The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 2

T >> Thomas Babington Macaulay >> The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 2

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

CHAPTER XXV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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