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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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