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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This was soon signally proved. In March the princes and
ambassadors who had been assembled at the Hague separated and
scarcely had they separated when all their plans were
disconcerted by a bold and skilful move of the enemy.

Lewis was sensible that the meeting of the Congress was likely to
produce a great effect on the public mind of Europe. That effect
he determined to counteract by striking a sudden and terrible
blow. While his enemies were settling how many troops each of
them should furnish, he ordered numerous divisions of his army to
march from widely distant points towards Mons, one of the most
important, if not the most important, of the fortresses which
protected the Spanish Netherlands. His purpose was discovered
only when it was all but accomplished. William, who had retired
for a few days to Loo, learned, with surprise and extreme
vexation, that cavalry, infantry, artillery, bridges of boats,
were fast approaching the fated city by many converging routes. A
hundred thousand men had been brought together. All the
implements of war had been largely provided by Louvois, the first
of living administrators. The command was entrusted to Luxemburg,
the first of living generals. The scientific operations were
directed by Vauban, the first of living engineers. That nothing
might be wanting which could kindle emulation through all the
ranks of a gallant and loyal army, the magnificent King himself
had set out from Versailles for the camp. Yet William had still
some faint hope that it might be possible to raise the siege. He
flew to the Hague, put all the forces of the States General in
motion, and sent pressing messages to the German Princes. Within
three weeks after he had received the first hint of the danger,
he was in the neighbourhood of the besieged city, at the head of
near fifty thousand troops of different nations. To attack a
superior force commanded by such a captain as Luxemburg was a
bold, almost a desperate, enterprise. Yet William was so sensible
that the loss of Mons would be an almost irreparable disaster and
disgrace that he made up his mind to run the hazard. He was
convinced that the event of the siege would determine the policy
of the Courts of Stockholm and Copenhagen. Those Courts had
lately seemed inclined to join the coalition. If Mons fell, they
would certainly remain neutral; they might possibly become
hostile. "The risk," he wrote to Heinsius, "is great; yet I am
not without hope. I will do what can be done. The issue is in the
hands of God." On the very day on which this letter was written
Mons fell. The siege had been vigorously pressed. Lewis himself,
though suffering from the gout, had set the example of strenuous
exertion. His household troops, the finest body of soldiers in
Europe, had, under his eye, surpassed themselves. The young
nobles of his court had tried to attract his notice by exposing
themselves to the hottest fire with the same gay alacrity with
which they were wont to exhibit their graceful figures at his
balls. His wounded soldiers were charmed by the benignant
courtesy with which he walked among their pallets, assisted while
wounds were dressed by the hospital surgeons, and breakfasted on
a porringer of the hospital broth. While all was obedience and
enthusiasm among the besiegers, all was disunion and dismay among
the besieged. The duty of the French lines was so well performed
that no messenger sent by William was able to cross them. The
garrison did not know that relief was close at hand. The burghers
were appalled by the prospect of those horrible calamities which
befall cities taken by storm. Showers of shells and redhot
bullets were falling in the streets. The town was on fire in ten
places at once. The peaceful inhabitants derived an unwonted
courage from the excess of their fear, and rose on the soldiers.
Thenceforth resistance was impossible; and a capitulation was
concluded. The armies then retired into quarters. Military
operations were suspended during some weeks; Lewis returned in
triumph to Versailles; and William paid a short visit to England,
where his presence was much needed.9

He found the ministers still employed in tracing out the
ramifications of the plot which had been discovered just before
his departure. Early in January, Preston, Ashton and Elliot had
been arraigned at the Old Bailey. They claimed the right of
severing in their challenges. It was therefore necessary to try
them separately. The audience was numerous and splendid. Many
peers were present. The Lord President and the two Secretaries of
State attended in order to prove that the papers produced in
Court were the same which Billop had brought to Whitehall. A
considerable number of judges appeared on the bench; and Holt
presided. A full report of the proceedings has come down to us,
and well deserves to be attentively studied, and to be compared
with the reports of other trials which had not long before taken
place under the same roof. The whole spirit of the tribunal had
undergone in a few months a change so complete that it might seem
to have been the work of ages. Twelve years earlier, unhappy
Roman Catholics, accused of wickedness which had never entered
into their thoughts, had stood in that dock. The witnesses for
the Crown had repeated their hideous fictions amidst the
applauding hums of the audience. The judges had shared, or had
pretended to share, the stupid credulity and the savage passions
of the populace, had exchanged smiles and compliments with the
perjured informers, had roared down the arguments feebly
stammered forth by the prisoners, and had not been ashamed, in
passing the sentence of death, to make ribald jests on purgatory
and the mass. As soon as the butchery of Papists was over, the
butchery of Whigs had commenced; and the judges had applied
themselves to their new work with even more than their old
barbarity. To these scandals the Revolution had put an end.
Whoever, after perusing the trials of Ireland and Pickering, of
Grove and Berry, of Sidney, Cornish and Alice Lisle, turns to the
trials of Preston and Ashton, will be astonished by the contrast.
The Solicitor General, Somers, conducted the prosecutions with a
moderation and humanity of which his predecessors had left him no
example. "I did never think," he said, "that it was the part of
any who were of counsel for the King in cases of this nature to
aggravate the crime of the prisoners, or to put false colours on
the evidence."10 Holt's conduct was faultless. Pollexfen, an
older man than Holt or Somers, retained a little,--and a little
was too much,--of the tone of that bad school in which he had
been bred. But, though he once or twice forgot the austere
decorum of his place, he cannot be accused of any violation of
substantial justice. The prisoners themselves seem to have been
surprised by the fairness and gentleness with which they were
treated. "I would not mislead the jury, I'll assure you," said
Holt to Preston, "nor do Your Lordship any manner of injury in
the world." "No, my Lord;" said Preston; "I see it well enough
that Your Lordship would not." "Whatever my fate may be," said
Ashton, "I cannot but own that I have had a fair trial for my
life."

The culprits gained nothing by the moderation of the Solicitor
General or by the impartiality of the Court; for the evidence was
irresistible. The meaning of the papers seized by Billop was so
plain that the dullest juryman could not misunderstand it. Of
those papers part was fully proved to be in Preston's
handwriting. Part was in Ashton's handwriting but this the
counsel for the prosecution had not the means of proving. They
therefore rested the case against Ashton on the indisputable
facts that the treasonable packet had been found in his bosom,
and that he had used language which was quite unintelligible
except on the supposition that he had a guilty knowledge of the
contents.11

Both Preston and Ashton were convicted and sentenced to death.
Ashton was speedily executed. He might have saved his life by
making disclosures. But though he declared that, if he were
spared, he would always be a faithful subject of Their Majesties,
he was fully resolved not to give up the names of his
accomplices. In this resolution he was encouraged by the
nonjuring divines who attended him in his cell. It was probably
by their influence that he was induced to deliver to the Sheriffs
on the scaffold a declaration which he had transcribed and
signed, but had not, it is to be hoped, composed or attentively
considered. In this paper he was made to complain of the
unfairness of a trial which he had himself in public acknowledged
to have been eminently fair. He was also made to aver, on the
word of a dying man, that he knew nothing of the papers which had
been found upon him. Unfortunately his declaration, when
inspected, proved to be in the same handwriting with one of the
most important of those papers. He died with manly fortitude.12

Elliot was not brought to trial. The evidence against him was not
quite so clear as that on which his associates had been
convicted; and he was not worth the anger of the government. The
fate of Preston was long in suspense. The Jacobites affected to
be confident that the government would not dare to shed his
blood. He was, they said, a favourite at Versailles, and his
death would be followed by a terrible retaliation. They scattered
about the streets of London papers in which it was asserted that,
if any harm befell him, Mountjoy, and all the other Englishmen of
quality who were prisoners in France, would be broken on the
wheel.13 These absurd threats would not have deferred the
execution one day. But those who had Preston in their power were
not unwilling to spare him on certain conditions. He was privy to
all the counsels of the disaffected party, and could furnish
information of the highest value. He was informed that his fate
depended on himself. The struggle was long and severe. Pride,
conscience, party spirit, were on one side; the intense love of
life on the other. He went during a time irresolutely to and fro.
He listened to his brother Jacobites; and his courage rose. He
listened to the agents of the government; and his heart sank
within him. In an evening when he had dined and drunk his claret,
he feared nothing. He would die like a man, rather than save his
neck by an act of baseness. But his temper was very different
when he woke the next morning, when the courage which he had
drawn from wine and company had evaporated, when he was alone
with the iron grates and stone walls, and when the thought of the
block, the axe and the sawdust rose in his mind. During some time
he regularly wrote a confession every forenoon when he was sober,
and burned it every night when he was merry.14 His nonjuring
friends formed a plan for bringing Sancroft to visit the Tower,
in the hope, doubtless, that the exhortations of so great a
prelate and so great a saint would confirm the wavering virtue of
the prisoner.15 Whether this plan would have been successful may
be doubted; it was not carried into effect; the fatal hour drew
near; and the fortitude of Preston gave way. He confessed his
guilt, and named Clarendon, Dartmouth, the Bishop of Ely and
William Penn, as his accomplices. He added a long list of persons
against whom he could not himself give evidence, but who, if he
could trust to Penn's assurances, were friendly to King James.
Among these persons were Devonshire and Dorset.16 There is not
the slightest reason to believe that either of these great
noblemen ever had any dealings, direct or indirect, with Saint
Germains. It is not, however, necessary to accuse Penn of
deliberate falsehood. He was credulous and garrulous. The Lord
Steward and the Lord Chamberlain had shared in the vexation with
which their party had observed the leaning of William towards the
Tories; and they had probably expressed that vexation
unguardedly. So weak a man as Penn, wishing to find Jacobites
every where, and prone to believe whatever he wished, might
easily put an erroneous construction on invectives such as the
haughty and irritable Devonshire was but too ready to utter, and
on sarcasms such as, in moments of spleen, dropped but too easily
from the lips of the keenwitted Dorset. Caermarthen, a Tory, and
a Tory who had been mercilessly persecuted by the Whigs, was
disposed to make the most of this idle hearsay. But he received
no encouragement from his master, who, of all the great
politicians mentioned in history, was the least prone to
suspicion. When William returned to England, Preston was brought
before him, and was commanded to repeat the confession which had
already been made to the ministers. The King stood behind the
Lord President's chair and listened gravely while Clarendon,
Dartmouth, Turner and Penn were named. But as soon as the
prisoner, passing from what he could himself testify, began to
repeat the stories which Penn had told him, William touched
Caermarthen on the shoulder and said, "My Lord, we have had too
much of this."17 This judicious magnanimity had its proper
reward. Devonshire and Dorset became from that day more zealous
than ever in the cause of the master who, in spite of calumny for
which their own indiscretion had perhaps furnished some ground,
had continued to repose confidence in their loyalty.18

Even those who were undoubtedly criminal were generally treated
with great lenity. Clarendon lay in the Tower about six months.
His guilt was fully established; and a party among the Whigs
called loudly and importunately for his head. But he was saved by
the pathetic entreaties of his brother Rochester, by the good
offices of the humane and generous Burnet, and by Mary's respect
for the memory of her mother. The prisoner's confinement was not
strict. He was allowed to entertain his friends at dinner. When
at length his health began to suffer from restraint, he was
permitted to go into the country under the care of a warder; the
warder was soon removed; and Clarendon was informed that, while
he led a quiet rural life, he should not be molested.19

The treason of Dartmouth was of no common dye. He was an English
seaman; and he had laid a plan for betraying Portsmouth to the
French, and had offered to take the command of a French squadron
against his country. It was a serious aggravation of his guilt
that he had been one of the very first persons who took the oaths
to William and Mary. He was arrested and brought to the Council
Chamber. A narrative of what passed there, written by himself,
has been preserved. In that narrative he admits that he was
treated with great courtesy and delicacy. He vehemently asserted
his innocence. He declared that he had never corresponded with
Saint Germains, that he was no favourite there, and that Mary of
Modena in particular owed him a grudge. "My Lords," he said, "I
am an Englishman. I always, when the interest of the House of
Bourbon was strongest here, shunned the French, both men and
women. I would lose the last drop of my blood rather than see
Portsmouth in the power of foreigners. I am not such a fool as to
think that King Lewis will conquer us merely for the benefit of
King James. I am certain that nothing can be truly imputed to me
beyond some foolish talk over a bottle." His protestations seem
to have produced some effect; for he was at first permitted to
remain in the gentle custody of the Black Rod. On further
inquiry, however, it was determined to send him to the Tower.
After a confinement of a few weeks he died of apoplexy; but he
lived long enough to complete his disgrace by offering his sword
to the new government, and by expressing in fervent language his
hope that he might, by the goodness of God and of Their
Majesties, have an opportunity of showing how much he hated the
French.20

Turner ran no serious risk; for the government was most unwilling
to send to the scaffold one of the Seven who had signed the
memorable petition. A warrant was however issued for his
apprehension; and his friends had little hope that he would
escape; for his nose was such as none who had seen it could
forget; and it was to little purpose that he put on a flowing wig
and that he suffered his beard to grow. The pursuit was probably
not very hot; for, after skulking a few weeks in England, he
succeeded in crossing the Channel, and remained some time in
France.21

A warrant was issued against Penn; and he narrowly escaped the
messengers. It chanced that, on the day on which they were sent
in search of him, he was attending a remarkable ceremony at some
distance from his home. An event had taken place which a
historian, whose object is to record the real life of a nation,
ought not to pass unnoticed. While London was agitated by the
news that a plot had been discovered, George Fox, the founder of
the sect of Quakers, died.

More than forty years had elapsed since Fox had begun to see
visions and to cast out devils.22 He was then a youth of pure
morals and grave deportment, with a perverse temper, with the
education of a labouring man, and with an intellect in the most
unhappy of all states, that is to say, too much disordered for
liberty, and not sufficiently disordered for Bedlam. The
circumstances in which he was placed were such as could scarcely
fail to bring out in the strongest form the constitutional
diseases of his mind. At the time when his faculties were
ripening, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists,
were striving for mastery, and were, in every corner of the
realm, refuting and reviling each other. He wandered from
congregation to congregation; he heard priests harangue against
Puritans; he heard Puritans harangue against priests; and he in
vain applied for spiritual direction and consolation to doctors
of both parties. One jolly old clergyman of the Anglican
communion told him to smoke tobacco and sing psalms; another
advised him to go and lose some blood.23 The young inquirer
turned in disgust from these advisers to the Dissenters, and
found them also blind guides.24 After some time he came to the
conclusion that no human being was competent to instruct him in
divine things, and that the truth had been communicated to him by
direct inspiration from heaven. He argued that, as the division
of languages began at Babel, and as the persecutors of Christ put
on the cross an inscription in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, the
knowledge of languages, and more especially of Latin, Greek and
Hebrew, must be useless to a Christian minister.25 Indeed, he was
so far from knowing many languages, that he knew none; nor can
the most corrupt passage in Hebrew be more unintelligible to the
unlearned than his English often is to the most acute and
attentive reader.26 One of the precious truths which were
divinely revealed to this new apostle was, that it was falsehood
and adulation to use the second person plural instead of the
second person singular. Another was, that to talk of the month of
March was to worship the bloodthirsty god Mars, and that to talk
of Monday was to pay idolatrous homage to the moon. To say Good
morning or Good evening was highly reprehensible, for those
phrases evidently imported that God had made bad days and bad
nights.27 A Christian was bound to face death itself rather than
touch his hat to the greatest of mankind. When Fox was challenged
to produce any Scriptural authority for this dogma, he cited the
passage in which it is written that Shadrach, Meshech and
Abednego were thrown into the fiery furnace with their hats on;
and, if his own narrative may be trusted, the Chief Justice of
England was altogether unable to answer this argument except by
crying out, "Take him away, gaoler."28 Fox insisted much on the
not less weighty argument that the Turks never show their bare
heads to their superiors; and he asked, with great animation,
whether those who bore the noble name of Christians ought not to
surpass Turks in virtue.29 Bowing he strictly prohibited, and,
indeed, seemed to consider it as the effect of Satanical
influence; for, as he observed, the woman in the Gospel, while
she had a spirit of infirmity, was bowed together, and ceased to
bow as soon as Divine power had liberated her from the tyranny of
the Evil One.30 His expositions of the sacred writings were of a
very peculiar kind. Passages, which had been, in the apprehension
of all the readers of the Gospels during sixteen centuries,
figurative, he construed literally. Passages, which no human
being before him had ever understood in any other than a literal
sense, he construed figuratively. Thus, from those rhetorical
expressions in which the duty of patience under injuries is
enjoined he deduced the doctrine that selfdefence against pirates
and assassins is unlawful. On the other hand, the plain commands
to baptize with water, and to partake of bread and wine in
commemoration of the redemption of mankind, he pronounced to be
allegorical. He long wandered from place to place, teaching this
strange theology, shaking like an aspen leaf in his paroxysms of
fanatical excitement, forcing his way into churches, which he
nicknamed steeple houses interrupting prayers and sermons with
clamour and scurrility,31 and pestering rectors and justices with
epistles much resembling burlesques of those sublime odes in
which the Hebrew prophets foretold the calamities of Babylon and
Tyre.32 He soon acquired great notoriety by these feats. His
strange face, his strange chant, his immovable hat and his
leather breeches were known all over the country; and he boasts
that, as soon as the rumour was heard, "The Man in Leather
Breeches is coming," terror seized hypocritical professors, and
hireling priests made haste to get out of his way.33 He was
repeatedly imprisoned and set in the stocks, sometimes justly,
for disturbing the public worship of congregations, and sometimes
unjustly, for merely talking nonsense. He soon gathered round him
a body of disciples, some of whom went beyond himself in
absurdity. He has told us that one of his friends walked naked
through Skipton declaring the truth.34 and that another was
divinely moved to go naked during several years to marketplaces,
and to the houses of gentlemen and clergymen.35 Fox complains
bitterly that these pious acts, prompted by the Holy Spirit, were
requited by an untoward generation with hooting, pelting,
coachwhipping and horsewhipping. But, though he applauded the
zeal of the sufferers, he did not go quite to their lengths. He
sometimes, indeed, was impelled to strip himself partially. Thus
he pulled off his shoes and walked barefoot through Lichfield,
crying, "Woe to the bloody city."36 But it does not appear that
he ever thought it his duty to appear before the public without
that decent garment from which his popular appellation was
derived.

If we form our judgment of George Fox simply by looking at his
own actions and writings, we shall see no reason for placing him,
morally or intellectually, above Ludowick Muggleton or Joanna
Southcote. But it would be most unjust to rank the sect which
regards him as its founder with the Muggletonians or the
Southcotians. It chanced that among the thousands whom his
enthusiasm infected were a few persons whose abilities and
attainments were of a very different order from his own. Robert
Barclay was a man of considerable parts and learning. William
Penn, though inferior to Barclay in both natural and acquired
abilities, was a gentleman and a scholar. That such men should
have become the followers of George Fox ought not to astonish any
person who remembers what quick, vigorous and highly cultivated
intellects were in our own times duped by the unknown tongues.
The truth is that no powers of mind constitute a security against
errors of this description. Touching God and His ways with man,
the highest human faculties can discover little more than the
meanest. In theology the interval is small indeed between
Aristotle and a child, between Archimedes and a naked savage. It
is not strange, therefore, that wise men, weary of investigation,
tormented by uncertainty, longing to believe something, and yet
seeing objections to every thing, should submit themselves
absolutely to teachers who, with firm and undoubting faith, lay
claim to a supernatural commission. Thus we frequently see
inquisitive and restless spirits take refuge from their own
scepticism in the bosom of a church which pretends to
infallibility, and, after questioning the existence of a Deity,
bring themselves to worship a wafer. And thus it was that Fox
made some converts to whom he was immeasurably inferior in every
thing except the energy of his convictions. By these converts his
rude doctrines were polished into a form somewhat less shocking
to good sense and good taste. No proposition which he had laid
down was retracted. No indecent or ridiculous act which he had
done or approved was condemned; but what was most grossly absurd
in his theories and practices was softened down, or at least not
obtruded on the public; whatever could be made to appear specious
was set in the fairest light; his gibberish was translated into
English; meanings which he would have been quite unable to
comprehend were put on his phrases; and his system, so much
improved that he would not have known it again, was defended by
numerous citations from Pagan philosophers and Christian fathers
whose names he had never heard.37 Still, however, those who had
remodelled his theology continued to profess, and doubtless to
feel, profound reverence for him; and his crazy epistles were to
the last received and read with respect in Quaker meetings all
over the country. His death produced a sensation which was not
confined to his own disciples. On the morning of the funeral a
great multitude assembled round the meeting house in Gracechurch
Street. Thence the corpse was borne to the burial ground of the
sect near Bunhill Fields. Several orators addressed the crowd
which filled the cemetery. Penn was conspicuous among those
disciples who committed the venerable corpse to the earth. The
ceremony had scarcely been finished when he learned that warrants
were out against him. He instantly took flight, and remained many
months concealed from the public eye.38