grant was so monstrously exaggerated that
William appeared to have surpassed the profligate extravagance of
his uncle Charles. The estate bestowed on the countess was valued at
twenty-four thousand pounds a year. The truth seems to be that the
income which she derived from the royal bounty, after making allowance
for incumbrances and for the rate of exchange, was about four thousand
pounds.

The success of the report was complete. The nation and its
representatives hated taxes, hated foreign favourites, and hated Irish
Papists; and here was a document which held out the hope that England
might, at the expense of foreign courtiers and of popish Celts, be
relieved from a great load of taxes. Many, both within and without
the walls of Parliament, gave entire faith to the estimate which the
commissioners had formed by a wild guess, in the absence of trustworthy
information. They gave entire faith also to the prediction that a strict
inquiry would detect many traitors who had hitherto been permitted to
escape with impunity, and that a large addition would thus be made
to the extensive territory which had already been confiscated. It was
popularly said that, if vigorous measures were taken, the gain to the
kingdom would be not less than three hundred thousand pounds a year; and
almost the whole of this sum, a sum more than sufficient to defray the
whole charge of such an army as the Commons were disposed to keep up
in time of peace, would be raised by simply taking away what had been
unjustifiably given to Dutchmen, who would still retain immense wealth
taken out of English pockets, or unjustifiably left to Irishmen,
who thought it at once the most pleasant and the most pious of all
employments to cut English throats. The Lower House went to work with
the double eagerness of rapacity and of animosity. As soon as the report
of the four and the protest of the three had been laid on the table
and read by the clerk, it was resolved that a Resumption Bill should
be brought in. It was then resolved, in opposition to the plainest
principles of justice, that no petition from any person who might think
himself aggrieved by this bill should ever be received. It was necessary
to consider how the commissioners should be remunerated for their
services; and this question was decided with impudent injustice. It
was determined that the commissioners who had signed the report should
receive a thousand pounds each. But a large party thought that the
dissentient three deserved no recompense; and two of them were merely
allowed what was thought sufficient to cover the expense of their
journey to Ireland. This was nothing less than to give notice to every
man who should ever be employed in any similar inquiry that, if he
wished to be paid, he must report what would please the assembly which
held the purse of the state. In truth the House was despotic, and was
fast contracting the vices of a despot. It was proud of its antipathy to
courtiers; and it was calling into existence a new set of courtiers who
would study all its humours, who would flatter all its weaknesses, who
would prophesy to it smooth things, and who would assuredly be, in no
respect, less greedy, less faithless, or less abject than the sycophants
who bow in the antechambers of kings.

Indeed the dissentient commissioners had worse evils to apprehend than
that of being left unremunerated. One of them, Sir Richard Levinz, had
mentioned in private to his friends some disrespectful expressions
which had been used by one of his colleagues about the King. What he
had mentioned in private was, not perhaps very discreetly, repeated
by Montague in the House. The predominant party eagerly seized the
opportunity of worrying both Montague and Levinz. A resolution implying
a severe censure on Montague was carried. Levinz was brought to the bar
and examined. The four were also in attendance. They protested that he
had misrepresented them. Trenchard declared that he had always spoken of
His Majesty as a subject ought to speak of an excellent sovereign, who
had been deceived by evil counsellors, and who would be grateful to
those who should bring the truth to his knowledge. He vehemently denied
that he had called the grant to Lady Orkney villainous. It was a
word that he never used, a word that never came out of the mouth of a
gentleman. These assertions will be estimated at the proper value by
those who are acquainted with Trenchard's pamphlets, pamphlets in which
the shocking word villainous will without difficulty be found, and which
are full of malignant reflections on William. [20] But the House was
determined not to believe Levinz. He was voted a calumniator, and sent
to the Tower, as an example to all who should be tempted to speak truth
which the Commons might not like to hear.

Meanwhile the bill had been brought in, and was proceeding easily. It
provided that all the property which had belonged to the Crown at the
time of the accession of James the Second, or which had been forfeited
to the Crown since that time, should be vested in trustees. These
trustees were named in the bill; and among them were the four
commissioners who had signed the report. All the Irish grants of William
were annulled. The legal rights of persons other than the grantees were
saved. But of those rights the trustees were to be judges, and judges
without appeal. A claimant who gave them the trouble of attending to
him, and could not make out his case, was to be heavily fined. Rewards
were offered to informers who should discover any property which was
liable to confiscation, and which had not yet been confiscated. Though
eight years had elapsed since an arm had been lifted up in the conquered
island against the domination of the Englishry, the unhappy children
of the soil, who had been suffered to live, submissive and obscure,
on their hereditary fields, were threatened with a new and severe
inquisition into old offences.

Objectionable as many parts of the bill undoubtedly were, nobody who
knew the House of Commons believed it to be possible to carry any
amendment. The King flattered himself that a motion for leaving at his
disposal a third part of the forfeitures would be favourably received.
There can be little doubt that a compromise would have been willingly
accepted twelve months earlier. But the report had made all compromise
impossible. William, however, was bent on trying the experiment; and
Vernon consented to go on what he considered as a forlorn hope. He made
his speech and his motion; but the reception which he met with was such
that he did not venture to demand a division. This feeble attempt
at obstruction only made the impetuous current chafe the more. Howe
immediately moved two resolutions; one attributing the load of debts and
taxes which lay on the nation to the Irish grants; the other censuring
all who had been concerned in advising or passing those grants. Nobody
was named; not because the majority was inclined to show any tenderness
to the Whig ministers, but because some of the most objectionable grants
had been sanctioned by the Board of Treasury when Godolphin and Seymour,
who had great influence with the country party, sate at that board.

Howe's two resolutions were laid before the King by the Speaker, in
whose train all the leaders of the opposition appeared at Kensington.
Even Seymour, with characteristic effrontery, showed himself there as
one of the chief authors of a vote which pronounced him guilty of a
breach of duty. William's answer was that he had thought himself bound
to reward out of the forfeited property those who had served him well,
and especially those who had borne a principal part in the reduction of
Ireland. The war, he said, had undoubtedly left behind it a heavy debt;
and he should be glad to see that debt reduced by just and effectual
means. This answer was but a bad one; and, in truth, it was
hardly possible for him to return a good one. He had done what was
indefensible; and, by attempting to defend himself, he made his case
worse. It was not true that the Irish forfeitures, or one fifth part of
them, had been granted to men who had distinguished themselves in the
Irish war; and it was not judicious to hint that those forfeitures could
not justly be applied to the discharge of the public debts. The Commons
murmured, and not altogether without reason. "His Majesty tells us,"
they said, "that the debts fall to us and the forfeitures to him. We
are to make good out of the purses of Englishmen what was spent upon the
war; and he is to put into the purses of Dutchmen what was got by the
war." When the House met again, Howe moved that whoever had advised
the King to return such an answer was an enemy to His Majesty and the
kingdom; and this resolution was carried with some slight modification.

To whatever criticism William's answer might be open, he had said one
thing which well deserved the attention of the House. A small part of
the forfeited property had been bestowed on men whose services to the
state well deserved a much larger recompense; and that part could not
be resumed without gross injustice and ingratitude. An estate of very
moderate value had been given, with the title of Earl of Athlone, to
Ginkell, whose skill and valour had brought the war in Ireland to a
triumphant close. Another estate had been given, with the title of Earl
of Galway, to Rouvigny, who, in the crisis of the decisive battle, at
the very moment when Saint Ruth was waving his hat, and exclaiming
that the English should be beaten back to Dublin, had, at the head of
a gallant body of horse, struggled through the morass, turned the left
wing of the Celtic army, and retrieved the day. But the predominant
faction, drunk with insolence and animosity, made no distinction between
courtiers who had been enriched by injudicious partiality and warriors
who had been sparingly rewarded for great exploits achieved in defence
of the liberties and the religion of our country. Athlone was a
Dutchman; Galway was a Frenchman; and it did not become a good
Englishman to say a word in favour of either.

Yet this was not the most flagrant injustice of which the Commons were
guilty. According to the plainest principles of common law and of common
sense, no man can forfeit any rights except those which he has. All the
donations which William had made he had made subject to this limitation.
But by this limitation the Commons were too angry and too rapacious to
be bound. They determined to vest in the trustees of the forfeited lands
an estate greater than had ever belonged to the forfeiting landholders.
Thus innocent persons were violently deprived of property which was
theirs by descent or by purchase, of property which had been strictly
respected by the King and by his grantees. No immunity was granted even
to men who had fought on the English side, even to men who had lined the
walls of Londonderry and rushed on the Irish guns at Newton Butler.

In some cases the Commons showed indulgence; but their indulgence was
not less unjustifiable, nor of less pernicious example, than their
severity. The ancient rule, a rule which is still strictly maintained,
and which cannot be relaxed without danger of boundless profusion and
shameless jobbery, is that whatever the Parliament grants shall be
granted to the Sovereign, and that no public bounty shall be bestowed on
any private person except by the Sovereign.

The Lower House now, contemptuously disregarding both principles and
precedents, took on itself to carve estates out of the forfeitures
for persons whom it was inclined to favour. To the Duke of Ormond
especially, who ranked among the Tories and was distinguished by his
dislike of the foreigners, marked partiality was shown. Some of his
friends, indeed, hoped that they should be able to insert in the bill
a clause bestowing on him all the confiscated estates in the county of
Tipperary. But they found that it would be prudent in them to content
themselves with conferring on him a boon smaller in amount, but equally
objectionable in principle. He had owed very large debts to persons who
had forfeited to the Crown all that belonged to them. Those debts were
therefore now due from him to the Crown. The House determined to make
him a present of the whole, that very House which would not consent
to leave a single acre to the general who had stormed Athlone, who had
gained the battle of Aghrim, who had entered Galway in triumph, and who
had received the submission of Limerick.

That a bill so violent, so unjust, and so unconstitutional would pass
the Lords without considerable alteration was hardly to be expected. The
ruling demagogues, therefore, resolved to join it with the bill which
granted to the Crown a land tax of two shillings in the pound for the
service of the next year, and thus to place the Upper House under the
necessity of either passing both bills together without the change of a
word, or rejecting both together, and leaving the public creditor unpaid
and the nation defenceless.

There was great indignation among the Peers. They were not indeed more
disposed than the Commons to approve of the manner in which the Irish
forfeitures had been granted away; for the antipathy to the foreigners,
strong as it was in the nation generally, was strongest in the highest
ranks. Old barons were angry at seeing themselves preceded by new
earls from Holland and Guelders. Garters, gold keys, white staves,
rangerships, which had been considered as peculiarly belonging to the
hereditary grandees of the realm, were now intercepted by aliens.
Every English nobleman felt that his chance of obtaining a share of
the favours of the Crown was seriously diminished by the competition
of Bentincks and Keppels, Auverquerques and Zulesteins. But, though the
riches and dignities heaped on the little knot of Dutch courtiers might
disgust him, the recent proceedings of the Commons could not but disgust
him still more. The authority, the respectability, the existence of his
order were threatened with destruction. Not only,--such were the
just complaints of the Peers,--not only are we to be deprived of that
coordinate legislative power to which we are, by the constitution of the
realm, entitled. We are not to be allowed even a suspensive veto. We are
not to dare to remonstrate, to suggest an amendment, to offer a reason,
to ask for an explanation. Whenever the other House has passed a bill
to which it is known that we have strong objections, that bill is to
be tacked to a bill of supply. If we alter it, we are told that we
are attacking the most sacred privilege of the representatives of the
people, and that we must either take the whole or reject the whole. If
we reject the whole, public credit is shaken; the Royal Exchange is in
confusion; the Bank stops payment; the army is disbanded; the fleet
is in mutiny; the island is left, without one regiment, without one
frigate, at the mercy of every enemy. The danger of throwing out a bill
of supply is doubtless great. Yet it may on the whole be better that we
should face that danger, once for all, than that we should consent to
be, what we are fast becoming, a body of no more importance than the
Convocation.

Animated by such feelings as these, a party in the Upper House was eager
to take the earliest opportunity of making a stand. On the fourth of
April, the second reading was moved. Near a hundred lords were present.
Somers, whose serene wisdom and persuasive eloquence had seldom been
more needed, was confined to his room by illness; and his place on the
woolsack was supplied by the Earl of Bridgewater. Several orators, both
Whig and Tory, objected to proceeding farther. But the chiefs of both
parties thought it better to try the almost hopeless experiment of
committing the bill and sending it back amended to the Commons. The
second reading was carried by seventy votes to twenty-three. It was
remarked that both Portland and Albemarle voted in the majority.

In the Committee and on the third reading several amendments were
proposed and carried. Wharton, the boldest and most active of the Whig
peers, and the Lord Privy Seal Lonsdale, one of the most moderate and
reasonable of the Tories, took the lead, and were strenuously supported
by the Lord President Pembroke, and by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who
seems on this occasion to have a little forgotten his habitual sobriety
and caution. Two natural sons of Charles the Second, Richmond and
Southampton, who had strong personal reasons for disliking resumption
bills, were zealous on the same side. No peer, however, as far as can
now be discovered, ventured to defend the way in which William had
disposed of his Irish domains. The provisions which annulled the grants
of those domains were left untouched. But the words of which the effect
was to vest in the parliamentary trustees property which had never
been forfeited to the King, and had never been given away by him, were
altered; and the clauses by which estates and sums of money were,
in defiance of constitutional principle and of immemorial practice,
bestowed on persons who were favourites of the Commons, were so far
modified as to be, in form, somewhat less exceptionable. The bill,
improved by these changes, was sent down by two judges to the Lower
House.

The Lower House was all in a flame. There was now no difference of
opinion there. Even those members who thought that the Resumption Bill
and the Land Tax Bill ought not to have been tacked together, yet felt
that, since those bills had been tacked together, it was impossible to
agree to the amendments made by the Lords without surrendering one
of the most precious privileges of the Commons. The amendments
were rejected without one dissentient voice. It was resolved that a
conference should be demanded; and the gentlemen who were to manage the
conference were instructed to say merely that the Upper House had no
right to alter a money bill; that the point had long been settled and
was too clear for argument; that they should leave the bill with the
Lords, and that they should leave with the Lords also the responsibility
of stopping the supplies which were necessary for the public service.
Several votes of menacing sound were passed at the same sitting. It was
Monday the eighth of April. Tuesday the ninth was allowed to the
other House for reflection and repentance. It was resolved that on the
Wednesday morning the question of the Irish forfeitures should again be
taken into consideration, and that every member who was in town should
be then in his place on peril of the highest displeasure of the House.
It was moved and carried that every Privy Councillor who had been
concerned in procuring or passing any exorbitant grant for his own
benefit had been guilty of a high crime and misdemeanour. Lest the
courtiers should flatter themselves that this was meant to be a mere
abstract proposition, it was ordered that a list of the members of
the Privy Council should be laid on the table. As it was thought not
improbable that the crisis might end in an appeal to the constituent
bodies, nothing was omitted which could excite out of doors a feeling
in favour of the bill. The Speaker was directed to print and publish the
report signed by the four Commissioners, not accompanied, as in common
justice it ought to have been, by the protest of the three dissentients,
but accompanied by several extracts from the journals which were thought
likely to produce an impression favourable to the House and unfavourable
to the Court. All these resolutions passed without any division,
and without, as far as appears, any debate. There was, indeed, much
speaking, but all on one side. Seymour, Harley, Howe, Harcourt, Shower,
Musgrave, declaimed, one after another, about the obstinacy of the other
House, the alarming state of the country, the dangers which threatened
the public peace and the public credit. If, it was said, none but
Englishmen sate in the Parliament and in the Council, we might hope that
they would relent at the thought of the calamities which impend over
England. But we have to deal with men who are not Englishmen, with men
who consider this country as their own only for evil, as their property,
not as their home; who, when they have gorged themselves with our
wealth, will, without one uneasy feeling, leave us sunk in bankruptcy,
distracted by faction, exposed without defence to invasion. "A new war,"
said one of these orators, "a new war, as long, as bloody, and as
costly as the last, would do less mischief than has been done by the
introduction of that batch of Dutchmen among the barons of the realm."
Another was so absurd as to call on the House to declare that whoever
should advise a dissolution would be guilty of high treason. A third
gave utterance to a sentiment which it is difficult to understand how
any assembly of civilised and Christian men, even in a moment of strong
excitement, should have heard without horror. "They object to tacking;
do they? Let them take care that they do not provoke us to tack in
earnest. How would they like to have bills of supply with bills of
attainder tacked to them?" This atrocious threat, worthy of the tribune
of the French Convention in the worst days of the Jacobin tyranny,
seems to have passed unreprehended. It was meant--such at least was the
impression at the Dutch embassy--to intimidate Somers. He was
confined by illness. He had been unable to take any public part in the
proceedings of the Lords; and he had privately blamed them for engaging
in a conflict in which he justly thought that they could not be
victorious. Nevertheless, the Tory leaders hoped that they might be
able to direct against him the whole force of the storm which they had
raised. Seymour, in particular, encouraged by the wild and almost savage
temper of his hearers, harangued with rancorous violence against the
wisdom and the virtue which presented the strongest contrast to his own
turbulence, insolence, faithlessness, and rapacity. No doubt, he said,
the Lord Chancellor was a man of parts. Anybody might be glad to have
for counsel so acute and eloquent an advocate. But a very good advocate
might be a very bad minister; and, of all the ministers who had brought
the kingdom into difficulties, this plausible, fair-spoken person was
the most dangerous. Nor was the old reprobate ashamed to add that he was
afraid that his Lordship was no better than a Hobbist in religion.

After a long sitting the members separated; but they reassembled early
on the morning of the following day, Tuesday the ninth of April. A
conference was held; and Seymour, as chief manager for the Commons,
returned the bill and the amendments to the Peers in the manner which
had been prescribed to him. From the Painted Chamber he went back to the
Lower House, and reported what had passed. "If," he said, "I may venture
to judge by the looks and manner of their Lordships, all will go right."
But within half an hour evil tidings came through the Court of Requests
and the lobbies. The Lords had divided on the question whether they
would adhere to their amendments. Forty-seven had voted for adhering,
and thirty-four for giving way. The House of Commons broke up with
gloomy looks, and in great agitation. All London looked forward to the
next day with painful forebodings. The general feeling was in favour
of the bill. It was rumoured that the majority which had determined to
stand by the amendments had been swollen by several prelates, by several
of the illegitimate sons of Charles the Second, and by several needy and
greedy courtiers. The cry in all the public places of resort was that
the nation would be ruined by the three B's, Bishops, Bastards, and
Beggars. On Wednesday the tenth, at length, the contest came to a
decisive issue. Both Houses were early crowded. The Lords demanded a
conference. It was held; and Pembroke delivered back to Seymour the
bill and the amendments, together with a paper containing a concise,
but luminous and forcible, exposition of the grounds on which the Lords
conceived themselves to be acting in a constitutional and strictly
defensive manner. This paper was read at the bar; but, whatever effect
it may now produce on a dispassionate student of history, it produced
none on the thick ranks of country gentlemen. It was instantly resolved
that the bill should again be sent back to the Lords with a peremptory
announcement that the Commons' determination was unalterable.

The Lords again took the amendments into consideration. During the last
forty-eight hours, great exertions had been made in various quarters to
avert a complete rupture between the Houses. The statesmen of the junto
were far too wise not to see that it would be madness to continue the
struggle longer. It was indeed necessary, unless the King and the Lords
were to be of as little weight in the State as in 1648, unless the
House of Commons was not merely to exercise a general control over the
government, but to be, as in the days of the Rump, itself the whole
government, the sole legislative chamber, the fountain from which were
to flow all those favours which had hitherto been in the gift of the
Crown, that a determined stand should be made. But, in order that such a
stand might be successful, the ground must be carefully selected; for
a defeat might be fatal. The Lords must wait for some occasion on
which their privileges would be bound up with the privileges of all
Englishmen, for some occasion on which the constituent bodies would,
if an appeal were made to them, disavow the acts of the representative
body; and this was not such an occasion. The enlightened and large
minded few considered tacking as a practice so pernicious that it
would be justified only by an emergency which would justify a resort to
physical force. But, in the many, tacking, when employed for a popular
end, excited little or no disapprobation. The public, which seldom
troubles itself with nice distinctions, could not be made to understand
that the question at issue was any other than this, whether a sum which
was vulgarly estimated at millions, and which undoubtedly amounted to
some hundreds of thousands, should be employed in paying the debts of
the state and alleviating the load of taxation, or in making Dutchmen,
who were already too rich, still richer. It was evident that on that
question the Lords could not hope to have the country with them,
and that, if a general election took place while that question was
unsettled, the new House of Commons would be even more mutinous and
impracticable than the present House. Somers, in his sick chamber,
had given this opinion. Orford had voted for the bill in every stage.
Montague, though no longer a minister, had obtained admission to the
royal closet, and had strongly represented to the King the dangers which
threatened the state. The King had at length consented to let it be
understood that he considered the passing of the bill as on the whole
the less of two great evils. It was soon clear that the temper of the
Peers had undergone a considerable alteration since the preceding
day. Scarcely any, indeed, changed sides. But not a few abstained from
voting. Wharton, who had at first spoken powerfully for the amendments,
left town for Newmarket. On the other hand, some Lords who had not yet
taken their part came down to give a healing vote. Among them were the
two persons to whom the education of the young heir apparent had
been entrusted, Marlborough and Burnet. Marlborough showed his usual
prudence. He had remained neutral while by taking a part he must have
offended either the House of Commons or the King. He took a part as soon
as he saw that it was possible to please both. Burnet, alarmed for the
public peace, was in a state of great excitement, and, as was usual with
him when in such a state, forgot dignity and decorum, called out "stuff"
in a very audible voice while a noble Lord was haranguing in favour of
the amendments, and was in great danger of being reprimanded at the bar
or delivered over to Black Rod. The motion on which the division took
place was that the House do adhere to the amendments. There were forty
contents and thirty-seven not contents. Proxies were called; and the
numbers were found to be exactly even. In the House of Lords there is no
casting vote. When the numbers are even, the non contents have it. The
motion to adhere had therefore been negatived. But this was not enough.
It was necessary that an affirmative resolution should be moved to the
effect that the House agreed to the bill without amendments; and, if the
numbers should again be equal, this motion would also be lost. It was
an anxious moment. Fortunately the Primate's heart failed him. He had
obstinately fought the battle down to the last stage. But he probably
felt that it was no light thing to take on himself, and to bring on his
order, the responsibility of throwing the whole kingdom into confusion.
He started up and hurried out of the House, beckoning to some of his
brethren. His brethren followed him with a prompt obedience, which,
serious as the crisis was, caused no small merriment. In consequence of
this defection, the motion to agree was carried by a majority of five.
Meanwhile the members of the other House had been impatiently waiting
for news, and had been alternately elated and depressed by the reports
which followed one another in rapid succession. At first it was
confidently expected that the Peers would yield; and there was general
good humour. Then came intelligence that the majority of the Lords
present had voted for adhering to the amendments. "I believe," so Vernon
wrote the next day, "I believe there was not one man in the House that
did not think the nation ruined." The lobbies were cleared; the back
doors were locked; the keys were laid on the table; the Serjeant at Arms
was directed to take his post at the front door, and to suffer no member
to withdraw. An awful interval followed, during which the angry passions
of the assembly seemed to be subdued by terror. Some of the leaders
of the opposition, men of grave character and of large property, stood
aghast at finding that they were engaged,--they scarcely knew how,--in
a conflict such as they had not at all expected, in a conflict in which
they could be victorious only at the expense of the peace and order of
society. Even Seymour was sobered by the greatness and nearness of the
danger. Even Howe thought it advisable to hold conciliatory language. It
was no time, he said, for wrangling. Court party and country party were
Englishmen alike. Their duty was to forget all past grievances, and to
cooperate heartily for the purpose of saving the country.

In a moment all was changed. A message from the Lords was announced.
It was a message which lightened many heavy hearts. The bill had been
passed without amendments.

The leading malecontents, who, a few minutes before, scared by finding
that their violence had brought on a crisis for which they were not
prepared, had talked about the duty of mutual forgiveness and close
union, instantly became again as rancorous as ever. One danger, they
said, was over. So far well. But it was the duty of the representatives
of the people to take such steps as might make it impossible that there
should ever again be such danger. Every adviser of the Crown, who had
been concerned in the procuring or passing of any exorbitant grant,
ought to be excluded from all access to the royal ear. A list of the
privy councillors, furnished in conformity with the order made two
days before, was on the table. That list the clerk was ordered to read.
Prince George of Denmark and the Archbishop of Canterbury passed without
remark. But, as soon as the Chancellor's name had been pronounced, the
rage of his enemies broke forth. Twice already, in the course of that
stormy session, they had attempted to ruin his fame and his fortunes;
and twice his innocence and his calm fortitude had confounded all their
politics. Perhaps, in the state of excitement to which the House had
been wrought up, a third attack on him might be successful. Orator
after orator declaimed against him. He was the great offender. He was
responsible for all the grievances of which the nation complained.
He had obtained exorbitant grants for himself. He had defended the
exorbitant grants obtained by others. He had not, indeed, been able, in
the late debates, to raise his own voice against the just demands of the
nation. But it might well be suspected that he had in secret prompted
the ungracious answer of the King and encouraged the pertinacious
resistance of the Lords. Sir John Levison Gower, a noisy and acrimonious
Tory, called for impeachment. But Musgrave, an abler and more
experienced politician, saw that, if the imputations which the
opposition had been in the habit of throwing on the Chancellor were
exhibited with the precision of a legal charge, their futility would
excite universal derision, and thought it more expedient to move that
the House should, without assigning any reason, request the King to
remove Lord Somers from His Majesty's counsels and presence for ever.
Cowper defended his persecuted friend with great eloquence and effect;
and he was warmly supported by many members who had been zealous for the
resumption of the Irish grants. Only a hundred and six members went into
the lobby with Musgrave; a hundred and sixty-seven voted against him.
Such a division, in such a House of Commons, and on such a day, is
sufficient evidence of the respect which the great qualities of Somers
had extorted even from his political enemies.

The clerk then went on with the list. The Lord President and the Lord
Privy Seal, who were well known to have stood up strongly for the
privileges of the Lords, were reviled by some angry members; but no
motion was made against either. And soon the Tories became uneasy in
their turn; for the name of the Duke of Leeds was read. He was one of
themselves. They were very unwilling to put a stigma on him. Yet how
could they, just after declaiming against the Chancellor for accepting
a very moderate and well earned provision, undertake the defence of
a statesman who had, out of grants, pardons and bribes, accumulated
a princely fortune? There was actually on the table evidence that His
Grace was receiving from the bounty of the Crown more than thrice as
much as had been bestowed on Somers; and nobody could doubt that His
Grace's secret gains had very far exceeded those of which there was
evidence on the table. It was accordingly moved that the House, which
had indeed been sitting massy hours, should adjourn. The motion was
lost; but neither party was disposed to move that the consideration of
the list should be resumed. It was however resolved, without a division,
that an address should be presented to the King, requesting that no
person not a native of his dominions, Prince George excepted, might
be admitted to the Privy Council either of England or of Ireland. The
evening was now far spent. The candles had been some time lighted;
and the House rose. So ended one of the most anxious, turbulent, and
variously eventful days in the long Parliamentary History of England.

What the morrow would have produced if time had been allowed for a
renewal of hostilities can only be guessed. The supplies had been voted.
The King was determined not to receive the address which requested him
to disgrace his dearest and most trusty friends. Indeed he would have
prevented the passing of that address by proroguing Parliament on the
preceding day, had not the Lords risen the moment after they had agreed
to the Resumption Bill. He had actually come from Kensington to the
Treasury for that purpose; and his robes and crown were in readiness.
He now took care to be at Westminster in good time. The Commons had
scarcely met when the knock of Black Rod was heard. They repaired to
the other House. The bills were passed; and Bridgewater, by the
royal command, prorogued the Parliament. For the first time since the
Revolution the session closed without a speech from the throne. William
was too angry to thank the Commons, and too prudent to reprimand them.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The health of James had been during some years declining and he had at
length, on Good Friday, 1701, suffered a shock from which he had never
recovered. While he was listening in his chapel to the solemn service
of the day, he fell down in a fit, and remained long insensible. Some
people imagined that the words of the anthem which his choristers were
chanting had produced in him emotions too violent to be borne by an
enfeebled body and mind. For that anthem was taken from the plaintive
elegy in which a servant of the true God, chastened by many sorrows and
humiliations, banished, homesick, and living on the bounty of strangers,
bewailed the fallen throne and the desolate Temple of Sion: "Remember,
O Lord, what is come upon us; consider and behold our reproach. Our
inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens; the crown is
fallen from our head. Wherefore dose thou forget us for ever?"

The King's malady proved to be paralytic. Fagon, the first physician of
the French Court, and, on medical questions, the oracle of all Europe,
prescribed the waters of Bourbon. Lewis, with all his usual generosity,
sent to Saint Germains ten thousand crowns in gold for the charges
of the journey, and gave orders that every town along the road should
receive his good brother with all the honours due to royalty. [21]

James, after passing some time at Bourbon, returned to the neighbourhood
of Paris with health so far reestablished that he was able to take
exercise on horseback, but with judgment and memory evidently impaired.
On the thirteenth of September, he had a second fit in his chapel; and
it soon became clear that this was a final stroke. He rallied the last
energies of his failing body and mind to testify his firm belief in
the religion for which he had sacrificed so much. He received the last
sacraments with every mark of devotion, exhorted his son to hold fast
to the true faith in spite of all temptations, and entreated Middleton,
who, almost alone among the courtiers assembled in the bedchamber,
professed himself a Protestant, to take refuge from doubt and error in
the bosom of the one infallible Church. After the extreme unction had
been administered, James declared that he pardoned all his enemies, and
named particularly the Prince of Orange, the Princess of Denmark, and
the Emperor. The Emperor's name he repeated with peculiar emphasis:
"Take notice, father," he said to the confessor, "that I forgive the
Emperor with all my heart." It may perhaps seem strange that he should
have found this the hardest of all exercises of Christian charity.
But it must be remembered that the Emperor was the only Roman Catholic
Prince still living who had been accessory to the Revolution, and
that James might not unnaturally consider Roman Catholics who had been
accessory to the Revolution as more inexcusably guilty than heretics who
might have deluded themselves into the belief that, in violating their
duty to him, they were discharging their duty to God.

While James was still able to understand what was said to him, and
make intelligible answers, Lewis visited him twice. The English exiles
observed that the Most Christian King was to the last considerate and
kind in the very slightest matters which concerned his unfortunate
guest. He would not allow his coach to enter the court of Saint
Germains, lest the noise of the wheels should be heard in the sick room.
In both interviews he was gracious, friendly, and even tender. But he
carefully abstained from saying anything about the future position
of the family which was about to lose its head. Indeed he could say
nothing, for he had not yet made up his own mind. Soon, however, it
became necessary for him to form some resolution. On the sixteenth James
sank into a stupor which indicated the near approach of death. While he
lay in this helpless state, Madame de Maintenon visited his consort. To
this visit many persons who were likely to be well informed attributed
a long series of great events. We cannot wonder that a woman should
have been moved to pity by the misery of a woman; that a devout Roman
Catholic should have taken a deep interest in the fate of a family
persecuted, as she conceived, solely for being Roman Catholics; or that
the pride of the widow of Scarron should have been intensely gratified
by the supplications of a daughter of Este and a Queen of England.
From mixed motives, probably, the wife of Lewis promised her powerful
protection to the wife of James.

Madame de Maintenon was just leaving Saint Germains when, on the brow of
the hill which overlooks the valley of the Seine, she met her husband,
who had come to ask after his guest. It was probable at this moment that
he was persuaded to form a resolution, of which neither he nor she by
whom he was governed foresaw the consequences. Before he announced that
resolution, however, he observed all the decent forms of deliberation. A
council was held that evening at Marli, and was attended by the princes
of the blood and by the ministers of state. The question was propounded,
whether, when God should take James the Second of England to himself,
France should recognise the Pretender as King James the Third?

The ministers were, one and all, against the recognition. Indeed, it
seems difficult to understand how any person who had any pretensions
to the name of statesman should have been of a different opinion. Torcy
took his stand on the ground that to recognise the Prince of Wales would
be to violate the Treaty of Ryswick. This was indeed an impregnable
position. By that treaty His Most Christian Majesty had bound himself
to do nothing which could, directly or indirectly, disturb the existing
order of things in England. And in what way, except by an actual
invasion, could he do more to disturb the existing order of things in
England than by solemnly declaring, in the face of the whole world, that
he did not consider that order of things as legitimate, that he regarded
the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement as nullities, and the King
in possession as an usurper? The recognition would then be a breach of
faith; and, even if all considerations of morality were set aside,
it was plain that it would, at that moment, be wise in the French
government to avoid every thing which could with plausibility be
represented as a breach of faith. The crisis was a very peculiar one.
The great diplomatic victory won by France in the preceding year had
excited the fear and hatred of her neighbours. Nevertheless there was,
as yet, no great coalition against her. The House of Austria, indeed,
had appealed to arms. But with the House of Austria alone the House of
Bourbon could easily deal. Other powers were still looking in doubt to
England for the signal; and England, though her aspect was sullen and
menacing, still preserved neutrality. That neutrality would not have
lasted so long, if William could have relied on the support of his
Parliament and of his people. In his Parliament there were agents of
France, who, though few, had obtained so much influence by clamouring
against standing armies, profuse grants, and Dutch favourites, that they
were often blindly followed by the majority; and his people, distracted
by domestic factions, unaccustomed to busy themselves about continental
politics, and remembering with bitterness the disasters and burdens of
the last war, the carnage of Landen, the loss of the Smyrna fleet, the
land tax at four shillings in the pound, hesitated about engaging
in another contest, and would probably continue to hesitate while he
continued to live. He could not live long. It had, indeed, often been
prophesied that his death was at hand; and the prophets had hitherto
been mistaken. But there was now no possibility of mistake. His cough
was more violent than ever; his legs were swollen; his eyes, once bright
and clear as those of a falcon, had grown dim; he who, on the day of the
Boyne, had been sixteen hours on the backs of different horses, could
now with great difficulty creep into his state coach. [22] The vigorous
intellect, and the intrepid spirit, remained; but on the body fifty
years had done the work of ninety. In a few months the vaults of
Westminster would receive the emaciated and shattered frame which was
animated by the most far-sighted, the most daring, the most commanding
of souls. In a few months the British throne would be filled by a woman
whose understanding was well known to be feeble, and who was believed to
lean towards the party which was averse from war. To get over those few
months without an open and violent rupture should have been the first
object of the French government. Every engagement should have been
punctually fulfilled; every occasion of quarrel should have been
studiously avoided. Nothing should have been spared which could quiet
the alarms and soothe the wounded pride of neighbouring nations.

The House of Bourbon was so situated that one year of moderation might
not improbably be rewarded by thirty years of undisputed ascendency.
Was it possible the politic and experienced Lewis would at such a
conjuncture offer a new and most galling provocation, not only to
William, whose animosity was already as great as it could be, but to
the people whom William had hitherto been vainly endeavouring to inspire
with animosity resembling his own? How often, since the Revolution of
1688, had it seemed that the English were thoroughly weary of the new
government. And how often had the detection of a Jacobite plot, or the
approach of a French armament, changed the whole face of things. All at
once the grumbling had ceased, the grumblers had crowded to sign loyal
addresses to the usurper, had formed associations in support of his
authority, had appeared in arms at the head of the militia, crying God
save King William. So it would be now. Most of those who had taken a
pleasure in crossing him on the question of his Dutch guards, on the
question of his Irish grants, would be moved to vehement resentment when
they learned that Lewis had, in direct violation of a treaty, determined
to force on England a king of his own religion, a king bred in his own
dominions, a king who would be at Westminster what Philip was at Madrid,
a great feudatory of France.

These arguments were concisely but clearly and strongly urged by Torcy
in a paper which is still extant, and which it is difficult to believe
that his master can have read without great misgivings. [23] On one side
were the faith of treaties, the peace of Europe, the welfare of France,
nay the selfish interest of the House of Bourbon. On the other side were
the influence of an artful woman, and the promptings of vanity which, we
must in candour acknowledge, was ennobled by a mixture of compassion and
chivalrous generosity. The King determined to act in direct opposition
to the advice of all his ablest servants; and the princes of the blood
applauded his decision, as they would have applauded any decision which
he had announced. Nowhere was he regarded with a more timorous, a more
slavish, respect than in his own family.

On the following day he went again to Saint Germains, and, attended by
a splendid retinue, entered James's bedchamber. The dying man scarcely
opened his heavy eyes, and then closed them again. "I have something,"
said Lewis, "of great moment to communicate to Your Majesty." The
courtiers who filled the room took this as a signal to retire, and were
crowding towards the door, when they were stopped by that commanding
voice: "Let nobody withdraw. I come to tell Your Majesty that, whenever
it shall please God to take you from us, I will be to your son what I
have been to you, and will acknowledge him as King of England, Scotland
and Ireland." The English exiles who were standing round the couch fell
on their knees. Some burst into tears. Some poured forth praises and
blessings with clamour such as, was scarcely becoming in such a place
and at such a time. Some indistinct murmurs which James uttered, and
which were drowned by the noisy gratitude of his attendants, were
interpreted to mean thanks. But from the most trustworthy accounts it
appears that he was insensible to all that was passing around him. [24]

As soon as Lewis was again at Marli, he repeated to the Court assembled
there the announcement which he had made at Saint Germains. The whole
circle broke forth into exclamations of delight and admiration.
What piety! What humanity! What magnanimity! Nor was this enthusiasm
altogether feigned. For, in the estimation of the greater part of that
brilliant crowd, nations were nothing and princes every thing. What
could be more generous, more amiable, than to protect an innocent boy,
who was kept out of his rightful inheritance by an ambitious kinsman?
The fine gentlemen and fine ladies who talked thus forgot that, besides
the innocent boy and that ambitious kinsman, five millions and a half
of Englishmen were concerned, who were little disposed to consider
themselves as the absolute property of any master, and who were still
less disposed to accept a master chosen for them by the French King.

James lingered three days longer. He was occasionally sensible during a
few minutes, and, during one of these lucid intervals, faintly expressed
his gratitude to Lewis. On the sixteenth he died. His Queen retired
that evening to the nunnery of Chaillot, where she could weep and pray
undisturbed. She left Saint Germains in joyous agitation. A herald
made his appearance before the palace gate, and, with sound of trumpet,
proclaimed, in Latin, French and English, King James the Third of
England and Eighth of Scotland. The streets, in consequence doubtless of
orders from the government, were illuminated; and the townsmen with loud
shouts wished a long reign to their illustrious neighbour. The poor lad
received from his ministers, and delivered back to them, the seals of
their offices, and held out his hand to be kissed. One of the first acts
of his mock reign was to bestow some mock peerages in conformity with
directions which he found in his father's will. Middleton, who had as
yet no English title, was created Earl of Monmouth. Perth, who had stood
high in the favour of his late master, both as an apostate from the
Protestant religion, and as the author of the last improvements on the
thumb screw, took the title of Duke.

Meanwhile the remains of James were escorted, in the dusk of the
evening, by a slender retinue to the Chapel of the English Benedictines
at Paris, and deposited there in the vain hope that, at some future
time, they would be laid with kingly pomp at Westminster among the
graves of the Plantagenets and Tudors.

Three days after these humble obsequies Lewis visited Saint Germains in
form. On the morrow the visit was returned. The French Court was now at
Versailles; and the Pretender was received there, in all points, as his
father would have been, sate in his father's arm chair, took, as his
father had always done, the right hand of the great monarch, and wore
the long violet coloured mantle which was by ancient usage the mourning
garb of the Kings of France. There was on that day a great concourse
of ambassadors and envoys; but one well known figure was wanting.
Manchester had sent off to Loo intelligence of the affront which had
been offered to his country and his master, had solicited instructions,
and had determined that, till these instructions should arrive, he would
live in strict seclusion. He did not think that he should be justified
in quitting his post without express orders; but his earnest hope was
that he should be directed to turn his back in contemptuous defiance on
the Court which had dared to treat England as a subject province.

As soon as the fault into which Lewis had been hurried by pity, by
the desire of applause, and by female influence was complete and
irreparable, he began to feel serious uneasiness. His ministers were
directed to declare everywhere that their master had no intention of
affronting the English government, that he had not violated the Treaty
of Ryswick, that he had no intention of violating it, that he had merely
meant to gratify an unfortunate family nearly related to himself by
using names and observing forms which really meant nothing, and that
he was resolved not to countenance any attempt to subvert the throne
of William. Torcy, who had, a few days before, proved by irrefragable
arguments that his master could not, without a gross breach of contract,
recognise the Pretender, imagined that sophisms which had not imposed on
himself might possibly impose on others. He visited the English embassy,
obtained admittance, and, as was his duty, did his best to excuse the
fatal act which he had done his best to prevent. Manchester's answer to
this attempt at explanation was as strong and plain as it could be in
the absence of precise instructions. The instructions speedily arrived.
The courier who carried the news of the recognition to Loo arrived there
when William was at table with some of his nobles and some princes of
the German Empire who had visited him in his retreat. The King said not
a word; but his pale cheek flushed; and he pulled his hat over his
eyes to conceal the changes of his countenance. He hastened to send off
several messengers. One carried a letter commanding Manchester to quit
France without taking leave. Another started for London with a despatch
which directed the Lords Justices to send Poussin instantly out of
England.

England was already in a flame when it was first known there that
James was dying. Some of his eager partisans formed plans and made
preparations for a great public manifestation of feeling in different
parts of the island. But the insolence of Lewis produced a burst of
public indignation which scarcely any malecontent had the courage to
face.

In the city of London, indeed, some zealots, who had probably swallowed
too many bumpers to their new Sovereign, played one of those senseless
pranks which were characteristic of their party. They dressed themselves
in coats bearing some resemblance to the tabards of heralds, rode
through the streets, halted at some places, and muttered something which
nobody could understand. It was at first supposed that they were merely
a company of prize fighters from Hockley in the Hole who had taken
this way of advertising their performances with back sword, sword and
buckler, and single falchion. But it was soon discovered that these
gaudily dressed horsemen were proclaiming James the Third. In an instant
the pageant was at an end. The mock kings at arms and pursuivants threw
away their finery and fled for their lives in all directions, followed
by yells and showers of stones. [25] Already the Common Council of
London had met, and had voted, without one dissentient voice, an address
expressing the highest resentment at the insult which France had offered
to the King and the kingdom. A few hours after this address had been
presented to the Regents, the Livery assembled to choose a Lord
Mayor. Duncombe, the Tory candidate, lately the popular favourite, was
rejected, and a Whig alderman placed in the chair. All over the kingdom,
corporations, grand juries, meetings of magistrates, meetings of
freeholders, were passing resolutions breathing affection to William,
and defiance to Lewis. It was necessary to enlarge the "London Gazette"
from four columns to twelve; and even twelve were too few to hold the
multitude of loyal and patriotic addresses. In some of those addresses
severe reflections were thrown on the House of Commons. Our deliverer
had been ungratefully requited, thwarted, mortified, denied the means
of making the country respected and feared by neighbouring states. The
factious wrangling, the penny wise economy, of three disgraceful years
had produced the effect which might have been expected. His Majesty
would never have been so grossly affronted abroad, if he had not first
been affronted at home. But the eyes of his people were opened. He had
only to appeal from the representatives to the constituents; and he
would find that the nation was still sound at heart.

Poussin had been directed to offer to the Lords Justices explanations
similar to those with which Torcy had attempted to appease Manchester.
A memorial was accordingly drawn up and presented to Vernon; but Vernon
refused to look at it. Soon a courier arrived from Loo with the letter
in which William directed his vicegerents to send the French agent out
of the kingdom. An officer of the royal household was charged with the
execution of the order. He repaired to Poussin's lodgings; but Poussin
was not at home; he was supping at the Blue Posts, a tavern much
frequented by Jacobites, the very tavern indeed at which Charnock and
his gang had breakfasted on the day fixed for the murderous ambuscade
of Turnham Green. To this house the messenger went; and there he found
Poussin at table with three of the most virulent Tory members of the
House of Commons, Tredenham, who returned himself for Saint Mawes;
Hammond, who had been sent to Parliament by the high churchmen of the
University of Cambridge; and Davenant, who had recently, at Poussin's
suggestion, been rewarded by Lewis for some savage invectives against
the Whigs with a diamond ring worth three thousand pistoles. This supper
party was, during some weeks, the chief topic of conversation. The
exultation of the Whigs was boundless. These then were the true English
patriots, the men who could not endure a foreigner, the men who would
not suffer His Majesty to bestow a moderate reward on the foreigners who
had stormed Athlone, and turned the flank of the Celtic army at Aghrim.
It now appeared they could be on excellent terms with a foreigner,
provided only that he was the emissary of a tyrant hostile to the
liberty, the independence, and the religion of their country. The
Tories, vexed and abashed, heartily wished that, on that unlucky day,
their friends had been supping somewhere else. Even the bronze of
Davenant's forehead was not proof to the general reproach. He defended
himself by pretending that Poussin, with whom he had passed whole days,
who had corrected his scurrilous pamphlets, and who had paid him his
shameful wages, was a stranger to him, and that the meeting at the Blue
Posts was purely accidental. If his word was doubted, he was willing to
repeat his assertion on oath. The public, however, which had formed a
very correct notion of his character, thought that his word was worth as
much as his oath, and that his oath was worth nothing.

Meanwhile the arrival of William was impatiently expected. From Loo
he had gone to Breda, where he had passed some time in reviewing his
troops, and in conferring with Marlborough and Heinsius. He had hoped
to be in England early in October. But adverse winds detained him
three weeks at the Hague. At length, in the afternoon of the fourth of
November, it was known in London that he had landed early that morning
at Margate. Great preparations were made for welcoming him to his
capital on the following day, the thirteenth anniversary of his landing
in Devonshire. But a journey across the bridge, and along Cornhill and
Cheapside, Fleet Street, and the Strand, would have been too great an
effort for his enfeebled frame. He accordingly slept at Greenwich, and
thence proceeded to Hampton Court without entering London. His return
was, however, celebrated by the populace with every sign of joy and
attachment. The bonfires blazed, and the gunpowder roared, all night. In
every parish from Mile End to Saint James's was to be seen enthroned on
the shoulders of stout Protestant porters a pope, gorgeous in robes
of tinsel and triple crown of pasteboard; and close to the ear of His
Holiness stood a devil with horns, cloven hoof, and a snaky tail.

Even in his country house the king could find no refuge from the
importunate loyalty of his people. Reputations from cities, counties,
universities, besieged him all day. He was, he wrote to Heinsius, quite
exhausted by the labour of hearing harangues and returning answers. The
whole kingdom meanwhile was looking anxiously towards Hampton Court.
Most of the ministers were assembled there. The most eminent men of the
party which was out of power had repaired thither, to pay their duty
to their sovereign, and to congratulate him on his safe return. It was
remarked that Somers and Halifax, so malignantly persecuted a few months
ago by the House of Commons, were received with such marks of esteem
and kindness as William was little in the habit of vouchsafing to his
English courtiers. The lower ranks of both the great factions were
violently agitated. The Whigs, lately vanquished and dispirited, were
full of hope and ardour. The Tories, lately triumphant and secure,
were exasperated and alarmed. Both Whigs and Tories waited with intense
anxiety for the decision of one momentous and pressing question. Would
there be a dissolution? On the seventh of November the King propounded
that question to his Privy Council. It was rumoured, and is highly
probable, that Jersey, Wright and Hedges advised him to keep the
existing Parliament. But they were not men whose opinion was likely to
have much weight with him; and Rochester, whose opinion might have had
some weight, had set out to take possession of his Viceroyalty just
before the death of James, and was still at Dublin. William, however,
had, as he owned to Heinsius, some difficulty in making up his mind. He
had no doubt that a general election would give him a better House of
Commons; but a general election would cause delay; and delay might cause
much mischief. After balancing these considerations, during some hours,
he determined to dissolve.

The writs were sent out with all expedition; and in three days the whole
kingdom was up. Never--such was the intelligence sent from the Dutch
Embassy to the Hague--had there been more intriguing, more canvassing,
more virulence of party feeling. It was in the capital that the first
great contests took place. The decisions of the Metropolitan constituent
bodies were impatiently expected as auguries of the general result. All
the pens of Grub Street, all the presses of Little Britain, were hard
at work. Handbills for and against every candidate were sent to every
voter. The popular slogans on both sides were indefatigably repeated.
Presbyterian, Papist, Tool of Holland, Pensioner of France, were the
appellations interchanged between the contending factions. The Whig
cry was that the Tory members of the last two Parliaments had, from a
malignant desire to mortify the King, left the kingdom exposed to danger
and insult, had unconstitutionally encroached both on the legislature
and on the judicial functions of the House of Lords, had turned the
House of Commons into a new Star Chamber, had used as instruments of
capricious tyranny those privileges which ought never to be employed but
in defence of freedom, had persecuted, without regard to law, to natural
justice, or to decorum, the great Commander who had saved the state
at La Hogue, the great Financier who had restored the currency and
reestablished public credit, the great judge whom all persons not
blinded by prejudice acknowledged to be, in virtue, in prudence,
in learning and eloquence, the first of living English jurists and
statesmen. The Tories answered that they had been only too moderate,
only too merciful; that they had used the Speaker's warrant and the
power of tacking only too sparingly; and that, if they ever again had
a majority, the three Whig leaders who now imagined themselves secure
should be impeached, not for high misdemeanours, but for high treason.
It soon appeared that these threats were not likely to be very speedily
executed. Four Whig and four Tory candidates contested the City of
London. The show of hands was for the Whigs. A poll was demanded; and
the Whigs polled nearly two votes to one. Sir John Levison Gower,
who was supposed to have ingratiated himself with the whole body of
shopkeepers by some parts of his parliamentary conduct, was put up for
Westminster on the Tory interest; and the electors were reminded by
puffs in the newspapers of the services which he had rendered to
trade. But the dread of the French King, the Pope, and the Pretender,
prevailed; and Sir John was at the bottom of the poll. Southwark not
only returned Whigs, but gave them instructions of the most Whiggish
character.

In the country, parties were more nearly balanced than in the capital.
Yet the news from every quarter was that the Whigs had recovered part
at least of the ground which they had lost. Wharton had regained his
ascendency in Buckinghamshire. Musgrave was rejected by Westmoreland.
Nothing did more harm to the Tory candidates than the story of Poussin's
farewell supper. We learn from their own acrimonious invectives that the
unlucky discovery of the three members of Parliament at the Blue
Posts cost thirty honest gentlemen their seats. One of the criminals,
Tredenham, escaped with impunity. For the dominion of his family over
the borough of St. Mawes was absolute even to a proverb. The other two
had the fate which they deserved. Davenant ceased to sit for Bedwin.
Hammond, who had lately stood high in the favour of the University of
Cambridge, was defeated by a great majority, and was succeeded by the
glory of the Whig party, Isaac Newton.

There was one district to which the eyes of hundreds of thousands were
turned with anxious interest, Gloucestershire. Would the patriotic and
high spirited gentry and yeomanry of that great county again confide
their dearest interests to the Impudent Scandal of parliaments, the
renegade, the slanderer, the mountebank, who had been, during thirteen
years, railing at his betters of every party with a spite restrained by
nothing but the craven fear of corporal chastisement, and who had in the
last Parliament made himself conspicuous by the abject court which he
had paid to Lewis and by the impertinence with which he had spoken of
William.

The Gloucestershire election became a national affair. Portmanteaus full
of pamphlets and broadsides were sent down from London. Every freeholder
in the county had several tracts left at his door. In every market
place, on the market day, papers about the brazen forehead, the viperous
tongue, and the white liver of Jack Howe, the French King's buffoon,
flew about like flakes in a snow storm. Clowns from the Cotswold Hills
and the forest of Dean, who had votes, but who did not know their
letters, were invited to hear these satires read, and were asked
whether they were prepared to endure the two great evils which were
then considered by the common people of England as the inseparable
concomitants of despotism, to wear wooden shoes, and to live on frogs.
The dissenting preachers and the clothiers were peculiarly zealous. For
Howe was considered as the enemy both of conventicles and of factories.
Outvoters were brought up to Gloucester in extraordinary numbers. In the
city of London the traders who frequented Blackwell Hall, then the great
emporium for woollen goods, canvassed actively on the Whig side.


[Here the revised part ends.--EDITOR.]


Meanwhile reports about the state of the King's health were constantly
becoming more and more alarming. His medical advisers, both English and
Dutch, were at the end of their resources. He had consulted by letter
all the most eminent physicians of Europe; and, as he was apprehensive
that they might return flattering answers if they knew who he was, he
had written under feigned names. To Fagon he had described himself as a
parish priest. Fagon replied, somewhat bluntly, that such symptoms could
have only one meaning, and that the only advice which he had to give
to the sick man was to prepare himself for death. Having obtained
this plain answer, William consulted Fagon again without disguise, and
obtained some prescriptions which were thought to have a little retarded
the approach of the inevitable hour. But the great King's days were
numbered. Headaches and shivering fits returned on him almost daily. He
still rode and even hunted; [26] but he had no longer that firm seat or
that perfect command of the bridle for which he had once been renowned.
Still all his care was for the future. The filial respect and tenderness
of Albemarle had been almost a necessary of life to him. But it was of
importance that Heinsius should be fully informed both as to the whole
plan of the next campaign and as to the state of the preparations.
Albemarle was in full possession of the King's views on these subjects.
He was therefore sent to the Hague. Heinsius was at that time suffering
from indisposition, which was indeed a trifle when compared with the
maladies under which William was sinking. But in the nature of William
there was none of that selfishness which is the too common vice of
invalids. On the twentieth of February he sent to Heinsius a letter in
which he did not even allude to his own sufferings and infirmities. "I
am," he said, "infinitely concerned to learn that your health is not yet
quite reestablished. May God be pleased to grant you a speedy recovery.
I am unalterably your good friend, William." Those were the last lines
of that long correspondence.

On the twentieth of February William was ambling on a favourite horse,
named Sorrel, through the park of Hampton Court. He urged his horse to
strike into a gallop just at the spot where a mole had been at work.
Sorrel stumbled on the mole-hill, and went down on his knees. The King
fell off, and broke his collar bone. The bone was set; and he returned
to Kensington in his coach. The jolting of the rough roads of that time
made it necessary to reduce the fracture again. To a young and vigorous
man such an accident would have been a trifle. But the frame of William
was not in a condition to bear even the slightest shock. He felt that
his time was short, and grieved, with a grief such as only noble spirits
feel, to think that he must leave his work but half finished. It was
possible that he might still live until one of his plans should be
carried into execution. He had long known that the relation in which
England and Scotland stood to each other was at best precarious, and
often unfriendly, and that it might be doubted whether, in an estimate
of the British power, the resources of the smaller country ought not
to be deducted from those of the larger. Recent events had proved that,
without doubt, the two kingdoms could not possibly continue for another
year to be on the terms on which they had been during the preceding
century, and that there must be between them either absolute union or
deadly enmity. Their enmity would bring frightful calamities, not on
themselves alone, but on all the civilised world. Their union would
be the best security for the prosperity of both, for the internal
tranquillity of the island, for the just balance of power among European
states, and for the immunities of all Protestant countries. On the
twenty-eighth of February the Commons listened with uncovered heads to
the last message that bore William's sign manual. An unhappy accident,
he told them, had forced him to make to them in writing a communication
which he would gladly have made from the throne. He had, in the first
year of his reign, expressed his desire to see an union accomplished
between England and Scotland. He was convinced that nothing could more
conduce to the safety and happiness of both. He should think it
his peculiar felicity if, before the close of his reign, some happy
expedient could be devised for making the two kingdoms one; and he, in
the most earnest manner, recommended the question to the consideration
of the Houses. It was resolved that the message should betaken into
consideration on Saturday, the seventh of March.

But on the first of March humours of menacing appearance showed
themselves in the King's knee. On the fourth of March he was attacked by
fever; on the fifth his strength failed greatly; and on the sixth he was
scarcely kept alive by cordials. The Abjuration Bill and a money bill
were awaiting his assent. That assent he felt that he should not be able
to give in person. He therefore ordered a commission to be prepared
for his signature. His hand was now too weak to form the letters of
his name, and it was suggested that a stamp should be prepared. On the
seventh of March the stamp was ready. The Lord Keeper and the clerks of
the parliament came, according to usage, to witness the signing of the
commission. But they were detained some hours in the antechamber while
he was in one of the paroxysms of his malady. Meanwhile the Houses were
sitting. It was Saturday, the seventh, the day on which the Commons
had resolved to take into consideration the question of the union with
Scotland. But that subject was not mentioned. It was known that the King
had but a few hours to live; and the members asked each other anxiously
whether it was likely that the Abjuration and money bills would be
passed before he died. After sitting long in the expectation of a
message, the Commons adjourned till six in the afternoon. By that time
William had recovered himself sufficiently to put the stamp on the
parchment which authorised his commissioners to act for him. In the
evening, when the Houses had assembled, Black Rod knocked. The Commons
were summoned to the bar of the Lords; the commission was read, the
Abjuration Bill and the Malt Bill became laws, and both Houses adjourned
till nine o'clock in the morning of the following day. The following day
was Sunday. But there was little chance that William would live through
the night. It was of the highest importance that, within the shortest
possible time after his decease, the successor designated by the Bill
of Rights and the Act of Succession should receive the homage of the
Estates of the Realm, and be publicly proclaimed in the Council: and the
most rigid Pharisee in the Society for the Reformation of Manners could
hardly deny that it was lawful to save the state, even on the Sabbath.

The King meanwhile was sinking fast. Albemarle had arrived at Kensington
from the Hague, exhausted by rapid travelling. His master kindly bade
him go to rest for some hours, and then summoned him to make his report.
That report was in all respects satisfactory. The States General were
in the best temper; the troops, the provisions and the magazines were
in the best order. Every thing was in readiness for an early campaign.
William received the intelligence with the calmness of a man whose
work was done. He was under no illusion as to his danger. "I am fast
drawing," he said, "to my end." His end was worthy of his life. His
intellect was not for a moment clouded. His fortitude was the more
admirable because he was not willing to die. He had very lately said to
one of those whom he most loved: "You know that I never feared death;
there have been times when I should have wished it; but, now that this
great new prospect is opening before me, I do wish to stay here a little
longer." Yet no weakness, no querulousness, disgraced the noble close
of that noble career. To the physicians the King returned his thanks
graciously and gently. "I know that you have done all that skill
and learning could do for me; but the case is beyond your art; and I
submit." From the words which escaped him he seemed to be frequently
engaged in mental prayer. Burnet and Tenison remained many hours in
the sick room. He professed to them his firm belief in the truth of the
Christian religion, and received the sacrament from their hands with
great seriousness. The antechambers were crowded all night with lords
and privy councillors. He ordered several of them to be called in,
and exerted himself to take leave of them with a few kind and cheerful
words. Among the English who were admitted to his bedside were
Devonshire and Ormond. But there were in the crowd those who felt as no
Englishman could feel, friends of his youth who had been true to him,
and to whom he had been true, through all vicissitudes of fortune; who
had served him with unalterable fidelity when his Secretaries of State,
his Treasury and his Admiralty had betrayed him; who had never on any
field of battle, or in an atmosphere tainted with loathsome and deadly
disease, shrunk from placing their own lives in jeopardy to save his,
and whose truth he had at the cost of his own popularity rewarded
with bounteous munificence. He strained his feeble voice to thank
Auverquerque for the affectionate and loyal services of thirty years.
To Albemarle he gave the keys of his closet, and of his private drawers.
"You know," he said, "what to do with them." By this time he could
scarcely respire. "Can this," he said to the physicians, "last long?" He
was told that the end was approaching. He swallowed a cordial, and asked
for Bentinck. Those were his last articulate words. Bentinck instantly
came to the bedside, bent down, and placed his ear close to the King's
mouth. The lips of the dying man moved; but nothing could be heard. The
King took the hand of his earliest friend, and pressed it tenderly to
his heart. In that moment, no doubt, all that had cast a slight passing
cloud over their long and pure friendship was forgotten. It was now
between seven and eight in the morning. He closed his eyes, and gasped
for breath. The bishops knelt down and read the commendatory prayer.
When it ended William was no more.

When his remains were laid out, it was found that he wore next to his
skin a small piece of black silk riband. The lords in waiting ordered
it to be taken off. It contained a gold ring and a lock of the hair of
Mary.


*****


[Footnote 1: Evelyn saw the Mentz edition of the Offices among Lord
Spencer's books in April 1699. Markland in his preface to the Sylvae of
Statius acknowledges his obligations to the very rare Parmesan edition
in Lord Spencer's collection. As to the Virgil of Zarottus, which
his Lordship bought for 46L, see the extracts from Warley's Diary, in
Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, i. 90.]

[Footnote 2: The more minutely we examine the history of the decline and
fall of Lacedaemon, the more reason we shall find to admire the sagacity
of Somers. The first great humiliation which befel the Lacedaemonians
was the affair of Sphacteria. It is remarkable that on this occasion
they were vanquished by men who made a trade of war. The force which
Cleon carried out with him from Athens to the Bay of Pyles, and to which
the event of the conflict is to be chiefly ascribed, consisted entirely
of mercenaries, archers from Scythia and light infantry from Thrace. The
victory gained by the Lacedaemonians over a great confederate army
at Tegea retrieved that military reputation which the disaster of
Sphacteria had impaired. Yet even at Tegea it was signally proved that
the Lacedaemonians, though far superior to occasional soldiers, were not
equal to professional soldiers. On every point but one the allies were
put to rout; but on one point the Lacedaemonians gave way; and that was
the point where they were opposed to a brigade of a thousand Argives,
picked men, whom the state to which they belonged had during many years
trained to war at the public charge, and who were, in fact a standing
army. After the battle of Tegea, many years elapsed before the
Lacedaemonians sustained a defeat. At length a calamity befel them which
astonished all their neighbours. A division of the army of Agesilaus was
cut off and destroyed almost to a man; and this exploit, which seemed
almost portentous to the Greeks of that age, was achieved by Iphicrates,
at the head of a body of mercenary light infantry. But it was from the
day of Leuctya that the fall of Spate became rapid and violent. Some
time before that day the Thebans had resolved to follow the example
set many years before by the Argives. Some hundreds of athletic youths,
carefully selected, were set apart, under the names of the City Band and
the Sacred Band, to form a standing army. Their business was war. They
encamped in the citadel; they were supported at the expense of the
community; and they became, under assiduous training, the first soldiers
in Greece. They were constantly victorious till they were opposed
to Philip's admirably disciplined phalanx at Charonea; and even at
Chaeronea they were not defeated but slain in their ranks, fighting to
the last. It was this band, directed by the skill of great captains,
which gave the decisive blow to the Lacedaemonian power. It is to be
observed that there was no degeneracy among the Lacedaemonians. Even
down to the time of Pyrrhus they seem to have been in all military
qualities equal to their ancestors who conquered at Plataea. But their
ancestors at Plataea had not such enemies to encounter.]

[Footnote 3: L'Hermitage, Dec. 3/13 7/17, 1697.]

[Footnote 4: Commons' Journals, Dec. 3. 1697. L'Hermitage, Dec 7/17.]

[Footnote 5: L'Hermitage, Dec. 15/24., Dec. 14/24., Journals.]

[Footnote 6: The first act of Farquhar's Trip to the Jubilee, the
passions which about his time agitated society are exhibited with much
spirit. Alderman Smuggler sees Colonel Standard and exclaims, "There's
another plague of the nation a red coat and feather." "I'm disbanded,"
says the Colonel. "This very morning, in Hyde Park, my brave regiment, a
thousand men that looked like lions yesterday, were scattered and looked
as poor and simple as the herd of deer that grazed beside them." "Fal al
deral!" cries the Alderman: "I'll have a bonfire this night, as high as
the monument." "A bonfire!" answered the soldier; "then dry, withered,
ill nature! had not those brave fellows' swords' defended you, your
house had been a bonfire ere this about your ears."]

[Footnote 7: L'Hermitage, January 11/21]

[Footnote 8: That a portion at least of the native population of Ireland
looked to the Parliament at Westminster for protection against the
tyranny of the Parliament at Dublin appears from a paper entitled The
Case of the Roman Catholic Nation of Ireland. This paper, written in
1711 by one of the oppressed race and religion, is in a MS. belonging to
Lord Fingall. The Parliament of Ireland is accused of treating the Irish
worse than the Turks treat the Christians, worse than the Egyptians
treated the Israelites. "Therefore," says the writer, "they (the
Irish) apply themselves to the present Parliament of Great Britain as
a Parliament of nice honour and stanch justice... Their request then is
that this great Parliament may make good the Treaty of Limerick in all
the Civil Articles." In order to propitiate those to whom he makes this
appeal, he accuses the Irish Parliament of encroaching on the supreme
authority of the English Parliament, and charges the colonists generally
with ingratitude to the mother country to which they owe so much.]

[Footnote 9: London Gazette, Jan 6. 1697/8; Postman of the same date;
Van Cleverskirke, Jan. 7/17; L'Hermitage, Jan. 4/14/, 7/17; Evelyn's
Diary; Ward's London Spy; William to Heinsius, Jan. 7/17. "The loss,"
the King writes, "is less to me than it would be to another person,
for I cannot live there. Yet it is serious." So late as 1758 Johnson
described a furious Jacobite as firmly convinced that William burned
down Whitehall in order to steal the furniture. Idler, No. 10. Pope,
in Windsor Forest, a poem which has a stronger tinge of Toryism than
anything else that he ever wrote, predicts the speedy restoration of the
fallen palace.

     "I see, I see, where two fair cities bend
     their ample bow, a new Whitehall ascend."

See Ralph's bitter remarks on the fate of Whitehall.]

[Footnote 10: As to the Czar: London Gazette; Van Citters, 1698; Jan.
11/21. 14/24 Mar 11/21, Mar 29/April 8; L'Hermitage 11/21, 18/28, Jan
25/Feb 4, Feb 1/11 8/18, 11/21 Feb 22/Mar 4; Feb 25/Mar 7, Mar 1/4, Mar
29/April 8/ April 22/ May 2 See also Evelyn's Diary; Burnet Postman,
Jan. 13. 15., Feb. 10 12, 24.; Mar. 24. 26. 31. As to Russia, see
Hakluyt, Purchas, Voltaire, St. Simon. Estat de Russie par Margeret,
Paris, 1607. State of Russia, London, 1671. La Relation des Trois
Ambassades de M. Le Comte de Carlisle, Amsterdam, 1672. (There is an
English translation from this French original.) North's Life of Dudley
North. Seymour's History of London, ii. 426. Pepys and Evelyn on the
Russian Embassies; Milton's account of Muscovy. On the personal habits
of the Czar see the Memoirs of the Margravine of Bayreuth.]

[Footnote 11: It is worth while to transcribe the words of the
engagement which Lewis, a chivalrous and a devout prince, violated
without the smallest scruple. "Nous, Louis, par la grace de Dieu, Roi
tres Chretien de France et de Navarre, promettons pour notre honneur, en
foi et parole de Roi, jurons sue la croix, les saints Evangiles, et
les canons de la Messe, que nous avons touches, que nous observerons
et accomplirons entierement de bonne foi tous et chacun des points et
articles contenus au traite de paix, renonciation, et amitie."]

[Footnote 12: George Psalmanazar's account of the state of the south
of France at this time is curious. On the high road near Lyons he
frequently passed corpses fastened to posts. "These," he says, "were the
bodies of highwaymen, or rather of soldiers, sailors, mariners and even
galley slaves, disbanded after the peace of Reswick, who, having neither
home nor occupation, used to infest the roads in troops, plunder towns
and villages, and, when taken, were hanged at the county town by dozens,
or even scores sometimes, after which their bodies were thus exposed
along the highway in terrorem."]

[Footnote 13: "Il est de bonne foi dans tout ce qu'il fait. Son procede
est droit et sincere." Tallard to Lewis, July 3. 1698.]

[Footnote 14: "Le Roi d'Angleterre, Sire, va tres sincerement jusqu'a
present; et j'ose dire que s'il entre une fois en traite avec Votre
Majeste, il le tiendra de bonne foi."--"Si je l'ose dire a V. M., il
est tres penetrant, et a l'esprit juste. Il s'apercevra bientôt qu'on
barguigne si les choses trainent trop de long." July 8.]

[Footnote 15: I will quote from the despatches of Lewis to Tallard three
or four passages which show that the value of the kingdom of the Two
Sicilies was quite justly appreciated at Versailles. "A l'egard du
royaume de Naples et de Sicile le roi d'Angleterre objectera que les
places de ces etats entre mes mains me rendront maitre du commerce de
la Mediteranee. Vous pourrez en ce cas laissez entendre, comme de vous
meme, qu'il serait si difficile de conserver ces royaumes unis a ma
couronne, que les depenses necessaires pour y envoyer des secours
seraient si grands, et qu'autrefois il a tant coute a la France pour les
maintenir dans son obeissance, que vraisemblablement j'etablirois un roi
pour les gouverner, et que peut-etre ce serait le partage d'un de mes
petits-fils qui voudroit regner independamment." April 7/17 1698. "Les
royaumes de Naples et de Sicile ne peuvent se regarder comme un partage
dont mon fils puisse se contenter pour lui tenir lieu de tous ses
droits. Les exemples du passe n'ont que trop appris combien ces etats
content a la France le peu d'utilite dont ils sont pour elle, et la
difficulte de les conserver." May 16. 1698. "Je considere la cession de
ces royaumes comme une source continuelle de depenses et d'embarras. Il
n'en a que trop coute a la France pour les conserver; et l'experience
a fait voir la necessite indispensable d'y entretenir toujours des
troupes, et d'y envoyer incessamment des vaisseaux, et combien toutes
ces peines ont ete inutiles." May 29. 1698. It would be easy to cite
other passages of the same kind. But these are sufficient to vindicate
what I have said in the text.]

[Footnote 16: Dec. 20/30 1698.]

[Footnote 17: Commons' Journals, February 24. 27.; March 9. 1698/9 In
the Vernon Correspondence a letter about the East India question which
belongs to the year 1699/1700 is put under the date of Feb. 10 1698. The
truth is that this most valuable correspondence cannot be used to good
purpose by any writer who does not do for himself all that the editor
ought to have done.]

[Footnote 18: I doubt whether there be extant a sentence of worse
English than that on which the House divided. It is not merely inelegant
and ungrammatical but is evidently the work of a man of puzzled
understanding, probably of Harley. "It is Sir, to your loyal Commons
an unspeakable grief, that any thing should be asked by Your Majesty's
message to which they cannot consent, without doing violence to that
constitution Your Majesty came over to restore and preserve; and did, at
that time, in your gracious declaration promise, that all those foreign
forces which came over with you should be sent back."]

[Footnote 19: It is curious that all Cowper's biographers with whom I am
acquainted, Hayley, Southey, Grimshawe Chalmers, mention the judge, the
common ancestor of the poet, of his first love Theodora Cowper, and
of Lady Hesketh; but that none of those biographers makes the faintest
allusion to the Hertford trial, the most remarkable event in the history
of the family; nor do I believe that any allusion to that trial can be
found in any of the poet's numerous letters.]

[Footnote 20: I give an example of Trenchard's mode of showing his
profound respect for an excellent Sovereign. He speaks thus of the
commencement of the reign of Henry the Third. "The kingdom was recently
delivered from a bitter tyrant, King John, and had likewise got rid of
their perfidious deliverer, the Dauphin of France, who after the English
had accepted him for their King, had secretly vowed their extirpation."]

[Footnote 21: Life of James; St. Simon; Dangeau.]

[Footnote 22: Poussin to Torcy April 28/May 8 1701 "Le roi d'Angleterre
tousse plus qu'il n'a jamais fait, et ses jambes sont fort enfles. Je le
vis hier sortir du preche de Saint James. Je le trouve fort casse, les
yeux eteints, et il eut beaucoup de peine a monter en carrosse."]

[Footnote 23: Memoire sur la proposition de reconnoitre au prince des
Galles le titre du Roi de la Grande Bretagne, Sept. 9/19, 1701.]

[Footnote 24: By the most trustworthy accounts I mean those of St. Simon
and Dangeau. The reader may compare their narratives with the Life of
James.]

[Footnote 25: Lettres Historiques Mois de Novembre 1701.]

[Footnote 26: Last letter to Heinsius.]