The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 4

T >> Thomas Babington Macaulay >> The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 4

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But this wonderful prosperity was not uninterrupted. Towards the
close of the reign of Charles the Second the Company began to be
fiercely attacked from without, and to be at the same time
distracted by internal dissensions. The profits of the Indian
trade were so tempting, that private adventurers had often, in
defiance of the royal charter, fitted out ships for the Eastern
seas. But the competition of these interlopers did not become
really formidable till the year 1680. The nation was then
violently agitated by the dispute about the Exclusion Bill. Timid
men were anticipating another civil war. The two great parties,
newly named Whigs and Tories, were fiercely contending in every
county and town of England; and the feud soon spread to every
corner of the civilised world where Englishmen were to be found.

The Company was popularly considered as a Whig body. Among the
members of the directing committee were some of the most vehement
Exclusionists in the City. Indeed two of them, Sir Samuel
Barnardistone and Thomas Papillon, drew on themselves a severe
persecution by their zeal against Popery and arbitrary power.162
Child had been originally brought into the direction by these
men; he had long acted in concert with them; and he was supposed
to hold their political opinions. He had, during many years,
stood high in the esteem of the chiefs of the parliamentary
opposition, and had been especially obnoxious to the Duke of
York.163 The interlopers therefore determined to affect the
character of loyal men, who were determined to stand by the
throne against the insolent tribunes of the City. They spread, at
all the factories in the East, reports that England was in
confusion, that the sword had been drawn or would immediately be
drawn, and that the Company was forward in the rebellion against
the Crown. These rumours, which, in truth, were not improbable,
easily found credit among people separated from London by what
was then a voyage of twelve months. Some servants of the Company
who were in ill humour with their employers, and others who were
zealous royalists, joined the private traders. At Bombay, the
garrison and the great body of the English inhabitants declared
that they would no longer obey any body who did not obey the
King; they imprisoned the Deputy Governor; and they proclaimed
that they held the island for the Crown. At Saint Helena there
was a rising. The insurgents took the name of King's men, and
displayed the royal standard. They were, not without difficulty,
put down; and some of them were executed by martial law.164

If the Company had still been a Whig Company when the news of
these commotions reached England, it is probable that the
government would have approved of the conduct of the mutineers,
and that the charter on which the monopoly depended would have
had the fate which about the same time befell so many other
charters. But while the interlopers were, at a distance of many
thousands of miles, making war on the Company in the name of the
King, the Company and the King had been reconciled. When the
Oxford Parliament had been dissolved, when many signs indicated
that a strong reaction in favour of prerogative was at hand, when
all the corporations which had incurred the royal displeasure
were beginning to tremble for their franchises, a rapid and
complete revolution took place at the India House. Child, who was
then Governor, or, in the modern phrase, Chairman, separated
himself from his old friends, excluded them from the direction,
and negotiated a treaty of peace and of close alliance with the
Court.165 It is not improbable that the near connection into
which he had just entered with the great Tory house of Beaufort
may have had something to do with this change in his politics.
Papillon, Barnardistone, and their adherents, sold their stock;
their places in the committee were supplied by persons devoted to
Child; and he was thenceforth the autocrat of the Company. The
treasures of the Company were absolutely at his disposal. The
most important papers of the Company were kept, not in the
muniment room of the office in Leadenhall Street, but in his desk
at Wanstead. The boundless power which he exercised at the India
House enabled him to become a favourite at Whitehall; and the
favour which he enjoyed at Whitehall confirmed his power at the
India House. A present of ten thousand guineas was graciously
received from him by Charles. Ten thousand more were accepted by
James, who readily consented to become a holder of stock. All who
could help or hurt at Court, ministers, mistresses, priests, were
kept in good humour by presents of shawls and silks, birds' nests
and atar of roses, bulses of diamonds and bags of guineas.166 Of
what the Dictator expended no account was asked by his
colleagues; and in truth he seems to have deserved the confidence
which they reposed in him. His bribes, distributed with judicious
prodigality, speedily produced a large return. Just when the
Court became all powerful in the State, he became all powerful at
the Court. Jeffreys pronounced a decision in favour of the
monopoly, and of the strongest acts which had been done in
defence of the monopoly. James ordered his seal to be put to a
new charter which confirmed and extended all the privileges
bestowed on the Company by his predecessors. All captains of
Indiamen received commissions from the Crown, and were permitted
to hoist the royal ensigns.167 John Child, brother of Sir Josiah,
and Governor of Bombay, was created a baronet by the style of Sir
John Child of Surat: he was declared General of all the English
forces in the East; and he was authorised to assume the title of
Excellency. The Company, on the other hand, distinguished itself
among many servile corporations by obsequious homage to the
throne, and set to all the merchants of the kingdom the example
of readily and even eagerly paying those customs which James, at
the commencement of his reign, exacted without the authority of
Parliament.168

It seemed that the private trade would now be utterly crushed,
and that the monopoly, protected by the whole strength of the
royal prerogative, would be more profitable than ever. But
unfortunately just at this moment a quarrel arose between the
agents of the Company in India and the Mogul Government. Where
the fault lay is a question which was vehemently disputed at the
time, and which it is now impossible to decide. The interlopers
threw all the blame on the Company. The Governor of Bombay, they
affirmed, had always been grasping and violent; but his baronetcy
and his military commission had completely turned his head. The
very natives who were employed about the factory had noticed the
change, and had muttered, in their broken English, that there
must be some strange curse attending the word Excellency; for
that, ever since the chief of the strangers was called
Excellency, every thing had gone to ruin. Meanwhile, it was said,
the brother in England had sanctioned all the unjust and
impolitic acts of the brother in India, till at length insolence
and rapine, disgraceful to the English nation and to the
Christian religion, had roused the just resentment of the native
authorities. The Company warmly recriminated. The story told at
the India House was that the quarrel was entirely the work of the
interlopers, who were now designated not only as interlopers but
as traitors. They had, it was alleged, by flattery, by presents,
and by false accusations, induced the viceroys of the Mogul to
oppress and persecute the body which in Asia represented the
English Crown. And indeed this charge seems not to have been
altogether without foundation. It is certain that one of the most
pertinacious enemies of the Childs went up to the Court of
Aurengzebe, took his station at the palace gate, stopped the
Great King who was in the act of mounting on horseback, and,
lifting a petition high in the air, demanded justice in the name
of the common God of Christians and Mussulmans.169 Whether
Aurengzebe paid much attention to the charges brought by infidel
Franks against each other may be doubted. But it is certain that
a complete rupture took place between his deputies and the
servants of the Company. On the sea the ships of his subjects
were seized by the English. On land the English settlements were
taken and plundered. The trade was suspended; and, though great
annual dividends were still paid in London, they were no longer
paid out of annual profits.

Just at this conjuncture, while every Indiaman that arrived in
the Thames was bringing unwelcome news from the East, all the
politics of Sir Josiah were utterly confounded by the Revolution.
He had flattered himself that he had secured the body of which he
was the chief against the machinations of interlopers, by uniting
it closely with the strongest government that had existed within
his memory. That government had fallen; and whatever had leaned
on the ruined fabric began to totter. The bribes had been thrown
away. The connections which had been the strength and boast of
the corporation were now its weakness and its shame. The King
who had been one of its members was an exile. The judge by whom
all its most exorbitant pretensions had been pronounced
legitimate was a prisoner. All the old enemies of the Company,
reinforced by those great Whig merchants whom Child had expelled
from the direction, demanded justice and vengeance from the Whig
House of Commons, which had just placed William and Mary on the
throne. No voice was louder in accusation than that of Papillon,
who had, some years before, been more zealous for the charter
than any man in London.170 The Commons censured in severe terms
the persons who had inflicted death by martial law at Saint
Helena, and even resolved that some of those offenders should be
excluded from the Act of Indemnity.171 The great question, how
the trade with the East should for the future be carried on, was
referred to a Committee. The report was to have been made on the
twenty-seventh of January 1690; but on that very day the
Parliament ceased to exist.

The first two sessions of the succeeding Parliament were so short
and so busy that little was said about India in either House.
But, out of Parliament, all the arts both of controversy and of
intrigue were employed on both sides. Almost as many pamphlets
were published about the India trade as about the oaths. The
despot of Leadenhall Street was libelled in prose and verse.
Wretched puns were made on his name. He was compared to Cromwell,
to the King of France, to Goliath of Gath, to the Devil. It was
vehemently declared to be necessary that, in any Act which might
be passed for the regulation of our traffic with the Eastern
seas, Sir Josiah should be by name excluded from all trust.172

There were, however, great differences of opinion among those who
agreed in hating Child and the body of which he was the head. The
manufacturers of Spitalfields, of Norwich, of Yorkshire, and of
the Western counties, considered the trade with the Eastern seas
as rather injurious than beneficial to the kingdom. The
importation of Indian spices, indeed, was admitted to be
harmless, and the importation of Indian saltpetre to be
necessary. But the importation of silks and of Bengals, as shawls
were then called, was pronounced to be a curse to the country.
The effect of the growing taste for such frippery was that our
gold and silver went abroad, and that much excellent English
drapery lay in our warehouses till it was devoured by the moths.
Those, it was said, were happy days for the inhabitants both of
our pasture lands and of our manufacturing towns, when every
gown, every hanging, every bed, was made of materials which our
own flocks had furnished to our own looms. Where were now the
brave old hangings of arras which had adorned the walls of lordly
mansions in the days of Elizabeth? And was it not a shame to see
a gentleman, whose ancestors had worn nothing but stuffs made by
English workmen out of English fleeces, flaunting in a calico
shirt and a pair of silk stockings? Clamours such as these had, a
few years before, extorted from Parliament the Act which required
that the dead should be wrapped in woollen; and some sanguine
clothiers hoped that the legislature would, by excluding all
Indian textures from our ports, impose the same necessity on the
living.173

But this feeling was confined to a minority. The public was,
indeed, inclined rather to overrate than to underrate the
benefits which might be derived by England from the Indian trade.
What was the most effectual mode of extending that trade was a
question which excited general interest, and which was answered
in very different ways.

A small party, consisting chiefly of merchants resident at
Bristol and other provincial seaports, maintained that the best
way to extend trade was to leave it free. They urged the well
known arguments which prove that monopoly is injurious to
commerce; and, having fully established the general law, they
asked why the commerce between England and India was to be
considered as an exception to that law. Any trader ought, they
said, to be permitted to send from any port a cargo to Surat or
Canton as freely as he now sent a cargo to Hamburg or Lisbon.174
In our time these doctrines may probably be considered, not only
as sound, but as trite and obvious. In the seventeenth century,
however, they were thought paradoxical. It was then generally
held to be a certain, and indeed an almost selfevident truth,
that our trade with the countries lying beyond the Cape of Good
Hope could be advantageously carried on only by means of a great
Joint Stock Company. There was no analogy, it was said, between
our European trade and our Indian trade. Our government had
diplomatic relations with the European States. If necessary, a
maritime force could easily be sent from hence to the mouth of
the Elbe or of the Tagus. But the English Kings had no envoy at
the Court of Agra or Pekin. There was seldom a single English man
of war within ten thousand miles of the Bay of Bengal or of the
Gulf of Siam. As our merchants could not, in those remote seas,
be protected by their Sovereign, they must protect themselves,
and must, for that end, exercise some of the rights of
sovereignty. They must have forts, garrisons and armed ships.
They must have power to send and receive embassies, to make a
treaty of alliance with one Asiatic prince, to wage war on
another. It was evidently impossible that every merchant should
have this power independently of the rest. The merchants trading
to India must therefore be joined together in a corporation which
could act as one man. In support of these arguments the example
of the Dutch was cited, and was generally considered as decisive.
For in that age the immense prosperity of Holland was every where
regarded with admiration, not the less earnest because it was
largely mingled with envy and hatred. In all that related to
trade, her statesmen were considered as oracles, and her
institutions as models.

The great majority, therefore, of those who assailed the Company
assailed it, not because it traded on joint funds and possessed
exclusive privileges, but because it was ruled by one man, and
because his rule had been mischievous to the public, and
beneficial only to himself and his creatures. The obvious remedy,
it was said, for the evils which his maladministration had
produced was to transfer the monopoly to a new corporation so
constituted as to be in no danger of falling under the dominion
either of a despot or of a narrow oligarchy. Many persons who
were desirous to be members of such a corporation, formed
themselves into a society, signed an engagement, and entrusted
the care of their interests to a committee which contained some
of the chief traders of the City. This society, though it had, in
the eye of the law, no personality, was early designated, in
popular speech, as the New Company; and the hostilities between
the New Company and the Old Company soon caused almost as much
excitement and anxiety, at least in that busy hive of which the
Royal Exchange was the centre, as the hostilities between the
Allies and the French King. The headquarters of the younger
association were in Dowgate; the Skinners lent their stately
hall; and the meetings were held in a parlour renowned for the
fragrance which exhaled from a magnificent wainscot of cedar.175

While the contention was hottest, important news arrived from
India, and was announced in the London Gazette as in the highest
degree satisfactory. Peace had been concluded between the great
Mogul and the English. That mighty potentate had not only
withdrawn his troops from the factories, but had bestowed on the
Company privileges such as it had never before enjoyed. Soon,
however, appeared a very different version of the story. The
enemies of Child had, before this time, accused him of
systematically publishing false intelligence. He had now, they
said, outlied himself. They had obtained a true copy of the
Firman which had put an end to the war; and they printed a
translation of it. It appeared that Aurengzebe had contemptuously
granted to the English, in consideration of their penitence and
of a large tribute, his forgiveness for their past delinquency,
had charged them to behave themselves better for the future, and
had, in the tone of a master, laid on them his commands to remove
the principal offender, Sir John Child, from power and trust. The
death of Sir John occurred so seasonably that these commands
could not be obeyed. But it was only too evident that the
pacification which the rulers of the India House had represented
as advantageous and honourable had really been effected on terms
disgraceful to the English name.176

During the summer of 1691, the controversy which raged on this
subject between the Leadenhall Street Company and the Dowgate
Company kept the City in constant agitation. In the autumn, the
Parliament had no sooner met than both the contending parties
presented petitions to the House of Commons.177 The petitions
were immediately taken into serious consideration, and
resolutions of grave importance were passed. The first resolution
was that the trade with the East Indies was beneficial to the
kingdom; the second was that the trade with the East Indies would
be best carried on by a joint stock company possessed of
exclusive privileges.178 It was plain, therefore, that neither
those manufacturers who wished to prohibit the trade, nor those
merchants at the outports who wished to throw it open, had the
smallest chance of attaining their objects. The only question
left was the question between the Old and the New Company.
Seventeen years elapsed before that question ceased to disturb
both political and commercial circles. It was fatal to the honour
and power of one great minister, and to the peace and prosperity
of many private families. The tracts which the rival bodies put
forth against each other were innumerable. If the drama of that
age may be trusted, the feud between the India House and
Skinners' Hall was sometimes as serious an impediment to the
course of true love in London as the feud of the Capulets and
Montagues had been at Verona.179 Which of the two contending
parties was the stronger it is not easy to say. The New Company
was supported by the Whigs, the Old Company by the Tories. The
New Company was popular; for it promised largely, and could not
be accused of having broken its promises; it made no dividends,
and therefore was not envied; it had no power to oppress, and had
therefore been guilty of no oppression. The Old Company, though
generally regarded with little favour by the public, had the
immense advantage of being in possession, and of having only to
stand on the defensive. The burden of framing a plan for the
regulation of the India trade, and of proving that plan to be
better than the plan hitherto followed, lay on the New Company.
The Old Company had merely to find objections to every change
that was proposed; and such objections there was little
difficulty in finding. The members of the New Company were ill
provided with the means of purchasing support at Court and in
Parliament. They had no corporate existence, no common treasury.
If any of them gave a bribe, he gave it out of his own pocket,
with little chance of being reimbursed. But the Old Company,
though surrounded by dangers, still held its exclusive
privileges, and still made its enormous profits. Its stock had
indeed gone down greatly in value since the golden days of
Charles the Second; but a hundred pounds still sold for a hundred
and twenty-two.180 After a large dividend had been paid to the
proprietors, a surplus remained amply sufficient, in those days,
to corrupt half a cabinet; and this surplus was absolutely at the
disposal of one able, determined and unscrupulous man, who
maintained the fight with wonderful art and pertinacity.

The majority of the Commons wished to effect a compromise, to
retain the Old Company, but to remodel it, to impose on it new
conditions, and to incorporate with it the members of the New
Company. With this view it was, after long and vehement debates
and close divisions, resolved that the capital should be
increased to a million and a half. In order to prevent a single
person or a small junto from domineering over the whole society,
it was determined that five thousand pounds of stock should be
the largest quantity that any single proprietor could hold, and
that those who held more should be required to sell the overplus
at any price not below par. In return for the exclusive privilege
of trading to the Eastern seas, the Company was to be required to
furnish annually five hundred tons of saltpetre to the Crown at a
low price, and to export annually English manufactures to the
value of two hundred thousand pounds.181

A bill founded on these resolutions was brought in, read twice,
and committed, but was suffered to drop in consequence of the
positive refusal of Child and his associates to accept the
offered terms. He objected to every part of the plan; and his
objections are highly curious and amusing. The great monopolist
took his stand on the principles of free trade. In a luminous and
powerfully written paper he exposed the absurdity of the
expedients which the House of Commons had devised. To limit the
amount of stock which might stand in a single name would, he
said, be most unreasonable. Surely a proprietor whose whole
fortune was staked on the success of the Indian trade was far
more likely to exert all his faculties vigorously for the
promotion of that trade than a proprietor who had risked only
what it would be no great disaster to lose. The demand that
saltpetre should be furnished to the Crown for a fixed sum Child
met by those arguments, familiar to our generation, which prove
that prices should be left to settle themselves. To the demand
that the Company should bind itself to export annually two
hundred thousand pounds' worth of English manufactures he very
properly replied that the Company would most gladly export two
millions' worth if the market required such a supply, and that,
if the market were overstocked, it would be mere folly to send
good cloth half round the world to be eaten by white ants. It was
never, he declared with much spirit, found politic to put trade
into straitlaced bodices, which, instead of making it grow
upright and thrive, must either kill it or force it awry.

The Commons, irritated by Child's obstinacy, presented an address
requesting the King to dissolve the Old Company, and to grant a
charter to a new Company on such terms as to His Majesty's wisdom
might seem fit.182 It is plainly implied in the terms of this
address that the Commons thought the King constitutionally
competent to grant an exclusive privilege of trading to the East
Indies.

The King replied that the subject was most important, that he
would consider it maturely, and that he would, at a future time,
give the House a more precise answer.183 In Parliament nothing
more was said on the subject during that session; but out of
Parliament the war was fiercer than ever; and the belligerents
were by no means scrupulous about the means which they employed.
The chief weapons of the New Company were libels; the chief
weapons of the Old Company were bribes.

In the same week in which the bill for the regulation of the
Indian trade was suffered to drop, another bill which had
produced great excitement and had called forth an almost
unprecedented display of parliamentary ability, underwent the
same fate.

During the eight years which preceded the Revolution, the Whigs
had complained bitterly, and not more bitterly than justly, of
the hard measure dealt out to persons accused of political
offences. Was it not monstrous, they asked, that a culprit should
be denied a sight of his indictment? Often an unhappy prisoner
had not known of what he was accused till he had held up his hand
at the bar. The crime imputed to him might be plotting to shoot
the King; it might be plotting to poison the King. The more
innocent the defendant was, the less likely he was to guess the
nature of the charge on which he was to be tried; and how could
he have evidence ready to rebut a charge the nature of which he
could not guess? The Crown had power to compel the attendance of
witnesses. The prisoner had no such power. If witnesses
voluntarily came forward to speak in his favour, they could not
be sworn. Their testimony therefore made less impression on a
jury than the testimony of the witnesses for the prosecution,
whose veracity was guaranteed by the most solemn sanctions of law
and of religion. The juries, carefully selected by Sheriffs whom
the Crown had named, were men animated by the fiercest party
spirit, men who had as little tenderness for an Exclusionist of a
Dissenter as for a mad dog. The government was served by a band
of able, experienced and unprincipled lawyers, who could, by
merely glancing over a brief, distinguish every weak and every
strong point of a case, whose presence of mind never failed them,
whose flow of speech was inexhaustible, and who had passed their
lives in dressing up the worse reason so as to make it appear the
better. Was it not horrible to see three or four of these shrewd,
learned and callous orators arrayed against one poor wretch who
had never in his life uttered a word in public, who was ignorant
of the legal definition of treason and of the first principles of
the law of evidence, and whose intellect, unequal at best to a
fencing match with professional gladiators, was confused by the
near prospect of a cruel and ignominious death? Such however was
the rule; and even for a man so much stupefied by sickness that
he could not hold up his hand or make his voice heard, even for a
poor old woman who understood nothing of what was passing except
that she was going to be roasted alive for doing an act of
charity, no advocate was suffered to utter a word. That a state
trial so conducted was little better than a judicial murder had
been, during the proscription of the Whig party, a fundamental
article of the Whig creed. The Tories, on the other hand, though
they could not deny that there had been some hard cases,
maintained that, on the whole, substantial justice had been done.
Perhaps a few seditious persons who had gone very near to the
frontier of treason, but had not actually passed that frontier,
might have suffered as traitors. But was that a sufficient reason
for enabling the chiefs of the Rye House Plot and of the Western
Insurrection to elude, by mere chicanery, the punishment of their
guilt? On what principle was the traitor to have chances of
escape which were not allowed to the felon? The culprit who was
accused of larceny was subject to all the same disadvantages
which, in the case of regicides and rebels, were thought so
unjust; ye nobody pitied him. Nobody thought it monstrous that he
should not have time to study a copy of his indictment, that his
witnesses should be examined without being sworn, that he should
be left to defend himself, without the help of counsel against
the best abilities which the Inns of Court could furnish. The
Whigs, it seemed, reserved all their compassion for those crimes
which subvert government and dissolve the whole frame of human
society. Guy Faux was to be treated with an indulgence which was
not to be extended to a shoplifter. Bradshaw was to have
privileges which were refused to a boy who had robbed a henroost.