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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The outcry was loud. Odious nicknames were given to the
Parliament. Sometimes it was the Officers' Parliament; sometimes
it was the Standing Parliament, and was pronounced to be a
greater nuisance than even a standing army.

Two specifics for the distempers of the State were strongly
recommended, and divided the public favour. One was a law
excluding placemen from the House of Commons. The other was a law
limiting the duration of Parliaments to three years. In general
the Tory reformers preferred a Place Bill, and the Whig reformers
a Triennial Bill; but not a few zealous men of both parties were
for trying both remedies.

Before Christmas a Place Bill was laid on the table of the
Commons. That bill has been vehemently praised by writers who
never saw it, and who merely guessed at what it contained. But no
person who takes the trouble to study the original parchment,
which, embrowned with the dust of a hundred and sixty years,
reposes among the archives of the House of Lords, will find much
matter for eulogy.

About the manner in which such a bill should have been framed
there will, in our time, be little difference of opinion among
enlightened Englishmen. They will agree in thinking that it would
be most pernicious to open the House of Commons to all placemen,
and not less pernicious to close that House against all placemen.
To draw with precision the line between those who ought to be
admitted and those who ought to be excluded would be a task
requiring much time, thought and knowledge of details. But the
general principles which ought to guide us are obvious. The
multitude of subordinate functionaries ought to be excluded. A
few functionaries who are at the head or near the head of the
great departments of the administration ought to be admitted.

The subordinate functionaries ought to be excluded, because their
admission would at once lower the character of Parliament and
destroy the efficiency of every public office. They are now
excluded, and the consequence is that the State possesses a
valuable body of servants who remain unchanged while cabinet
after cabinet is formed and dissolved, who instruct every
successive minister in his duties, and with whom it is the most
sacred point of honour to give true information, sincere advise,
and strenuous assistance to their superior for the time being. To
the experience, the ability and the fidelity of this class of men
is to be attributed the ease and safety with which the direction
of affairs has been many times, within our own memory,
transferred from Tories to Whigs and from Whigs to Tories. But no
such class would have existed if persons who received salaries
from the Crown had been suffered to sit without restriction in
the House of Commons. Those commissionerships, assistant
secretaryships, chief clerkships, which are now held for life by
persons who stand aloof from the strife of parties, would have
been bestowed on members of Parliament who were serviceable to
the government as voluble speakers or steady voters. As often as
the ministry was changed, all this crowd of retainers would have
been ejected from office, and would have been succeeded by
another set of members of Parliament who would probably have been
ejected in their turn before they had half learned their
business. Servility and corruption in the legislature, ignorance
and incapacity in all the departments of the executive
administration, would have been the inevitable effects of such a
system.

Still more noxious, if possible, would be the effects of a system
under which all the servants of the Crown, without exception,
should be excluded from the House of Commons. Aristotle has, in
that treatise on government which is perhaps the most judicious
and instructive of all his writings, left us a warning against a
class of laws artfully framed to delude the vulgar, democratic in
seeming, but oligarchic in effect.374 Had he had an opportunity
of studying the history of the English constitution, he might
easily have enlarged his list of such laws. That men who are in
the service and pay of the Crown ought not to sit in an assembly
specially charged with the duty of guarding the rights and
interests of the community against all aggression on the part of
the Crown is a plausible and a popular doctrine. Yet it is
certain that if those who, five generations ago, held that
doctrine, had been able to mould the constitution according to
their wishes, the effect
would have been the depression of that branch of the legislature
which springs from the people and is accountable to the people,
and the ascendency of the monarchical and aristocratical elements
of our polity. The government would have been entirely in
patrician hands. The House of Lords, constantly drawing to itself
the first abilities in the realm, would have become the most
august of senates, while the House of Commons would have sunk
almost to the rank of a vestry. From time to time undoubtedly men
of commanding genius and of aspiring temper would have made their
appearance among the representatives of the counties and
boroughs. But every such man would have considered the elective
chamber merely as a lobby through which he must pass to the
hereditary chamber. The first object of his ambition would have
been that coronet without which he could not be powerful in the
state. As soon as he had shown that he could be a formidable
enemy and a valuable friend to the government, he would have made
haste to quit what would then have been in every sense the Lower
House for what would then have been in every sense the Upper. The
conflict between Walpole and Pulteney, the conflict between Pitt
and Fox, would have been transferred from the popular to the
aristocratic part of the legislature. On every great question,
foreign, domestic or colonial, the debates of the nobles would
have been impatiently expected and eagerly devoured. The report
of the proceedings of an assembly containing no person empowered
to speak in the name of the government, no person who had ever
been in high political trust, would have been thrown aside with
contempt. Even the control of the purse of the nation must have
passed, not perhaps in form, but in substance, to that body in
which would have been found every man who was qualified to bring
forward a budget or explain an estimate. The country would have
been governed by Peers; and the chief business of the Commons
would have been to wrangle about bills for the inclosing of moors
and the lighting of towns.

These considerations were altogether overlooked in 1692. Nobody
thought of drawing a line between the few functionaries who ought
to be allowed to sit in the House of Commons and the crowd of
functionaries who ought to be shut out. The only line which the
legislators of that day took pains to draw was between themselves
and their successors. Their own interest they guarded with a care
of which it seems strange that they should not have been ashamed.
Every one of them was allowed to keep the places which he had got, and to get as
many more places as he could before the next dissolution
of Parliament, an event which might not happen for many years.
But a member who should be chosen after the first of February
1693 was not to be permitted to accept any place whatever.375

In the House of Commons the bill passed through all its stages
rapidly and without a single division. But in the Lords the
contest was sharp and obstinate. Several amendments were proposed
in committee; but all were rejected. The motion that the bill
should pass was supported by Mulgrave in a lively and poignant
speech, which has been preserved, and which proves that his
reputation for eloquence was not unmerited. The Lords who took
the other side did not, it should seem, venture to deny that
there was an evil which required a remedy; but they maintained
that the proposed remedy would only aggravate the evil. The
patriotic representatives of the people had devised a reform
which might perhaps benefit the next generation; but they had
carefully reserved to themselves the privilege of plundering the
present generation. If this bill passed, it was clear that, while
the existing Parliament lasted, the number of placemen in the
House of Commons would be little, if at all, diminished; and, if
this bill passed, it was highly probable that the existing
Parliament would last till both King William and Queen Mary were
dead. For as, under this bill, Their Majesties would be able to
exercise a much greater influence over the existing Parliament
than over any future Parliament, they would naturally wish to put
off a dissolution as long as possible. The complaint of the
electors of England was that now, in 1692, they were unfairly
represented. It was not redress, but mockery, to tell them that
their children should be fairly represented in 1710 or 1720. The
relief ought to be immediate; and the way to give immediate
relief was to limit the duration of Parliaments, and to begin
with that Parliament which, in the opinion of the country, had
already held power too long.

The forces were so evenly balanced that a very slight accident
might have turned the scale. When the question was put that the
bill do pass, eighty-two peers were present. Of these forty-two
were for the bill, and forty against it. Proxies were then
called. There were only two proxies for the bill; there were
seven against it; but of the seven three were questioned, and
were with difficulty admitted. The result was that the bill was
lost by three votes.

The majority appears to have been composed of moderate Whigs and
moderate Tories. Twenty of the minority protested, and among them
were the most violent and intolerant members of both parties,
such as Warrington, who had narrowly escaped the block for
conspiring against James, and Aylesbury, who afterwards narrowly
escaped the block for conspiring against William. Marlborough,
who, since his imprisonment, had gone all lengths in opposition
to the government, not only put his own name to the protest, but
made the Prince of Denmark sign what it was altogether beyond the
faculties of His Royal Highness to comprehend.376

It is a remarkable circumstance that neither Caermarthen, the
first in power as well as in abilities of the Tory ministers, nor
Shrewsbury, the most distinguished of those Whigs who were then
on bad terms with the Court, was present on this important
occasion. Their absence was in all probability the effect of
design; for both of them were in the House no long time before
and no long time after the division.

A few days later Shrewsbury laid on the table of the Lord a bill
for limiting the duration of Parliaments. By this bill it was
provided that the Parliament then sitting should cease to exist
on the first of January 1694, and that no future Parliament
should last longer than three years.

Among the Lords there seems to have been almost perfect unanimity
on this subject. William in vain endeavoured to induce those
peers in whom he placed the greatest confidence to support his
prerogative. Some of them thought the proposed change salutary;
others hoped to quiet the public mind by a liberal concession;
and others had held such language when they were opposing the
Place Bill that they could not, without gross inconsistency,
oppose the Triennial Bill. The whole House too bore a grudge to
the other House, and had a pleasure in putting the other House in
a most disagreeable dilemma. Burnet, Pembroke, nay, even
Caermarthen, who was very little in the habit of siding with the
people against the throne, supported Shrewsbury. "My Lord," said
the King to Caermarthen, with bitter displeasure, "you will live
to repent the part which you are taking in this matter."377 The
warning was disregarded; and the bill, having passed the Lords
smoothly and rapidly, was carried with great solemnity by two
judges to the Commons.

Of what took place in the Commons we have but very meagre
accounts; but from those accounts it is clear that the Whigs, as
a body, supported the bill, and that the opposition came chiefly
from Tories. Old Titus, who had been a politician in the days of
the Commonwealth, entertained the House with a speech in the
style which had been fashionable in those days. Parliaments, he
said, resembled the manna which God bestowed on the chosen
people. They were excellent while they were fresh; but if kept
too long they became noisome; and foul worms were engendered by
the corruption of that which had been sweeter than honey.
Littleton and other leading Whigs spoke on the same side.
Seymour, Finch, and Tredenham, all stanch Tories, were vehement
against the bill; and even Sir John Lowther on this point
dissented from his friend and patron Caermarthen. Several Tory
orators appealed to a feeling which was strong in the House, and
which had, since the Revolution, prevented many laws from
passing. Whatever, they said, comes from the Peers is to be
received with suspicion; and the present bill is of such a nature
that, even if it were in itself good, it ought to be at once
rejected merely because it has been brought down from them. If
their Lordships were to send us the most judicious of all money
bills, should we not kick it to the door? Yet to send us a money
bill would hardly be a grosser affront than to send us such a
bill as this. They have taken an initiative which, by every rule
of parliamentary courtesy, ought to have been left to us. They
have sate in judgment on us, convicted us, condemned us to
dissolution, and fixed the first of January for the execution.
Are we to submit patiently to so degrading a sentence, a sentence
too passed by men who have not so conducted themselves as to have
acquired any right to censure others? Have they ever made any
sacrifice of their own interest, of their own dignity, to the
general welfare? Have not excellent bills been lost because we
would not consent to insert in them clauses conferring new
privileges on the nobility? And now that their Lordships are bent
on obtaining popularity, do they propose to purchase it by
relinquishing even the smallest of their own oppressive
privileges? No; they offer to their country that which will cost
them nothing, but which will cost us and will cost the Crown
dear. In such circumstances it is our duty to repel the insult
which has been offered to us, and, by doing so, to vindicate the
lawful prerogative of the King.

Such topics as these were doubtless well qualified to inflame the
passions of the House of Commons. The near prospect of a
dissolution could not be very agreeable to a member whose
election was likely to be contested. He must go through all the
miseries of a canvass, must shake hands with crowds of
freeholders or freemen, must ask after their wives and children,
must hire conveyances for outvoters, must open alehouses, must
provide mountains of beef, must set rivers of ale running, and
might perhaps, after all the drudgery and all the expense, after
being lampooned, hustled, pelted, find himself at the bottom of
the poll, see his antagonists chaired, and sink half ruined into
obscurity. All this evil he was now invited to bring on himself,
and invited by men whose own seats in the legislature were
permanent, who gave up neither dignity nor quiet, neither power
nor money, but gained the praise of patriotism by forcing him to
abdicate a high station, to undergo harassing labour and anxiety,
to mortgage his cornfields and to hew down his woods. There was
naturally much irritation, more probably than is indicated by the
divisions. For the constituent bodies were generally delighted
with the bill; and many members who disliked it were afraid to
oppose it. The House yielded to the pressure of public opinion,
but not without a pang and a struggle. The discussions in the
committee seem to have been acrimonious. Such sharp words passed
between Seymour and one of the Whig members that it was necessary
to put the Speaker in the chair and the mace on the table for the
purpose of restoring order. One amendment was made. The respite
which the Lords had granted to the existing Parliament was
extended from the first of January to Lady Day, in order that
there might be full time for another session. The third reading
was carried by two hundred votes to a hundred and sixty-one. The
Lords agreed to the bill as amended; and nothing was wanting but
the royal assent. Whether that assent would or would not be given
was a question which remained in suspense till the last day of
the session.378

One strange inconsistency in the conduct of the reformers of that
generation deserves notice. It never occurred to any one of those
who were zealous for the Triennial Bill that every argument which
could be urged in favour of that bill was are argument against
the rules which had been framed in old times for the purpose of
keeping parliamentary deliberations and divisions strictly
secret. It is quite natural that a government which withholds
political privileges from the commonalty should withhold also
political information. But nothing can be more irrational than to
give power, and not to give the knowledge without which there is
the greatest risk that power will be abused. What could be more
absurd than to call constituent bodies frequently together that
they might decide whether their representative had done his duty
by them, and yet strictly to interdict them from learning, on
trustworthy authority, what he had said or how he had voted? The
absurdity however appears to have passed altogether unchallenged.
It is highly probable that among the two hundred members of the
House of Commons who voted for the third reading of the Triennial
Bill there was not one who would have hesitated about sending to
Newgate any person who had dared to publish a report of the
debate on that bill, or a list of the Ayes and the Noes. The
truth is that the secrecy of parliamentary debates, a secrecy
which would now be thought a grievance more intolerable than the
Shipmoney or the Star Chamber, was then inseparably associated,
even in the most honest and intelligent minds, with
constitutional freedom. A few old men still living could remember
times when a gentleman who was known at Whitehall to have let
fall a sharp word against a court favourite would have been
brought before the Privy Council and sent to the Tower. Those
times were gone, never to return. There was no longer any danger
that the King would oppress the members of the legislature; and
there was much danger that the members of the legislature might
oppress the people. Nevertheless the words Privilege of
Parliament, those words which the stern senators of the preceding
generation had murmured when a tyrant filled their chamber with
his guards, those words which a hundred thousand Londoners had
shouted in his ears when he ventured for the last time within the
walls of their city; still retained a magical influence over all
who loved liberty. It was long before even the most enlightened
men became sensible that the precautions which had been
originally devised for the purpose of protecting patriots against
the displeasure of the Court now served only to protect
sycophants against the displeasure of the nation.

It is also to be observed that few of those who showed at this
time the greatest desire to increase the political power of the
people were as yet prepared to emancipate the press from the
control of the government. The Licensing Act, which had passed,
as a matter of course, in 1685, expired in 1693, and was renewed,
not however without an opposition, which, though feeble when
compared with the magnitude of the object in dispute, proved that
the public mind was beginning dimly to perceive how closely civil
freedom and freedom of conscience are connected with freedom of
discussion.

On the history of the Licensing Act no preceding writer has
thought it worth while to expend any care or labour. Yet surely
the events which led to the establishment of the liberty of the
press in England, and in all the countries peopled by the English
race, may be thought to have as much interest for the present
generation as any of those battles and sieges of which the most
minute details have been carefully recorded.

During the first three years of William's reign scarcely a voice
seems to have been raised against the restrictions which the law
imposed on literature. Those restrictions were in perfect
harmony with the theory of government held by the Tories, and
were not, in practice, galling to the Whigs. Roger Lestrange, who
had been licenser under the last two Kings of the House of
Stuart, and who had shown as little tenderness to Exclusionists
and Presbyterians in that character as in his other character of
Observator, was turned out of office at the Revolution, and was
succeeded by a Scotch gentleman, who, on account of his passion
for rare books, and his habit of attending all sales of
libraries, was known in the shops and coffeehouses near Saint
Paul's by the name of Catalogue Fraser. Fraser was a zealous
Whig. By Whig authors and publishers he was extolled as a most
impartial and humane man. But the conduct which obtained their
applause drew on him the abuse of the Tories, and was not
altogether pleasing to his official superior Nottingham.379 No
serious difference however seems to have arisen till the year
1692. In that year an honest old clergyman named Walker, who had,
in the time of the Commonwealth, been Gauden's curate, wrote a
book which convinced all sensible and dispassionate readers that
Gauden, and not Charles the First, was the author of the Icon
Basilike. This book Fraser suffered to be printed. If he had
authorised the publication of a work in which the Gospel of Saint
John or the Epistle to the Romans had been represented as
spurious, the indignation of the High Church party could hardly
have been greater. The question was not literary, but religious.
Doubt was impiety. In truth the Icon was to many fervent
Royalists a supplementary revelation. One of them indeed had gone
so far as to propose that lessons taken out of the inestimable
little volume should be read in the churches.380 Fraser found it
necessary to resign his place; and Nottingham appointed a
gentleman of good blood and scanty fortune named Edmund Bohun.
This change of men produced an immediate and total change of
system; for Bohun was as strong a Tory as a conscientious man who
had taken the oaths could possibly be. He had been conspicuous as
a persecutor of nonconformists and a champion of the doctrine of
passive obedience. He had edited Filmer's absurd treatise on the
origin of government, and had written an answer to the paper
which Algernon Sidney had delivered to the Sheriffs on Tower
Hill. Nor did Bohun admit that, in swearing allegiance to William
and Mary, he had done any thing inconsistent with his old creed.
For he had succeeded in convincing himself that they reigned by
right of conquest, and that it was the duty of an Englishman to
serve them as faithfully as Daniel had served Darius or as
Nehemiah had served Artaxerxes. This doctrine, whatever peace it
might bring to his own conscience, found little favour with any
party. The Whigs loathed it as servile; the Jacobites loathed it
as revolutionary. Great numbers of Tories had doubtless submitted
to William on the ground that he was, rightfully or wrongfully,
King in possession; but very few of them were disposed to allow
that his possession had originated in conquest. Indeed the plea
which had satisfied the weak and narrow mind of Bohun was a mere
fiction, and, had it been a truth, would have been a truth not to
be uttered by Englishmen without agonies of shame and
mortification.381 He however clung to his favourite whimsy with a
tenacity which the general disapprobation only made more intense.
His old friends, the stedfast adherents of indefeasible
hereditary right, grew cold and reserved. He asked Sancroft's
blessing, and got only a sharp word, and a black look. He asked
Ken's blessing; and Ken, though not much in the habit of
transgressing the rules of Christian charity and courtesy,
murmured something about a little scribbler. Thus cast out by one
faction, Bohun was not received by any other. He formed indeed a
class apart; for he was at once a zealous Filmerite and a zealous
Williamite. He held that pure monarchy, not limited by any law or
contract, was the form of government which had been divinely
ordained. But he held that William was now the absolute monarch,
who might annul the Great Charter, abolish trial by jury, or
impose taxes by royal proclamation, without forfeiting the right
to be implicitly obeyed by Christian men. As to the rest, Bohun
was a man of some learning, mean understanding and unpopular
manners. He had no sooner entered on his functions than all
Paternoster Row and Little Britain were in a ferment. The Whigs
had, under Fraser's administration, enjoyed almost as entire a
liberty as if there had been no censorship. But they were now as
severely treated as in the days of Lestrange. A History of the
Bloody Assizes was about to be published, and was expected to
have as great a run as the Pilgrim's Progress. But the new
licenser refused his Imprimatur. The book, he said, represented
rebels and schismatics as heroes and martyrs; and he would not
sanction it for its weight in gold. A charge delivered by Lord
Warrington to the grand jury of Cheshire was not permitted to
appear, because His Lordship had spoken contemptuously of divine
right and passive obedience. Julian Johnson found that, if he
wished to promulgate his notions of government, he must again
have recourse, as in the evil times of King James, to a secret
press.382 Such restraint as this, coming after several years of
unbounded freedom, naturally produced violent exasperation. Some
Whigs began to think that the censorship itself was a grievance;
all Whigs agreed in pronouncing the new censor unfit for his
post, and were prepared to join in an effort to get rid of him.