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Critical and Historical Essays — Volume 1

by Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay · English · Gutenberg #2332 · 1,743,804 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Critical and Historical Essays — Volume 1

Author: Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay


        
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CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL ESSAYS, VOLUME ONE

By Thomas Babbington Macaulay




EDITOR’S NOTE


By A. J. Grieve

A French student of English letters (M. Paul Oursel) has written the
following lines:

“Depuis deux siècles les Essais forment une branche importante de la
littérature anglaise; pour designer un écrivain de cette classe, nos
voisins emploient un mot qui n’a pas d’équivalent en francais; ils
disent: un essayiste. Quo’est-ce qu’un essayiste? L’essayiste se distingue
du moraliste, de l’historien, du critique littéraire, du biographe, de
l’écrivain politique; et pourtant il emprunte quelque trait a chacun
d’eux; il ressemble tour a tour a l’un ou a l’autre; il est aussi
philosophe, il est satirique, humoriste a ses heures; il remit en sa
personne des qualités multiples; il offre dans ses écrits un
spécimen de tous les genres. On voit qu’il n’est pas facile de définir
l’essayiste; mais l’exemple suppléera a la définition. On connaîtra
exactement le sens du mot quand on aura étudie l’écrivain qui, d’après
le jugement de ces compatriotes, est l’essayiste par excellence, ou,
comme on disait dans les anciens cours de littérature, le Prince des
essayistes.”

Macaulay is indeed the prince of essayists, and his reign is
unchallenged. “I still think--says Professor Saintsbury (Corrected
Impressions, p. 89 f.)--that on any subject which Macaulay has touched,
his survey is unsurpassable for giving a first bird’s-eye view, and
for creating interest in the matter.... And he certainly has not his
equal anywhere for covering his subject in the pointing-stick fashion.
You need not--you had much better not--pin your faith on his details,
but his Pisgah sights are admirable. Hole after hole has been picked
in the “Clive” and the “Hastings,” the “Johnson” and the “Addison,”
the “Frederick” and the “Horace Walpole,” yet every one of these papers
contains sketches, summaries, precis, which have not been made obsolete
or valueless by all the work of correction in detail.

Two other appreciations from among the mass of critical literature that
has accumulated round Macaulay’s work may be fitly cited, This from Mr.
Frederic Harrison:--

“How many men has Macaulay succeeded in reaching, to whom all other
history and criticism is a sealed book, or a book in an unknown tongue!
If he were a sciolist or a wrongheaded fanatic, this would be a serious
evil. But, as he is substantially right in his judgments, brimful of
saying common-sense and generous feeling, and profoundly well read in
his own periods and his favourite literature, Macaulay has conferred
most memorable services on the readers of English throughout the world.
He stands between philosophic historians and the public very much as
journals and periodicals stand between the masses and great libraries.
Macaulay is a glorified journalist and reviewer, who brings the matured
results of scholars to the man in the street in a form that he can
remember and enjoy, when he could not make use of a merely learned book.
He performs the office of the ballad-maker or story-teller in an age
before books were known or were common. And it is largely due to his
influence that the best journals and periodicals of our day are written
in a style so clear, so direct, so resonant.”

And this from Mr. Cotter Morison

“Macaulay did for the historical essay what Haydn did for the sonata,
and Watt for the steam engine; he found it rudimentary and unimportant,
and left it complete and a thing of power.... To take a bright period
or personage of history, to frame it in a firm outline, to conceive it
at once in article-size, and then to fill in this limited canvas
with sparkling anecdote, telling bits of colour, and facts, all fused
together by a real genius for narrative, was the sort of genre-painting
which Macaulay applied to history.... And to this day his essays
remain the best of their class, not only in England, but in Europe....
The best would adorn any literature, and even the less successful have
a picturesque animation, and convey an impression of power that will not
easily be matched. And, again, we need to bear in mind that they were
the productions of a writer immersed in business, written in his
scanty moments of leisure, when most men would have rested or sought
recreation. Macaulay himself was most modest in his estimate of their
value.... It was the public that insisted on their re-issue, and few
would be bold enough to deny that the public was right.”

It is to Mr. Morison that the plan followed in the present edition of
the Essays is due. In his monograph on Macaulay (English Men of Letters
series) he devotes a chapter to the Essays and “with the object of
giving as much unity as possible to a subject necessarily wanting it,”
classifies the Essays into four groups, (1)English history, (2)Foreign
history, (3)Controversial, (4)Critical and Miscellaneous. The articles
in the first group are equal in bulk to those of the three other groups
put together, and are contained in the first volume of this issue.
They form a fairly complete survey of English history from the time of
Elizabeth to the later years of the reign of George III, and are fitly
introduced by the Essay on Hallam’s History, which forms a kind of
summary or microcosm of the whole period.

The scheme might be made still more complete by including certain
articles (and especially the exquisite biographies contributed by
Macaulay to the Encyclopaedia Britannica) which are published in the
volume of “Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches.” Exigencies of space
have, however, compelled the limitation of the present edition to
the “Essays” usually so-called. These have also been reprinted in the
chronological arrangement ordinarily followed (see below) in The Temple
Classics (5 vols. 1900), where an exhaustive bibliography, etc., has
been appended to each Essay.

Chief dates in the life of Thomas Babington Macaulay, afterwards Baron
Macaulay:--

1800 (Oct. 25). Birth at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire. 1818-1825.
Life at Cambridge (Fellow of Trinity, 1824). 1825. Essay on Milton
contributed to Edinburgh Review. 1826. Joined the Northern Circuit. 1830
M.P. for Calne (gift of the Marquis of Lansdowne). 1833. M.P. for Leeds.
1834-38. Legal Adviser to the Supreme Council of India. Work at the
Indian Penal Code. 1839. M.P. for Edinburgh, and Secretary at War In
Melbourne’s Cabinet. 1842. Lays of Ancient Rome. 1843. Collected edition
of the Essays. 1847. Rejected at the Election of M.P. for Edinburgh.
1848. England from the Accession of James II. vols. i. and ii. 1852.
M.P. for Edinburgh; serious illness. 1855. History of England, vols.
iii. and iv. 1857. Raised to the peerage. 1859 (Dec. 28). Death at Holly
Lodge, Kensington. (Buried in Westminster Abbey, 9th January 1860.)

The following are the works of Thomas Babington Macaulay:

Pompeii (Prize poem), 1819; Evening (prize poem), 1821; Lays of Ancient
Rome (1842); Ivry and the Armada (Quarterly Magazine), added to Edition
of 1848; Critical and Historical Essays (Edinburgh Review), 1843.

The Essays originally appeared as follows:

Milton, August 1825; Machiavelli, March 1827; Hallam’s “Constitutional
History,” September 1828; Southey’s “Colloquies,” January 1830; R.
Montgomery’s Poems, April 1830; Civil Disabilities of Jews, January
1831; Byron, June 1831; Croker’s “Boswell,” September 1831; Pilgrim’s
Progress, December 1831; Hampden, December 1831; Burleigh, April 1832;
War of Succession in Spain, January 1833; Horace Walpole, October 1833;
Lord Chatham, January 1834; Mackintosh’s “History of Revolution,” July
1835; Bacon, July 1837; Sir William Temple, October 1838; “Gladstone on
Church and State,” April 1839; Clive, January 1840; Ranke’s “History of
the Popes,” October 1840; Comic Dramatists, January 1841; Lord Holland,
July 1841; Warren Hastings, October 1841; Frederick the Great, April
1842; Madame D’Arblay, January 1843; Addison, July 1843; Lord Chatham
(2nd Art.), October 1844.

History of England, vols. i. and ii., 1848; vols. iii. and iv., 1855;
vol. v., Ed. Lady Trevelyan, 1861; Ed. 8 vols., 1858-62 (Life by Dean
Milman); Ed. 4 vols., People’s Edition, with Life by Dean Milman,
1863-4; Inaugural Address (Glasgow), 1849; Speeches corrected by
himself, 1854 (unauthorized version, 1853, by Vizetelly); Miscellaneous
Writings, 2 vols. 1860 (Ed. T. F. Ellis). These include poems, lives
(Encyclo. Britt. 8th ed.), and contributions to Quarterly Magazine, and
the following from Edinburgh Review:

Dryden, January 1828; History, May 1828; Mill on Government, March 1829;
Westminster Reviewer’s Defence of Mill, June 1829; Utilitarian Theory
of Government, October 1829; Sadler’s “Law of Population,” July 1830;
Sadler’s “Refutation Refuted,” January 1831 Mirabeau, July 1832; Barere,
April 1844.

Complete Works (Ed. Lady Trevelyan), 8 vols., 1866.




BOOKS OF REFERENCE

Sir G.O. Trevelyan: The Life and Letters Of Lord Macaulay (2 vols. 8vo.,
1876, 2nd ed. with additions, 1877, subsequent editions 1878 and 1881).

J. Cotter Morison: Macaulay [English Men of Letters], (1882).

Mark Pattison: Art. “Macaulay” in Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Leslie Stephen: Hours in a Library [new ed. 1892], ii. 243-376. Art.
“Macaulay” in Dictionary of National Biography.

Frederic Harrison: Macaulay’s Place in Literature (1894). Studies in
Early Victorian Literature, chap. iii. (1895).

G. Saintsbury: Corrected Impressions, chaps. ix. x. (189,5). A History
of Nineteenth Century Literature, pp. 224-232 (1896).

P. Oursel: Les Essais de Lord Macaulay (1882).

D.H. Macgregor: Lord Macaulay (1901).

Sir R.C. Jebb: Macaulay (1900).

F.C. Montague. Macaulay’s Essays (3 vols. 1901).

A. J. G. August 1907.




HALLAM


(September 1828)
_The Constitutional History of England, from the Accession of Henry VII.
to the Death of George II. By HENRY HALLAM. In 2 vols. 1827_


HISTORY, at least in its state of ideal perfection, is a compound of
poetry and philosophy. It impresses general truths on the mind by a
vivid representation of particular characters and incidents. But, in
fact, the two hostile elements of which it consists have never been
known to form a perfect amalgamation; and at length, in our own time,
they have been completely and professedly separated. Good histories, in
the proper sense of the word, we have not. But we have good historical
romances, and good historical essays. The imagination and the reason,
if we may use a legal metaphor, have made partition of a province of
literature of which they were formerly seized per my et per tout; and
now they hold their respective portions in severalty, instead of holding
the whole in common.

To make the past present, to bring the distant near, to place us in the
society of a great man or on the eminence which overlooks the field of
a mighty battle, to invest with the reality of human flesh and blood
beings whom we are too much inclined to consider as personified
qualities in an allegory, to call up our ancestors before us with all
their peculiarities of language, manners, and garb, to show us over
their houses, to seat us at their tables, to rummage their old-fashioned
ward-robes, to explain the uses of their ponderous furniture, these
parts of the duty which properly belongs to the historian have been
appropriated by the historical novelist. On the other hand, to extract
the philosophy of history, to direct on judgment of events and men,
to trace the connection of cause and effects, and to draw from the
occurrences of former time general lessons of moral and political
wisdom, has become the business of a distinct class of writers.

Of the two kinds of composition into which history has been thus
divided, the one may be compared to a map, the other to a painted
landscape. The picture, though it places the country before us, does not
enable us to ascertain with accuracy the dimensions, the distances, and
the angles. The map is not a work of imitative art. It presents no scene
to the imagination; but it gives us exact information as to the bearings
of the various points, and is a more useful companion to the traveller
or the general than the painted landscape could be, though it were the
grandest that ever Rosa peopled with outlaws, or the sweetest over which
Claude ever poured the mellow effulgence of a setting sun.

It is remarkable that the practice of separating the two ingredients of
which history is composed has become prevalent on the Continent as well
as in this country. Italy has already produced a historical novel, of
high merit and of still higher promise. In France, the practice has been
carried to a length somewhat whimsical. M. Sismondi publishes a grave
and stately history of the Merovingian Kings, very valuable, and a
little tedious. He then sends forth as a companion to it a novel, in
which he attempts to give a lively representation of characters and
manners. This course, as it seems to us, has all the disadvantages of
a division of labour, and none of its advantages. We understand the
expediency of keeping the functions of cook and coachman distinct. The
dinner will be better dressed, and the horses better managed. But where
the two situations are united, as in the Maitre Jacques of Moliere, we
do not see that the matter is much mended by the solemn form with which
the pluralist passes from one of his employments to the other.

We manage these things better in England. Sir Walter Scott gives us
a novel; Mr. Hallam a critical and argumentative history. Both are
occupied with the same matter. But the former looks at it with the eye
of a sculptor. His intention is to give an express and lively image of
its external form. The latter is an anatomist. His task is to dissect
the subject to its inmost recesses, and to lay bare before us all the
springs of motion and all the causes of decay.

Mr. Hallam is, on the whole, far better qualified than any other
writer of our time for the office which he has undertaken. He has great
industry and great acuteness. His knowledge is extensive, various, and
profound. His mind is equally distinguished by the amplitude of its
grasp, and by the delicacy of its tact. His speculations have none of
that vagueness which is the common fault of political philosophy. On
the contrary, they are strikingly practical, and teach us not only the
general rule, but the mode of applying it to solve particular cases. In
this respect they often remind us of the Discourses of Machiavelli.

The style is sometimes open to the charge of harshness. We have also
here and there remarked a little of that unpleasant trick, which
Gibbon brought into fashion, the trick, we mean, of telling a story by
implication and allusion. Mr. Hallam however, has an excuse which Gibbon
had not. His work is designed for readers who are already acquainted
with the ordinary books on English history, and who can therefore
unriddle these little enigmas without difficulty. The manner of the book
is, on the whole, not unworthy of the matter. The language, even where
most faulty, is weighty and massive, and indicates strong sense in every
line. It often rises to an eloquence, not florid or impassioned,
but high, grave, and sober; such as would become a state paper, or a
judgment delivered by a great magistrate, a Somers or a D’Aguesseau.

In this respect the character of Mr. Hallam’s mind corresponds
strikingly with that of his style. His work is eminently judicial. Its
whole spirit is that of the bench, not that of the bar. He sums up with
a calm, steady impartiality, turning neither to the right nor to the
left, glossing over nothing, exaggerating nothing, while the advocates
on both sides are alternately biting their lips to hear their
conflicting misstatements and sophisms exposed. On a general survey,
we do not scruple to pronounce the Constitutional History the most
impartial book that we ever read. We think it the more incumbent on us
to bear this testimony strongly at first setting out, because, in the
course of our remarks, we shall think it right to dwell principally on
those parts of it from which we dissent.

There is one peculiarity about Mr. Hallam which, while it adds to the
value of his writings, will, we fear, take away something from their
popularity. He is less of a worshipper than any historian whom we can
call to mind. Every political sect has its esoteric and its exoteric
school, its abstract doctrines for the initiated, its visible symbols,
its imposing forms, its mythological fables for the vulgar. It assists
the devotion of those who are unable to raise themselves to the
contemplation of pure truth by all the devices of Pagan or Papal
superstition. It has its altars and its deified heroes, its relics and
pilgrimages, its canonized martyrs and confessors, its festivals and its
legendary miracles. Our pious ancestors, we are told, deserted the High
Altar of Canterbury, to lay all their oblations on the shrine of St.
Thomas. In the same manner the great and comfortable doctrines of the
Tory creed, those particularly which relate to restrictions on worship
and on trade, are adored by squires and rectors in Pitt Clubs, under the
name of a minister who was as bad a representative of the system which
has been christened after him as Becket of the spirit of the Gospel. On
the other hand, the cause for which Hampden bled on the field and Sidney
on the scaffold is enthusiastically toasted by many an honest radical
who would be puzzled to explain the difference between Ship-money and
the Habeas Corpus Act. It may be added that, as in religion, so in
politics, few even of those who are enlightened enough to comprehend the
meaning latent under the emblems of their faith can resist the contagion
of the popular superstition. Often, when they flatter themselves that
they are merely feigning a compliance with the prejudices of the vulgar,
they are themselves under the influence of those very prejudices. It
probably was not altogether on grounds of expediency that Socrates
taught his followers to honour the gods whom the state honoured, and
bequeathed a cock to Esculapius with his dying breath. So there is often
a portion of willing credulity and enthusiasm in the veneration which
the most discerning men pay to their political idols. From the very
nature of man it must be so. The faculty by which we inseparably
associate ideas which have often been presented to us in conjunction
is not under the absolute control of the will. It may be quickened into
morbid activity. It may be reasoned into sluggishness. But in a certain
degree it will always exist. The almost absolute mastery which Mr.
Hallam has obtained over feelings of this class is perfectly astonishing
to us, and will, we believe, be not only astonishing but offensive to
many of his readers. It must particularly disgust those people who, in
their speculations on politics, are not reasoners but fanciers; whose
opinions, even when sincere, are not produced, according to the
ordinary law of intellectual births, by induction or inference, but
are equivocally generated by the heat of fervid tempers out of the
overflowing of tumid imaginations. A man of this class is always
in extremes. He cannot be a friend to liberty without calling for
a community of goods, or a friend to order without taking under his
protection the foulest excesses of tyranny. His admiration oscillates
between the most worthless of rebels and the most worthless of
oppressors, between Marten, the disgrace of the High Court of justice,
and Laud, the disgrace of the Star-Chamber. He can forgive anything but
temperance and impartiality. He has a certain sympathy with the violence
of his opponents, as well as with that of his associates. In every
furious partisan he sees either his present self or his former self,
the pensioner that is, or the Jacobin that has been. But he is unable to
comprehend a writer who, steadily attached to principles, is indifferent
about names and badges, and who judges of characters with equable
severity, not altogether untinctured with cynicism, but free from the
slightest touch of passion, party spirit, or caprice.

We should probably like Mr. Hallam’s book more if, instead of pointing
out with strict fidelity the bright points and the dark spots of both
parties, he had exerted himself to whitewash the one and to blacken the
other. But we should certainly prize it far less. Eulogy and invective
may be had for the asking. But for cold rigid justice, the one weight
and the one measure, we know not where else we can look.

No portion of our annals has been more perplexed and misrepresented by
writers of different parties than the history of the Reformation. In
this labyrinth of falsehood and sophistry, the guidance of Mr. Hallam
is peculiarly valuable. It is impossible not to admire the even-handed
justice with which he deals out castigation to right and left on the
rival persecutors.

It is vehemently maintained by some writers of the present day that
Elizabeth persecuted neither Papists nor Puritans as such, and that the
severe measures which she occasionally adopted were dictated, not by
religious intolerance, but by political necessity. Even the excellent
account of those times which Mr. Hallam has given has not altogether
imposed silence on the authors of this fallacy. The title of the Queen,
they say, was annulled by the Pope; her throne was given to another; her
subjects were incited to rebellion; her life was menaced; every Catholic
was bound in conscience to be a traitor; it was therefore against
traitors, not against Catholics, that the penal laws were enacted.

In order that our readers may be fully competent to appreciate the
merits of this defence, we will state, as concisely as possible, the
substance of some of these laws.

As soon as Elizabeth ascended the throne, and before the least hostility
to her government had been shown by the Catholic population, an act
passed prohibiting the celebration of the rites of the Romish Church on
pain of forfeiture for the first offence, of a year’s imprisonment for
the second, and of perpetual imprisonment for the third.

A law was next made in 1562, enacting, that all who had ever graduated
at the Universities or received holy orders, all lawyers, and all
magistrates, should take the oath of supremacy when tendered to them, on
pain of forfeiture and imprisonment during the royal pleasure. After the
lapse of three mouths, the oath might again be tendered to them; and
if it were again refused, the recusant was guilty of high treason. A
prospective law, however severe, framed to exclude Catholics from the
liberal professions, would have been mercy itself compared with this
odious act. It is a retrospective statute; it is a retrospective penal
statute; it is a retrospective penal statute against a large class. We
will not positively affirm that a law of this description must always,
and under all circumstances, be unjustifiable. But the presumption
against it is most violent; nor do we remember any crisis either in our
own history, or in the history of any other country, which would
have rendered such a provision necessary. In the present case,
what circumstances called for extraordinary rigour? There might be
disaffection among the Catholics. The prohibition of their worship would
naturally produce it. But it is from their situation, not from their
conduct, from the wrongs which they had suffered, not from those which
they had committed, that the existence of discontent among them must be
inferred. There were libels, no doubt, and prophecies, and rumours and
suspicions, strange grounds for a law inflicting capital penalties, ex
post facto, on a large body of men.

Eight years later, the bull of Pius deposing Elizabeth produced a third
law. This law, to which alone, as we conceive, the defence now under our
consideration can apply, provides that, if any Catholic shall convert
a Protestant to the Romish Church, they shall both suffer death as for
high treason.

We believe that we might safely content ourselves with stating the
fact, and leaving it to the judgment of every plain Englishman. Recent
controversies have, however, given so much importance to this subject,
that we will offer a few remarks on it.

In the first place, the arguments which are urged in favour of Elizabeth
apply with much greater force to the case of her sister Mary. The
Catholics did not, at the time of Elizabeth’s accession, rise in arms
to seat a Pretender on her throne. But before Mary had given, or could
give, provocation, the most distinguished Protestants attempted to
set aside her rights in favour of the Lady Jane. That attempt, and the
subsequent insurrection of Wyatt, furnished at least as good a plea
for the burning of Protestants, as the conspiracies against Elizabeth
furnish for the hanging and embowelling of Papists.

The fact is that both pleas are worthless alike. If such arguments are
to pass current, it will be easy to prove that there was never such a
thing as religious persecution since the creation. For there never was
a religious persecution in which some odious crime was not, justly
or unjustly, said to be obviously deducible from the doctrines of the
persecuted party. We might say, that the Caesars did not persecute the
Christians; that they only punished men who were charged, rightly or
wrongly, with burning Rome, and with committing the foulest abominations
in secret assemblies; and that the refusal to throw frankincense on the
altar of Jupiter was not the crime, but only evidence of the crime.
We might say, that the massacre of St. Bartholomew was intended to
extirpate, not a religious sect, but a political party. For, beyond all
doubt, the proceedings of the Huguenots, from the conspiracy of Amboise
to the battle of Moncontour, had given much more trouble to the French
monarchy than the Catholics have ever given to the English monarchy
since the Reformation; and that too with much less excuse.

The true distinction is perfectly obvious. To punish a man because he
has committed a crime, or because he is believed, though unjustly, to
have committed a crime, is not persecution. To punish a man, because
we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the
conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he
will commit a crime is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and
wicked.

When Elizabeth put Ballard and Babington to death, she was not
persecuting. Nor should we have accused her government of persecution
for passing any law, however severe, against overt acts of sedition. But
to argue that, because a man is a Catholic, he must think it right to
murder a heretical sovereign, and that because he thinks it right, he
will attempt to do it, and then, to found on this conclusion a law for
punishing him as if he had done it, is plain persecution.

If, indeed, all men reasoned in the same manner on the same data,
and always did what they thought it their duty to do, this mode of
dispensing punishment might be extremely judicious. But as people who
agree about premises often disagree about conclusions, and as no man in
the world acts up to his own standard of right, there are two enormous
gaps in the logic by which alone penalties for opinions can be defended.
The doctrine of reprobation, in the judgment of many very able men,
follows by syllogistic necessity from the doctrine of election. Others
conceive that the Antinomian heresy directly follows from the doctrine
of reprobation; and it is very generally thought that licentiousness and
cruelty of the worst description are likely to be the fruits, as they
often have been the fruits, of Antinomian opinions. This chain of
reasoning, we think, is as perfect in all its parts as that which makes
out a Papist to be necessarily a traitor. Yet it would be rather a
strong measure to hang all the Calvinists, on the ground that if they
were spared, they would infallibly commit all the atrocities of Matthias
and Knipperdoling. For, reason the matter as we may, experience shows
us that a man may believe in election without believing in reprobation,
that he may believe in reprobation without being an Antinomian, and that
he may be an Antinomian without being a bad citizen. Man, in short,
is so inconsistent a creature that it is impossible to reason from his
belief to his conduct, or from one part of his belief to another.

We do not believe that every Englishman who was reconciled to the
Catholic Church would, as a necessary consequence, have thought himself
justified in deposing or assassinating Elizabeth. It is not sufficient
to say that the convert must have acknowledged the authority of the
Pope, and that the Pope had issued a bull against the Queen. We know
through what strange loopholes the human mind contrives to escape,
when it wishes to avoid a disagreeable inference from an admitted
proposition. We know how long the Jansenists contrived to believe the
Pope infallible in matters of doctrine, and at the same time to believe
doctrines which he pronounced to be heretical. Let it pass, however,
that every Catholic in the kingdom thought that Elizabeth might be
lawfully murdered. Still the old maxim, that what is the business of
everybody is the business of nobody, is particularly likely to hold good
in a case in which a cruel death is the almost inevitable consequence of
making any attempt.

Of the ten thousand clergymen of the Church of England, there is
scarcely one who would not say that a man who should leave his country
and friends to preach the Gospel among savages, and who should, after
labouring indefatigably without any hope of reward, terminate his life
by martyrdom, would deserve the warmest admiration. Yet we can doubt
whether ten of the ten thousand ever thought of going on such an
expedition. Why should we suppose that conscientious motives, feeble as
they are constantly found to be in a good cause, should be omnipotent
for evil? Doubtless there was many a jolly Popish priest in the old
manor-houses of the northern counties, who would have admitted, in
theory, the deposing power of the Pope, but who would not have been
ambitious to be stretched on the rack, even though it were to be used,
according to the benevolent proviso of Lord Burleigh, “as charitably
as such a thing can be,” or to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, even
though, by that rare indulgence which the Queen, of her special grace,
certain knowledge, and mere motion, sometimes extended to very mitigated
cases, he were allowed a fair time to choke before the hangman began to
grabble in his entrails.

But the laws passed against the Puritans had not even the wretched
excuse which we have been considering. In this case, the cruelty was
equal, the danger, infinitely less. In fact, the danger was created
solely by the cruelty. But it is superfluous to press the argument.
By no artifice of ingenuity can the stigma of persecution, the
worst blemish of the English Church, be effaced or patched over. Her
doctrines, we well know, do not tend to intolerance. She admits the
possibility of salvation out of her own pale. But this circumstance, in
itself honourable to her, aggravates the sin and the shame of those
who persecuted in her name. Dominic and De Montfort did not, at least,
murder and torture for differences of opinion which they considered as
trifling. It was to stop an infection which, as they believed, hurried
to certain perdition every soul which it seized, that they employed
their fire and steel. The measures of the English government with
respect to the Papists and Puritans sprang from a widely different
principle. If those who deny that the founders of the Church were guilty
of religious persecution mean only that the founders of the Church were
not influenced by any religious motive, we perfectly agree with them.
Neither the penal code of Elizabeth, nor the more hateful system by
which Charles the Second attempted to force Episcopacy on the Scotch,
had an origin so noble. The cause is to be sought in some circumstances
which attended the Reformation in England, circumstances of which the
effects long continued to be felt, and may in some degree be traced even
at the present day.

In Germany, in France, in Switzerland, and in Scotland, the contest
against the Papal power was essentially a religious contest. In all
those countries, indeed, the cause of the Reformation, like every
other great cause, attracted to itself many supporters influenced by no
conscientious principle, many who quitted the Established Church
only because they thought her in danger, many who were weary of her
restraints, and many who were greedy for her spoils. But it was not
by these adherents that the separation was there conducted. They were
welcome auxiliaries; their support was too often purchased by unworthy
compliances; but, however exalted in rank or power, they were not the
leaders in the enterprise. Men of a widely different description,
men who redeemed great infirmities and errors by sincerity,
disinterestedness, energy and courage, men who, with many of the vices
of revolutionary chiefs and of polemic divines, united some of the
highest qualities of apostles, were the real directors. They might
be violent in innovation and scurrilous in controversy. They might
sometimes act with inexcusable severity towards opponents, and sometimes
connive disreputably at the vices of powerful allies. But fear was not
in them, nor hypocrisy, nor avarice, nor any petty selfishness. Their
one great object was the demolition of the idols and the purification of
the sanctuary. If they were too indulgent to the failings of eminent men
from whose patronage they expected advantage to the church, they
never flinched before persecuting tyrants and hostile armies. For that
theological system to which they sacrificed the lives of others without
scruple, they were ready to throw away their own lives without fear.
Such were the authors of the great schism on the Continent and in the
northern part of this island. The Elector of Saxony and the Landgrave
of Hesse, the Prince of Conde and the King of Navarre, the Earl of Moray
and the Earl of Morton, might espouse the Protestant opinions, or might
pretend to espouse them; but it was from Luther, from Calvin, from Knox,
that the Reformation took its character.

England has no such names to show; not that she wanted men of sincere
piety, of deep learning, of steady and adventurous courage. But these
were thrown into the background. Elsewhere men of this character were
the principals. Here they acted a secondary part. Elsewhere worldliness
was the tool of zeal. Here zeal was the tool of worldliness. A King,
whose character may be best described by saying that he was despotism
itself personified, unprincipled ministers, a rapacious aristocracy,
a servile Parliament, such were the instruments by which England was
delivered from the yoke of Rome. The work which had been begun by Henry,
the murderer of his wives, was continued by Somerset, the murderer of
his brother, and completed by Elizabeth, the murderer of her guest.
Sprung from brutal passion, nurtured by selfish policy, the Reformation
in England displayed little of what had, in other countries,
distinguished it; unflinching and unsparing devotion, boldness of
speech, and singleness of eye. These were indeed to be found; but it was
in the lower ranks of the party which opposed the authority of Rome, in
such men as Hooper, Latimer, Rogers, and Taylor. Of those who had any
important share in bringing the Reformation about, Ridley was perhaps
the only person who did not consider it as a mere political job. Even
Ridley did not play a very prominent part. Among the statesmen and
prelates who principally gave the tone to the religious changes, there
is one, and one only, whose conduct partiality itself can attribute to
any other than interested motives. It is not strange, therefore, that
his character should have been the subject of fierce controversy. We
need not say that we speak of Cranmer.

Mr. Hallam has been severely censured for saying with his usual placid
severity, that, “if we weigh the character of this prelate in an equal
balance, he will appear far indeed removed from the turpitude imputed to
him, by his enemies; yet not entitled to any extraordinary veneration.”
We will venture to expand the sense of Mr. Hallam, and to comment on it
thus:--If we consider Cranmer merely as a statesman, he will not appear
a much worse man than Wolsey, Gardiner, Cromwell, or Somerset. But, when
an attempt is made to set him up as a saint, it is scarcely possible
for any man of sense who knows the history of the times to preserve his
gravity. If the memory of the archbishop had been left to find its own
place, he would have soon been lost among the crowd which is mingled


                        “A quel cattivo coro

               Degli angeli, che non furon ribelli,

               Ne fur fedelia Dio, per se foro.”


And the only notice which it would have been necessary to take of his
name would have been

               “Non ragioniam di lui; ma guarda, e passa.”

But, since his admirers challenge for him a place in the noble army of
martyrs, his claims require fuller discussion.

The origin of his greatness, common enough in the scandalous chronicles
of courts, seems strangely out of place in a hagiology. Cranmer rose
into favour by serving Henry in the disgraceful affair of his first
divorce. He promoted the marriage of Anne Boleyn with the King. On
a frivolous pretence he pronounced that marriage null and void. On a
pretence, if possible still more frivolous, he dissolved the ties which
bound the shameless tyrant to Anne of Cleves. He attached himself to
Cromwell while the fortunes of Cromwell flourished. He voted for cutting
off Cromwell’s head without a trial, when the tide of royal favour
turned. He conformed backwards and forwards as the King changed his
mind. He assisted, while Henry lived, in condemning to the flames those
who denied the doctrine of transubstantiation. He found out, as soon as
Henry was dead, that the doctrine was false. He was, however, not at a
loss for people to burn. The authority of his station and of his grey
hairs was employed to overcome the disgust with which an intelligent and
virtuous child regarded persecution. Intolerance is always bad. But the
sanguinary intolerance of a man who thus wavered in his creed excites
a loathing, to which it is difficult to give vent without calling foul
names. Equally false to political and to religious obligations,
the primate was first the tool of Somerset, and then the tool of
Northumberland. When the Protector wished to put his own brother
to death, without even the semblance of a trial, he found a ready
instrument in Cranmer. In spite of the canon law, which forbade a
churchman to take any part in matters of blood, the archbishop signed
the warrant for the atrocious sentence. When Somerset had been in his
turn destroyed, his destroyer received the support of Cranmer in a
wicked attempt to change the course of the succession.

The apology made for him by his admirers only renders his conduct more
contemptible. He complied, it is said, against his better judgment,
because he could not resist the entreaties of Edward. A holy prelate
of sixty, one would think, might be better employed by the bedside of
a dying child, than in committing crimes at the request of the young
disciple. If Cranmer had shown half as much firmness when Edward
requested him to commit treason as he had before shown when Edward
requested him not to commit murder, he might have saved the country from
one of the greatest misfortunes that it ever underwent. He became, from
whatever motive, the accomplice of the worthless Dudley. The virtuous
scruples of another young and amiable mind were to be overcome. As
Edward had been forced into persecution, Jane was to be seduced into
treason. No transaction in our annals is more unjustifiable than this.
If a hereditary title were to be respected, Mary possessed it. If a
parliamentary title were preferable, Mary possessed that also. If
the interest of the Protestant religion required a departure from the
ordinary rule of succession, that interest would have been best served
by raising Elizabeth to the throne. If the foreign relations of the
kingdom were considered, still stronger reasons might be found for
preferring Elizabeth to Jane. There was great doubt whether Jane or the
Queen of Scotland had the better claim; and that doubt would, in all
probability, have produced a war both with Scotland and with France, if
the project of Northumberland had not been blasted in its infancy.
That Elizabeth had a better claim than the Queen of Scotland was
indisputable. To the part which Cranmer, and unfortunately some better
men than Cranmer, took in this most reprehensible scheme, much of the
severity with which the Protestants were afterwards treated must in
fairness be ascribed.

The plot failed; Popery triumphed; and Cranmer recanted. Most people
look on his recantation as a single blemish on an honourable life, the
frailty of an unguarded moment. But, in fact, his recantation was in
strict accordance with the system on which he had constantly acted. It
was part of a regular habit. It was not the first recantation that he
had made; and, in all probability, if it had answered its purpose, it
would not have been the last. We do not blame him for not choosing to be
burned alive. It is no very severe reproach to any person that he does
not possess heroic fortitude. But surely a man who liked the fire
so little should have had some sympathy for others. A persecutor who
inflicts nothing which he is not ready to endure deserves some respect.
But when a man who loves his doctrines more than the lives of his
neighbours, loves his own little finger better than his doctrines, a
very simple argument a fortiori will enable us to estimate the amount of
his benevolence.

But his martyrdom, it is said, redeemed everything. It is extraordinary
that so much ignorance should exist on this subject. The fact is that,
if a martyr be a man who chooses to die rather than to renounce his
opinions, Cranmer was no more a martyr than Dr. Dodd. He died solely
because he could not help it. He never retracted his recantation till
he found he had made it in vain. The Queen was fully resolved that,
Catholic or Protestant, he should burn. Then he spoke out, as people
generally speak out when they are at the point of death and have nothing
to hope or to fear on earth. If Mary had suffered him to live, we
suspect that he would have heard mass and received absolution, like a
good Catholic, till the accession of Elizabeth, and that he would then
have purchased, by another apostasy, the power of burning men better and
braver than himself.

We do not mean, however, to represent him as a monster of wickedness.
He was not wantonly cruel or treacherous. He was merely a supple, timid,
interested courtier, in times of frequent and violent change. That which
has always been represented as his distinguishing virtue, the facility
with which he forgave his enemies, belongs to the character. Slaves of
his class are never vindictive, and never grateful. A present interest
effaces past services and past injuries from their minds together. Their
only object is self-preservation; and for this they conciliate those who
wrong them, just as they abandon those who serve them. Before we extol
a man for his forgiving temper, we should inquire whether he is above
revenge, or below it.

Somerset had as little principle as his coadjutor. Of Henry, an orthodox
Catholic, except that he chose to be his own Pope, and of Elizabeth, who
certainly had no objection to the theology of Rome, we need say nothing.
These four persons were the great authors of the English Reformation.
Three of them had a direct interest in the extension of the royal
prerogative. The fourth was the ready tool of any who could frighten
him. It is not difficult to see from what motives, and on what plan,
such persons would be inclined to remodel the Church. The scheme
was merely to transfer the full cup of sorceries from the Babylonian
enchantress to other hands, spilling as little as possible by the way.
The Catholic doctrines and rites were to be retained in the Church of
England. But the King was to exercise the control which had formerly
belonged to the Roman Pontiff. In this Henry for a time succeeded. The
extraordinary force of his character, the fortunate situation in which
he stood with respect to foreign powers, and the vast resources which
the suppression of the monasteries placed at his disposal, enabled
him to oppress both the religious factions equally. He punished with
impartial severity those who renounced the doctrines of Rome, and those
who acknowledged her jurisdiction. The basis, however, on which he
attempted to establish his power was too narrow to be durable. It would
have been impossible even for him long to persecute both persuasions.
Even under his reign there had been insurrections on the part of the
Catholics, and signs of a spirit which was likely soon to produce
insurrection on the part of the Protestants. It was plainly necessary,
therefore, that the Crown should form an alliance with one or with the
other side. To recognise the Papal supremacy, would have been to abandon
the whole design. Reluctantly and sullenly the government at last joined
the Protestants. In forming this junction, its object was to procure
as much aid as possible for its selfish undertaking, and to make the
smallest possible concessions to the spirit of religious innovation.

From this compromise the Church of England sprang. In many respects,
indeed, it has been well for her that, in an age of exuberant zeal, her
principal founders were mere politicians. To this circumstance she owes
her moderate articles, her decent ceremonies, her noble and pathetic
liturgy. Her worship is not disfigured by mummery. Yet she has
preserved, in a far greater degree than any of her Protestant sisters,
that art of striking the senses and filling the imagination in which
the Catholic Church so eminently excels. But, on the other hand, she
continued to be, for more than a hundred and fifty years, the servile
handmaid of monarchy, the steady enemy of public liberty. The divine
right of kings, and the duty of passively obeying all their commands,
were her favourite tenets. She held those tenets firmly through times
of oppression, persecution, and licentiousness; while law was trampled
down; while judgment was perverted; while the people were eaten as
though they were bread. Once, and but once, for a moment, and but for
a moment, when her own dignity and property were touched, she forgot to
practise the submission which she had taught.

Elizabeth clearly discerned the advantages which were to be derived from
a close connection between the monarchy and the priesthood. At the
time of her accession, indeed, she evidently meditated a partial
reconciliation with Rome; and, throughout her whole life, she leaned
strongly to some of the most obnoxious parts of the Catholic system.
But her imperious temper, her keen sagacity, and her peculiar situation,
soon led her to attach herself completely to a church which was all
her own. On the same principle on which she joined it, she attempted to
drive all her people within its pale by persecution. She supported it by
severe penal laws, not because she thought conformity to its discipline
necessary to salvation; but because it was the fastness which arbitrary
power was making strong for itself, because she expected a more
profound obedience from those who saw in her both their civil and their
ecclesiastical chief than from those who, like the Papists, ascribed
spiritual authority to the Pope, or from those who, like some of the
Puritans, ascribed it only to Heaven. To dissent from her establishment
was to dissent from an institution founded with an express view to the
maintenance and extension of the royal prerogative.

This great Queen and her successors, by considering conformity and
loyalty as identical at length made them so. With respect to the
Catholics, indeed, the rigour of persecution abated after her death.
James soon found that they were unable to injure him, and that the
animosity which the Puritan party felt towards them drove them of
necessity to take refuge under his throne. During the subsequent
conflict, their fault was anything but disloyalty. On the other hand,
James hated the Puritans with more than the hatred of Elizabeth. Her
aversion to them was political; his was personal. The sect had plagued
him in Scotland, where he was weak; and he was determined to be even
with them in England, where he was powerful. Persecution gradually
changed a sect into a faction. That there was anything in the religious
opinions of the Puritans which rendered them hostile to monarchy has
never been proved to our satisfaction. After our civil contests, it
became the fashion to say that Presbyterianism was connected with
Republicanism; just as it has been the fashion to say, since the time of
the French Revolution, that Infidelity is connected with Republicanism.
It is perfectly true that a church constituted on the Calvinistic model
will not strengthen the hands of the sovereign so much as a hierarchy
which consists of several ranks, differing in dignity and emolument, and
of which all the members are constantly looking to the Government for
promotion. But experience has clearly shown that a Calvinistic church,
like every other church, is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet
when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favoured and
cherished. Scotland has had a Presbyterian establishment during a
century and a half. Yet her General Assembly has not, during that
period, given half so much trouble to the government as the Convocation
of the Church of England gave during the thirty years which followed
the Revolution. That James and Charles should have been mistaken in this
point is not surprising. But we are astonished, we must confess,
that men of our own time, men who have before them the proof of what
toleration can effect, men who may see with their own eyes that the
Presbyterians are no such monsters when government is wise enough to
let them alone, should defend the persecutions of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries as indispensable to the safety of the church and
the throne.

How persecution protects churches and thrones was soon made manifest.
A systematic political opposition, vehement, daring, and inflexible,
sprang from a schism about trifles, altogether unconnected with the real
interests of religion or of the state. Before the close of the reign of
Elizabeth this opposition began to show itself. It broke forth on the
question of the monopolies. Even the imperial Lioness was compelled
to abandon her prey, and slowly and fiercely to recede before the
assailants. The spirit of liberty grew with the growing wealth and
intelligence of the people. The feeble struggles and insults of James
irritated instead of suppressing it; and the events which immediately
followed the accession of his son portended a contest of no common
severity, between a king resolved to be absolute, and a people resolved
to be free.

The famous proceedings of the third Parliament of Charles, and the
tyrannical measures which followed its dissolution, are extremely well
described by Mr. Hallam. No writer, we think, has shown, in so clear
and satisfactory a manner, that the Government then entertained a fixed
purpose of destroying the old parliamentary constitution of England, or
at least of reducing it to a mere shadow. We hasten, however, to a part
of his work which, though it abounds in valuable information and in
remarks well deserving to be attentively considered, and though it is,
like the rest, evidently written in a spirit of perfect impartiality,
appears to us, in many points, objectionable.

We pass to the year 1640. The fate of the short Parliament held in
that year clearly indicated the views of the king. That a Parliament so
moderate in feeling should have met after so many years of oppression
is truly wonderful. Hyde extols its loyal and conciliatory spirit. Its
conduct, we are told, made the excellent Falkland in love with the very
name of Parliament. We think, indeed, with Oliver St. John, that its
moderation was carried too far, and that the times required sharper
and more decided councils. It was fortunate, however, that the king
had another opportunity of showing that hatred of the liberties of his
subjects which was the ruling principle of all his conduct. The sole
crime of the Commons was that, meeting after a long intermission of
parliaments, and after a long series of cruelties and illegal imposts,
they seemed inclined to examine grievances before they would vote
supplies. For this insolence they were dissolved almost as soon as they
met.

Defeat, universal agitation, financial embarrassments, disorganisation
in every part of the government, compelled Charles again to convene the
Houses before the close of the same year. Their meeting was one of the
great eras in the history of the civilised world. Whatever of political
freedom exists either in Europe or in America has sprung, directly or
indirectly, from those institutions which they secured and reformed.
We never turn to the annals of those times without feeling increased
admiration of the patriotism, the energy, the decision, the consummate
wisdom, which marked the measures of that great Parliament, from the day
on which it met to the commencement of civil hostilities.

The impeachment of Strafford was the first, and perhaps the greatest
blow. The whole conduct of that celebrated man proved that he had formed
a deliberate scheme to subvert the fundamental laws of England. Those
parts of his correspondence which have been brought to light since his
death, place the matter beyond a doubt. One of his admirers has, indeed,
offered to show “that the passages which Mr. Hallam has invidiously
extracted from the correspondence between Laud and Strafford, as proving
their design to introduce a thorough tyranny, refer not to any such
design, but to a thorough reform in the affairs of state, and the
thorough maintenance of just authority.” We will recommend two or three
of these passages to the especial notice of our readers.

All who know anything of those times, know that the conduct of Hampden
in the affair of the ship-money met with the warm approbation of every
respectable Royalist in England. It drew forth the ardent eulogies
of the champions of the prerogative and even of the Crown lawyers
themselves. Clarendon allows Hampden’s demeanour through the whole
proceeding to have been such, that even those who watched for an
occasion against the defender of the people, were compelled to
acknowledge themselves unable to find any fault in him. That he was
right in the point of law is now universally admitted. Even had it been
otherwise, he had a fair case. Five of the judges, servile as our Courts
then were, pronounced in his favour. The majority against him was the
smallest possible. In no country retaining the slightest vestige of
constitutional liberty can a modest and decent appeal to the laws be
treated as a crime. Strafford, however, recommends that, for taking
the sense of a legal tribunal on a legal question, Hampden should be
punished, and punished severely, “whipt,” says the insolent apostate,
“whipt into his senses. If the rod,” he adds, “be so used that it smarts
not, I am the more sorry.” This is the maintenance of just authority.

In civilised nations, the most arbitrary governments have generally
suffered justice to have a free course in private suits. Strafford
wished to make every cause in every court subject to the royal
prerogative. He complained that in Ireland he was not permitted to
meddle in cases between party and party. “I know very well,” says he,
“that the common lawyers will be passionately against it, who are wont
to put such a prejudice upon all other professions, as if none were to
be trusted, or capable to administer justice, but themselves: yet how
well this suits with monarchy, when they monopolise all to be governed
by their year-books, you in England have a costly example.” We are
really curious to know by what arguments it is to be proved, that the
power of interfering in the law-suits of individuals is part of the just
authority of the executive government.

It is not strange that a man so careless of the common civil rights,
which even despots have generally respected, should treat with scorn the
limitations which the constitution imposes on the royal prerogative. We
might quote pages: but we will content ourselves with a single specimen:
“The debts of the Crown being taken off, you may govern as you please:
and most resolute I am that may be done without borrowing any help forth
of the King’s lodgings.”

Such was the theory of that thorough reform in the state which Strafford
meditated. His whole practice, from the day on which he sold himself to
the court, was in strict conformity to his theory. For his accomplices
various excuses may be urged; ignorance, imbecility, religious bigotry.
But Wentworth had no such plea. His intellect was capacious. His early
prepossessions were on the side of popular rights. He knew the whole
beauty and value of the system which he attempted to deface. He was the
first of the Rats, the first of those statesmen whose patriotism has
been only the coquetry of political prostitution, and whose profligacy
has taught governments to adopt the old maxim of the slave-market,
that it is cheaper to buy than to breed, to import defenders from an
Opposition than to rear them in a Ministry. He was the first Englishman
to whom a peerage was a sacrament of infamy, a baptism into the
communion of corruption. As he was the earliest of the hateful list,
so was he also by far the greatest; eloquent, sagacious, adventurous,
intrepid, ready of invention, immutable of purpose, in every talent
which exalts or destroys nations pre-eminent, the lost Archangel,
the Satan of the apostasy. The title for which, at the time of his
desertion, he exchanged a name honourably distinguished in the cause of
the people, reminds us of the appellation which, from the moment of the
first treason, fixed itself on the fallen Son of the Morning,

                   “Satan;--so call him now--

                   His former name

                   Is heard no more in heaven.”

The defection of Strafford from the popular party contributed mainly to
draw on him the hatred of his contemporaries. It has since made him an
object of peculiar interest to those whose lives have been spent, like
his, in proving that there is no malice like the malice of a renegade;
Nothing can be more natural or becoming than that one turncoat should
eulogize another.

Many enemies of public liberty have been distinguished by their private
virtues. But Strafford was the same throughout. As was the statesman,
such was the kinsman and such the lover. His conduct towards Lord
Mountmorris is recorded by Clarendon. For a word which can scarcely be
called rash, which could not have been made the subject of an ordinary
civil action, the Lord Lieutenant dragged a man of high rank, married to
a relative of that saint about whom he whimpered to the peers, before a
tribunal of slaves. Sentence of death was passed. Everything but death
was inflicted. Yet the treatment which Lord Ely experienced was still
more scandalous. That nobleman was thrown into prison, in order
to compel him to settle his estate in a manner agreeable to his
daughter-in-law, whom, as there is every reason to believe, Strafford
had debauched. These stories do not rest on vague report. The historians
most partial to the minister admit their truth, and censure them in
terms which, though too lenient for the occasion, was too severe. These
facts are alone sufficient to justify the appellation with which Pym
branded him “the wicked Earl.”

In spite of all Strafford’s vices, in spite of all his dangerous
projects, he was certainly entitled to the benefit of the law; but of
the law in all its rigour; of the law according to the utmost strictness
of the letter, which killeth. He was not to be torn in pieces by a mob,
or stabbed in the back by an assassin. He was not to have punishment
meted out to him from his own iniquitous measure. But if justice, in the
whole range of its wide armoury, contained one weapon which could pierce
him, that weapon his pursuers were bound, before God and man, to employ.

                        “If he may

               Find mercy in the law, ‘tis his: if none,

               Let him not seek’t of us.”

Such was the language which the Commons might justly use.

Did then the articles against Strafford strictly amount to high treason?
Many people, who know neither what the articles were, nor what high
treason is, will answer in the negative, simply because the accused
person, speaking for his life, took that ground of defence. The journals
of the Lords show that the judges were consulted. They answered, with
one accord, that the articles on which the earl was convicted amounted
to high treason. This judicial opinion, even if we suppose it to
have been erroneous, goes far to justify the Parliament. The judgment
pronounced in the Exchequer Chamber has always been urged by the
apologists of Charles in defence of his conduct respecting ship-money.
Yet on that occasion there was but a bare majority in favour of the
party at whose pleasure all the magistrates composing the tribunal were
removable. The decision in the case of Strafford was unanimous; as far
as we can judge, it was unbiassed; and, though there may be room for
hesitation, we think, on the whole, that it was reasonable. “It may
be remarked,” says Mr. Hallam, “that the fifteenth article of the
impeachment, charging Strafford with raising money by his own authority,
and quartering troops on the people of Ireland, in order to compel their
obedience to his unlawful requisitions, upon which, and upon one other
article, not upon the whole matter, the Peers voted him guilty, does,
at least, approach very nearly, if we may not say more, to a substantive
treason within the statute of Edward the Third, as a levying of war
against the King.” This most sound and just exposition has provoked
a very ridiculous reply. “It should seem to be an Irish construction
this,” says, an assailant of Mr. Hallam, “which makes the raising money
for the King’s service, with his knowledge, and by his approbation, to
come under the head of levying war on the King, and therefore to be high
treason.” Now, people who undertake to write on points of constitutional
law should know, what every attorney’s clerk and every forward schoolboy
on an upper form knows, that, by a fundamental maxim of our polity, the
King can do no wrong; that every court is bound to suppose his conduct
and his sentiments to be, on every occasion, such as they ought to be;
and that no evidence can be received for the purpose of setting aside
this loyal and salutary presumption. The Lords therefore, were bound to
take it for granted that the King considered arms which were unlawfully
directed against his people as directed against his own throne.

The remarks of Mr. Hallam on the bill of attainder, though, as
usual, weighty and acute, do not perfectly satisfy us. He defends the
principle, but objects to the severity of the punishment. That, on great
emergencies, the State may justifiably pass a retrospective act against
an offender, we have no doubt whatever. We are acquainted with only one
argument on the other side, which has in it enough of reason to bear an
answer. Warning, it is said, is the end of punishment. But a punishment
inflicted, not by a general rule, but by an arbitrary discretion, cannot
serve the purpose of a warning. It is therefore useless; and useless
pain ought not to be inflicted. This sophism has found its way into
several books on penal legislation. It admits however of a very simple
refutation. In the first place, punishments ex post facto are not
altogether useless even as warnings. They are warnings to a particular
class which stand in great need of warnings to favourites and ministers.
They remind persons of this description that there maybe a day of
reckoning for those who ruin and enslave their country in all forms
of the law. But this is not all. Warning is, in ordinary cases, the
principal end of punishment; but it is not the only end. To remove
the offender, to preserve society from those dangers which are to be
apprehended from his incorrigible depravity, is often one of the ends.
In the case of such a knave as Wild, or such a ruffian as Thurtell, it
is a very important end. In the case of a powerful and wicked statesman,
it is infinitely more important; so important, as alone to justify the
utmost severity, even though it were certain that his fate would not
deter others from imitating his example. At present, indeed, we should
think it extremely pernicious to take such a course, even with a worse
minister than Strafford, if a worse could exist; for, at present,
Parliament has only to withhold its support from a Cabinet to produce an
immediate change of hands. The case was widely different in the reign of
Charles the First. That Prince had governed during eleven years without
any Parliament; and, even when Parliament was sitting, had supported
Buckingham against its most violent remonstrances.

Mr. Hallam is of opinion that a bill of pains and penalties ought to
have been passed; but he draws a distinction less just, we think, than
his distinctions usually are. His opinion, so far as we can collect
it, is this, that there are almost insurmountable objections to
retrospective laws for capital punishment, but that, where the
punishment stops short of death, the objections are comparatively
trifling. Now the practice of taking the severity of the penalty into
consideration, when the question is about the mode of procedure and the
rules of evidence, is no doubt sufficiently common. We often see a
man convicted of a simple larceny on evidence on which he would not be
convicted of a burglary. It sometimes happens that a jury, when there
is strong suspicion, but not absolute demonstration, that an act,
unquestionably amounting to murder, was committed by the prisoner before
them, will find him guilty of manslaughter. But this is surely very
irrational. The rules of evidence no more depend on the magnitude of the
interests at stake than the rules of arithmetic. We might as well say
that we have a greater chance of throwing a size when we are playing for
a penny than when we are playing for a thousand pounds, as that a form
of trial which is sufficient for the purposes of justice, in a matter
affecting liberty and property, is insufficient in a matter affecting
life. Nay, if a mode of proceeding be too lax for capital cases, it is,
a fortiori, too lax for all others; for in capital cases, the principles
of human nature will always afford considerable security. No judge is so
cruel as he who indemnifies himself for scrupulosity in cases of blood,
by licence in affairs of smaller importance. The difference in tale on
the one side far more than makes up for the difference in weight on the
other.

If there be any universal objection to retrospective punishment, there
is no more to be said. But such is not the opinion of Mr. Hallam. He
approves of the mode of proceeding. He thinks that a punishment, not
previously affixed by law to the offences of Strafford, should have
been inflicted; that Strafford should have been, by act of Parliament,
degraded from his rank, and condemned to perpetual banishment. Our
difficulty would have been at the first step, and there only. Indeed
we can scarcely conceive that any case which does not call for capital
punishment can call for punishment by a retrospective act. We can
scarcely conceive a man so wicked and so dangerous that the whole course
of law must be disturbed in order to reach him, yet not so wicked as to
deserve the severest sentence, nor so dangerous as to require the last
and surest custody, that of the grave. If we had thought that Strafford
might be safely suffered to live in France, we should have thought it
better that he should continue to live in England, than that he should
be exiled by a special act. As to degradation, it was not the Earl, but
the general and the statesman, whom the people had to fear. Essex said,
on that occasion, with more truth than elegance, “Stone dead hath no
fellow.” And often during the civil wars the Parliament had reason to
rejoice that an irreversible law and an impassable barrier protected
them from the valour and capacity of Wentworth.

It is remarkable that neither Hyde nor Falkland voted against the bill
of attainder. There is, indeed, reason to believe that Falkland spoke in
favour of it. In one respect, as Mr. Hallam has observed, the proceeding
was honourably distinguished from others of the same kind. An act was
passed to relieve the children of Strafford from the forfeiture and
corruption of blood which were the legal consequences of the sentence.
The Crown had never shown equal generosity in a case of treason. The
liberal conduct of the Commons has been fully and most appropriately
repaid. The House of Wentworth has since that time been as much
distinguished by public spirit as by power and splendour, and may at
the present moment boast of members with whom Say and Hampden would have
been proud to act.

It is somewhat curious that the admirers of Strafford should also be,
without a single exception, the admirers of Charles; for, whatever
we may think of the conduct of the Parliament towards the unhappy
favourite, there can be no doubt that the treatment which he received
from his master was disgraceful. Faithless alike to his people and to
his tools, the King did not scruple to play the part of the cowardly
approver, who hangs his accomplice. It is good that there should be such
men as Charles in every league of villainy. It is for such men that the
offer of pardon and reward which appears after a murder is intended.
They are indemnified, remunerated and despised. The very magistrate who
avails himself of their assistance looks on them as more contemptible
than the criminal whom they betray. Was Strafford innocent? Was he a
meritorious servant of the Crown? If so, what shall we think of the
Prince, who having solemnly promised him that not a hair of his head
should be hurt, and possessing an unquestioned constitutional right to
save him, gave him up to the vengeance of his enemies? There were some
points which we know that Charles would not concede, and for which he
was willing to risk the chances of the civil war. Ought not a King, who
will make a stand for anything, to make a stand for the innocent blood?
Was Strafford guilty? Even on this supposition, it is difficult not to
feel disdain for the partner of his guilt, the tempter turned punisher.
If, indeed, from that time forth, the conduct of Charles had been
blameless, it might have been said that his eyes were at last opened to
the errors of his former conduct, and that, in sacrificing to the wishes
of his Parliament a minister whose crime had been a devotion too zealous
to the interests of his prerogative, he gave a painful and deeply
humiliating proof of the sincerity of his repentance. We may describe
the King’s behaviour on this occasion in terms resembling those which
Hume has employed when speaking of the conduct of Churchill at the
Revolution. It required ever after the most rigid justice and sincerity
in the dealings of Charles with his people to vindicate his conduct
towards his friend. His subsequent dealings with his people, however,
clearly showed, that it was not from any respect for the Constitution,
or from any sense of the deep criminality of the plans in which
Strafford and himself had been engaged, that he gave up his minister to
the axe. It became evident that he had abandoned a servant who, deeply
guilty as to all others, was guiltless to him alone, solely in order to
gain time for maturing other schemes of tyranny, and purchasing the aid
of the other Wentworths. He, who would not avail himself of the power
which the laws gave him to save an adherent to whom his honour was
pledged, soon showed that he did not scruple to break every law and
forfeit every pledge, in order to work the ruin of his opponents.

“Put not your trust in princes!” was the expression of the fallen
minister, when he heard that Charles had consented to his death. The
whole history of the times is a sermon on that bitter text. The defence
of the Long Parliament is comprised in the dying words of its victim.

The early measures of that Parliament Mr. Hallam in general approves.
But he considers the proceedings which took place after the recess in
the summer of 1641 as mischievous and violent. He thinks that, from
that time, the demands of the Houses were not warranted by any imminent
danger to the Constitution and that in the war which ensued they were
clearly the aggressors. As this is one of the most interesting questions
in our history, we will venture to state, at some length, the reasons
which have led us to form an opinion on it contrary to that of a writer
whose judgment we so highly respect.

We will premise that we think worse of King Charles the First than even
Mr. Hallam appears to do. The fixed hatred of liberty which was the
principle of the King’s public conduct the unscrupulousness with which
he adopted any means which might enable him to attain his ends, the
readiness with which he gave promises, the impudence with which he broke
them, the cruel indifference with which he threw away his useless or
damaged tools, made him, at least till his character was fully exposed,
and his power shaken to its foundations, a more dangerous enemy to the
Constitution than a man of far greater talents and resolution might
have been. Such princes may still be seen, the scandals of the southern
thrones of Europe, princes false alike to the accomplices who have
served them and to the opponents who have spared them, princes who, in
the hour of danger, concede everything, swear everything, hold out their
cheeks to every smiter, give up to punishment every instrument of their
tyranny, and await with meek and smiling implacability the blessed day
of perjury and revenge.

We will pass by the instances of oppression and falsehood which
disgraced the early part of the reign of Charles. We will leave out of
the question the whole history of his third Parliament, the price which
he exacted for assenting to the Petition of Right, the perfidy with
which he violated his engagements, the death of Eliot, the barbarous
punishments inflicted by the Star-Chamber, the ship-money, and all the
measures now universally condemned, which disgraced his administration
from 1630 to 1640. We will admit that it might be the duty of the
Parliament after punishing the most guilty of his creatures, after
abolishing the inquisitorial tribunals which had been the instruments
of his tyranny, after reversing the unjust sentences of his victims to
pause in its course. The concessions which had been made were great, the
evil of civil war obvious, the advantages even of victory doubtful. The
former errors of the King might be imputed to youth, to the pressure of
circumstances, to the influence of evil counsel, to the undefined state
of the law. We firmly believe that if, even at this eleventh hour,
Charles had acted fairly towards his people, if he had even acted fairly
towards his own partisans, the House of Commons would have given him a
fair chance of retrieving the public confidence. Such was the opinion of
Clarendon. He distinctly states that the fury of opposition had abated,
that a reaction had begun to take place, that the majority of those
who had taken part against the King were desirous of an honourable
and complete reconciliation and that the more violent or, as it soon
appeared, the more judicious members of the popular party were fast
declining in credit. The Remonstrance had been carried with great
difficulty. The uncompromising antagonists of the court such as
Cromwell, had begun to talk of selling their estates and leaving
England. The event soon showed that they were the only men who
really understood how much inhumanity and fraud lay hid under the
constitutional language and gracious demeanour of the King.

The attempt to seize the five members was undoubtedly the real cause of
the war. From that moment, the loyal confidence with which most of the
popular party were beginning to regard the King was turned into hatred
and incurable suspicion. From that moment, the Parliament was compelled
to surround itself with defensive arms. From that moment, the city
assumed the appearance of a garrison. From that moment, in the phrase
of Clarendon, the carriage of Hampden became fiercer, that he drew the
sword and threw away the scabbard. For, from that moment, it must
have been evident to every impartial observer, that, in the midst
of professions, oaths, and smiles, the tyrant was constantly looking
forward to an absolute sway, and to a bloody revenge.

The advocates of Charles have very dexterously contrived to conceal from
their readers the real nature of this transaction. By making concessions
apparently candid and ample, they elude the great accusation. They allow
that the measure was weak and even frantic, an absurd caprice of Lord
Digby, absurdly adopted by the King. And thus they save their client
from the full penalty of his transgression, by entering a plea of guilty
to the minor offence. To us his conduct appears at this day as at the
time it appeared to the Parliament and the city. We think it by no
means so foolish as it pleases his friends to represent it, and far more
wicked.

In the first place, the transaction was illegal from beginning to end.
The impeachment was illegal. The process was illegal. The service was
illegal. If Charles wished to prosecute the five members for treason, a
bill against them should have been sent to a grand jury. That a commoner
cannot be tried for high treason by the Lords at the suit of the Crown,
is part of the very alphabet of our law. That no man can be arrested by
the King in person is equally clear. This was an established maxim of
our jurisprudence even in the time of Edward the Fourth. “A subject,”
said Chief Justice Markham to that Prince, “may arrest for treason:
the King cannot; for, if the arrest be illegal, the party has no remedy
against the King.”

The time at which Charles took his step also deserves consideration. We
have already said that the ardour which the Parliament had displayed at
the time of its first meeting had considerably abated, that the leading
opponents of the court were desponding, and that their followers were in
general inclined to milder and more temperate measures than those which
had hitherto been pursued. In every country, and in none more than
in England, there is a disposition to take the part of those who are
unmercifully run down, and who seem destitute of all means of defence.
Every man who has observed the ebb and flow of public feeling in our own
time will easily recall examples to illustrate this remark. An English
statesman ought to pay assiduous worship to Nemesis, to be most
apprehensive of ruin when he is at the height of power and popularity,
and to dread his enemy most when most completely prostrated. The fate of
the Coalition Ministry in 1784 is perhaps the strongest instance in
our history of the operation of this principle. A few weeks turned
the ablest and most extended Ministry that ever existed into a feeble
Opposition, and raised a King who was talking of retiring to Hanover to
a height of power which none of his predecessors had enjoyed since the
Revolution. A crisis of this description was evidently approaching in
1642. At such a crisis, a Prince of a really honest and generous nature,
who had erred, who had seen his error, who had regretted the lost
affections of his people, who rejoiced in the dawning hope of regaining
them, would be peculiarly careful to take no step which could give
occasion of offence, even to the unreasonable. On the other hand, a
tyrant, whose whole life was a lie, who hated the Constitution the more
because he had been compelled to feign respect for it, and to whom his
own honour and the love of his people were as nothing, would select such
a crisis for some appalling violation of the law, for some stroke which
might remove the chiefs of an Opposition, and intimidate the herd. This
Charles attempted. He missed his blow; but so narrowly, that it would
have been mere madness in those at whom it was aimed to trust him again.

It deserves to be remarked that the King had, a short time before,
promised the most respectable Royalists in the House of Commons,
Falkland, Colepepper, and Hyde, that he would take no measure in which
that House was concerned, without consulting them. On this occasion he
did not consult them. His conduct astonished them more than any other
members of the Assembly. Clarendon says that they were deeply hurt by
this want of confidence, and the more hurt, because, if they had been
consulted, they would have done their utmost to dissuade Charles from so
improper a proceeding. Did it never occur to Clarendon, will it not at
least occur to men less partial, that there was good reason for this?
When the danger to the throne seemed imminent, the King was ready to put
himself for a time into the hands of those who, though they disapproved
of his past conduct, thought that the remedies had now become worse than
the distempers. But we believe that in his heart he regarded both the
parties in the Parliament with feelings of aversion which differed only
in the degree of their intensity, and that the awful warning which
he proposed to give, by immolating the principal supporters of the
Remonstrance, was partly intended for the instruction of those who
had concurred in censuring the ship-money and in abolishing the
Star-Chamber.

The Commons informed the King that their members should be forthcoming
to answer any charge legally brought against them. The Lords refused
to assume the unconstitutional office with which he attempted to invest
them. And what was then his conduct? He went, attended by hundreds of
armed men, to seize the objects of his hatred in the House itself. The
party opposed to him more than insinuated that his purpose was of the
most atrocious kind. We will not condemn him merely on their suspicions.
We will not hold him answerable for the sanguinary expressions of the
loose brawlers who composed his train. We will judge of his act by
itself alone. And we say, without hesitation, that it is impossible
to acquit him of having meditated violence, and violence which might
probably end in blood. He knew that the legality of his proceedings was
denied. He must have known that some of the accused members were men not
likely to submit peaceably to an illegal arrest. There was every reason
to expect that he would find them in their places, that they would
refuse to obey his summons, and that the House would support them in
their refusal. What course would then have been left to him? Unless we
suppose that he went on this expedition for the sole purpose of making
himself ridiculous, we must believe that he would have had recourse to
force. There would have been a scuffle; and it might not, under such
circumstances, have been in his power, even if it had been in his
inclination, to prevent a scuffle from ending in a massacre. Fortunately
for his fame, unfortunately perhaps for what he prized far more, the
interests of his hatred and his ambition, the affair ended differently.
The birds, as he said, were flown, and his plan was disconcerted.
Posterity is not extreme to mark abortive crimes; and thus the King’s
advocates have found it easy to represent a step, which, but for a
trivial accident, might have filled England with mourning and dismay, as
a mere error of judgment, wild and foolish, but perfectly innocent.
Such was not, however, at the time, the opinion of any party. The most
zealous Royalists were so much disgusted and ashamed that they suspended
their opposition to the popular party, and, silently at least, concurred
in measures of precaution so strong as almost to amount to resistance.

From that day, whatever of confidence and loyal attachment had survived
the misrule of seventeen years was, in the great body of the people,
extinguished, and extinguished for ever. As soon as the outrage
had failed, the hypocrisy recommenced. Down to the very eve of this
flagitious attempt Charles had been talking of his respect for the
privileges of Parliament and the liberties of his people. He began again
in the same style on the morrow; but it was too late. To trust him now
would have been, not moderation, but insanity. What common security
would suffice against a Prince who was evidently watching his season
with that cold and patient hatred which, in the long-run, tires out
every other passion?

It is certainly from no admiration of Charles that Mr. Hallam
disapproves of the conduct of the Houses in resorting to arms. But
he thinks that any attempt on the part of that Prince to establish a
despotism would have been as strongly opposed by his adherents as by his
enemies, and that therefore the Constitution might be considered as out
of danger, or, at least that it had more to apprehend from the war than
from the King. On this subject Mr. Hallam dilates at length, and with
conspicuous ability. We will offer a few considerations which lead us to
incline to a different opinion.

The Constitution of England was only one of a large family. In all the
monarchies of Western Europe, during the middle ages, there existed
restraints on the royal authority, fundamental laws, and representative
assemblies. In the fifteenth century, the government of Castile seems to
have been as free as that of our own country. That of Arragon was beyond
all question more so. In France, the sovereign was more absolute. Yet
even in France, the States-General alone could constitutionally impose
taxes; and, at the very time when the authority of those assemblies
was beginning to languish, the Parliament of Paris received such an
accession of strength as enabled it, in some measure, to perform
the functions of a legislative assembly. Sweden and Denmark had
constitutions of a similar description.

Let us overleap two or three hundred years, and contemplate Europe at
the commencement of the eighteenth century. Every free constitution,
save one, had gone down. That of England had weathered the danger,
and was riding in full security. In Denmark and Sweden, the kings had
availed themselves of the disputes which raged between the nobles and
the commons, to unite all the powers of government in their own hands.
In France the institution of the States was only mentioned by lawyers as
a part of the ancient theory of their government. It slept a deep sleep,
destined to be broken by a tremendous waking. No person remembered the
sittings of the three orders, or expected ever to see them renewed.
Louis the Fourteenth had imposed on his parliament a patient silence
of sixty years. His grandson, after the War of the Spanish Succession,
assimilated the constitution of Arragon to that of Castile, and
extinguished the last feeble remains of liberty in the Peninsula. In
England, on the other hand, the Parliament was infinitely more powerful
than it had ever been. Not only was its legislative authority fully
established; but its right to interfere, by advice almost equivalent
to command, in every department of the executive government, was
recognised. The appointment of ministers, the relations with foreign
powers, the conduct of a war or a negotiation, depended less on the
pleasure of the Prince than on that of the two Houses.

What then made us to differ? Why was it that, in that epidemic malady of
constitutions, ours escaped the destroying influence; or rather that, at
the very crisis of the disease, a favourable turn took place in England,
and in England alone? It was not surely without a cause that so many
kindred systems of government, having flourished together so long,
languished and expired at almost the same time.

It is the fashion to say that the progress of civilisation is favourable
to liberty. The maxim, though in some sense true, must be limited by
many qualifications and exceptions. Wherever a poor and rude nation,
in which the form of government is a limited monarchy, receives a great
accession of wealth and knowledge, it is in imminent danger of falling
under arbitrary power.

In such a state of society as that which existed all over Europe during
the middle ages, very slight checks sufficed to keep the sovereign in
order. His means of corruption and intimidation were very scanty. He had
little money, little patronage, no military establishment. His armies
resembled juries. They were drawn out of the mass of the people:
they soon returned to it again: and the character which was habitual
prevailed over that which was occasional. A campaign of forty days was
too short, the discipline of a national militia too lax, to efface from
their minds the feelings of civil life. As they carried to the camp the
sentiments and interests of the farm and the shop, so they carried back
to the farm and the shop the military accomplishments which they had
acquired in the camp. At home the soldier learned how to value his
rights, abroad how to defend them.

Such a military force as this was a far stronger restraint on the regal
power than any legislative assembly. The army, now the most formidable
instrument of the executive power, was then the most formidable check on
that power. Resistance to an established government, in modern times
so difficult and perilous an enterprise, was in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries the simplest and easiest matter in the world.
Indeed, it was far too simple and easy. An insurrection was got up then
almost as easily as a petition is got up now. In a popular cause, or
even in an unpopular cause favoured by a few great nobles, a force of
ten thousand armed men was raised in a week. If the King were, like our
Edward the Second and Richard the Second, generally odious, he could not
procure a single bow or halbert. He fell at once and without an effort.
In such times a sovereign like Louis the Fifteenth or the Emperor Paul
would have been pulled down before his misgovernment had lasted for a
month. We find that all the fame and influence of our Edward the Third
could not save his Madame de Pompadour from the effects of the public
hatred.

Hume and many other writers have hastily concluded, that, in the
fifteenth century, the English Parliament was altogether servile,
because it recognised, without opposition, every successful usurper.
That it was not servile its conduct on many occasions of inferior
importance is sufficient to prove. But surely it was not strange that
the majority of the nobles, and of the deputies chosen by the commons,
should approve of revolutions which the nobles and commons had effected.
The Parliament did not blindly follow the event of war, but participated
in those changes of public sentiment on which the event of war depended.
The legal check was secondary and auxiliary to that which the nation
held in its own hands.

There have always been monarchies in Asia, in which the royal authority
has been tempered by fundamental laws, though no legislative body exists
to watch over them. The guarantee is the opinion of a community of
which every individual is a soldier. Thus, the king of Cabul, as Mr.
Elphinstone informs us, cannot augment the land revenue, or interfere
with the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals.

In the European kingdoms of this description there were representative
assemblies. But it was not necessary that those assemblies should meet
very frequently, that they should interfere with all the operations
of the executive government, that they should watch with jealousy, and
resent with prompt indignation, every violation of the laws which the
sovereign might commit. They were so strong that they might safely be
careless. He was so feeble that he might safely be suffered to encroach.
If he ventured too far, chastisement and ruin were at hand. In fact,
the people generally suffered more from his weakness than from his
authority. The tyranny of wealthy and powerful subjects was the
characteristic evil of the times. The royal prerogatives were not even
sufficient for the defence of property and the maintenance of police.

The progress of civilisation introduced a great change. War became a
science, and, as a necessary consequence, a trade. The great body of the
people grew every day more reluctant to undergo the inconveniences of
military service, and better able to pay others for undergoing them.
A new class of men, therefore, dependent on the Crown alone, natural
enemies of those popular rights which are to them as the dew to the
fleece of Gideon, slaves among freemen, freemen among slaves, grew into
importance. That physical force which in the dark ages had belonged to
the nobles and the commons, and had, far more than any charter, or any
assembly, been the safeguard of their privileges, was transferred
entire to the King. Monarchy gained in two ways. The sovereign was
strengthened, the subjects weakened. The great mass of the population,
destitute of all military discipline and organisation, ceased to
exercise any influence by force on political transactions. There have,
indeed, during the last hundred and fifty years, been many popular
insurrections in Europe: but all have failed except those in which the
regular army has been induced to join the disaffected.

Those legal checks which, while the sovereign remained dependent on his
subjects, had been adequate to the purpose for which they were designed,
were now found wanting. The dikes which had been sufficient while the
waters were low were not high enough to keep out the springtide. The
deluge passed over them and, according to the exquisite illustration of
Butler, the formal boundaries, which had excluded it, now held it in.
The old constitutions fared like the old shields and coats of mail. They
were the defences of a rude age; and they did well enough against the
weapons of a rude age. But new and more formidable means of destruction
were invented. The ancient panoply became useless; and it was thrown
aside, to rust in lumber-rooms, or exhibited only as part of an idle
pageant.

Thus absolute monarchy was established on the Continent. England
escaped; but she escaped very narrowly. Happily our insular situation,
and the pacific policy of James, rendered standing armies unnecessary
here, till they had been for some time kept up in the neighbouring
kingdoms. Our public men, had therefore an opportunity of watching the
effects produced by this momentous change on governments which bore a
close analogy to that established in England. Everywhere they saw the
power of the monarch increasing, the resistance of assemblies which were
no longer supported by a national force gradually becoming more and more
feeble, and at length altogether ceasing. The friends and the enemies of
liberty perceived with equal clearness the causes of this general decay.
It is the favourite theme of Strafford. He advises the King to procure
from the judges a recognition of his right to raise an army at his
pleasure. “This place well fortified,” says he, “for ever vindicates the
monarchy at home from under the conditions and restraints of subjects.”
We firmly believe that he was in the right. Nay; we believe that, even
if no deliberate scheme, of arbitrary government had been formed, by
the sovereign and his ministers, there was great reason to apprehend
a natural extinction of the Constitution. If, for example, Charles had
played the part of Gustavus Adolphus, if he had carried on a popular war
for the defence of the Protestant cause in Germany, if he had gratified
the national pride by a series of victories, if he had formed an army of
forty or fifty thousand devoted soldiers, we do not see what chance the
nation would have had of escaping from despotism. The judges would
have given as strong a decision in favour of camp-money as they gave in
favour of ship-money. If they had been scrupulous, it would have made
little difference. An individual who resisted would have been treated
as Charles treated Eliot, and as Strafford wished to treat Hampden.
The Parliament might have been summoned once in twenty years, to
congratulate a King on his accession, or to give solemnity to some great
measure of state. Such had been the fate of legislative assemblies as
powerful, as much respected, as high-spirited, as the English Lords and
Commons.

The two Houses, surrounded by the ruins of so many free constitutions
overthrown or sapped by the new military system, were required to
intrust the command of an army and the conduct of the Irish war to a
King who had proposed to himself the destruction of liberty as the great
end of his policy. We are decidedly of opinion that it would have been
fatal to comply. Many of those who took the side of the King on this
question would have cursed their own loyalty, if they had seen him
return from war; at the head of twenty thousand troops, accustomed to
carriage and free quarters in Ireland.

We think with Mr. Hallam that many of the Royalist nobility and gentry
were true friends to the Constitution, and that, but for the solemn
protestations by which the King bound himself to govern according to
the law for the future, they never would have joined his standard. But
surely they underrated the public danger. Falkland is commonly selected
as the most respectable specimen of this class. He was indeed a man of
great talents and of great virtues but, we apprehend, infinitely too
fastidious for public life. He did not perceive that, in such times as
those on which his lot had fallen, the duty of a statesman is to choose
the better cause and to stand by it, in spite of those excesses by which
every cause, however good in itself, will be disgraced. The present
evil always seemed to him the worst. He was always going backward and
forward; but it should be remembered to his honour that it was always
from the stronger to the weaker side that he deserted. While Charles was
oppressing the people, Falkland was a resolute champion of liberty.
He attacked Strafford. He even concurred in strong measures against
Episcopacy. But the violence of his party annoyed him, and drove him to
the other party, to be equally annoyed there. Dreading the success of
the cause which he had espoused, disgusted by the courtiers of Oxford,
as he had been disgusted by the patriots of Westminster, yet bound by
honour not to abandon the cause, for which he was in arms, he pined
away, neglected his person, went about moaning for peace, and at last
rushed desperately on death, as the best refuge in such miserable times.
If he had lived through the scenes that followed, we have little doubt
that he would have condemned himself to share the exile and beggary of
the royal family; that he would then have returned to oppose all their
measures; that he would have been sent to the Tower by the Commons as
a stifler of the Popish Plot, and by the King as an accomplice in the
Rye-House Plot; and that, if he had escaped being hanged, first by
Scroggs, and then by Jeffreys, he would, after manfully opposing James
the Second through years of tyranny, have been seized with a fit of
compassion, at the very moment of the Revolution, have voted for a
regency, and died a non-juror.

We do not dispute that the royal party contained many excellent men and
excellent citizens. But this we say, that they did not discern those
times. The peculiar glory of the Houses of Parliament is that, in the
great plague and mortality of constitutions, they took their stand
between the living and the dead. At the very crisis of our destiny, at
the very moment when the fate which had passed on every other nation was
about to pass on England, they arrested the danger.

Those who conceive that the parliamentary leaders were desirous merely
to maintain the old constitution, and those who represent them as
conspiring to subvert it, are equally in error. The old constitution,
as we have attempted to show, could not be maintained. The progress
of time, the increase of wealth, the diffusion of knowledge, the great
change in the European system of war, rendered it impossible that any
of the monarchies of the middle ages should continue to exist on the old
footing. The prerogative of the crown was constantly advancing. If the
privileges of the people were to remain absolutely stationary, they
would relatively retrograde. The monarchical and democratical parts of
the government were placed in a situation not unlike that of the two
brothers in the Fairy Queen, one of whom saw the soil of his inheritance
daily, washed away by the tide and joined to that of his rival. The
portions had at first been fairly meted out. By a natural and constant
transfer, the one had been extended; the other had dwindled to nothing.
A new partition, or a compensation, was necessary to restore the
original equality.

It was now, therefore, absolutely necessary to violate the formal part
of the constitution, in order to preserve its spirit. This might have
been done, as it was done at the Revolution, by expelling the reigning
family, and calling to the throne princes who, relying solely on an
elective title, would find it necessary to respect the privileges and
follow the advice of the assemblies to which they owed everything, to
pass every bill which the Legislature strongly pressed upon them, and
to fill the offices of state with men in whom the Legislature confided.
But, as the two Houses did not choose to change the dynasty, it was
necessary that they should do directly what at the Revolution was done
indirectly. Nothing is more usual than to hear it said that, if the
Houses had contented themselves with making such a reform in the
government under Charles as was afterwards made under William, they
would have had the highest claim to national gratitude; and that in
their violence they overshot the mark. But how was it possible to make
such a settlement under Charles? Charles was not, like William and the
princes of the Hanoverian line, bound by community of interests and
dangers to the Parliament. It was therefore necessary that he should be
bound by treaty and statute.

Mr. Hallam reprobates, in language which has a little surprised us, the
nineteen propositions into which the Parliament digested its scheme.
Is it possible to doubt that, if James the Second had remained in the
island, and had been suffered, as he probably would in that case have
been suffered, to keep his crown, conditions to the full as hard would
have been imposed on him? On the other hand, we fully admit that, if the
Long Parliament had pronounced the departure of Charles from London an
abdication, and had called Essex or Northumberland to the throne,
the new prince might have safely been suffered to reign without such
restrictions. His situation would have been a sufficient guarantee.

In the nineteen propositions we see very little to blame except the
articles against the Catholics. These, however, were in the spirit of
that age; and to some sturdy churchmen in our own, they may seem
to palliate even the good which the Long Parliament effected. The
regulation with respect to new creations of Peers is the only other
article about which we entertain any doubt. One of the propositions is
that the judges shall hold their offices during good behaviour. To this
surely no exception will be taken. The right of directing the education
and marriage of the princes was most properly claimed by the Parliament,
on the same ground on which, after the Revolution, it was enacted, that
no king, on pain of forfeiting, his throne, should espouse a Papist.
Unless we condemn the statesmen of the Revolution, who conceived
that England could not safely be governed by a sovereign married to a
Catholic queen, we can scarcely condemn the Long Parliament because,
having a sovereign so situated, they thought it necessary to place him
under strict restraints. The influence of Henrietta Maria had already
been deeply felt in political affairs. In the regulation of her family,
in the education and marriage of her children, it was still more likely
to be felt; There might be another Catholic queen; possibly a Catholic
king. Little, as we are disposed to join in the vulgar clamour on this
subject, we think that such an event ought to be, if possible, averted;
and this could only be done, if Charles was to be left on the throne, by
placing his domestic arrangements under the control of Parliament.

A veto on the appointment of ministers was demanded. But this veto
Parliament has virtually possessed ever since the Revolution. It is
no doubt very far better that this power of the Legislature should be
exercised as it is now exercised, when any great occasion calls for
interference, than that at every change the Commons should have to
signify their approbation or disapprobation in form. But, unless a new
family had been placed on the throne, we do not see how this power could
have been exercised as it is now exercised. We again repeat that no
restraints which could be imposed on the princes who reigned after the
Revolution could have added to the security, which their title afforded.
They were compelled to court their parliaments. But from Charles nothing
was to be expected which was not set down in the bond.

It was not stipulated that the King should give up his negative on acts
of Parliament. But the Commons, had certainly shown a strong disposition
to exact this security also. “Such a doctrine,” says Mr. Hallam, “was
in this country as repugnant to the whole history of our laws, as it was
incompatible with the subsistence of the monarchy in anything more than
a nominal preeminence.” Now this article has been as completely carried
into elect by the Revolution as if it had been formally inserted in the
Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement. We are surprised, we confess,
that Mr. Hallam should attach so much importance to a prerogative which
has not been exercised for a hundred and thirty years, which probably
will never be exercised again, and which can scarcely, in any
conceivable case, be exercised for a salutary purpose.

But the great security, the security without which every other would
have been insufficient, was the power of the sword. This both parties
thoroughly understood. The Parliament insisted on having the command
of the militia and the direction of the Irish war. “By God, not for an
hour!” exclaimed the King. “Keep the militia,” said the Queen, after
the defeat of the royal party. “Keep the militia; that will bring back
everything.” That, by the old constitution, no military authority was
lodged in the Parliament, Mr. Hallam has clearly shown. That it is a
species of authority which ought, not to be permanently lodged in
large and divided assemblies, must, we think in fairness be conceded.
Opposition, publicity, long discussion, frequent compromise; these
are the characteristics of the proceedings of such assemblies. Unity,
secrecy, decision, are the qualities which military arrangements
require. There were, therefore, serious objections to the proposition
of the Houses on this subject. But, on the other hand, to trust such
a King, at such a crisis, with the very weapon which, in hands less
dangerous, had destroyed so many free constitutions, would have been the
extreme of rashness. The jealousy with which the oligarchy of Venice and
the States of Holland regarded their generals and armies induced them
perpetually to interfere in matters of which they were incompetent to
judge. This policy secured them against military usurpation, but placed
them, under great disadvantages in war. The uncontrolled power which
the King of France exercised over his troops enabled him to conquer
his enemies, but enabled him also to oppress his people. Was there any
intermediate course? None, we confess altogether free from objection.
But on the whole, we conceive that the best measure would have been that
which the Parliament over and over proposed, namely, that for a limited
time the power of the sword should be left to the two Houses, and that
it should revert to the Crown when the constitution should be firmly
established, and when the new securities of freedom should be so far
strengthened by prescription that it would be difficult to employ even a
standing army for the purpose of subverting them.

Mr. Hallam thinks that the dispute might easily have been compromised,
by enacting that, the King should have no power to keep a standing army
on foot without the consent of Parliament. He reasons as if the question
had been merely theoretical, and as if at that time no army had been
wanted. “The kingdom,” he says, “might have well dispensed, in that age,
with any military organisation.” Now, we think that Mr. Hallam overlooks
the most important circumstance in the whole case. Ireland was actually
in rebellion; and a great expedition would obviously be necessary to
reduce that kingdom to obedience. The Houses had therefore to consider,
not at abstract question of law, but an urgent practical question,
directly involving the safety of the state. They had to consider the
expediency of immediately giving a great army to a King who was, at
least, as desirous to put down the Parliament of England as to conquer
the insurgents of Ireland.

Of course we do not mean to defend all the measures of the Houses. Far
from it. There never was a perfect man. It would, therefore, be the
height of absurdity to expect a perfect party or a perfect assembly. For
large bodies are far more likely to err than individuals. The passions
are inflamed by sympathy; the fear of punishment and the sense of shame
are diminished by partition. Every day we see men do for their faction
what they would die rather than do for themselves.

Scarcely any private quarrel ever happens, in which the right and wrong
are so exquisitely divided that all the right lies on one side, and all
the wrong on the other. But here was a schism which separated a great
nation into two parties. Of these parties, each was composed of many
smaller parties. Each contained many members, who differed far less from
their moderate opponents than from their violent allies. Each reckoned
among its supporters many who were determined in their choice by some
accident of birth, of connection, or of local situation. Each of them
attracted to itself in multitudes those fierce and turbid spirits,
to whom the clouds and whirlwinds of the political hurricane are
the atmosphere of life. A party, like a camp, has its sutlers and
camp-followers, as well as its soldiers. In its progress it collects
round it a vast retinue, composed of people who thrive by its custom
or are amused by its display, who may be sometimes reckoned, in an
ostentatious enumeration, as forming a part of it, but who give no aid
to its operations, and take but a languid interest in its success, who
relax its discipline and dishonour its flag by their irregularities, and
who, after a disaster, are perfectly ready to cut the throats and rifle
the baggage of their companions.

Thus it is in every great division; and thus it was in our civil war. On
both sides there was, undoubtedly, enough of crime and enough of error
to disgust any man who did not reflect that the whole history of the
species is made up of little except crimes and errors. Misanthropy is
not the temper which qualifies a man to act in great affairs, or to
judge of them.

“Of the Parliament,” says Mr. Hallam, “it may be said I think, with not
greater severity than truth, that scarce two or three public acts of
justice, humanity, or generosity, and very few of political wisdom or
courage, are recorded of them, from their quarrel with the King, to
their expulsion by Cromwell.” Those who may agree with us in the opinion
which we have expressed as to the original demands of the Parliament
will scarcely concur in this strong censure. The propositions which the
Houses made at Oxford, at Uxbridge, and at Newcastle, were in strict
accordance with these demands. In the darkest period of the war, they
showed no disposition to concede any vital principle. In the fulness
of their success, they showed no disposition to encroach beyond these
limits. In this respect we cannot but think that they showed justice and
generosity, as well as political wisdom and courage.

The Parliament was certainly far from faultless. We fully agree with
Mr. Hallam in reprobating their treatment of Laud. For the individual,
indeed, we entertain a more unmitigated contempt than, for any other
character in our history. The fondness with which a portion of the
church regards his memory, can be compared only to that perversity of
affection which sometimes leads a mother to select the monster or the
idiot of the family as the object of her especial favour, Mr. Hallam
has incidentally observed, that, in the correspondence of Laud with
Strafford, there are no indications of a sense of duty towards God or
man. The admirers of the Archbishop have, in consequence, inflicted upon
the public a crowd of extracts designed to prove the contrary. Now, in
all those passages, we see nothing, which a prelate as wicked as Pope
Alexander or Cardinal Dubois might not have written. Those passages
indicate no sense of duty to God or man, but simply a strong interest in
the prosperity and dignity of the order to which the writer belonged;
an interest which, when kept within certain limits, does not deserve
censure, but which can never be considered as a virtue. Laud is anxious
to accommodate satisfactorily the disputes in the University of Dublin.
He regrets to hear that a church is used as a stable, and that the
benefices of Ireland are very poor. He is desirous that, however small a
congregation may be, service should be regularly performed. He expresses
a wish that the judges of the court before which questions of tithe are
generally brought should be selected with a view to the interest of the
clergy. All this may be very proper; and it may be very proper that an
alderman should stand up for the tolls of his borough, and an East India
director for the charter of his Company. But it is ridiculous to say
that these things indicate piety and benevolence. No primate, though he
were the most abandoned of mankind, could wish to see the body, with
the influence of which his own influence was identical, degraded in the
public estimation by internal dissensions, by the ruinous state of its
edifices, and by the slovenly performance of its rites. We willingly
acknowledge that the particular letters in question have very little
harm in them; a compliment which cannot often be paid either to the
writings or to the actions of Laud.

Bad as the Archbishop was, however, he was not a traitor within the
statute. Nor was he by any means so formidable as to be a proper subject
for a retrospective ordinance of the legislature. His mind had not
expansion enough to comprehend a great scheme, good or bad. His
oppressive acts were not, like those of the Earl of Strafford, parts
of an extensive system. They were the luxuries in which a mean and
irritable disposition indulges itself from day to day, the excesses
natural to a little mind in a great place. The severest punishment which
the two Houses could have inflicted on him would have been to set him at
liberty and send him to Oxford. There he might have stayed, tortured by
his own diabolical temper, hungering for Puritans to pillory and mangle,
plaguing the Cavaliers, for want of somebody else to plague with
his peevishness and absurdity, performing grimaces and antics in the
cathedral, continuing that incomparable diary, which we never see
without forgetting the vices of his heart. In the imbecility of his
intellect minuting down his dreams, counting the drops of blood which
fell from his nose, watching the direction of the salt, and listening
for the note of the screech-owls. Contemptuous mercy was the only
vengeance which it became the Parliament to take on such a ridiculous
old bigot.

The Houses, it must be acknowledged, committed great errors in the
conduct of the war, or rather one great error, which brought their
affairs into a condition requiring the most perilous expedients. The
parliamentary leaders of what may be called the first generation, Essex,
Manchester, Northumberland, Hollis, even Pym, all the most eminent men
in short, Hampden excepted, were inclined to half measures. They dreaded
a decisive victory almost as much as a decisive overthrow. They wished
to bring the King into a situation which might render it necessary
for him to grant their just and wise demands, but not to subvert the
constitution or to change the dynasty. They were afraid of serving the
purposes of those fierce and determined enemies of monarchy, who now
began to show themselves in the lower ranks of the party. The war was,
therefore, conducted in a languid and inefficient manner. A resolute
leader might have brought it to a close in a month. At the end of three
campaigns, however, the event was still dubious; and that it had not
been decidedly unfavourable to the cause of liberty was principally
owing to the skill and energy which the more violent roundheads had
displayed in subordinate situations. The conduct of Fairfax and Cromwell
at Marston had, exhibited a remarkable contrast to that of Essex at
Edgehill, and to that of Waller at Lansdowne.

If there be any truth established by the universal experience of
nations, it is this; that to carry the spirit of peace into war is weak
and cruel policy. The time for negotiation is the time for deliberation
and delay. But when an extreme case calls for that remedy which is in
its own nature most violent, and which, in such cases, is a remedy only
because it is violent, it is idle to think of mitigating and diluting.
Languid war can do nothing which negotiation or submission will not
do better: and to act on any other principle is, not to save blood and
money, but to squander them.

This the parliamentary leaders found. The third year of hostilities was
drawing to a close; and they had not conquered the King. They had not
obtained even those advantages which they had expected from a policy
obviously erroneous in a military point of view. They had wished to
husband their resources. They now found that in enterprises like
theirs, parsimony is the worst profusion. They had hoped to effect a
reconciliation. The event taught them that the best way to conciliate
is to bring the work of destruction to a speedy termination. By their
moderation many lives and much property had been wasted. The angry
passions which, if the contest had been short, would have died away
almost as soon as they appeared, had fixed themselves in the form of
deep and lasting hatred. A military caste had grown up. Those who had
been induced to take up arms by the patriotic feelings of citizens had
begun to entertain the professional feelings of soldiers. Above all, the
leaders of the party had forfeited its confidence, If they had, by their
valour and abilities, gained a complete victory, their influence might
have been sufficient to prevent their associates from abusing it. It
was now necessary to choose more resolute and uncompromising commanders.
Unhappily the illustrious man who alone united in himself all the
talents and virtues which the crisis required, who alone could have
saved his country from the present dangers without plunging her into
others, who alone could have united all the friends of liberty in
obedience to his commanding genius and his venerable name, was no more.
Something might still be done. The Houses might still avert that worst
of all evils, the triumphant return of an imperious and unprincipled
master. They might still preserve London from all the horrors of rapine,
massacre, and lust. But their hopes of a victory as spotless as their
cause, of a reconciliation which might knit together the hearts of
all honest Englishmen for the defence of the public good, of durable
tranquillity, of temperate freedom, were buried in the grave of Hampden.

The self-denying ordinance was passed, and the army was remodelled.
These measures were undoubtedly full of danger. But all that was left to
the Parliament was to take the less of two dangers. And we think that,
even if they could have accurately foreseen all that followed, their
decision ought to have been the same. Under any circumstances, we should
have preferred Cromwell to Charles. But there could be no comparison
between Cromwell and Charles victorious, Charles restored, Charles
enabled to feed fat all the hungry grudges of his smiling rancour
and his cringing pride. The next visit of his Majesty to his faithful
Commons would have been more serious than that with which he last
honoured them; more serious than that which their own General paid them
some years after. The King would scarce have been content with praying
that the Lord would deliver him from Vane, or with pulling Marten by
the cloak. If, by fatal mismanagement, nothing was left to England but
a choice of tyrants, the last tyrant whom she should have chosen was
Charles.

From the apprehension of this worst evil the Houses were soon delivered
by their new leaders. The armies of Charles were everywhere routed, his
fastnesses stormed, his party humbled and subjugated. The King himself
fell into the hands of the Parliament; and both the King and the
Parliament soon fell into the hands of the army. The fate of both the
captives was the same. Both were treated alternately with respect and
with insult. At length the natural life of one, and the political life
of the other, were terminated by violence; and the power for which both
had struggled was united in a single hand. Men naturally sympathise with
the calamities of individuals; but they are inclined to look on a fallen
party with contempt rather than with pity. Thus misfortune turned the
greatest of Parliaments into the despised Rump, and the worst of Kings
into the Blessed Martyr.

Mr. Hallam decidedly condemns the execution of Charles; and in all that
he says on that subject we heartily agree. We fully concur with him in
thinking that a great social schism, such as the civil war, is not to be
confounded with an ordinary treason, and that the vanquished ought to be
treated according to the rules, not of municipal, but of international
law. In this case the distinction is of the less importance, because
both international and municipal law were in favour of Charles. He was a
prisoner of war by the former, a King by the latter. By neither was he a
traitor. If he had been successful, and had put his leading opponents to
death, he would have deserved severe censure; and this without reference
to the justice or injustice of his cause. Yet the opponents of Charles,
it must be admitted, were technically guilty of treason. He might have
sent them to the scaffold without violating any established principle
of jurisprudence. He would not have been compelled to overturn the whole
constitution in order to reach them. Here his own case differed widely
from theirs. Not only was his condemnation in itself a measure which
only the strongest necessity could vindicate; but it could not be
procured without taking several previous steps, every one of which would
have required the strongest necessity to vindicate it. It could not be
procured without dissolving the Government by military force, without
establishing precedents of the most dangerous description, without
creating difficulties which the next ten years were spent in removing,
without pulling down institutions which it soon became necessary to
reconstruct, and setting up others which almost every man was soon
impatient to destroy. It was necessary to strike the House of Lords
out of the constitution, to exclude members of the House of Commons by
force, to make a new crime, a new tribunal, a new mode of procedure.
The whole legislative and judicial systems were trampled down for
the purpose of taking a single head. Not only those parts of the
constitution which the republicans were desirous to destroy, but those
which they wished to retain and exalt, were deeply injured by these
transactions. High Courts of justice began to usurp the functions of
juries. The remaining delegates of the people were soon driven from
their seats by the same military violence which had enabled them to
exclude their colleagues.

If Charles had been the last of his line, there would have been an
intelligible reason for putting him to death. But the blow which
terminated his life at once transferred the allegiance of every Royalist
to an heir, and an heir who was at liberty. To kill the individual was,
under such circumstances, not to destroy, but to release the King.

We detest the character of Charles; but a man ought not to be removed by
a law ex post facto, even constitutionally procured, merely because he
is detestable. He must also be very dangerous. We can scarcely conceive
that any danger which a state can apprehend from any individual could
justify the violent, measures which were necessary to procure a sentence
against Charles. But in fact the danger amounted to nothing. There was
indeed, danger from the attachment of a large party to his office. But
this danger his execution only increased. His personal influence was
little indeed. He had lost the confidence of every party. Churchmen,
Catholics, Presbyterians, Independents, his enemies, his friends, his
tools, English, Scotch, Irish, all divisions and subdivisions of his
people had been deceived by him. His most attached councillors turned
away with shame and anguish from his false and hollow policy, plot
intertwined with plot, mine sprung beneath mine, agents disowned,
promises evaded, one pledge given in private, another in public.
“Oh, Mr. Secretary,” says Clarendon, in a letter to Nicholas, “those
stratagems have given me more sad hours than all the misfortunes in war
which have befallen the King, and look like the effects of God’s anger
towards us.”

The abilities of Charles were not formidable. His taste in the fine arts
was indeed exquisite; and few modern sovereigns have written or spoken
better. But he was not fit for active life. In negotiation he was always
trying to dupe others, and duping only himself. As a soldier, he was
feeble, dilatory, and miserably wanting, not in personal courage, but in
the presence of mind which his station required. His delay at Gloucester
saved the parliamentary party from destruction. At Naseby, in the very
crisis of his fortune, his want of self-possession spread a fatal panic
through his army. The story which Clarendon tells of that affair reminds
us of the excuses by which Bessus and Bobadil explain their cudgellings.
A Scotch nobleman, it seems, begged the King not to run upon his death,
took hold of his bridle, and turned his horse round. No man who had much
value for his life would have tried to perform the same friendly office
on that day for Oliver Cromwell.

One thing, and one alone, could make Charles dangerous--a violent death.
His tyranny could not break the high spirit of the English people.
His arms could not conquer, his arts could not deceive them; but his
humiliation and his execution melted them into a generous compassion.
Men who die on a scaffold for political offences almost always die well.
The eyes of thousands are fixed upon them. Enemies and admirers are
watching their demeanour. Every tone of voice, every change of colour,
is to go down to posterity. Escape is impossible. Supplication is vain.
In such a situation pride and despair have often been known to nerve
the weakest minds with fortitude adequate to the occasion. Charles died
patiently and bravely; not more patiently or bravely, indeed, than many
other victims of political rage; not more patiently or bravely than his
own judges, who were not only killed, but tortured; or than Vane, who
had always been considered as a timid man. However, the king’s conduct
during his trial and at his execution made a prodigious impression.
His subjects began to love his memory as heartily as they had hated his
person; and posterity has estimated his character from his death rather
than from his life.

To represent Charles as a martyr in the cause of Episcopacy is absurd.
Those who put him to death cared as little for the Assembly of Divines,
as for the Convocation, and would, in all probability, only have hated
him the more if he had agreed to set up the Presbyterian discipline.
Indeed, in spite of the opinion of Mr. Hallam, we are inclined to think
that the attachment of Charles to the Church of England was altogether
political. Human nature is, we admit, so capricious that there may be
a single, sensitive point, in a conscience which everywhere else is
callous. A man without truth or humanity may have some strange scruples
about a trifle. There was one devout warrior in the royal camp whose
piety bore a great resemblance to that which is ascribed to the King.
We mean Colonel Turner. That gallant Cavalier was hanged, after the
Restoration, for a flagitious burglary. At the gallows he told the crowd
that his mind received great consolation from one reflection: he had
always taken off his hat when he went into a church. The character of
Charles would scarcely rise in our estimation, if we believed that he
was pricked in conscience after the manner of this worthy loyalist, and
that while violating all the first rules of Christian morality, he was
sincerely scrupulous about church-government. But we acquit him of such
weakness. In 1641 he deliberately confirmed the Scotch Declaration which
stated that the government of the church by archbishops and bishops was
contrary to the word of God. In 1645, he appears to have offered to set
up Popery in Ireland. That a King who had established the Presbyterian
religion in one kingdom, and who was willing to establish the Catholic
religion in another, should have insurmountable scruples about the
ecclesiastical constitution of the third, is altogether incredible. He
himself says in his letters that he looks on Episcopacy as a stronger
support of monarchical power than even the army. From causes which we
have already considered, the Established Church had been, since the
Reformation, the great bulwark of the prerogative. Charles wished,
therefore, to preserve it. He thought himself necessary both to the
Parliament and to the army. He did not foresee, till too late, that by
paltering with the Presbyterians, he should put both them and himself
into the power of a fiercer and more daring party. If he had foreseen
it, we suspect that the royal blood which still cries to Heaven every
thirtieth of January, for judgments only to be averted by salt-fish and
egg-sauce, would never have been shed. One who had swallowed the Scotch
Declaration would scarcely strain at the Covenant.

The death of Charles and the strong measures which led to it raised
Cromwell to a height of power fatal to the infant Commonwealth. No
men occupy so splendid a place in history as those who have founded
monarchies on the ruins of republican institutions. Their glory, if not
of the purest, is assuredly of the most seductive and dazzling kind. In
nations broken to the curb, in nations long accustomed to be transferred
from one tyrant to another, a man without eminent qualities may easily
gain supreme power. The defection of a troop of guards, a conspiracy of
eunuchs, a popular tumult, might place an indolent senator or a brutal
soldier on the throne of the Roman world. Similar revolutions have often
occurred in the despotic states of Asia. But a community which has heard
the voice of truth and experienced the pleasures of liberty, in which
the merits of statesmen and of systems are freely canvassed, in which
obedience is paid, not to persons, but to laws, in which magistrates are
regarded, not as the lords, but as the servants of the public, in which
the excitement of a party is a necessary of life, in which political
warfare is reduced to a system of tactics; such a community is not
easily reduced to servitude. Beasts of burden may easily be managed by a
new master. But will the wild ass submit to the bonds? Will the unicorn
serve and abide by the crib? Will leviathan hold out his nostrils to the
book? The mythological conqueror of the East, whose enchantments reduced
wild beasts to the tameness of domestic cattle, and who harnessed
lions and tigers to his chariot, is but an imperfect type of those
extraordinary minds which have thrown a spell on the fierce spirits of
nations unaccustomed to control, and have compelled raging factions to
obey their reins and swell their triumph. The enterprise, be it good
or bad, is one which requires a truly great man. It demands courage,
activity, energy, wisdom, firmness, conspicuous virtues, or vices so
splendid and alluring as to resemble virtues.

Those who have succeeded in this arduous undertaking form a very small
and a very remarkable class. Parents of tyranny, heirs of freedom,
kings among citizens, citizens among kings, they unite in themselves the
characteristics of the system which springs from them, and those of the
system from which they have sprung. Their reigns shine with a double
light, the last and dearest rays of departing freedom mingled with the
first and brightest glories of empire in its dawn. The high qualities
of such a prince lend to despotism itself a charm drawn from the
liberty under which they were formed, and which they have destroyed.
He resembles an European who settles within the Tropics, and carries
thither the strength and the energetic habits acquired in regions more
propitious to the constitution. He differs as widely from princes nursed
in the purple of imperial cradles, as the companions of Gama from their
dwarfish and imbecile progeny, which, born in a climate unfavourable to
its growth and beauty, degenerates more and more, at every descent, from
the qualities of the original conquerors.

In this class three men stand pre-eminent, Caesar, Cromwell, and
Bonaparte. The highest place in this remarkable triumvirate belongs
undoubtedly to Caesar. He united the talents of Bonaparte to those of
Cromwell; and he possessed also, what neither Cromwell nor Bonaparte
possessed, learning, taste, wit, eloquence, the sentiments and the
manners of an accomplished gentleman.

Between Cromwell and Napoleon Mr. Hallam has instituted a parallel,
scarcely less ingenious than that which Burke has drawn between Richard
Coeur de Lion and Charles the Twelfth of Sweden. In this parallel,
however, and indeed throughout his work, we think that he hardly gives
Cromwell fair measure. “Cromwell,” says he, “far unlike his antitype,
never showed any signs of a legislative mind, or any desire to place his
renown on that noblest basis, the amelioration of social institutions.”
The difference in this respect, we conceive, was not in the character of
the men, but in the character of the revolutions by means of which they
rose to power. The civil war in England had been undertaken to defend
and restore; the republicans of France set themselves to destroy. In
England, the principles of the common law had never been disturbed, and
most even of its forms had been held sacred. In France, the law and
its ministers had been swept away together. In France, therefore,
legislation necessarily became the first business of the first settled
government which rose on the ruins of the old system. The admirers of
Inigo Jones have always maintained that his works are inferior to those
of Sir Christopher Wren, only because the great fire of London gave
Wren such a field for the display of his powers as no architect in the
history of the world ever possessed. Similar allowance must be made for
Cromwell. If he erected little that was new, it was because there had
been no general devastation to clear a space for him. As it was, he
reformed the representative system in a most judicious manner. He
rendered the administration of justice uniform throughout the island.
We will quote a passage from his speech to the Parliament in September
1656, which contains, we think, simple and rude as the diction is,
stronger indications of a legislative mind, than are to be found in the
whole range of orations delivered on such occasions before or since.

“There is one general grievance in the nation. It is the law. I think,
I may say it, I have as eminent judges in this land as have been had,
or that the nation has had for these many years. Truly, I could be
particular as to the executive part, to the administration; but
that would trouble you. But the truth of it is, there are wicked and
abominable laws that will be in your power to alter. To hang a man for
sixpence, threepence, I know not what,--to hang for a trifle, and pardon
murder, is in the ministration of the law through the ill framing of it.
I have known in my experience abominable murders quitted; and to see men
lose their lives for petty matters! This is a thing that God will reckon
for; and I wish it may not lie upon this nation a day longer than you
have an opportunity to give a remedy; and I hope I shall cheerfully join
with you in it.”

Mr. Hallam truly says that, though it is impossible to rank Cromwell
with Napoleon as a general, “yet his exploits were as much above
the level of his contemporaries, and more the effects of an original
uneducated capacity.” Bonaparte was trained in the best military
schools; the army which he led to Italy was one of the finest that ever
existed. Cromwell passed his youth and the prime of his manhood in a
civil situation. He never looked on war till he was more than forty
years old. He had first to form himself, and then to form his troops.
Out of raw levies he created an army, the bravest and the best
disciplined, the most orderly in peace, and the most terrible in war,
that Europe had seen. He called this body into existence. He led it to
conquest. He never fought a battle without gaining it. He never gained a
battle without annihilating the force opposed to him. Yet his victories
were not the highest glory of his military system. The respect which his
troops paid to property, their attachment to the laws and religion of
their country, their submission to the civil power, their temperance,
their intelligence, their industry, are without parallel. It was after
the Restoration that the spirit which their great leader had infused
into them was most signally displayed. At the command of the established
government, an established government which had no means of enforcing
obedience, fifty thousand soldiers whose backs no enemy had ever seen,
either in domestic or in continental war, laid down their arms, and
retired into the mass of the people, thenceforward to be distinguished
only by superior diligence, sobriety, and regularity in the pursuits, of
peace, from the other members of the community which they had saved.

In the general spirit and character of his administration, we think
Cromwell far superior to Napoleon. “In the civil government,” says Mr.
Hallam, “there can be no adequate parallel between one who had sucked
only the dregs of a besotted fanaticism, and one to whom the stores of
reason and philosophy were open.” These expressions, it seems to
us, convey the highest eulogium on our great countryman. Reason
and philosophy did not teach the conqueror of Europe to command his
passions, or to pursue, as a first object, the happiness of his people.
They did not prevent him from risking his fame and his power in a
frantic contest against the principles of human nature and the laws of
the physical world, against the rage of the winter and the liberty
of the sea. They did not exempt him from the influence of that most
pernicious of superstitions, a presumptuous fatalism. They did not
preserve him from the inebriation of prosperity, or restrain him from
indecent querulousness in adversity. On the other hand, the fanaticism
of Cromwell never urged him on impracticable undertakings, or confused
his perception of the public good. Our countryman, inferior to Bonaparte
in invention, was far superior to him in wisdom. The French Emperor is
among conquerors what Voltaire is among writers, a miraculous child.
His splendid genius was frequently clouded by fits of humour as absurdly
perverse as those of the pet of the nursery, who quarrels with his food,
and dashes his playthings to pieces. Cromwell was emphatically a man.
He possessed, in an eminent degree, that masculine and full-grown
robustness of mind, that equally diffused intellectual health, which,
if our national partiality does not mislead us, has peculiarly
characterised the great men of England. Never was any ruler so
conspicuously born for sovereignty. The cup which has intoxicated almost
all others, sobered him. His spirit, restless from its own buoyancy in
a lower sphere, reposed in majestic placidity as soon as it had reached
the level congenial to it. He had nothing in common with that large
class of men who distinguish themselves in subordinate posts, and whose
incapacity becomes obvious as soon as the public voice summons them
to take the lead. Rapidly as his fortunes grew, his mind expanded
more rapidly still. Insignificant as a private citizen, he was a great
general; he was a still greater prince. Napoleon had a theatrical
manner, in which the coarseness of a revolutionary guard-room was
blended with the ceremony of the old Court of Versailles. Cromwell,
by the confession even of his enemies, exhibited in his demeanour the
simple and natural nobleness of a man neither ashamed of his origin
nor vain of his elevation, of a man who had found his proper place in
society, and who felt secure that he was competent to fill it. Easy,
even to familiarity, where his own dignity was concerned, he was
punctilious only for his country. His own character he left to take care
of itself; he left it to be defended by his victories in war, and his
reforms in peace. But he was a jealous and implacable guardian of the
public honour. He suffered a crazy Quaker to insult him in the gallery
of Whitehall, and revenged himself only by liberating him and giving him
a dinner. But he was prepared to risk the chances of war to avenge the
blood of a private Englishman.

No sovereign ever carried to the throne so large a portion of the best
qualities of the middling orders, so strong a sympathy with the feelings
and interests of his people. He was sometimes driven to arbitrary
measures; but he had a high, stout, honest, English heart. Hence it was
that he loved to surround his throne with such men as Hale and Blake.
Hence it was that he allowed so large a share of political liberty to
his subjects, and that, even when an opposition dangerous to his power
and to his person almost compelled him to govern by the sword, he was
still anxious to leave a germ from which, at a more favourable season,
free institutions might spring. We firmly believe that, if his first
Parliament had not commenced its debates by disputing his title, his
government would have been as mild at home as it was energetic and able
abroad. He was a soldier; he had risen by war. Had his ambition been of
an impure or selfish kind, it would have been easy for him to plunge his
country into continental hostilities on a large scale, and to dazzle
the restless factions which he ruled, by the splendour of his victories.
Some of his enemies have sneeringly remarked, that in the successes
obtained under his administration he had no personal share; as if a man
who had raised himself from obscurity to empire solely by his military
talents could have any unworthy reason for shrinking from military
enterprise. This reproach is his highest glory. In the success of the
English navy he could have no selfish interest. Its triumphs added
nothing to his fame; its increase added nothing to his means of
overawing his enemies; its great leader was not his friend. Yet he took
a peculiar pleasure in encouraging that noble service which, of all the
instruments employed by an English government, is the most impotent
for mischief, and the most powerful for good. His administration was
glorious, but with no vulgar glory. It was not one of those periods of
overstrained and convulsive exertion which necessarily produce debility
and languor. Its energy was natural, healthful, temperate. He placed
England at the head of the Protestant interest, and in the first rank of
Christian powers. He taught every nation to value her friendship and
to dread her enmity. But he did not squander her resources in a vain
attempt to invest her with that supremacy which no power, in the modern
system of Europe, can safely affect, or can long retain.

This noble and sober wisdom had its reward. If he did not carry the
banners of the Commonwealth in triumph to distant capitals, if he did
not adorn Whitehall with the spoils of the Stadthouse and the Louvre, if
he did not portion out Flanders and Germany into principalities for his
kinsmen and his generals, he did not, on the other hand, see his country
overrun by the armies of nations which his ambition had provoked. He did
not drag out the last years of his life an exile and a prisoner, in
an unhealthy climate and under an ungenerous gaoler, raging with the
impotent desire of vengeance, and brooding over visions of departed
glory. He went down to his grave in the fulness of power and fame; and
he left to his son an authority which any man of ordinary firmness and
prudence would have retained.

But for the weakness of that foolish Ishbosheth, the opinions which we
have been expressing would, we believe, now have formed the orthodox
creed of good Englishmen. We might now be writing under the government
of his Highness Oliver the Fifth or Richard the Fourth, Protector, by
the grace of God, of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland,
and the dominions thereto belonging. The form of the great founder of
the dynasty, on horseback, as when he led the charge at Naseby or on
foot, as when he took the mace from the table of the Commons, would
adorn our squares and over look our public offices from Charing Cross;
and sermons in his praise would be duly preached on his lucky day, the
third of September, by court-chaplains, guiltless of the abomination of
the surplice.

But, though his memory has not been taken under the patronage of any
party, though every device has been used to blacken it, though to praise
him would long have been a punishable crime, truth and merit at last
prevail. Cowards who had trembled at the very sound of his name, tools
of office, who, like Downing, had been proud of the honour of lacqueying
his coach, might insult him in loyal speeches and addresses. Venal poets
might transfer to the king the same eulogies little the worse for wear,
which they had bestowed on the Protector. A fickle multitude might crowd
to shout and scoff round the gibbeted remains of the greatest Prince
and Soldier of the age. But when the Dutch cannon startled an effeminate
tyrant in his own palace, when the conquests which had been won by the
armies of Cromwell were sold to pamper the harlots of Charles, when
Englishmen were sent to fight under foreign banners, against the
independence of Europe and the Protestant religion, many honest hearts
swelled in secret at the thought of one who had never suffered his
country to be ill-used by any but himself. It must indeed have been
difficult for any Englishman to see the salaried viceroy of France, at
the most important crisis of his fate, sauntering through his haram,
yawning and talking nonsense over a despatch, or beslobbering his
brother and his courtiers in a fit of maudlin affection, without a
respectful and tender remembrance of him before whose genius the young
pride of Louis and the veteran craft of Mazarine had stood rebuked, who
had humbled Spain on the land and Holland on the sea, and whose imperial
voice had arrested the sails of the Libyan pirates and the persecuting
fires of Rome. Even to the present day his character, though constantly
attacked, and scarcely ever defended, is popular with the great body of
our countrymen.

The most blameable act of his life was the execution of Charles. We have
already strongly condemned that proceeding; but we by no means consider
it as one which attaches any peculiar stigma of infamy to the names of
those who participated in it. It was an unjust and injudicious display
of violent party spirit; but it was not a cruel or perfidious measure.
It had all those features which distinguish the errors of magnanimous
and intrepid spirits from base and malignant crimes.

From the moment that Cromwell is dead and buried, we go on in almost
perfect harmony with Mr. Hallam to the end of his book. The times which
followed the Restoration peculiarly require that unsparing impartiality
which is his most distinguishing virtue. No part of our history,
during the last three centuries, presents a spectacle of such general
dreariness. The whole breed of our statesmen seems to have degenerated;
and their moral and intellectual littleness strikes us with the more
disgust, because we see it placed in immediate contrast with the high
and majestic qualities of the race which they succeeded. In the great
civil war, even the bad cause had been rendered respectable and amiable
by the purity and elevation of mind which many of its friends displayed.
Under Charles the Second, the best and noblest of ends was disgraced by
means the most cruel and sordid. The rage of faction succeeded to the
love of liberty. Loyalty died away into servility. We look in vain among
the leading politicians of either side for steadiness of principle,
or even for that vulgar fidelity to party which, in our time, it is
esteemed infamous to violate. The inconsistency, perfidy, and baseness,
which the leaders constantly practised, which their followers defended,
and which the great body of the people regarded, as it seems, with
little disapprobation, appear in the present age almost incredible. In
the age of Charles the First, they would, we believe, have excited as
much astonishment.

Man, however, is always the same. And when so marked a difference
appears between two generations, it is certain that the solution may be
found in their respective circumstances. The principal statesmen of the
reign of Charles the Second were trained during the civil war and the
revolutions which followed it. Such a period is eminently favourable to
the growth of quick and active talents. It forms a class of men, shrewd,
vigilant, inventive; of men whose dexterity triumphs over the most
perplexing combinations of circumstances, whose presaging instinct no
sign of the times can elude. But it is an unpropitious season for the
firm and masculine virtues. The statesman who enters on his career at
such a time, can form no permanent connections, can make no accurate
observations on the higher parts of political science. Before he can
attach himself to a party, it is scattered. Before he can study the
nature of a government, it is overturned. The oath of abjuration comes
close on the oath of allegiance. The association which was subscribed
yesterday is burned by the hangman to-day. In the midst of the constant
eddy and change, self-preservation becomes the first object of the
adventurer. It is a task too hard for the strongest head to keep itself
from becoming giddy in the eternal whirl. Public spirit is out of the
question. A laxity of principle, without which no public man can be
eminent or even safe, becomes too common to be scandalous; and the whole
nation looks coolly on instances of apostasy which would startle the
foulest turncoat of more settled times.

The history of France since the Revolution affords some striking
illustrations of these remarks. The same man was a servant of the
Republic, of Bonaparte, of Lewis the Eighteenth, of Bonaparte again
after his return from Elba, of Lewis again after his return from Ghent.
Yet all these manifold treasons by no means seemed to destroy his
influence, or even to fix any peculiar stain of infamy on his character.
We, to be sure, did not know what to make of him; but his countrymen
did not seem to be shocked; and in truth they had little right to be
shocked: for there was scarcely one Frenchman distinguished in the state
or in the army, who had not, according to the best of his talents and
opportunities, emulated the example. It was natural, too, that this
should be the case. The rapidity and violence with which change followed
change in the affairs of France towards the close of the last century
had taken away the reproach of inconsistency, unfixed the principles
of public men, and produced in many minds a general scepticism and
indifference about principles of government.

No Englishman who has studied attentively the reign of Charles the
Second, will think himself entitled to indulge in any feelings of
national superiority over the Dictionnaire des Girouttes. Shaftesbury
was surely a far less respectable man than Talleyrand; and it would
be injustice even to Fouche to compare him with Lauderdale. Nothing,
indeed, can more clearly show how low the standard of political
morality had fallen in this country than the fortunes of the two British
statesmen whom we have named. The government wanted a ruffian to carry
on the most atrocious system of misgovernment with which any nation
was ever cursed, to extirpate Presbyterianism by fire and sword, by the
drowning of women, by the frightful torture of the boot. And they
found him among the chiefs of the rebellion and the subscribers of the
Covenant. The opposition looked for a chief to head them in the most
desperate attacks ever made, under the forms of the Constitution, on
any English administration; and they selected the minister who had the
deepest share in the worst acts of the Court, the soul of the Cabal, the
counsellor who had shut up the Exchequer and urged on the Dutch war. The
whole political drama was of the same cast. No unity of plan, no decent
propriety of character and costume, could be found in that wild
and monstrous harlequinade. The whole was made up of extravagant
transformations and burlesque contrasts; Atheists turned Puritans;
Puritans turned Atheists; republicans defending the divine right of
kings; prostitute courtiers clamouring for the liberties of the people;
judges inflaming the rage of mobs; patriots pocketing bribes from
foreign powers; a Popish prince torturing Presbyterians into Episcopacy
in one part of the island; Presbyterians cutting off the heads of Popish
noblemen and gentlemen in the other. Public opinion has its natural flux
and reflux. After a violent burst, there is commonly a reaction. But
vicissitudes so extraordinary as those which marked the reign of Charles
the Second can only be explained by supposing an utter want of principle
in the political world. On neither side was there fidelity enough to
face a reverse. Those honourable retreats from power which, in later
days, parties have often made, with loss, but still in good order, in
firm union, with unbroken spirit and formidable means of annoyance, were
utterly unknown. As soon as a check took place a total rout followed:
arms and colours were thrown away. The vanquished troops, like the
Italian mercenaries of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, enlisted
on the very field of battle, in the service of the conquerors. In a
nation proud of its sturdy justice and plain good sense, no party could
be found to take a firm middle stand between the worst of oppositions
and the worst of courts. When on charges as wild as Mother Goose’s
tales, on the testimony of wretches who proclaimed themselves to be
spies and traitors, and whom everybody now believes to have been also
liars and murderers, the offal of gaols and brothels, the leavings of
the hangman’s whip and shears, Catholics guilty of nothing but their
religion were led like sheep to the Protestant shambles, where were the
loyal Tory gentry and the passively obedient clergy? And where, when the
time of retribution came, when laws were strained and juries packed
to destroy the leaders of the Whigs, when charters were invaded, when
Jeffreys and Kirke were making Somersetshire what Lauderdale and
Graham had made Scotland, where were the ten thousand brisk boys of
Shaftesbury, the members of ignoramus juries, the wearers of the Polish
medal? All-powerful to destroy others, unable to save themselves, the
members of the two parties oppressed and were oppressed, murdered and
were murdered, in their turn. No lucid interval occurred between the
frantic paroxysms of two contradictory illusions.

To the frequent changes of the government during the twenty years which
had preceded the Restoration, this unsteadiness is in a great measure to
be attributed. Other causes had also been at work. Even if the country
had been governed by the house of Cromwell or by the remains of the Long
Parliament, the extreme austerity of the Puritans would necessarily have
produced a revulsion. Towards the close of the Protectorate many signs
indicated that a time of licence was at hand. But the restoration of
Charles the Second rendered the change wonderfully rapid and violent.
Profligacy became a test of orthodoxy, and loyalty a qualification for
rank and office. A deep and general taint infected the morals of the
most influential classes, and spread itself through every province
of letters. Poetry inflamed the passions; philosophy undermined the
principles; divinity itself, inculcating an abject reverence for the
Court, gave additional effect to the licentious example of the Court.
We look in vain for those qualities which lend a charm to the errors
of high and ardent natures, for the generosity, the tenderness, the
chivalrous delicacy, which ennoble appetites into passions, and impart
to vice itself a portion of the majesty of virtue. The excesses of that
age remind us of the humours of a gang of footpads, revelling with their
favourite beauties at a flash-house In the fashionable libertinism there
is a hard, cold ferocity, an impudence, a lowness, a dirtiness, which
can be paralleled only among the heroes and heroines of that filthy
and heartless literature which encouraged it. One nobleman of great
abilities wanders about as a Merry-Andrew. Another harangues the mob
stark naked from a window. A third lays an ambush to cudgel a man who
has offended him. A knot of gentlemen of high rank and influence combine
to push their fortunes at Court by circulating stories intended to ruin
an innocent girl, stones which had no foundation, and which, if they had
been true, would never have passed the lips of a man of honour. A dead
child is found in the palace, the offspring of some maid of honour
by some courtier, or perhaps by Charles himself. The whole flight of
pandars and buffoons pounce upon it, and carry it in triumph to the
royal laboratory, where his Majesty, after a brutal jest, dissects it
for the amusement of the assembly, and probably of its father among
the rest. The favourite Duchess stamps about Whitehall, cursing and
swearing. The ministers employ their time at the council-board in
making mouths at each other and taking off each other’s gestures for the
amusement of the King. The Peers at a conference begin to pommel each
other and to tear collars and periwigs. A speaker in the House of
Commons gives offence to the Court. He is waylaid by a gang of bullies,
and his nose is cut to the bone. This ignominious dissoluteness, or
rather, if we may venture to designate it by the only proper word,
blackguardism of feeling and manners, could not but spread from private
to public life. The cynical sneers, and epicurean sophistry, which had
driven honour and virtue from one part of the character, extended their
influence over every other. The second generation of the statesmen of
this reign were worthy pupils of the schools in which they had been
trained, of the gaming-table of Grammont, and the tiring-room of Nell.
In no other age could such a trifler as Buckingham have exercised any
political influence. In no other age could the path to power and glory
have been thrown open to the manifold infamies of Churchill.

The history of Churchill shows, more clearly perhaps than that of any
other individual, the malignity and extent of the corruption which had
eaten into the heart of the public morality. An English gentleman of
good family attaches himself to a Prince who has seduced his sister, and
accepts rank and wealth as the price of her shame and his own. He then
repays by ingratitude the benefits which he has purchased by ignominy,
betrays his patron in a manner which the best cause cannot excuse, and
commits an act, not only of private treachery, but of distinct military
desertion. To his conduct at the crisis of the fate of James, no service
in modern times has, as far as we remember, furnished any parallel. The
conduct of Ney, scandalous enough no doubt, is the very fastidiousness
of honour in comparison of it. The perfidy of Arnold approaches it
most nearly. In our age and country no talents, no services, no party
attachments, could bear any man up under such mountains of infamy. Yet,
even before Churchill had performed those great actions which in some
degree redeem his character with posterity, the load lay very lightly on
him. He had others in abundance to keep him in countenance. Godolphin,
Orford, Danby, the trimmer Halifax, the renegade Sunderland, were all
men of the same class.

Where such was the political morality of the noble and the wealthy, it
may easily be conceived that those professions which, even in the best
times, are peculiarly liable to corruption, were in a frightful state.
Such a bench and such a bar England has never seen. Jones, Scroggs,
Jeffreys, North, Wright, Sawyer, Williams, are to this day the spots
and blemishes of our legal chronicles. Differing in constitution and
in situation, whether blustering or cringing, whether persecuting
Protestant or Catholics, they were equally unprincipled and inhuman. The
part which the Church played was not equally atrocious; but it must have
been exquisitely diverting to a scoffer. Never were principles so loudly
professed, and so shamelessly abandoned. The Royal prerogative had been
magnified to the skies in theological works. The doctrine of passive
obedience had been preached from innumerable pulpits. The University of
Oxford had sentenced the works of the most moderate constitutionalists
to the flames. The accession of a Catholic King, the frightful cruelties
committed in the west of England, never shook the steady loyalty of
the clergy. But did they serve the King for nought? He laid his hand
on them, and they cursed him to his face. He touched the revenue of a
college and the liberty of some prelates; and the whole profession set
up a yell worthy of Hugh Peters himself. Oxford sent her plate to an
invader with more alacrity than she had shown when Charles the First
requested it. Nothing was said about the wickedness of resistance till
resistance had done its work, till the anointed vicegerent of Heaven had
been driven away, and till it had become plain that he would never be
restored, or would be restored at least under strict limitations. The
clergy went back, it must be owned, to their old theory, as soon as they
found that it would do them no harm.

It is principally to the general baseness and profligacy of the times
that Clarendon is indebted for his high reputation. He was, in every
respect, a man unfit for his age, at once too good for it and too bad
for it. He seemed to be one of the ministers of Elizabeth, transplanted
at once to a state of society widely different from that in which the
abilities of such ministers had been serviceable. In the sixteenth
century, the Royal prerogative had scarcely been called in question. A
Minister who held it high was in no danger, so long as he used it
well. That attachment to the Crown, that extreme jealousy of popular
encroachments, that love, half religious half political, for the Church,
which, from the beginning of the second session of the Long Parliament,
showed itself in Clarendon, and which his sufferings, his long residence
in France, and his high station in the government, served to strengthen,
would a hundred years earlier, have secured to him the favour of his
sovereign without rendering him odious to the people. His probity, his
correctness in private life, his decency of deportment, and his
general ability, would not have misbecome a colleague of Walsingham and
Burleigh. But, in the times on which he was cast, his errors and his
virtues were alike out of place. He imprisoned men without trial. He was
accused of raising unlawful contributions on the people for the support
of the army. The abolition of the act which ensured the frequent holding
of Parliaments was one of his favourite objects. He seems to have
meditated the revival of the Star-Chamber and the High Commission Court.
His zeal for the prerogative made him unpopular; but it could not secure
to him the favour of a master far more desirous of ease and pleasure
than of power. Charles would rather have lived in exile and privacy,
with abundance of money, a crowd of mimics to amuse him, and a score of
mistresses, than have purchased the absolute dominion of the world by
the privations and exertions to which Clarendon was constantly urging
him. A councillor who was always bringing him papers and giving him
advice, and who stoutly refused to compliment Lady Castlemaine and to
carry messages to Mistress Stewart, soon became more hateful to him than
ever Cromwell had been. Thus, considered by the people as an oppressor,
by the Court as a censor, the Minister fell from his high office with a
ruin more violent and destructive than could ever have been his fate, if
he had either respected the principles of the Constitution or flattered
the vices of the King.

Mr. Hallam has formed, we think, a most correct estimate of the
character and administration of Clarendon. But he scarcely makes
a sufficient allowance for the wear and tear which honesty almost
necessarily sustains in the friction of political life, and which, in
times so rough as those through which Clarendon passed, must be very
considerable. When these are fairly estimated, we think that his
integrity may be allowed to pass muster. A high-minded man he certainly
was not, either in public or in private affairs. His own account of his
conduct in the affair of his daughter is the most extraordinary passage
in autobiography. We except nothing even in the Confessions of Rousseau.
Several writers have taken a perverted and absurd pride in representing
themselves as detestable; but no other ever laboured hard to make
himself despicable and ridiculous. In one important particular Clarendon
showed as little regard to the honour of his country as he had shown to
that of his family. He accepted a subsidy from France for the relief of
Portugal. But this method of obtaining money was afterwards practised to
a much greater extent and for objects much less respectable, both by the
Court and by the Opposition.

These pecuniary transactions are commonly considered as the most
disgraceful part of the history of those times: and they were no doubt
highly reprehensible. Yet, in justice to the Whigs and to Charles
himself, we must admit that they were not so shameful or atrocious as at
the present day they appear. The effect of violent animosities between
parties has always been an indifference to the general welfare
and honour of the State. A politician, where factions run high, is
interested not for the whole people, but for his own section of it.
The rest are, in his view, strangers, enemies, or rather pirates. The
strongest aversion which he can feel to any foreign power is the ardour
of friendship, when compared with the loathing which he entertains
towards those domestic foes with whom he is cooped up in a narrow space,
with whom he lives in a constant interchange of petty injuries and
insults, and from whom, in the day of their success, he has to expect
severities far beyond any that a conqueror from a distant country would
inflict. Thus, in Greece, it was a point of honour for a man to cleave
to his party against his country. No aristocratical citizen of Samos
or Corcyra would have hesitated to call in the aid of Lacedaemon. The
multitude, on the contrary, looked everywhere to Athens. In the Italian
states of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, from the same cause,
no man was so much a Pisan or a Florentine as a Ghibelline or a Guelf.
It may be doubted whether there was a single individual who would have
scrupled to raise his party from a state of depression, by opening
the gates of his native city to a French or an Arragonese force. The
Reformation, dividing almost every European country into two parts,
produced similar effects. The Catholic was too strong for the
Englishman, the Huguenot for the Frenchman. The Protestant statesmen of
Scotland and France called in the aid of Elizabeth; and the Papists of
the League brought a Spanish army into the very heart of France. The
commotions to which the French Revolution gave rise were followed by the
same consequences. The Republicans in every part of Europe were eager to
see the armies of the National Convention and the Directory appear among
them, and exalted in defeats which distressed and humbled those whom
they considered as their worst enemies, their own rulers. The princes
and nobles of France, on the other hand, did their utmost to bring
foreign invaders to Paris. A very short time has elapsed since the
Apostolical party in Spain invoked, too successfully, the support of
strangers.

The great contest which raged in England during the seventeenth century
extinguished, not indeed in the body of the people, but in those classes
which were most actively engaged in politics, almost all national
feelings. Charles the Second and many of his courtiers had passed a
large part of their lives in banishment, living on the bounty of foreign
treasuries, soliciting foreign aid to re-establish monarchy in their
native country. The King’s own brother had fought in Flanders, under the
banners of Spain, against the English armies. The oppressed Cavaliers in
England constantly looked to the Louvre and the Escurial for deliverance
and revenge. Clarendon censures the continental governments with great
bitterness for not interfering in our internal dissensions. It is not
strange, therefore, that, amidst the furious contests which followed the
Restoration, the violence of party feeling should produce effects which
would probably have attended it even in an age less distinguished by
laxity of principle and indelicacy of sentiment. It was not till a
natural death had terminated the paralytic old age of the Jacobite
party that the evil was completely at an end. The Whigs long looked to
Holland, the High Tories to France. The former concluded the Barrier
Treaty; the latter entreated the Court of Versailles to send an
expedition to England. Many men, who, however erroneous their political
notions might be, were unquestionably honourable in private life,
accepted money without scruple from the foreign powers favourable to the
Pretender.

Never was there less of national feeling among the higher orders than
during the reign of Charles the Second. That Prince, on the one side,
thought it better to be the deputy of an absolute king than the King
of a free people. Algernon Sydney, on the other hand, would gladly have
aided France in all her ambitious schemes, and have seen England reduced
to the condition of a province, in the wild hope that a foreign despot
would assist him to establish his darling republic. The King took the
money of France to assist him in the enterprise which he meditated
against the liberty of his subjects, with as little scruple as Frederic
of Prussia or Alexander of Russia accepted our subsidies in time of war.
The leaders of the Opposition no more thought themselves disgraced by
the presents of Lewis, than a gentleman of our own time thinks himself
disgraced by the liberality of powerful and wealthy members of his party
who pay his election bill. The money which the King received from France
had been largely employed to corrupt members of Parliament. The enemies
of the court might think it fair, or even absolutely necessary, to
encounter bribery with bribery. Thus they took the French gratuities,
the needy among them for their own use, the rich probably for the
general purposes of the party, without any scruple. If we compare their
conduct not with that of English statesmen in our own time, but with
that of persons in those foreign countries which are now situated as
England then was, we shall probably see reason to abate something of the
severity of censure with which it has been the fashion to visit those
proceedings. Yet when every allowance is made, the transaction is
sufficiently offensive. It is satisfactory to find that Lord Russell
stands free from any imputation of personal participation in the spoil.
An age so miserably poor in all the moral qualities which render public
characters respectable can ill spare the credit which it derives from a
man, not indeed conspicuous for talents or knowledge, but honest even
in his errors, respectable in every relation of life, rationally pious,
steadily and placidly brave.

The great improvement which took place in our breed of public men is
principally to be ascribed to the Revolution. Yet that memorable event,
in a great measure, took its character from the very vices which it
was the means of reforming. It was assuredly a happy revolution, and
a useful revolution; but it was not, what it has often been called, a
glorious revolution. William, and William alone, derived glory from it.
The transaction was, in almost every part, discreditable to England.
That a tyrant who had violated the fundamental laws of the country, who
had attacked the rights of its greatest corporations, who had begun to
persecute the established religion of the state, who had never respected
the law either in his superstition or in his revenge, could not be
pulled down without the aid of a foreign army, is a circumstance not
very grateful to our national pride. Yet this is the least degrading
part of the story. The shameless insincerity of the great and noble,
the warm assurances of general support which James received, down to
the moment of general desertion, indicate a meanness of spirit and a
looseness of morality most disgraceful to the age. That the enterprise
succeeded, at least that it succeeded without bloodshed or commotion,
was principally owing to an act of ungrateful perfidy, such as no
soldier had ever before committed, and to those monstrous fictions
respecting the birth of the Prince of Wales which persons of the highest
rank were not ashamed to circulate. In all the proceedings of the
convention, in the conference particularly, we see that littleness of
mind which is the chief characteristic of the times. The resolutions on
which the two Houses at last agreed were as bad as any resolutions for
so excellent a purpose could be. Their feeble and contradictory language
was evidently intended to save the credit of the Tories, who were
ashamed to name what they were not ashamed to do. Through the whole
transaction no commanding talents were displayed by any Englishman;
no extraordinary risks were run; no sacrifices were made for the
deliverance of the nation, except the sacrifice which Churchill made of
honour, and Anne of natural affection.

It was in some sense fortunate, as we have already said, for the Church
of England, that the Reformation in this country was effected by men who
cared little about religion. And, in the same manner, it was fortunate
for our civil government that the Revolution was in a great measure
effected by men who cared little about their political principles. At
such a crisis, splendid talents and strong passions might have done more
harm than good. There was far greater reason to fear that too much
would be attempted, and that violent movements would produce an equally
violent reaction, than that too little would be done in the way of
change. But narrowness of intellect, and flexibility of principle,
though they may be serviceable, can never be respectable.

If in the Revolution itself, there was little that can properly be
called glorious, there was still less in the events which followed. In
a church which had as one man declared the doctrine of resistance
unchristian, only four hundred persons refused to take the oath of
allegiance to a government founded on resistance. In the preceding
generation, both the Episcopal and the Presbyterian clergy, rather than
concede points of conscience not more important, had resigned their
livings by thousands.

The churchmen, at the time of the Revolution, justified their conduct by
all those profligate sophisms which are called Jesuitical, and which are
commonly reckoned among the peculiar sins of Popery, but which, in fact,
are everywhere the anodynes employed by minds rather subtle than strong,
to quiet those internal twinges which they cannot but feel and which
they will not obey. As the oath taken by the clergy was in the teeth of
their principles, so was their conduct in the teeth of their oath. Their
constant machinations against the Government to which they had sworn
fidelity brought a reproach on their order and on Christianity itself. A
distinguished prelate has not scrupled to say that the rapid increase
of infidelity at that time was principally produced by the disgust which
the faithless conduct of his brethren excited in men not sufficiently
candid or judicious to discern the beauties of the system amidst the
vices of its ministers.

But the reproach was not confined to the Church. In every political
party in the Cabinet itself, duplicity and perfidy abounded. The very
men whom William loaded with benefits and in whom he reposed most
confidence, with his seals of office in their hands, kept up a
correspondence with the exiled family. Orford, Leeds, and Shrewsbury
were guilty of this odious treachery. Even Devonshire is not altogether
free from suspicion. It may well be conceived that, at such a time,
such a nature as that of Marlborough would riot in the very luxury of
baseness. His former treason, thoroughly furnished with all that makes
infamy exquisite, placed him under the disadvantage which attends every
artist from the time that he produces a masterpiece. Yet his second
great stroke may excite wonder, even in those who appreciate all the
merit of the first. Lest his admirers should be able to say that at
the time of the Revolution he had betrayed his King from any other
than selfish motives, he proceeded to betray his country. He sent
intelligence to the French Court of a secret expedition intended to
attack Brest. The consequence was that the expedition failed, and that
eight hundred British soldiers lost their lives from the abandoned
villainy of a British general. Yet this man has been canonized by
so many eminent writers that to speak of him as he deserves may seem
scarcely decent.

The reign of William the Third, as Mr. Hallam happily says, was the
Nadir of the national prosperity. It was also the Nadir of the national
character. It was the time when the rank harvest of vices sown during
thirty years of licentiousness and confusion was gathered in; but it was
also the seed-time of great virtues.

The press was emancipated from the censorship soon after the Revolution;
and the Government immediately fell under the censorship of the press.
Statesmen had a scrutiny to endure which was every day becoming more and
more severe. The extreme violence of opinions abated. The Whigs learned
moderation in office; the Tories learned the principles of liberty
in opposition. The parties almost constantly approximated, often met,
sometimes crossed each other. There were occasional bursts of violence;
but, from the time of the Revolution, those bursts were constantly
becoming less and less terrible. The severity with which the Tories, at
the close of the reign of Anne, treated some of those who had directed
the public affairs during the war of the Grand Alliance, and the
retaliatory measures of the Whigs, after the accession of the House of
Hanover, cannot be justified; but they were by no means in the style
of the infuriated parties, whose alternate murders had disgraced our
history towards the close of the reign of Charles the Second. At the
fall of Walpole far greater moderation was displayed. And from that
time it has been the practice, a practice not strictly according to the
theory of our Constitution, but still most salutary, to consider the
loss of office, and the public disapprobation, as punishments sufficient
for errors in the administration not imputable to personal corruption.
Nothing, we believe, has contributed more than this lenity to raise
the character of public men. Ambition is of itself a game sufficiently
hazardous and sufficiently deep to inflame the passions without adding
property, life, and liberty to the stake. Where the play runs so
desperately high as in the seventeenth century, honour is at an end.
Statesmen instead of being, as they should be, at once mild and steady,
are at once ferocious and inconsistent. The axe is for ever before their
eyes. A popular outcry sometimes unnerves them, and sometimes makes them
desperate; it drives them to unworthy compliances, or to measures of
vengeance as cruel as those which they have reason to expect. A Minister
in our times need not fear either to be firm or to be merciful. Our old
policy in this respect was as absurd as that of the king in the Eastern
tale who proclaimed that any physician who pleased might come to court
and prescribe for his diseases, but that if the remedies failed the
adventurer should lose his head. It is easy to conceive how many able
men would refuse to undertake the cure on such conditions; how much the
sense of extreme danger would confuse the perceptions, and cloud the
intellect of the practitioner, at the very crisis which most called for
self-possession, and how strong his temptation would be, if he found
that he had committed a blunder, to escape the consequences of it by
poisoning his patient.

But in fact it would have been impossible, since the Revolution, to
punish any Minister for the general course of his policy, with the
slightest semblance of justice; for since that time no Minister has been
able to pursue any general course of policy without the approbation of
the Parliament. The most important effects of that great change were,
as Mr. Hallam has most truly said, and most ably shown, those which
it indirectly produced. Thenceforward it became the interest of the
executive government to protect those very doctrines which an executive
government is in general inclined to persecute. The sovereign, the
ministers, the courtiers, at last even the universities and the clergy,
were changed into advocates of the right of resistance. In the theory of
the Whigs, in the situation of the Tories, in the common interest of all
public men, the Parliamentary constitution of the country found perfect
security. The power of the House of Commons, in particular, has been
steadily on the increase. Since supplies have been granted for short
terms and appropriated to particular services, the approbation of that
House has been as necessary in practice to the executive administration
as it has always been in theory to taxes and to laws.

Mr. Hallam appears to have begun with the reign of Henry the Seventh, as
the period at which what is called modern history, in contradistinction
to the history of the middle ages, is generally supposed to commence. He
has stopped at the accession of George the Third, “from unwillingness”
as he says, “to excite the prejudices of modern politics, especially
those connected with personal character.” These two eras, we think,
deserved the distinction on other grounds. Our remote posterity, when
looking back on our history in that comprehensive manner in which remote
posterity alone can, without much danger of error, look back on it, will
probably observe those points with peculiar interest. They are, if we
mistake not, the beginning and the end of an entire and separate chapter
in our annals. The period which lies between them is a perfect cycle, a
great year of the public mind.

In the reign of Henry the Seventh, all the political differences which
had agitated England since the Norman conquest seemed to be set at
rest. The long and fierce struggle between the Crown and the Barons had
terminated. The grievances which had produced the rebellions of Tyler
and Cade had disappeared. Villanage was scarcely known. The two royal
houses, whose conflicting claims had long convulsed the kingdom, were
at length united. The claimants whose pretensions, just or unjust, had
disturbed the new settlement, were overthrown. In religion there was no
open dissent, and probably very little secret heresy. The old subjects
of contention, in short, had vanished; those which were to succeed had
not yet appeared.

Soon, however, new principles were announced; principles which were
destined to keep England during two centuries and a half in a state of
commotion. The Reformation divided the people into two great parties.
The Protestants were victorious. They again subdivided themselves.
Political factions were engrafted on theological sects. The mutual
animosities of the two parties gradually emerged into the light of
public life. First came conflicts in Parliament; then civil war; then
revolutions upon revolutions, each attended by its appurtenance of
proscriptions, and persecutions, and tests; each followed by severe
measures on the part of the conquerors; each exciting a deadly and
festering hatred in the conquered. During the reign of George the
Second, things were evidently tending to repose. At the close of that
reign, the nation had completed the great revolution which commenced in
the early part of the sixteenth century, and was again at rest, The fury
of sects had died away. The Catholics themselves practically enjoyed
toleration; and more than toleration they did not yet venture even to
desire. Jacobitism was a mere name. Nobody was left to fight for
that wretched cause, and very few to drink for it. The Constitution,
purchased so dearly, was on every side extolled and worshipped. Even
those distinctions of party which must almost always be found in a free
state could scarcely be traced. The two great bodies which, from the
time of the Revolution, had been gradually tending to approximation,
were now united in emulous support of that splendid Administration which
smote to the dust both the branches of the House of Bourbon. The great
battle for our ecclesiastical and civil polity had been fought and
won. The wounds had been healed. The victors and the vanquished were
rejoicing together. Every person acquainted with the political writers
of the last generation will recollect the terms in which they generally
speak of that time. It was a glimpse of a golden age of union and
glory, a short interval of rest, which had been preceded by centuries of
agitation, and which centuries of agitation were destined to follow.

How soon faction again began to ferment is well known. The Letters of
Junius, in Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Discontents, and in many
other writings of less merit, the violent dissensions which speedily
convulsed the country are imputed to the system of favouritism which
George the Third introduced, to the influence of Bute, or to the
profligacy of those who called themselves the King’s friends. With
all deference to the eminent writers to whom we have referred, we may
venture to say that they lived too near the events of which they treated
to judge correctly. The schism which was then appearing in the nation,
and which has been from that time almost constantly widening, had little
in common with those schisms which had divided it during the reigns of
the Tudors and the Stuarts. The symptoms of popular feeling, indeed,
will always be in a great measure the same; but the principle which
excited that feeling was here new. The support which was given to
Wilkes, the clamour for reform during the American war, the disaffected
conduct of large classes of people at the time of the French Revolution,
no more resembled the opposition which had been offered to the
government of Charles the Second, than that opposition resembled the
contest between the Roses.

In the political as in the natural body, a sensation is often referred
to a part widely different from that in which it really resides. A man
whose leg is cut off fancies that he feels a pain in his toe. And in the
same manner the people, in the earlier part of the late reign, sincerely
attributed their discontent to grievances which had been effectually
lopped off. They imagined that the prerogative was too strong for the
Constitution, that the principles of the Revolution were abandoned, that
the system of the Stuarts was restored. Every impartial man must now
acknowledge that these charges were groundless. The conduct of the
Government with respect to the Middlesex election would have been
contemplated with delight by the first generation of Whigs. They would
have thought it a splendid triumph of the cause of liberty that the
King and the Lords should resign to the lower House a portion of the
legislative power, and allow it to incapacitate without their consent.
This, indeed, Mr. Burke clearly perceived. “When the House of Commons,”
says he, “in an endeavour to obtain new advantages at the expense of the
other orders of the state, for the benefit of the commons at large, have
pursued strong measures, if it were not just, it was at least natural,
that the constituents should connive at all their proceedings; because
we ourselves were ultimately to profit. But when this submission is
urged to us in a contest between the representatives and ourselves, and
where nothing can be put into their scale which is not taken from
ours, they fancy us to be children when they tell us that they are our
representatives, our own flesh and blood, and that all the stripes they
give us are for our good.” These sentences contain, in fact, the whole
explanation of the mystery. The conflict of the seventeenth century
was maintained by the Parliament against the Crown. The conflict which
commenced in the middle of the eighteenth century, which still remains
undecided, and in which our children and grandchildren will probably be
called to act or to suffer, is between a large portion of the people on
the one side, and the Crown and the Parliament united on the other.

The privileges of the House of Commons, those privileges which, in
1642, all London rose in arms to defend, which the people considered
as synonymous with their own liberties, and in comparison of which they
took no account of the most precious and sacred principles of English
jurisprudence, have now become nearly as odious as the rigours of
martial law. That power of committing which the people anciently loved
to see the House of Commons exercise, is now, at least when employed
against libellers, the most unpopular power in the Constitution. If the
Commons were to suffer the Lords to amend money-bills, we do not believe
that the people would care one straw about the matter. If they were to
suffer the Lords even to originate money-bills, we doubt whether such
a surrender of their constitutional rights would excite half so much
dissatisfaction as the exclusion of strangers from a single important
discussion. The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth
estate of the realm. The publication of the debates, a practice which
seemed to the most liberal statesmen of the old school full of danger to
the great safeguards of public liberty, is now regarded by many persons
as a safeguard tantamount, and more than tantamount, to all the rest
together.

Burke, in a speech on parliamentary reform which is the more remarkable
because it was delivered long before the French Revolution, has
described, in striking language, the change in public feeling of which
we speak. “It suggests melancholy reflections,” says he, “in consequence
of the strange course we have long held, that we are now no longer
quarrelling about the character, or about the conduct of men, or the
tenor of measures; but we are grown out of humour with the English
Constitution itself; this is become the object of the animosity of
Englishmen. This constitution in former days used to be the envy of the
world; it was the pattern for politicians; the theme of the eloquent;
the meditation of the philosopher in every part of the world. As to
Englishmen, it was their pride, their consolation. By it they lived, and
for it they were ready to die. Its defects, if it had any, were partly
covered by partiality, and partly borne by prudence. Now all its
excellencies are forgot, its faults are forcibly dragged into day,
exaggerated by every artifice of misrepresentation. It is despised and
rejected of men; and every device and invention of ingenuity or idleness
is set up in opposition, or in preference to it.” We neither adopt nor
condemn the language of reprobation which the great orator here employs.
We call him only as a witness to the fact. That the revolution of public
feeling which he described was then in progress is indisputable; and it
is equally indisputable, we think, that it is in progress still.

To investigate and classify the causes of so great a change would
require far more thought, and far more space, than we at present have
to bestow. But some of them are obvious. During the contest which the
Parliament carried on against the Stuarts, it had only to cheek and
complain. It has since had to govern. As an attacking body, it could
select its points of attack, and it naturally chose those on which it
was likely to receive public support. As a ruling body, it has neither
the same liberty of choice, nor the same motives to gratify the people.
With the power of an executive government, it has drawn to itself some
of the vices, and all the unpopularity of an executive government. On
the House of Commons above all, possessed as it is of the public purse,
and consequently of the public sword, the nation throws all the blame
of an ill-conducted war, of a blundering negotiation, of a disgraceful
treaty, of an embarrassing commercial crisis. The delays of the Court of
Chancery, the misconduct of a judge at Van Diemen’s Land, any thing,
in short, which in any part of the administration any person feels as a
grievance, is attributed to the tyranny, or at least to the negligence,
of that all-powerful body. Private individuals pester it with their
wrongs and claims. A merchant appeals to it from the Courts of Rio
Janeiro or St. Petersburg. A historical painter complains to it that
his department of art finds no encouragement. Anciently the Parliament
resembled a member of opposition, from whom no places are expected, who
is not expected to confer favours and propose measures, but merely
to watch and censure, and who may, therefore, unless he is grossly
injudicious, be popular with the great body of the community. The
Parliament now resembles the same person put into office, surrounded by
petitioners whom twenty times his patronage would not satisfy, stunned
with complaints, buried in memorials, compelled by the duties of his
station to bring forward measures similar to those which he was formerly
accustomed to observe and to check, and perpetually encountered by
objections similar to those which it was formerly his business to raise.

Perhaps it may be laid down as a general rule that a legislative
assembly, not constituted on democratical principles, cannot be popular
long after it ceases to be weak. Its zeal for what the people, rightly
or wrongly, conceive to be their interests, its sympathy with their
mutable and violent passions, are merely the effects of the particular
circumstances in which it is placed. As long as it depends for existence
on the public favour, it will employ all the means in its power
to conciliate that favour. While this is the case, defects in its
constitution are of little consequence. But, as the close union of such
a body with the nation is the effect of an identity of interests not
essential but accidental, it is in some measure dissolved from the time
at which the danger which produced it ceases to exist.

Hence, before the Revolution, the question of Parliamentary reform was
of very little importance. The friends of liberty had no very ardent
wish for reform. The strongest Tories saw no objections to it. It is
remarkable that Clarendon loudly applauds the changes which Cromwell
introduced, changes far stronger than the Whigs of the present day
would in general approve. There is no reason to think, however, that the
reform effected by Cromwell made any great difference in the conduct of
the Parliament. Indeed, if the House of Commons had, during the reign
of Charles the Second, been elected by universal suffrage, or if all the
seats had been put up to sale, as in the French Parliaments, it would,
we suspect, have acted very much as it did. We know how strongly the
Parliament of Paris exerted itself in favour of the people on many
important occasions; and the reason is evident. Though it did not
emanate from the people, its whole consequence depended on the support
of the people.

From the time of the Revolution the House of Commons has been gradually
becoming what it now is, a great council of state, containing many
members chosen freely by the people, and many others anxious to acquire
the favour of the people; but, on the whole, aristocratical in its
temper and interest. It is very far from being an illiberal and stupid
oligarchy; but it is equally far from being an express image of the
general f

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